The very sharp and regular dark tops of the fir trees

July 26. 

Sunday. 

I distinguish more plainly than formerly the very sharp and regular dark tops of the fir trees, shaped like the points of bodkins. These give a peculiarly dark and sombre look to the forest. The spruce-top has a more ragged outline. . . . 

Here are many raspberries on the site of an old logging-camp, but not yet ripe. . . . 

In the meanwhile I observe the plants on the shore: white and black spruce, Hypericum ellipticum, Smilax herbacea, sium, and a strange-looking polygonum. . . . 

As we sit on the bank, two canoes, containing men, women, and children, probably from Chesuncook, return down the stream. We suppose that they had been a-berrying this Sunday morning. . . . 

The canoe implies a long antiquity in which its manufacture has been gradually perfected. It will ere long, perhaps, be ranked among the lost arts. . . .

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 26, 1857

See The Maine Woods ("Sunday, July 26. The note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting but almost wiry sound, was the first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. This was the prevailing bird in the northern part of Maine. . . . We soon passed the island where I had camped four years before, and I recognized the very spot. . . .As we were pushing away again, a white-headed eagle sailed over our heads. . . . We carried a part of the baggage about Pine Stream Falls, while the Indian went down in the canoe.. . .There were magnificent great purple fringed orchises on this carry and the neighboring shores. I measured the largest canoe birch which I saw in this journey near the end of the carry. It was 14| feet in circumference. . . About noon we turned northward, up a broad kind of estuary, and at its northeast corner found the Caucomgomoc River, and after going about a mile from the lake, reached the Umbazookskus,. . .Rambling about the woods at this camp, I noticed that they consisted chiefly of firs, black spruce, and some white, red maple, canoe birch, and, along the river, the hoary alder (Alnus incana). I name them in the order of their abundance.. . .The Clintonia borealis, with ripe berries, was very abundant, and perfectly at home there.")

Canoe manufacture will ere long, perhaps, be ranked among the lost arts.See September 22, 1853 ("It took him a fortnight or three weeks to complete a canoe after he had got the materials ready. I was much struck by the method of this work, and the process deserves to be minutely described"); July 25, 1857 ("Here was a canoe on the stocks, in an earlier stage of its manufacture than I had seen before")

July 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 26

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 © 2009-2021