Sailing downwind to Bedford line.

April 14. 

Monday. A raw, overcast morning. 

April 14, 2013

8 A. M. — Up Assabet. 

See one striped squirrel chasing another round and round the Island, with a faint squeak from time to time and a rustling of the dry leaves. They run quite near to the water.

Hear the flicker’s cackle on the old aspen, and his tapping sounds afar over the water. Their tapping resounds thus far, with this peculiar ring and distinctness, because it is a hollow tree they select to play on, as a drum or tambour. It is a hollow sound which rings distinct to a great distance, especially over water. 

I still find small turtle’s eggs on the surface entire, while looking for arrowheads by the Island. 

See from my window a fish hawk flying high west of the house, cutting off the bend between Willow Bay and the meadow, in front of the house, between one vernal lake and another. He suddenly wheels and, straightening out his long narrow wings, makes one circle high above the last meadow, as if he had caught a glimpse of a fish beneath, and then continues his course down the river. 

P. M. — Sail to Hill by Bedford line. 

Wind southwest and pretty strong; sky overcast; weather cool. 

Start up a fish hawk from near the swamp white oaks southwest of the Island, undoubtedly the one of the morning. I now see that this is a much darker bird, both above and beneath, than that bird of the 6th. It flies quite low, surveying the water, in an undulating, buoyant manner, like a marsh hawk, or still more a. nighthawk, with its long curved wings. He flies so low westward that I lose sight of him against the dark hill side and trees. 

The river is going down rapidly, yet the Hunt’s Bridge causeway is but just bare. 

The south side of Ponkawtasset looks much greener and more forward than any part of the town I have noticed. It is almost like another season there. They are already plowing there. 

I steer down straight through the Great Meadows, with the wind almost directly aft, feeling it more and more the farther I advance into them. They make a noble lake now. The boat, tossed up by the rolling billows, keeps falling again on the waves with a chucking sound which is inspiriting. 

There go a couple of ducks, which probably I have started, now scaling far away on motionless pinions, with a slight descent in their low flight, toward some new cove. Anon I scare up two black ducks which make one circle around me, reconnoitring and rising higher and higher, then go down the river. Is it they that so commonly practice this manoeuvre? 

Peter’s is now far behind on a forgotten shore. The boat moored beneath his hill is no longer visible, and the red russet hill which is my goal rises before me. 

I moor my boat to a tree at the base of this hill. The waves are breaking with violence on this shore, as on a sea-beach, and here is the first painted tortoise just east up by them and lying on his back amid the stones, in the most favorable position to display his bright-vermilion marks, as the waves still break over him. 

He makes no effort to turn himself back, probably being weary contending with the waves. A little further is another, also at the mercy of the waves, which greatly interfere with its staid and measured ways, its head helplessly wagging with every billow. Their scales are very clean and bright now. The only yellow I notice is about the head and upper part of the tail. The scales of the back are separated or bordered with a narrow greenish-yellow edging. 

Looking back over the meadow from the top of this hill, I see it regularly watered with foam-streaks from five to ten feet apart, extending quite across it in the direction of the wind. Washed up against this shore, I see the first dead sucker. 

You see nowadays on every side, on the meadow bottom, the miserable carcasses of the musquash stripped of their pelts. I saw one plunge from beneath the monument. 

There is much lumber—fencing-stuff, etc. —to be gathered now by those inclined. 

I see an elm-top at the Battle-Ground covered with blackbirds uttering their squeaks and split whistles, as if they had not got their voices yet, and a coarse, rasping tchuck or char, not in this case from a crow blackbird. 

Again I see the fish hawk, near the old place. He alights on the ground where there is a ridge covered with bushes, surrounded by water, but I scare him again, and he finally goes off northeast, flying high. He had apparently-stayed about that place all day fishing.

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


The boat, tossed up by the rolling billows, keeps falling again on the waves with a chucking sound which is inspiriting. See April 10, 1852 ("It is pleasant, now that we are in the wind, to feel the chopping sound when the boat seems to fall upon the successive waves which it meets at right angles or in the eye of the wind.")

Hear the flicker’s cackle on the old aspen, and his tapping sounds afar over the water. See  March 11, 1859 (“But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings; it echoes peculiarly in the air of a spring morning.”);  March 13, 1855 ("I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water."); March 15, 1854 ("I hear that peculiar, interesting loud hollow tapping of a woodpecker from over the water.")' March 18, 1853 ("The tapping of the woodpecker about this time.”); March 30, 1854 ("At the Island I see and hear this morning the cackle of a pigeon woodpecker at the hollow poplar; had heard him tapping distinctly from my boat's place."); April 27, 1856 ("The tapping of a woodpecker is made a more remarkable and emphatic sound by the hollowness of the trunk, the expanse of water which conducts the sound, and the morning hour at which I commonly hear it.”); May 9, 1860 ("The tapping of a woodpecker sounds distinct and hollow this still cloudy day. The water is smooth. ”). See also  A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker)

See from my window a fish hawk flying high . . . See April 14, 1852 ("The streams break up; the ice goes to the sea. Then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey.")

The south side of Ponkawtasset looks much greener. See April 14, 1854 ("There is a general tinge of green now discernible through the russet on the bared meadows and the hills."); April 15, 1855 ("The reflections of the maples, of Ponkawtasset and the poplar hill, and the whole township in the southwest, are as perfect as I ever saw.") See also September 9, 1851 ("The distant meadows towards the north beyond Conant's Grove, full of fog, appear like a vast lake out of which rise Annursnack and Ponkawtasset like rounded islands."); January 30, 1860 ("Certain rounded hills . . .have a marked family likeness. . . they suggest a relation geologically. Such are, for instance, Nashoba, Annursnack, Nawshawtuct, and Ponkawtasset,"); November 1, 1858 ("The curving moraine forming the west side of Sleepy Hollow . . .is continued northward by itself almost to the river, and points plainly enough to Ponkawtasset Hill on the other side . . .and so the sloping cemetery lots on the west of Sleepy Hollow are related to the distant Ponkawtasset..")

April 14. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, April 14.

\

I steer down straight through

the Great Meadows with the wind

almost directly aft.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Sailing downwind to Bedford line.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

tinyurl.com/hdt-560414