Ice-out on Walden

March 29.

Flint’s Pond is entirely open; may have been a day or two. There was only a slight opening about the boat-house on the 21st, and the weather has been very cold ever since. Walden is more than half open, Goose Pond only a little about the shores, and Fair Haven Pond only just open over the channel of the river. 

There is washed up on the shore of Flint’s some pretty little whorls of the radical leaves of the Lobelia Dortmanna, with its white root-fibres. 

As I stand on Heywood’s Peak, looking over Walden, more than half its surface already sparkling blue water, I inhale with pleasure the cold but wholesome air like a draught of cold water, contrasting it in my memory with the wind of summer, which I do not thus eagerly swallow. This, which is a chilling wind to my fellow, is decidedly refreshing to me, and I swallow it with eagerness as a panacea. I feel an impulse, also, already, to jump into the half-melted pond. This cold wind is refreshing to my palate, as the warm air of summer is not, methinks. I love to stand there and be blown on as much as a horse in July. 

A field of ice nearly half as big as the pond has drifted against the eastern shore and crumbled up against it, forming a shining white wall of its fragments.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 29, 1855

Walden is more than half open. A field of ice nearly half as big as the pond has drifted against the eastern shore and crumbled up against it, forming a shining white wall of its fragments. See March 29, 1859 ("Walden is first clear after to-day.”) and note to March 29, 1857 ("Walden open, say to-day, though there is still a little ice in the deep southern bay and a very narrow edging along the southern shore.")

A field of ice nearly half as big as the pond . . ., forming a shining white wall of its fragments. See March 29, 1854 ("Thin cakes of ice at a distance now and then blown up on their edges glistening in the sun. ")