How a forest fire may have pushed Thoreau to Walden Pond

From Woods burner by John Pipkin :

But there is one curious event in the life of Henry David Thoreau that has received little attention, and which may have been a formative event, influencing not only his decision to sequester himself at Walden Pond, but also the development of his environmentalist philosophy. On April 30, 1844, Thoreau started a blaze in the Concord Woods, scorching a 300-acre swath of earth between Fair Haven Bay and Concord. The fire was an accident, but the destruction of valuable woodland, the loss of firewood and lumber, and the narrowly avoided catastrophe that almost befell Concord itself angered the local residents and nearly ruined Thoreau's reputation. For years afterward, Thoreau could hardly walk the streets of his hometown without hearing the epithet "woods burner."

That the father of American environmentalism could have been the scourge of the Concord Woods may seem too ironic to be true. Yet, not only did this unlikely event actually occur, but it seems quite possible that, given Thoreau's general lack of direction at the time, as well as his growing interest in pursuing a career as a civil engineer, America's first great naturalist might not have undertaken his Walden experiment at all, had it not been for the forest fire he sparked a year earlier. The fire happened at a time when Thoreau seemed desperately in need of some catalyst to convert his thoughts into action.

There is no shortage of ruminations on fire and firefighting in Thoreau's writing. At the beginning of "Walden" he talks of the penance he sees the people of Concord performing every day in the form of the labor required to live in a society fixated on material success, and he compares them with "Bramins" sitting exposed to flames. In "Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind," Robert D. Richardson goes so far as to suggest that the catastrophe in the Concord Woods might have even been the source of the dreams about "fire and wind-whipped showers of sparks" that Thoreau later describes in his "Ktaadn" essay. However, it would be a mistake, an oversimplification, to read all of Thoreau's later work through the lens of the Concord fire. Rather, the significance of the fire, occurring when it did, may be that it set in motion a series of events that might not otherwise have happened.

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