I still travel everywhere on the middle of the river.

March 14, 2016
camel’s hump

March 14.

Quite warm. Thermometer 46°. 

3 P. M. — Up Assabet. 

The ice formed the fore part of this week, as that at Merrick’s noticed on the 12th, and heard of else where in the Mill Brook, appears to have been chiefly snow ice, though no snow fell. It was apparently blown into the water during those extremely cold nights and assisted its freezing. So that it is a question whether the river would have closed again at Merrick’s on the night of the 10th and 11th, notwithstanding the intense cold, if the snow had not been blown into it,—-a question, I say, because the snow was blown into it. 

I think it remarkable that, cold as it was, I should not have supposed from my sensations that it was nearly so cold as the thermometer indicated. 

Tapped several white maples with my knife, but find no sap flowing; but, just above Pinxter Swamp, one red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark. Tapping this, I was surprised to find it flow freely. Where the sap had dried on the bark, shining and sticky, it tasted quite sweet. 

Yet Anthony Wright tells me that he attempted to trim some apple trees on the 11th, but was obliged to give up, it was so cold. They were frozen solid. 

This is the only one of eight or ten white and red maples that flows. I do not see why it should be. 

As I return by the old Merrick Bath Place, on the river,—for I still travel everywhere on the middle of the river, — the setting sun falls on the osier row toward the road and attracts my attention. They certainly look brighter now and from this point than I have noticed them before this year, — greenish and yellowish below and reddish above, — and I fancy the sap fast flowing in their pores. 

Yet I think that on a close inspection I should find no change. Nevertheless, it is, on the whole, perhaps the most springlike sight I have seen.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 14, 1856

One red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark. . . . Where the sap had dried on the bark, shining and sticky, it tasted quite sweet. See March 15, 1856 ("Put a spout in the red maple of yesterday, and hang a pail beneath to catch the sap.”) See also March 7, 1855 ("To-day, as also three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet.")