Midsummer

August 2. 

That fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is an August sound. It suggests a certain maturity in the year -- a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 2, 1859

moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer. See July 31, 1856 (" As I make my way amid rank weeds still wet with the dew, the air filled with a decaying musty scent and the z-ing of small locusts, I hear the distant sound of a flail, and thoughts of autumn occupy my mind, and the memory of past years. ") and A Book of the Seasons: Midsummer midlife blues


Aug. 2. I try the current above Dodd's. There is a southwest breeze. A loose board moves faster than one with a sunk box, but soon drifts diagonally across and lodges at fifty feet. The box, sunk fourteen inches below the board, floats one hundred feet in nine minutes; sunk two and a half feet, in nine and a quarter minutes; sunk five and a half feet, it is not half-way in thirteen minutes, or, allowing for its starting this time a little out of the wind and current, say it is twenty minutes in going a hundred feet. 

I should infer from this that the swiftest and most uninterrupted current under all conditions was neither at the surface nor the bottom, but nearer the surface than the bottom. If the wind is down-stream, it is at the surface; if up-stream, it is beneath it, and at a depth proportionate to the strength of the wind. I think that there never ceases to be a downward current. 

Rudely calculating the capacity of the river here and comparing it with my boat's place, I find it about as two to one, and such is the slowness of the current, viz. nine minutes to four and a half to a hundred feet.

If you are boating far it is extremely important to know the direction of the wind. If it blows strong up-stream, there will be a surface current flowing upward, another beneath flowing downward, and a very feeble one (in the lake-like parts) creeping downward next the bottom. A wind in which it is not worth the while to raise a sail will often blow your sailless boat up-stream. 

The sluggishness of the current, I should say, must be at different places as the areas of cross-sections at those places. 

That fine z-ing of locusts in the grass which I have heard for three or four days is, methinks, an August sound and is very inspiriting. It is a certain maturity in the year which it suggests. My thoughts are the less crude for it. There is a certain moral and physical sluggishness and standstill at midsummer.

 I think that clams are chiefly found at shallow and slightly muddy places where there is a gradually shelving shore. Are not found on a very hard bottom, nor in deep mud. 

All of the river from the southwest of Wayland to off the Height of Hill [sic] below Hill's Bridge is meadowy. This is the true Musketaquid. 

The buttonwood bark strews the streets, — curled pieces. Is it not the effect of dry weather and heat? As birds shed their feathers, or moult, and beasts their hair. Neat rolls of bark (like cinnamon, but larger), light and dark brown.