The snow which began last night has continued to fall very silently but steadily, and now it is not far from a foot deep, much the most we have had yet; a dry, light, powdery snow.
When I come down I see it in miniature drifts against the panes, alternately streaked dark and light as it is more or less dense. A remarkable, perfectly regular conical peak, a foot high, with concave sides, stands in the fireplace under the sink-room chimney. The pump has a regular conical Persian(?) cap, and every post about the house a. similar one. It is quite light, but has not drifted.
About 9 A. M. it ceases, and the sun comes out, and shines dazzlingly over the white surface. Every neighbor is shovelling out, and hear the sound of shovels scraping on door-steps. Winter now first fairly commenced, I feel.
The places which are slowest to freeze in our river are, first, on account of warmth as well as motion, where a brook comes in, and also probably where are springs in banks and under bridges; then, on account of shallowness and rapidity, at bends. I perceive that the cold respects the same places every winter. In the dark, or after a heavy snow, I know well where to cross the river most safely. Where the river is most like a lake, broad with a deep and muddy bottom, there it freezes first and thickest. The open water at a bend seems to be owing to the swiftness of the current, and this to the shallowness, and this to the sands taken out of the opposing bank and deposited there.
There was yesterday eight or ten acres of open water at the west end of Walden, where is depth and breadth combined.
What a horrid shaggy and stiff low wilderness were the Andromeda Ponds yesterday! What then must they have been on the 21st! As it was, it was as if I walked through a forest of glass (with a tough woody core) up to my middle. That dense tufted grass with a greenish tinge was still stiffly coated with ice, as well as everything else, and my shoes were filled with the fragments, but here I and there the crimson sphagnum blushed through the crust beneath. Think of that dense grass, a horrid stiff crop, each stem as big as your finger, firm but brittle and about two feet high, and the countless birds’ nests filled even with ice!
P. M. - Across river and over Hill.
The wind has been blowing and the snow drifting. The paths are filled up again. The surface of the snow is coarsely waved and rough now, as if it caught at every straw and faced its windy foe again. It appears a coarser grain now. By the river are conspicuous the now empty and spread pods of the water milkweed, gray-brown without, silky—white within, — in some a seed or two left still; also the late rose corymbs of red hips; also the eupatorium some with brown fuzz and seeds still; the sium sometimes, with its very flat cymes; and that light-brown sedge or rush. Some black ash keys still hang on amid the black abortions(?)
For a few days I have noticed the snow sprinkled with alder and birch scales. I go now through the birch meadow southwest of the Rock. The high wind is scattering them over the snow there.
See one downy woodpecker and one or two chickadees.
The track of a squirrel on the Island Neck. Tracks are altered by the depth of the snow.
Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun.
Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away.
The snow is too deep and soft yet for many tracks. No doubt the mice have been out beneath it.
Recrossing the river behind Dodd’s, now at 4 P. M., the sun quite low, the open reach just below is quite green, a vitreous green, as if seen through a junk-bottle. Perhaps I never observed this phenomenon but when the sun was low.
He who would study birds’ nests must look for them in November and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen and he can approach new kinds. He will often be surprised to find how many have haunted where he little suspected, and will receive many hints accordingly, which he can act upon in the summer. I am surprised to find many new ones (i. e. not new species) in groves which I had examined several times with particular care in the summer.
This was not a lodging snow, and the wind has already blown most of it off the trees, yet the long-limbed oak on the north of the hill still supports a ridge of its pure white as thick as its limbs. They lie parallel like the ulna and radius, and one is a bare white bone.
Beside the other weeds on the last page, I might have shown the tall rough golden nod, still conspicuous.
Found, in the Wheeler meadow southwest of the Island, a nest in the fork of an alder about eight feet from ground, partly saddled on, made apparently chiefly of fine grass and bark fibres, quite firm and very thick bottomed, and well bound without with various kind of lint. This is a little oval, three by three and a half inches within and seven eighths deep, with a very firm, smooth rim of fine grass and dark shreds, lined with the same and some lint. A few alder leaves dangle from the edge, and, what is remarkable, the outer edge all around is defiled, quite covered, with black and white caterpillar like droppings of the young birds. It is broader and shallower than a yellowbird’s and larger than a wood pewee’s. Can it be a redstart’s? I should think it too large.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 30, 1855
Not far from a foot deep, much the most we have had yet. See December 30, 1859 ("I awake to find it snowing fast. Perhaps seven or eight inches have fallen, - the deepest snow yet.”); December 30, 1853 (“I carried a two-foot rule and measured the snow of yesterday. . . it varied from fourteen to twenty-four inches.”) and note to January 16, 1856 ("With this snow the fences are scarcely an obstruction to the traveller; he easily steps over them. Often they are buried. I suspect it is two and a half feet deep in Andromeda Swamps now.")
