Fire
They forgot to take matches.1 Before they were far downstream, Edward Hoar2 and Henry discovered their oversight and stopped at the nearest house by the river—home of one of Concord’s many shoemakers—to beg a match. In the fifteen years since the introduction of the lucifer match, the clever invention had improved a great deal. Now safer and more reliable, matches had become a staple of travel, vastly reducing the amount of time and energy devoted to fire building. After deciding that they wanted to live off the land like Indians on their brief boating expedition, the young men had packed few supplies other than fishing tackle. Quick to follow technological advances, however, Henry naturally adopted matches as camping equipment—and then forgot to bring them.
It was Tuesday, the last day of April 1844, five months after Henry’s return from Staten Island and six weeks before his twenty-eighth birthday. A senior at Harvard, Edward Hoar was the twenty-one-year-old son of Samuel Hoar; brother of Elizabeth and Rockwood and George, Edward had known Henry for most of his life. His enthusiasm for natural history helped draw him to Henry, because both were passionately interested in the plants of the region. When Edward was young, he trekked the woods with Henry, who showed him how to fire his antique single-barrel flintlock even though Edward’s parents forbade his carrying a gun.
Edward and Henry were ignoring Town Meeting Day in Concord. Able-bodied citizens were expected to debate and vote on such municipal issues as expense appropriations and motions for raising taxes. Instead, Henry had taken time off from making pencils and, while Edward was on holiday from college, the young men had set out to boat the sources of the Concord, planning to spend their nights sleeping on the riverbank or in a nearby farmhouse or perhaps in a country inn. They rowed south and southeast of the village, heading toward Fair Haven Pond. Thanks to recent drought, the river was shallow and its banks parched. They caught enough fish for their supper before Concord was out of sight. A few minutes later, where the river poured out of Fair Haven, which was southwest of Walden Pond with Adams Woods between them, they pulled the boat up to the eastern shore, which was warmed by afternoon sun in the west.
A good distance from the woods, Henry and Edward chose as a fire site a stump in a little recess on a hillside where scattered bushes were surrounded by long wiry grass. Last year’s dry grass lingered around the stump’s base like a straggly beard. Henry and Edward used their match to start a fire on the stump—and almost instantly the flame leaped to the grass around it. Caught off guard, both rushed to quench it, but nothing they threw on helped. Frantically they stomped the flames. One ran to get a board from the boat and slapped at the fire with it, but to no avail. Soon the flames were racing up the hillside, crackling loudly and leaping from bush to bush across the grass, which itself burned almost instantly.
“Where will this end?”3 Edward yelled.
“It will go to town.”
Edward jumped in the boat and guided it toward town to get help. Henry raced toward the woods to alert the landowners and to rouse as many neighbors as possible. A veteran of campfires since childhood, he had never lost control of one before. This was a disaster. There was no telling what the fire would devour before it was stopped—if it could be stopped. Henry ran up the hill and through the woods as smoke climbed to the sky behind him. Emerging from the trees, he encountered a farmer who paused in driving his team only to ask where the smoke was coming from.
A breathless Henry explained.
“Well, it is none of my stuff,” the farmer replied, and drove his team onward.
Henry started racing again. He had run two exhausting miles by the time he met one of the landowners in his field, and they immediately turned and ran back together to the woods. As they neared the flaming trees, they met a carpenter who was fleeing with a firm grip on his ax. The farmer ran back for more help. Spent to the point of collapse, Henry remained where he was, panting. He estimated that the fire now had a raging front a good half mile wide. It was being fueled not only by standing trees and brush but by countless stacked cords of firewood scattered throughout the woods like tinder, fuel that had been cut the previous winter and left to age.
Alone, he walked slowly through the woods to the highest promontory of Fair Haven Cliff and sat down on a rock to watch the fire, which was moving in his direction. Already the woods were burning more than a mile from where Henry and Edward had built their campfire. It was terrifying but also a spectacle, the flames devouring trees, the smoke climbing into the clouds. Struggling to distance himself from his shame and embarrassment and anger by renouncing his sympathy for the farmers and landowners, Henry asked himself, Who are these men4 who are said to be the owners of these woods, and how am I related to them? More than once, in walks with Emerson, Henry had expressed frustration with property owners’ restrictions5 about their land. I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it.
