Life in the ice

January 10.

To Beck Stow’s. The swamp is suddenly frozen up again, and they are carting home the mud which was dug out last fall, in great frozen masses.

The twigs of the Andromeda Polifolia, with its rich leaves turned to a mulberry-color above by the winter, with a bluish bloom and a delicate bluish white, as in summer, beneath, project above the ice, the tallest twigs recurved at top, with the leaves standing up on the upper side like teeth of a rake.

Then there is the Andromeda calyculata, its leaves appressed to the twigs, pale-brown beneath, reddish above, with minute whitish dots. As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish.

The great buds of the swamp-pink, on the central twig, clustered together, are more or less imbrowned and reddened.

At European Cranberry Swamp, I see great quanities of the seeds of that low three-celled rush or sedge, about the edge of the pool on the ice, black and elliptical, looking like the droppings of mice, so thick in many places that by absorbing the sun’s heat they had melted an inch or more into the ice.

Cold and blustering as it is, the crows are flapping and sailing about and buffeting one another as usual.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 10, 1855


As I go toward the sun now at 4 P. M., the translucent leaves are lit up by it and appear of a soft red, more or less brown, like cathedral windows, but when I look back from the sun, the whole bed appears merely gray and brown or less reddish. See April 17, 1852 (" . . .chancing to turn round, I was surprised to see that all this pond-hole also was filled with the same warm brownish-red-colored andromeda. The fact was I was opposite to the sun, but from every other position I saw only the sun reflected from the surface of the andromeda leaves, which gave the whole a grayish-brown hue tinged with red; but from this position alone I saw, as it were, through the leaves which the opposite sun lit up, giving to the whole this charming warm, what I call Indian, red color, — the mellowest, the ripest, red imbrowned color;. . . that warm, rich red tinge, surpassing cathedral windows”)


European Cranberry Swamp.[Gowing's Swamp] See August 30, 1856 ("To Vaccinium Oxycoccus Swamp . . . I have come out this afternoon a-cranberrying, chiefly to gather some of the small cranberry, Vaccinium Oxycoccus, which Emerson says is the common cranberry of the north of Europe.").")

Cold and blustering as it is, the crows are flapping and sailing about and buffeting one another as usual. See November 25, 1860 (“I see a very great collection of crows far and wide on the meadows, evidently gathered by this cold and blustering weather.”)

We are up to the ridge again it is colder tonight perhaps 14° snow is slippery there are fox and coyote tracks on the way up and we don't stop at the view because of the cold and on the ridge in back we find a bobcat track that follows the trail along our own tracks up the ridge. For the first time this winter we walk on the ice on the pond and a new tree has fallen across the shortcut right above the driveway. Such a remarkable thing to be out in the cold in the woods with the bobcat this is the single thing to remember about today .

A fresh bobcat track

follows the trail up the ridge

along our old tracks.

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