Getting lost

August 15.

Walk all day with Channing, northwest into Acton and Carlisle. 

A dog-day, comfortably cloudy and cool as well as still. 

The river meadows, where no mowing, have a yellowish and autumnal look.  

I see large flocks of bobolinks on the Union Turnpike. 

Ford the Assabet at the bathing-place. 

Panicled cornel berries on College Road. 

Many of the trees in Barrett's orchard on Annursnack touch the ground all around, weighed down with fruit.

Cross from top of Annursnack to top of Strawberry Hill.  The locomotive whistle, far southwest, sounds like a bell. 

From Strawberry Hill we steer northeast toward the east point of a wood in the direction of Hutchinson's, perhaps two miles off.

Before starting on this walk I had studied the map to discover a new walk, and decided to go through a large wooded tract west and northwest of the Paul Dudley house, where there was no road, there at last to strike east across the head of Spencer Brook Meadow, perhaps to the old Carlisle road.

A mile and a half northeast of Strawberry Hill, keeping on through a somewhat swampy upland, we fall  into a path, which Channing preferring, though it leads us through woods widely out of our course westward. 

I soon correct it, and, descending through swampy land, at length see through the trees and bushes into a small meadow completely surrounded by woods, in which is a man haying only eight or ten rods off. 

Soon after, we follow an indistinct path through a dense birch wood, leading quite out of our course, westward.

At length, when I endeavor to correct my course by compass, it points so that I lose my faith in it, and we continue to go out of our way, till we come out on a side-hill immediately overlooking a stream and mill and several houses and a small mill-pond. 

We are completely lost, and see not one familiar object. 

At length see steeples which we think Westford, but the monument proves it Acton. Take their bearings, calculate a new course, and pursue it at first east-northeast, then east, and finally southeast, along rocky hillsides covered with weeds, where the fall seems further advanced than in Concord, with more autumnal colors, through dense oak woods and scrub oak, across a road or two, over some pastures, through a swamp or two, where the cinnamon fern is as high as our heads.   

After travelling about five miles, for the most part in woods, without knowing where we are, we come out on a hill from which we see, far to the south, the open valley at head of Spencer Brook.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 15, 1854

A large flocks of bobolinks... See August 15, 1852 ("I see a dense, compact flock of bobolinks going off in the air over a field. They cover the rails and alders, and go rustling off with a brassy, tinkling note as I approach, revealing their yellow breasts and bellies. This is an autumnal sight, that small flock of grown birds in the afternoon sky.")

Cross from top of Annursnack to top of Strawberry Hill.  See September 6, 1851 ("From Strawberry Hill the first, but a very slight, glimpse of Nagog Pond by standing up on the wall. That is enough to relate of a hill, methinks, that its elevation gives you the first sight of some distant lake.")

We are completely lost, .... See March 29, 1853 ("It is a surprising and memorable and, I may add, valuable experience to be lost in the woods, especially at night")