Skating through snow.

February 3.

This will deserve to be called the winter of skating. 

P. M. — Skating through snow. Skate up the river with Tappan in spite of the snow and wind. It has cleared up, but the snow is on a level strong three quarters of an inch deep (seemingly an inch), but for the most part blown into drifts three to ten feet wide and much deeper (with bare intervals) under a strong northwesterly wind. 

February 3

It is a novel experience, this skating through snow, some times a mile without a bare spot, this blustering day. 

On the whole the snow is but a slight obstruction. We skate with much more facility than I had anticipated; I would not have missed the experience for a good deal. 

We go up the Pantry Meadow above the old William Wheeler house, and come down this meadow again with the wind and snow dust, spreading our coat-tails, like birds, though somewhat at the risk of our necks if we strike a foul place. I find that I can sail on a tack pretty well, trimming with my skirts. Sometimes we have to jump suddenly over some obstacle which the snow has concealed, to save our necks. 

It is worth the while for one to look back against the sun and wind and see the other sixty rods off coming, floating down like a graceful demon in the midst of the broad meadow all covered and lit with the curling snow-steam.

Looking toward the sun and wind, you see a broad river half a mile or more in width, its whole surface lit and alive with flowing streams of snow, in form like the steam which curls along a river’s surface at sunrise, and in midst of this moving world sails down the skater, majestically, as if on the surface of water while the steam curls as high as his knees.

                           ***

I still recur in my mind to that skate of the 3lst. I was thus enabled to get a bird’s-eye view of the river, -— to survey its length and breadth within a few hours, connect one part (one shore) with another in my mind, and realize what was going on upon it from end to end, —to know the whole as I ordinarily knew a few miles of it only.

It is all the way of one character, — a meadow river, or dead stream,—Musketicook,—the abode of muskrats, pickerel, etc., crossed within these dozen miles each way, —or thirty in all, —by some twenty low wooden bridges, connected with the mainland by willowy causeways. Thus the long, shallow lakes divided into reaches. 

These long causeways all under water and ice now, only the bridges peeping out from time to time like a dry eyelid. You must look close to find them in many cases. Mere islands are they to the traveller, in the waste of water and ice. Only two villages lying near the river, Concord and Wayland, and one at each end of this thirty miles.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 3, 1855

I still recur in my mind to that skate of the 31st. See January 31, 1855 (“An unprecedented expanse of ice. At 10 A. M., skated up the river to explore further than I had been.”)  See The Winter of Skating

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 3

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

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