Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  Thoreau would not write his account of the debacle until 1850, after he’d been helping farmers set brushfires to clear the woods. They showed him the right way to do it: “You must burn against the wind always & burn slowly.” But that day back in 1844, the fire had burned with the wind, and fast. Thoreau recalled walking ahead of it to the highest rock on Fairhaven Cliff and watching it approach until it almost swallowed him. By then the town was arriving in force. For the rest of the day he fought the fire with his neighbors, surrounding the flames, cutting trenches with hoes and shovels, setting backfires. Now, recalling this six years later, Thoreau suggested the town form a volunteer fire department of forty or fifty men who, at an alarm sounded on a drum, would cart to the scene hoes and shovels, kept specially for the purpose since neighbors refused to lend their own tools for fear of losing them, and fight fires in an orderly way directed by an experienced captain.118 His suggestion made sense: by 1850, when Thoreau finally confronted his actions in the 1844 fire, wildfires were a constant problem, sparked by railroad engines along the tracks. Already the very land Thoreau had burned once had burned a second time. Throughout the 1850s he studied with special care the effects of fire and regrowth on Concord’s pine-oak ecology, which, he discovered, was actually the product of frequent fires, some natural, some set by Native Americans who for hundreds of years had managed the forest with controlled burns.

  But none of this helped Thoreau face up to the memory of that terrible day. One witness remembered that “people blamed Thoreau’s carelessness but thought well of him for coming at once to say what he had done” and for helping them fight the flames.119 But others were far less generous, calling Thoreau “a ‘damned rascal,’” and for years afterward, some would taunt him by hiding and shouting “Burnt Woods” at his back. The farmer who’d said it was “none of his stuff” lost sixty cords of wood he’d cut and stacked to sell. His daughter never forgave Thoreau: “Don’t talk to me about Henry Thoreau,” she used to say. “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?” The Concord Freeman scolded “the thoughtlessness of two of our citizens,” but also pointed out the fire was “mainly confined to the young wood, underbrush, and leaves,” so it appeared “more destructive than it really was.” The newspaper estimated 300 acres were burned—an exaggeration, for the woodland in that part of town was roughly 150 acres in extent, closer to Thoreau’s own estimate of a hundred acres or more. And despite Thoreau’s panicked exclamation, the fire could not have reached town, for the woods stopped far short of any buildings.120

  But the damage was real and lasting. The newspaper set the financial loss at about $2,000—a huge sum—and there was talk of prosecution. Had Thoreau been alone or with anyone other than Samuel Hoar’s son, he might have faced charges in court; but once again Concord’s leading citizen smoothed things over by quietly paying damages to the injured. The harm to the woods was soon forgotten, but the harm to Thoreau’s reputation lived on. Long after his death, when the 1850 confession buried deep in his unpublished Journal was unearthed and reprinted in the Atlantic, the jeers resumed: The icon of woodcraft, so careless he burned down the woods! The saint of environmental protection, scorching the earth! The town ne’er-do-well, off fishing when he should have been earning a living!

  The damage to Thoreau’s own psyche was also real and lasting. Not only did it take him six years to confess, but when he did, his own words convicted him of the profound remorse he denied. Watching the fire advance, perched helpless and alone on Fairhaven Cliff, he “felt like a guilty person—nothing but shame and regret.” But the instant the alarm bell told him the town was on its way, he turned prickly and defensive: “Who are these men who are said to be the owners of these woods & how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest—but I have done no wrong therein—& now it is as if the lightning had done it. . . . So shortly I settled it with myself & stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle & I was the only one there to enjoy it.” Of course this rings hollow emotionally, but there’s a certain truth here. From the perspective of the woods, Thoreau’s destructive agency was indeed as natural as the lightning and impersonal as the railroad, setting off a course of regeneration that was part of this forest’s normal ecological cycle, clearing away dead leaves and undergrowth, releasing nutrients back into the soil and activating the cycle of regeneration known as forest succession.