The fire bell in the village was clanging loudly. While Henry sat atop the hill as if in shock, villagers were running to help. Henry stood up and peered at the wall of fire, which was drawing nearer, beginning to climb Fair Haven Hill. Three confused passenger pigeons flew straight into the smoke. Squirrels ran from the fire as if fleeing a hawk. The woods were so dry that when the fire reached the base of a pine, it dashed up it like some mythic animal, igniting the bark and needles almost instantly, as if they were composed of gunpowder. The tree became a torch and shed fireworks.
Henry realized that soon the flames were going to surround him on the hill, so he went down a different way and rejoined the men fighting the monster. Amid the blinding smoke and heat, they labored for hours, digging the dry soil with shovels, hacking at the ground with hoes. They built backfires and chopped down trees until they created dry moats of treeless ground. Henry saw a man struggling to defend his stacked cords of firewood from this wild blaze and realized that it was the farmer who earlier had dismissed the fire as not his problem. Later the farmer Henry had led to the woods revealed how little he knew his property by asking Henry the quickest route back home through his own woods.
Henry went home, surrounded by the condemnations of his townsfolk but answering none of them. He tried to tell himself that many seemed almost invigorated by the battle with fire. Later he went back out. For hours that night, while all the other exhausted firefighters slept at home or drank in a tavern, Henry walked alone. His woods were a blackened battlefield. What had been pine trees were now trunks of charcoal. Here and there small flames still licked at stumps; embers glowed in the burned needles and leaves on the ground. An irresistible morbid curiosity drew him back to the scene of the crime. In the wee hours of the spring morning he found himself working his way through the massacred woods to where he and Edward had foolishly built their campfire. There around the stump were the dressed fish they had been trying to cook—now broiled and charred.
“The fire, we understand,”6 declared the Concord Freeman on the third of May, “was communicated to the woods through the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens who kindled it in a pine stump, near the Pond, for the purpose of making a chowder. As every thing around them was as combustible almost as a fire-ship, the flames spread with rapidity and hours elapsed before it could be subdued. It is to be hoped that this unfortunate result of sheer carelessness, will be borne in mind by those who may wish to visit the woods in future for recreation.”
The demands of farming and firewood, and especially the construction of homes and more recently of the railroad, had left few trees standing in surrounding areas. Only around Walden had substantial tracts of woods remained in the Concord area. Thanks to Edward and Henry’s carelessness—and Henry was the older culprit—more than three hundred acres burned and many of the trees left standing were irreparably damaged. The estimate of the number of stacked cords of wood destroyed by the fire climbed above one hundred, the value of which was estimated to range between $300 and $450. The estimate of total damage passed $2,000. Probably the only reason that Edward and Henry evaded prosecution7 was that Edward’s father was the irresistible force of Concord government, the jurist and former senator Samuel Hoar.
In the same issue of the Concord Freeman as the news story about the fire, an advertisement appeared that applauded neighbors’ efforts to control it: “Cyrus Hubbard and others,8 return their thanks to the citizens of Concord for their prompt and unwearied exertions in extinguishing the fire in the woods on Tuesday last.” Hubbard was one of the men to whom Samuel Hoar was later said to have paid damage costs, and Abiel Wheeler was another. “Don’t talk to me of Henry Thoreau!”9 one of Wheeler’s daughters exclaimed later. “Didn’t I all that winter have to go to school with a smootched apron or dress because I had to pitch in and help fill the wood box with partly charred wood?”
For months, as Henry walked through the woods or town, he heard people yell to him about the “burnt woods.” He strode past with his usual rigid stoicism, but inside, beneath his mask, even below his guilt and shame, he felt an inconsolable grief10 over the loss of the woods. He was informed that some people now referred to him not as a ne’er-do-well or a curiosity—sobriquets he might wear with equanimity and even pride—but as a “damned rascal.”11