Winter now first fairly commenced, I feel. See December 29, 1853 ("The thoughts and associations of summer and autumn are now as completely departed from our minds as the leaves are blown from the trees.") See also March 16, 1859 ("A new phase of the spring is presented; a new season has come.. . . The earth has cast off her white coat and come forth in her clean-washed sober russet early spring dress . . .This first sight of the bare tawny and russet earth, seen afar, perhaps, over the meadow flood in the spring, affects me as the first glimpse of land, his native land, does the voyager who has not seen it a long time."); March 20, 1853 ("It is glorious to behold the life and joy of this ribbon of water sparkling in the sun. . . There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy."); March 26, 1860 ("The brown season extends from about the 6th of March ordinarily into April. . . Tried by various tests, this season fluctuates more or less.") ; April 25, 1859 ("I got to-day and yesterday the first decided impression of greenness beginning to prevail. . .Even the grass begins to wave . . . and I am suddenly advertised that a new season has arrived. This is the beginning of that season which, methinks, culminates with the buttercup and wild pink and Viola pedata. It begins when the first toad is heard."); May 14, 1858 ("To-day, for the first time, it appears to me summerlike and a new season. There is a tender green on the meadows and just leafing trees."); May 17, 1852 ("Does not summer begin after the May storm? "); May 27, 1853 ("A new season has commenced - summer - leafy June.”); May 30, 1852 (Now is the summer come. . . . A day for shadows, even of moving clouds, over fields in which the grass is beginning to wave."); July 18, 1854 ("A hot midsummer day with a sultry mistiness in the air and shadows on land and water beginning to have a peculiar distinctness and solidity."); July 28, 1854 ("Methinks the season culminated about the middle of this month, — that the year was of indefinite promise before, but that, after the first intense heats, we postponed the fulfillment of many of our hopes for this year, and, having as it were attained the ridge of the summer, commenced to descend the long slope toward winter, the afternoon and down-hill of the year."); August 5, 1854 ("It is one long acclivity from winter to midsummer and another long declivity from midsummer to winter."); August 9, 1853 ("How fatally the season is advanced toward the fall! I am not surprised now to see the small rough sunflower. There is much yellow beside now in the fields.");August 26, 1859 ("The first fall rain is a memorable occasion, when the river is raised and cooled, and the first crop of sere and yellow leaves falls. The air is cleared; the dog-days are over; sun-sparkles are seen on water; crickets sound more distinct."); September 20, 1857 ("This is our first fall rain, and makes a dividing line between the summer and fall."); November 10, 1858 ("The season of brilliant leaves may be considered over, — say about the 10th; and now a new season begins, the pure November season of the russet earth and withered leaf and bare twigs and hoary withered goldenrods, etc. ")
The countless birds’ nests filled even with ice! See December 24, 1851 (Now and long since the birds' nests have been full of snow.“); December 29, 1855 (“I find in the andromeda bushes in the Andromeda Ponds a great many nests apparently of the red-wing suspended after their fashion amid the twigs of the andromeda, each now filled with ice.”); January 7, 1856 ("I go along the edge of the Hubbard Meadow woods, the north side, where the snow is gathered, light and up to my middle, shaking down birds’ nests"); January 24, 1856 (“The snow is so deep along the sides of the river that I can now look into nests which I could hardly reach in the summer. . . .They have only an ice egg in them now.”); February 16, 1860 ("Also all the birds' nests in the blueberry bushes are revealed, by the great snow-balls they hold.")
There was yesterday eight or ten acres of open water at the west end of Walden, where is depth and breadth combined. See December 21, 1855 (“Walden is skimmed over, all but an acre, in my cove.”); December 29, 1855 ("Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open, notwithstanding the cold of the 26th, 27th, and 28th and of to-day. It must be owing to the wind partly.”); January 1, 1856 (“Walden is covered with white snow ice six inches thick, for it froze while it was snowing, though commonly there is a thin dark beneath. . . . A very small patch of Walden, frozen since the snow, looks at a little distance exactly like open water by contrast with the snow ice, the trees being reflected in it, and indeed I am not certain but a very small part of this patch was water.”) Compare December 30, 1853 ("The pond not yet frozen entirely over; about six acres open, the wind blew so hard last night. “) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Annual ice-in at Walden
No comments:
Post a Comment