To the North River in front of Major Barrett’s--Walking in the river.

July 10.

July 10, 2019

Another day, if possible still hotter than the last. We have already had three or four such, and still no rain.

It is with a suffocating sensation and a slight pain in the head that I walk the Union Turnpike where the heat is reflected from the road. I have to lift my hat to let the air cool my head.

There are but few travellers abroad, on account of the oppressive heat. 

I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk.  It seems the properest highway for this weather. Now in water a foot or two deep, now suddenly descending through valleys up to my neck, but all alike agreeable. 

There are many interesting objects of study walking up and down a clear river like this in the water, where you can see every inequality in the bottom and every object on it. Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head.

Now we traverse a long water plain some two feet deep; now we descend into a darker river valley, where the bottom is lost sight of and the water rises to our armpits; now we go over a hard iron pan; now we stoop and go under a low bough of the Salix nigra; now we slump into soft mud amid the pads of the Nymphaea odorata, at this hour shut. 

On this road there is no other traveller to turn out for.

We finally return to the dry land, and recline in the shade of an apple tree on a bank overlooking the meadow. The stones lying in the sun on this hillside where the grass has been cut are as hot to the hand as an egg just boiled, and very uncomfortable to hold. 

Every hour we expect a thundershower to cool the air, but none comes.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 10, 1852.

I make quite an excursion up and down the river in the water, a fluvial, a water walk . . . Walking up and down a river in torrid weather with only a hat to shade the head. See July 22, 1851("I bathe, and in a few hours I bathe again, not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river, I take off my clothes and carry them over, then bathe and wash off the mud and continue my walk. I would fain take rivers in my walks endwise.”); July 27, 1852 ("That the luxury of walking in the river may be perfect it must be very warm, such as are few days even in July, so that the breeze on those parts of the body that have just been immersed may not produce the least chilliness. It cannot be too warm, so that, with a shirt to fend the sun from your back, you may walk with perfect indifference, or rather with equal pleasure, alternately in deep and in shallow water. Both water and air must be unusually warm; otherwise we shall feel no impulse to cast ourselves into and remain in the stream")  See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Luxury of Bathing

July 10. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 10

  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 © 2009-2021