A wild and arctic scene

February 28.

February 28, 2014 

Our meadows present a very wild and arctic scene. Far on every side, over what is usually dry land, are scattered a stretching pack of great cakes of ice, often two or more upon each other and partly tilted up, a foot thick and one to two or more rods broad.  

Just south of Derby’s Bridge lie many great cakes, some one upon another, which were stopped by the  bridge and causeway, and a great many have a crust of the meadow of equal thickness — six inches to one foot — frozen to their under surfaces. Some of these are a rod in diameter, and when the ice melts, the meadow where they are landed will present a singular appearance. 

I see many also freshly deposited on the Elfin Burial-Ground, showing how that was formed. The greater part of those hummocks there are probably, if not certainly, carried by the ice.  

Many great cakes have lodged on a ridge of the meadow west of the river here, and suggest how such a ridge may be growing from year to year. 

This is a powerful agent at work. 

The westering sun reflected from their edges makes them shine finely.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 28, 1855

Our meadows present a very wild and arctic scene. See  February 23, 1855 ("I see great cakes of ice, a rod or more in length and one foot thick, lying high and dry on the bare ground in the low fields some ten feet or more beyond the edge of the thinner ice, washed up by the last rise (the 18th).”); February 24, 1855 ("The whole of the broad meadows is a rough, irregular checker-board of great cakes a rod square or more —arctic enough to look at.”); February 26, 1855 ("Those great cakes of ice which the last freshet floated up on to uplands now lie still further from the edge of the recent ice.);   See also 

February 3, 1852:

                    The landscape covered with snow –

                              is this the habitable globe?
                                     The scenery is arctic.
                                     A glacier crept southward.
                              Who can think his summer thoughts now?

February 2, 1860 ("A very wild and arctic scene. Indeed, no part of our scenery is ever more arctic than the river and its meadows now. . .It was a very arctic scene this cold day, "); February 21, 1855 (“There can be no more arctic scene than these mountains in the edge of the horizon completely crusted over with snow, with the sun shining on them.”); and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February is Mid-Winter

February 28.  See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 28 

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 ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt-550228