My first true winter walk

December 13

December 13, 2015

P. M. — On river to Fair Haven Pond.

My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer.

It is the walk peculiar to winter, and now first I take it.

I see that the fox too has already taken the same walk before me, just along the edge of the button-bushes, where not even he can go in the summer. We both turn our steps hither at the same time.

Going over black ice three or four inches thick, only reassured by seeing the thickness at the cracks, I see it richly marked internally with large whitish figures. The work of crystallization.

Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also.

I see, in the Pleasant Meadow field near the pond, some little masses of snow, such as I noticed yesterday in the open land by the railroad causeway at the Cut. I could not account for them then, for I did not go to them, but thought they might be the remainders of drifts which had been blown away, leaving little perpendicular masses six inches or a foot higher than the surrounding snow in the midst of the fields. Now I detect the cause. 

These (which I see to-day) are the remains of snowballs which the wind of yesterday rolled up in the moist snow. The morning was mild, and the snow accordingly soft and moist yet light, but in the middle of the day a strong northwest wind arose, and before night it became quite hard to bear. 

These masses which I examined in the Pleasant Meadow field were generally six or eight inches high — though they must have wasted and settled considerably — and a little longer than high, presenting a more or less fluted appearance externally. They were hollow cylinders about two inches in diameter within, like muffs. Here were a dozen within two rods square, and I saw them in three or four localities miles apart, in almost any place exposed to the sweep of the northwest wind. There was plainly to be seen the furrow in the snow produced when they were rolled up, in the form of a very narrow pyramid, commencing perhaps two inches wide, and in the course of ten feet (sometimes of four or five only) becoming six or eight inches wide, when the mass was too heavy to be moved further. 

The snow had been thus rolled up even, like a carpet. This occurred on perfectly level ground and also where the ground rose gently to the southeast. The ground was not laid bare. That wind must have rolled up masses thus till they were a foot in diameter. 

It is certain, then, that a sudden strong wind when the snow is moist but light (it had fallen the afternoon previous) will catch and roll it up as a boy rolls up his ball. These white balls are seen far off over the fields.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 13, 1859

On river to Fair Haven Pond. See December 13, 1850 ("The river froze over last night, — skimmed over. "); December 13, 1852 ("River and ponds all open."); December 13, 1856 ("The river is generally open again.")  See also  December 5, 1853 ("The river frozen over thinly in most places . . . Fair Haven Pond is skimmed completely over."); December 5, 1856 ('The river is well skimmed over in most places, though it will not bear,"); December 7, 1856 (" Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond”);  December 8, 1850 ("A week or two ago Fair Haven Pond was frozen and the ground was still bare. Now  the Pond is open and ground is covered with snow and ice."); December 9, 1859 ("The river and Fair Haven Pond froze over generally last night, though they were only frozen along the edges yesterday. This is unusually sudden"); December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business. "); December 14, 1854 ("The river is open almost its whole length. It is a beautiful smooth mirror within an icy frame"); December 15, 1855 ("The boys have skated. a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to fbear a man yet.")

My first true winter walk is . . . where I cannot go in the summer. See February 10, 1860 ("No finer walking in any respect than on our broad meadow highway in the winter, when covered with bare ice"); February 13, 1859 ("Winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer. Not till winter do we take possession of the whole of our territory. I have three great highways raying out from one centre, which is near my door."); February 19, 1854 ("I incline to walk now in swamps and on the river and ponds, where I cannot walk in summer.")

Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet. See February 12, 1860 ("You have seen those purple fortunate isles in the sunset heavens, and that green and amber sky between them. Would you believe that you could ever walk amid those isles? You can on many a winter evening. I have done so a hundred times. The ice is a solid crystalline sky under our feet.")

I see that the fox too has already taken the same walk before me. See December 8, 1854 (" Go over the fields on the crust to Walden, over side of Bear Garden. Already foxes have left their tracks. How the crust shines afar, the sun now setting!");  December 12, 1855 ("The snow having come, we see where is the path of the partridge . . . and now first, as it were, we have the fox for our nightly neighbor, and countless tiny deer mice.  "); December 14, 1855 ("Then I came upon a fox-track made last night, leading toward a farmhouse . . . Thus by the snow I was made aware in this short walk of the recent presence there of squirrels, a fox, and countless mice, whose trail I had crossed, but none of which I saw, or probably should have seen before the snow fell."); December 20, 1855 ("I see . . .in now hard, dark ice, the tracks apparently of a fox, made when it was saturated snow."); December 24, 1856 (". It is very pleasant walking thus before the storm is over, in the soft, subdued light. . . .Do not see a track of any animal till returning near the Well Meadow Field, where many foxes, one of whom I have a glimpse of, had been coursing back and forth in the path and near it for three quarters of a mile. They had made quite a path"); December 25, 1858 (“I notice that a fox has taken pretty much my own course along the Andromeda Ponds.”); December 31, 1854 (" I see mice and rabbit and fox tracks on the meadow.") See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  The Fox

December 13. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  December 13

And now I first take

that peculiar winter walk –

sky under my feet.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, My first true winter walk 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2024

tinyurl.com/HDT591213