A walk along the side of the river.

December 20.

Still no snow, and, as usual, I wear no gloves. 

P. M. — To Hubbard’s skating meadow. 

A few chickadees busily inspecting the buds at the willow-row ivy tree, for insects, with a short, clear chink from time to time, as if to warn me of their neighborhood. 

Boys are now devoted to skating after school at night, far into evening, going without their suppers. It is pretty good on the meadows, which are somewhat overflown, and the sides of the river, but the greater part of it is open. 

I walk along the side of the river, on the ice beyond the Bath Place. Already there is dust on this smooth ice, on its countless facets, revealed by the sun. 

How warm the dull-red cranberry vine rises above the ice here and there! 

I stamp and shake the ice to detect the holes and weak places where that little brook comes in there. They are plainly revealed, for the water beneath, being agitated, proclaims itself at every hole far and wide or for three or four rods. The edge of the ice toward the channel is either rubbed up or edged with a ridge of frozen foam. 

I see some gossamer on the weeds above the ice. Also, in now hard, dark ice, the tracks apparently of a fox, made when it was saturated snow. So long his trail is revealed, but over the pastures no hound can now trace him. 

There has been much overflow about every tussock in the meadow, making that rough, opaque ice, like yeast. The ice is that portion of the flood which is congealed and laid up in our fields for a season.

I mark the many preparations for another year which the farmer has made, — his late plowings, his muck-heaps in fields, perhaps of grass, which he intends to plow and cultivate, his ditches to carry off the winter’s floods, etc. 

How placid, like silver or like steel in different lights, the surface of the still, living water between these borders of ice, reflecting the weeds and trees, and now the warm colors of the sunset sky! 



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 20, 1855

[Skating] is pretty good on the meadows, which are somewhat overflown, and the sides of the river, but the greater part of it is open. See December 20, 1854 ("The river appears to be frozen everywhere. Where was water last night is a firm bridge of ice this morning. . . . All of the river that was not frozen before, and therefore not covered with snow on the 18th, is now frozen quite smoothly. . .")