It takes the rest of the day to row back against the wind.

October 9.

 

October 9, 2013

A high wind south of westerly. Set sail with W. E. C. down the river. 

The red maples are now red and also yellow and reddening. The white maples are green and silvery, also yellowing and blushing. The birch is yellow; the black willow brown; the elms sere, brown, and thin; the bass bare. The button-bush, which was so late, is already mostly bare except the lower part, protected. The swamp white oak is green with a brownish tinge; the white ash turned mulberry. The white maples toward Ball's Hill have a burnt white appearance; the white oak a salmon-color and also red. Is that scarlet oak rosed? Huckleberries and blackberries are red. Leaves are falling; apples more distinctly seen on the trees; muskrat-houses not quite done. 

This wind carries us along glibly, I think six miles an hour, till we stop in Billerica, just below the first bridge beyond the Carlisle Bridge, — at the Hibiscus Shore. 

I collect some hibiscus seeds and swamp white oak acorns, and we walk on thence, a mile or more further, over scrubby hills which with a rocky core border the western shore, still in Billerica, at last not far above the mills. 

At one place, opposite what I once called Grape Island (still unchanged), I smell grapes, and though I see no vines at first, they being bare of leaves, at last find the grapes quite plenty and ripe and fresh enough on the ground under my feet. Ah! their scent is very penetrating and memorable. 

Did we not see a fish hawk? 

We find ourselves in an extensive wood here, which we do not get out of. 

It takes the rest of the day to row back against the wind.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 9, 1853

I smell grapes, . . . their scent is very penetrating and memorable. See September 4, 1853 ("The fragrance of a grape-vine branch, with ripe grapes on it, which I have brought home, fills the whole house. This fragrance is exceedingly rich, surpassing the flavor of any grape."); September 8, 1854 ("I partly smell them out. . . .I bring home a half-bushel of grapes to scent my chamber with. As I paddle home with my basket of grapes in the bow, every now and then their perfume was wafted to me in the stern, and I think that I am passing a richly laden vine on shore.”):  September 13, 1856 (“. . . the best are more admirable for fragrance than for flavor. Depositing them in the bows of the boat, they fill all the air with their fragrance, as we row along against the wind, as if we were rowing through an endless vineyard in its maturity.”)