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| October 20, 2017 |
I go along the riverside and by Dakin the pumpmaker's.
There is a very strong northwest wind, Novemberish and cool, raising waves on the river and admonishing to prepare for winter.
I see two Chenopodium album with stems as bright purple and fair as the poke has been, and the calyx lobes enveloping the seeds the same color.
Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees.
I had gone but little way on the old Carlisle road when I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, barefooted, as usual, with an axe in his hand; was in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. It is he who took the Centinel so long. When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had n’t anything to carry them in, he put 'em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry fruit in. How many he got in along toward the toes, I don’t know. I noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. It pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days. Far be it from me to call it avarice or penury, this childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields and carrying it home in the October evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter's store. Oh, no; he was happy to be Nature's pensioner still, and bird- . like to pick up his living. Better his robin than your turkey, his shoes full of apples than your barrels full; they will be sweeter and suggest a better tale. He can afford to tell how he got them, and we to listen. There is an old wife, too, at home, to share them and hear how they were obtained. Like an old squirrel shuf ling to his hole with a nut. Far less pleasing to me the loaded wain, more suggestive of avarice and of spiritual penury.
This old man's cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church's sacraments and memento mori's. It was better than a prayerful mood. It proves to me old age as tolerable, as happy, as infancy. I was glad of an occasion to suspect that this afternoon he had not been at “work” but living somewhat after my own fashion (though he did not explain the axe), — had been out to see what nature had for him, and now was hasten ing home to a burrow he knew, where he could warm his old feet. If he had been a young man, he would probably have thrown away his apples and put on his shoes when he saw me coming, for shame. But old age is manlier; it has learned to live, makes fewer apologies, like infancy. This seems a very manly man. I have known him within a few years building stone wall by himself, barefooted.
I keep along the old Carlisle road. The leaves having mostly fallen, the country now seems deserted, and you feel further from home and more lonely.
I see where squirrels, apparently, have gnawed the apples left in the road.
The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them. They must make a principal part of their food now.
I see the yellowish election-cake fungi. Those large chocolate-colored ones have been burst some days (at least).
Warren Brown, who owns the Easterbrooks place, the west side the road, is picking barberries. Allows that the soil thereabouts is excellent for fruit, but it is so rocky that he has not patience to plow it. That is the reason this tract is not cultivated. The yellow birches are generally bare. The sassafras in Sted Buttrick's pasture near to E. Hubbard's Wood, nearly so; leaves all withered. Much or most of the fever-bush still green, though somewhat wrinkled."
There was Melvin, too, a-barberrying and nutting. He had got two baskets, one in each hand, and his game-bag, which hung from his neck, all full of nuts and barberries, and his mouth full of tobacco. Trust him to find where the nuts and berries grow. He is hunting all the year and he marks the bushes and the trees which are fullest, and when the time comes, for once leaves his gun, though not his dog, at home, and takes his baskets to the spot. It is pleasanter to me to meet him with his gun or with his baskets than to meet some portly caterer for a family, basket on arm, at the stalls of Quincy Market. Better Melvin's pignuts than the others' shagbarks. It is to be ob served that the best things are generally most abused, and so are not so much enjoyed as the worst. Shag barks are eaten by epicures with diseased appetites; pignuts by the country boys who gather them. So wood.
Melvin says he has caught partridges in his hands. If there’s only one hole, knows they’ve not gone out. Sometimes shoots them through the snow.
What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country!
Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. Such great rocky and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little; but think of the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair, both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon.
There are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could actually pick two bushels of berries with out being seen by you on the other side. And they are not a quarter picked at last, by all creatures to gether. I walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side, seeming to issue from between the pines or other trees, as if it were they that were promenading there, not I.
That very dense and handsome maple and pine grove opposite the pond-hole on this old Carlisle road is Ebby Hubbard's. [Sted Buttrick's, according to Melvin.] Melvin says there are those alive who remember mowing there. Hubbard loves to come with his axe in the fall or winter and trim up his woods.
Melvin tells me that Skinner says he thinks he heard a wildcat scream in E. Hubbard's Wood, by the Close. It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats. They had better look out, or he will skin them, for that seems to have been the trade of his ancestors. How long Nature has manoeuvred to bring our Skinner within ear-shot of that wildcat's scream! Saved Ebby's wood to be the scene of it! Ebby, the wood-saver.
Melvin says that Sted sold the principal log of one of those pasture oaks to Garty for ten dollars and got several cords besides. What a mean bribe to take the life of so noble a tree!
Wesson is so gouty that he rarely comes out-of-doors, and is a spectacle in the street; but he loves to tell his old stories still! How, when he was stealing along to get a shot at his ducks, and was just upon them a red squirrel sounded the alarm, chickaree chickaree chickaree, and off they went; but he turned his gun upon the squirrel to avenge himself.
It would seem as if men generally could better appreciate honesty of the John Beatton stamp, which gives you your due to a mill, than the generosity which habitually throws in the half-cent.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 20, 1857
Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees. See October 5, 1857 (“I see in most orchards the apples in heaps under the trees, and ladders slanted against their twiggy masses.”)
Yellowish election-cake fungi. See note to October 20, 1856 (“I notice, as elsewhere of late, a great many brownish-yellow (and some pink) election-cake fungi, eaten by crickets; about three inches in diameter. Some of those spread chocolate-colored ones have many grubs in them, though dry and dusty.")
What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! See June 10, 1853 ("What shall this great wild tract over which we strolled be called?. . . It contains what I call the Boulder Field, the Yellow Birch Swamp, the Black Birch Hill, the Laurel Pasture, the Hog-Pasture, the White Pine Grove, the Easterbrooks Place, the Old Lime-Kiln, the Lime Quarries, Spruce Swamp, the Ermine Weasel Woods; also the Oak Meadows, the Cedar Swamp, the Kibbe Place, and the old place northwest of Brooks Clark‘s.Ponkawtasset bounds it on the south. There are a few frog-ponds and an old mill-pond within it, and Bateman‘s Pond on its edge. What shall the whole be called? . . .Shall we call it the Easterbrooks Country?")
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