  From that day forward, Thoreau knew a truth few others fully understand: human beings are not separate from nature but fully involved in natural cycles, agents who trigger change and are vulnerable to the changes they trigger. That night, Thoreau wandered through “the blackened waste . . . far in the night,” threading his way back to the stump where he started the fire. There were the fish, scattered over the burnt grass, perfectly broiled. For the rest of his life he returned to these same woods relentlessly, over and over again, and what he saw astounded him: “In the spring I burned over a hundred acres till the earth was sere and black—& by mid-summer this space was clad in a fresher & more luxuriant green than the surrounding even. Shall man then despair? Is he not a sproutland too after never so many searings & witherings?”121 Thoreau could never forget that he, too, was a fallen man—he, too, was a son of Adam. And nature, unaccountably and miraculously, forgave him, even when his neighbors would not.

  · · ·

  One friend never wavered in his loyalty: Ellery Channing, still living in Concord with Ellen and their newborn baby girl. Channing had business in New York that summer and agreed to meet Thoreau afterward in Pittsfield, in western Massachusetts near the Hudson River. In mid-July, Thoreau set off alone and on foot, with a staff and a pilgrim’s knapsack holding a few books and a change of clothes, to climb the weathered, rocky peak of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock.122 After a night on the summit, he headed southwest to Mount Greylock, or “Saddleback Mountain,” eighty miles away. He tramped over the hills for days, stopping to pick berries or eat a loaf of bread purchased at a farmer’s house, followed the Connecticut River south, then turned west up Deerfield River through valleys that rose higher and higher, until he crossed the Hoosac Range to drop to the valley below and ascend Greylock, tracking up the long notch called “the Bellows” for the wildness of the wind that rushed through it during storms.

  Thunder rumbled at his heels as he climbed, but the storm passed off. When the trail veered right, Thoreau followed his compass straight ahead to the summit, “the shorter and more adventurous way.” At one house he met a young woman who was “busily and unconcernedly combing her long black hair while she talked, [giving] her head the necessary toss with each sweep of the comb, with lively, sparkling eyes, and full of interest in that lower world from which I had come.”123 Tempted to linger, instead he followed his compass through dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, then through scraggly trees, then above the treeline to the summit. Desperate for water, he drank dry the tiny puddles pooled in horse tracks, “a pure, cold, spring-like water.” He made a campsite, cooked up his supper of rice, and read scraps of newspaper by firelight into the night, which was so cold he covered himself in old boards from the ruins of the observatory tower.

  Dawn found him surrounded by an ocean of mist reaching precisely to the base of the tower, “left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank in cloudland.” It was, he wrote, “a favor for which to be forever silent to be shown this vision.” As the sun rose and gilded the mist, he wavered: Could he return to the house of the woman with the long black hair? Instead he felt called by the summits of the yet higher mountains westward. Down he went into the clouds and drizzling rain, where Channing waited at the Pittsfield station. He looked, thought Channing, like a bum. “He had no shirt-collar perceptible, carried a small leather wallet belonging to the late Charles Emerson on his back and looked as if he had slept out in the fields, as he was unshaven & drest very poorly.�
�124 They spent the night “before the mast and on the deck of the world”—or more prosaically, on the open deck of a steamboat down the Hudson to Albany—Thoreau standing entranced at the prow, watching “the moonlight amid the mountains.” Another passenger took him for a deckhand and elbowed him: “Come now, can’t ye lend me a chaw o’baccy?” Later Channing chuckled to see him walking the deck past fine gentlemen and ladies, “eating upon a half loaf of bread, his dinner for the day.”125

  In the Catskills they passed an elegant tourist resort (famed later as the Mountain House) to spend the night at a sawmiller’s by Kaaterskill Falls. Thoreau remembered not the famous falls—higher than Niagara and more wild—but the unplastered house, clean and airy with all the music of the Catskills sweeping through its aisles. He dreamed of living in just such a house, somewhere on his own high mountain tarn.126 In the Southern Berkshires they stopped at Bash Bish Falls, then walked thirty miles to Chester, boarded the Western Railroad to Framingham, and walked north, trudging into Concord early on August first. Thoreau had been gone for weeks, measuring the land from Concord to Monadnock in the north, then to Greylock far in the west: now his feet knew the breadth of Massachusetts, step by step. It had been a test of his physical endurance, his resourcefulness alone, his inner reserves of strength, and of his literary reserves as well. Walking was becoming synonymous with writing, the measure of his steps with the measure of his prose. Thoreau’s first great excursion never made it into a separate essay, but out of it came many rich and lyrical pages.

