Fall phenomena on the river.

September 5.

P. M. — Up Assabet to Sam Barrett’s Pond. 

The river rising probably. The river weeds are now much decayed. Almost all pads but the white lily have disappeared, and they are thinned, and in midstream those dense beds of weeds are so much thinned (potamogeton, heart-leaf, sparganium, etc., etc.) as to give one the impression of the river having risen,‘though it is not more than six inches higher on account of the rain.

This is a fall phenomenon. The river weeds, becoming rotten, though many are still green, fall or are loosened, the water rises, the winds come, and they are drifted to the shore, and the water is cleared.

During the drought I used to see Sam Wheeler’s men carting hogsheads of water from the river to water his shrubbery. They drove into the river, and, naked all but a coat and hat, they dipped up the water with a pail. Though a shiftless, it looked like an agreeable, labor that hot weather. 

Barrett shows me some very handsome pear-shaped cranberries, not uncommon, which may be a permanent variety different from the common rounded ones.

Bathe at the swamp white oak, the water again warmer than I expected. I see much thistle-down without the seed floating on the river and a hummingbird about a cardinal-flower over the water’s edge.

Just this side the rock, the water near the shore and pads is quite white for twenty rods, as with a white sawdust, with the exuviae of small insects about an eighth of an inch long, mixed with scum and weeds.

I hear the tree-toad to-day. Now at sundown, a blue heron flaps away from his perch on an oak over the river before me, just above the rock. 

Hear locusts after sundown.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 5, 1854

A blue heron flaps away from his perch on an oak over the river before me . . . See August 15, 1860 ("See a blue heron.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Blue Heron

September 05, 2014

Walk to the view after sunset. we are treated to a light show of lightning. severe storms to northwest over Ottowa and Montreal, lighting the clouds, sometimes showing bolts, for perhaps an hour. A first quarter moon low in the south. we go down by the big house then bushwack to the fort. windy. zphx September 5, 2014

Hear locusts after sundown. See September 2, 1856 ("Frank Harding has caught a dog-day locust which lit on the bottom of my boat, in which he was sitting, and z-ed there"); September 7, 1858 (" It is an early September afternoon, melting warm and sunny. . .and ever and anon the hot z-ing of the locust is heard.")


Incessant flashes
lighting the edge of the cloud.
A rush of cool wind.
September 6, 1854