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| March 19, 2015 |
P. M. — Paddled to Fair Haven Pond. Very pleasant and warm, when the wind lulls and the water is perfectly smooth. I make the voyage without gloves.
The snow of March 14th is about gone, and the landscape is once more russet. The thick ice of the meadows lies rotting on each side of the stream, white and almost soft as snow. In many places it extends still over the shallower parts of the river.
As I paddle or pole up the side of the stream, the muddy bottom looks dark and dead, and no greenness is observed. But on a closer scrutiny you detect here and there this radical greenness to correspond with that on the land.
Already Farrar is out with his boat looking for spring cranberries, and here comes, slowly paddling, the dark-faced trapper Melvin with his dog and gun. I see a poor drowned gray rabbit floating, back up as in life, but three quarters submerged. I see a hawk circling over a small maple grove through this calm air, ready to pounce on the first migrating sparrow that may have arrived.
As I paddle or push along by the edge of the thick ice which lines the shore, sometimes pushing against it, I observe that it is curiously worn by the water. The undulations made by my boat and paddle make a constant sound as I pass.
I am surprised to find that the river has not yet worn through Fair Haven Pond.
Getting up a weed with the paddle close to the shore under water, where five or six inches deep, I find a fishworm in the mud.
The wind has got round more to the east now, at 5 P.M., andis raw and disagreeable, and produces a bluish haze or mist at once in the air. It is early for such a phenomenon.
Smell muskrats in two places, and see two. I hear at last the tchuck tchuck of a blackbird and, looking up, see him flying high over the river southwesterly in great haste to reach somewhere.
And when I reach my landing I hear my first bluebird, somewhere about Cheney’s trees by the river. I hear him out of the blue deeps, but do not yet see his blue body. He comes with a warble.
Not a duck do I see. It is perhaps too bright and serene a day for them.
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| MARCH 19, 2015 |
Launch my boat. . . . Paddled to Fair Haven Pond. See March 18, 1857 ("I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking driftwood.”); March 22, 1854 (“Launch boat and paddle to Fair Haven. ”)
Here comes, slowly paddling, the dark-faced trapper Melvin with his dog and gun. See March 18, 1858 (“Melvin is already out in his boat for all day, with his white hound in the prow, bound up the river for musquash.”)
I am surprised to find that the river has not yet worn through Fair Haven Pond. See March 26, 1860 ("Fair Haven Pond may be open by the 20th of March, as this year [1860], or not till April 13 as in '56, or twenty-three days later.”); April 4, 1855 ("I am surprised to find Fair Haven Pond not yet fully open.“)
I hear him out of the blue deeps, but do not yet see his blue body. He comes with a warble. See March 20, 1855 ("The bluebird, too, is in the air, and I detect its blue back for a moment upon a picket.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Bluebird in Spring.
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