  They reached Concord just in time to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies, which called for a gala event. That May, Concord’s delegates to the Anti-Slavery Convention in Boston, including Cynthia, Helen, and Sophia Thoreau, had demanded the “dissolution of the Union,” refusing to obey a Constitution that empowered slaveholders. Two weeks later, Frederick Douglass returned to Concord, and Helen Thoreau, as secretary, recorded the angry antislavery meeting where the town fathers, led by Rev. Barzillai Frost, condemned the Disunionists. Douglass fired back, and the women rose in defiance to sing their anthem: “no union with slaveholders you followers of the free.” Hardly had the meeting ended when they were planning an even bigger one: by August 1, the railroad would be open; it could bring crowds from the city to Concord. The Liberator got busy imploring those crowds to come while the organizers recruited the speakers—Douglass, of course, but also, astonishingly, Emerson himself. Up to this moment he had withheld all support for organized abolitionism.127

  When Thoreau arrived for the gala kickoff, everything was chaos. Crowds were pouring in, but there was nowhere to meet: a furious Reverend Frost had slammed shut the doors of the First Parish Church, and the Trinitarians closed theirs as well. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne offered the great lawn behind the Old Manse, but a sudden summer rainstorm had everyone running for shelter. Visitors mobbed the courthouse, but who would ring the First Parish bell to call the town? The sexton refused, and five or six others milled about, afraid to touch the bellrope without permission. Thoreau, “not an hour home from his journey,” pushed his way through, seized the rope “with a strong arm,” and the bell “pealed forth its summons right merrily.”128 The audience assembled at the courthouse, where Emerson rose and delivered a two-and-a-half-hour speech, his first antislavery address and one of his greatest. Margaret Fuller, listening, cried for joy: Emerson had finally taken a stand. Transcendentalism’s energies were reaching out into the world. Thoreau, too, took up the cause, printing and distributing Emerson’s speech, signing himself “agent for the Society”—that is, the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society.129 More and more he aligned himself with abolitionism, not by formal membership, but by his words and deeds.

  At home that night, Thoreau found a most intriguing letter waiting for him. Earlier that spring, the young religious seeker Isaac Hecker, having left Brook Farm with a pause at Fruitlands, alighted in Concord to study with fellow Brook Farmer George Bradford.130 Hecker moved in with the Thoreaus, and over the next two months, he and Henry became friends. Indeed, Hecker wished he were studying under Thoreau instead, for he had “a better knowledge of languages,” taking real “delight” in them, and more leisure, too. Like his mentor Brownson, Hecker was drawn to Catholicism; now, back home in New York on the eve of his baptism in the Roman Catholic Church, he wrote Thoreau with a grand, crazy idea: Come with me to Europe. “Let us take a walk over the fairest portion of the planet Earth and make it ours. . . . We shall prove the dollar is not almighty and the impossible moonshine. The wide world is before us beckoning us to come let us accept and embrace it.”131

  Thoreau hesitated. He knew from walking across Massachusetts that this was the way to see the world. But, he finally told Hecker, he needed something else now, not a “wanderjahr” but “a kind of Brahminical Artesian, Inner Temple, life.”132 Channing thought Thoreau was crazy to say no, and Hecker pleaded that only Thoreau could be his companion on such a heroic quest. Thoreau wavered again, stirred by the sheer romance of it. “Far travel very far travel or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home,” he replied. “If you don’t go soon,” he added, write me again. He literally could not bear to say no.133 But he couldn’t say yes, either, and in 1845 Hecker set off to Europe without him. Two years later he returned and founded the Paulist Order, becoming, with Brownson himself, one of the nation’s great Catholic intellectuals.

