The ice on Lake Champlain was broken up on the 12th.

April 17, 2016

April 17.

Was awakened in the night by a thunder and lightning shower and hail-storm — the old familiar burst and rumble, as if it had been rumbling somewhere else ever since I heard it last, and had not lost the knack. 

I heard a thousand hailstones strike and bounce on the roof at once. What a clattering! Yet it did not last long, and the hail took a breathing-space once or twice. I did not know at first but we should lose our windows, the blinds being away at the painters’. 

These sounds lull me into a deeper slumber than before.

Hail-storms are milked out of the first summer-like warmth; they belong to lingering cool veins in the air, which thus burst and come down. The thunder, too, sounds like the final rending and breaking up of winter; thus precipitous is its edge. The first one is a skirmish between the cool rear-guard of winter and the warm and earnest vanguard of summer. Advancing summer strikes on the edge of winter, which does not drift fast enough away, and fire is elicited. Electricity is engendered by the early heats. 

I love to hear the voice of the first thunder as of the toad (though it returns irregularly like pigeons), far away in his moist meadow where he is warmed to life, and see the flash of his eye. 

Hear a chip-bird high on an elm this morning, and probably that was one I heard on the 15th. You would not be apt to distinguish the note of the earliest. 

I still see quite a snow-bank from my window on the hillside at the northeast end of Clamshell, say a northeast exposure. This is on the surface, but the snow lies there in still greater quantity, in two hollows where sand has been dug for the meadow, on the hillside, though sloping to the southeast, where it is quite below the general surface. We have had scarcely any rain this spring, and the snow has been melting very gradually in the sun. 

P. M. Start for Conantum in boat, wind southwest. 

I can hide my oars and sail up there and come back another day. A moist muggy afternoon, rain-threatening, true April weather, after a particularly warm and pleasant forenoon. The meadows are still well covered, and I cut off the bends. 

The red-wing goes over with his che-e-e che-e-e, chatter, chatter, chatter. 

On Hubbard’s great meadow I hear the sound of some fowl, perhaps a loon, rushing through the water, over by Dennis’s Hill, and push for it. Meanwhile it grows more and more rain-threatening, — all the air moist and muggy, a great ill-defined cloud darkening all the west. — but I push on till I feel the first drops, knowing that the wind will take me back again. 

Now I hear ducks rise, and know by their hoarse quacking that they are black ones, and see two going off as if with one mind, along the edge of the wood.

Now comes the rain with a rush. In haste I put my boat about, raise my sail, and, cowering under my umbrella in the stern, with the steering oar in my hand, begin to move homeward. The rain soon fulls up my sail, and it catches all the little wind. From under the umbrella I look out on the scene. 

The big drops pepper the watery plain, the aequor, on every side. It is not a hard, dry pattering, as on a roof, but a softer, liquid pattering, which makes the impression of a double wateriness. You do not observe the drops descending but where they strike, for there they batter and indent the surface deeply like buckshot, and they, or else other drops which they create, rebound or hop up an inch or two, and these last you see, and also when they circling dimples, running into and breaking one another, and very often a bubble is formed by the force of the shot, which floats entire for half a minute. These big shot are battering the surface every three inches or thicker. 

I make haste to take down my sail at the bridges, but at the stone arches forgot my umbrella, which was un avoidably crushed in part. 

Even in the midst of this rain I am struck by the variegated surface of the water, different portions reflecting the light differently, giving what is called a watered appearance. Broad streams of light water stretch away between streams of dark, as if they were different kinds of water unwilling to mingle, though all are equally dimpled by the rain, and you detect no difference in their condition. As if Nature loved variety for its own sake. 

It is a true April shower, or rain,—I think the first. It rains so easy, —has a genius for it and infinite capacity for it. Many showers will not exhaust the moisture of April. 

When I get home and look out the window, I am surprised to see how it has greened the grass. It springs up erect like a green flame in the ditches on each side the road, where we had not noticed it before. Grass is born. 

There is a quite distinct tinge of green on the hillside seen from my window now. I did not look for the very first. 

I learn from the papers that an unusual number of fruit trees have been girdled by the mice under the deep snow of the past winter. Immense damage has been done to nurseries and orchards. I saw where a prostrate maple in the Great Meadows had been gnawed nearly bare. 

April 17, 2016

Our river was generally breaking up on the 3d of April, though some parts were frozen till the 12th. I see by the papers that the ice had left Lake St. Peter (St. Lawrence) the 12th. Another paper (of the 11th) has heard that the St. Lawrence was open from Quebec to Three Rivers, or before the Hudson. The ice on Lake Champlain was broken up on the 12th. Fair Haven Pond was quite open the 13th. The ice moved down the Penobscot, and the river opened the 15th. Lake Ontario was free of ice the 16th. The Kennebec is expected to open this week. (To-day is Thursday.) 

There is still ice in Walden.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 17, 1856


Drops batter and indent the surface deeply like buckshot. . . Broad streams of light water stretch away between streams of dark. . . See July 31, 1860 ("I see the differently shaded or lit currents of the river . . .and a myriad white globules dance or rebound an inch or two from the surface, where the big drops fall, and I hear a sound as if it rains pebbles or shot”); June 17, 1859 ("The different-colored currents, light and dark, are seen through it all. At last the whole surface is nicked with the rebounding drops ...” )

April 17, 2016