  When Thoreau pushed past his timid neighbors to ring the church bell, an observer concluded this man must be “the general Scapegoat” of the town. Indeed, that “damned rascal” Thoreau found alienation oddly liberating: “What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”134 Once, he’d been the good striving son; now he was the ragged seeker with knapsack and pilgrim’s staff, the town conscience, the gadfly who would sting them into awareness. “Henry is a good substantial childe, not encumbered with himself,” wrote Emerson about this time; he “lives extempore, & brings today a new proposition as radical & revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different. The only man of leisure in the town.” Like all the other “grand promisers,” Thoreau, too, had fizzled out, but at least he hadn’t sold out. “With his practical faculty, he has declined all the kingdoms of this world. Satan has no bribe for him.” For his part, Thoreau told Emerson that not this world but “the other world was all his art; that his pencils would draw no other; that his jackknife would cut nothing else.”135

  The path before him was coming clear; he knew exactly where he needed to go. All he needed now was the means.

  PART TWO

  The Making of Walden

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Walden, Is It You?” (1845–1847)

  Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago. . . . I can almost say, Walden, is it you?

  Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  Preparations

  Emerson was right: the railroad changed everything. Once passenger service opened in June 1844, running four trains daily from sunrise to dusk, Concord would forever be a Boston suburb. The tracks curved northward just enough to graze the southwest edge of Concord village, opening up a commuter rail hub centered on the new Concord Depot. Overnight the nearby farm fields were being platted and sold as house lots—new lands for the landless, including John and Cynthia Thoreau. After six years renting the Parkman House, it was time, thought Cynthia, to move into their own home.

  John was skeptical, but Cynthia prevailed. She selected a three-quarter-acre lot by the tracks, in the bare fields of what everyone jokingly called “Texas,” after the barren, faraway, and disputed territory dominating the headlines. Cynthia arranged to buy one of Concord’s solid, well-built houses and have it moved onto the site—common practice then, which saved immense sums in labor and conserved scarce wood.1 On September 10, John Thoreau paid $25 to the developer of the farmland. Two days later, he mortgaged the property for $500 to pay for the house and supplies.2 Henry got to work digging and
stoning the cellar, helping the carpenter with renovations, banking the house, and setting out an orchard’s worth of apples.3 With the Irish workers moving up the line, Sam Staples was auctioning off the vacant railroad shanties; the Thoreaus recycled a couple into a pencil factory and shop behind the house. Early in 1849 Henry would survey for the new road out front, eventually named Belknap Street after one of the railroad developers, but the house would always be known as the “Texas House.” The Thoreaus moved in sometime early in 1845 and lived there until 1850. Even after they moved back to Main Street, they held on to the Texas House, renting it to newcomers. Near the end of his life, Henry, who was always fond of the place, boasted that he’d harvested nearly eleven barrels of apples from the trees he’d planted there fourteen years before.4

  Land speculators were eyeing Walden Woods, too. Late in September 1844, Emerson celebrated turning in the final proofs of Essays: Second Series by taking a walk to Walden Pond. There he ran into several men bidding on Wyman Field, an overgrown patch alongside Walden Road with a side road running through it to Walden’s shore. One thing led to another, and Emerson walked home the owner of eleven acres of briar patch, at $8.10 an acre. The next day his friends pointed out the briar patch was worthless without the neighboring pine grove, which the owner surely would cut soon, so Emerson bought three or four more acres for $125—more expensive thanks to the timber. Thus Emerson became “landlord & waterlord of 14 acres, more or less, on the shore of Walden,” just the place to build “a cabin or a turret there high as the tree-tops, and spend my nights as well as days in the midst of a beauty which never fades from me.”5 Now he had land fever: he thought of building a cottage for Lucy Brown near his house, and buying a farm for Ellery Channing, who was pining away in New York City working for the New-York Tribune, plus buying a little more Walden for himself. A year later, Emerson purchased another forty acres rising from Walden’s farther shore to the heights everyone took to calling “Emerson’s Cliff.” From there he could see Monadnock to the north, Wachusett to the west, and the Sudbury River below—perfect, thought Bronson Alcott, for “a poet’s lodge,” where Emerson could retreat “with book and pen when good hours come.”6