A north snow-storm, very hard to face..

January 4. 

January 4, 2019 

A northeast snow-storm, or rather a north snow-storm, very hard to face.

P. M. to Walden in it. 

It snows very hard, driving along almost horizontally, falling but a foot or two in a rod. Nobody is in the street, or thinks of going out far except on important business. Most roads are trackless. The snow may be now fifteen to eighteen inches deep. As I go along the causeway, I find it is one thing to go south, or from the wind, another to face it. 

I can see through the storm a house or large tree only a quarter of a mile; beyond all is white falling snow. Woods and single trees seen through this air are all dark or black. 

The surface of the snow is in great waves whose ridges run from east to west, about a rod apart, or generally less, — say ten feet, — low and gentle swells. 

The small white pines stand thus, the lower branches loaded and bent down the ground, while the upper are commonly free and erect:

But the pitch pines near Thrush Alley are the most interesting objects, for they hold much more snow. The snow lodges on their plumes, and, bending them down, it accumulates more and more on the angle generally at the base of the several plumes, in little conical heaps shaped somewhat like this:

differing according to the number and position of the plumes. They look as if a child had stuck up its elbow under a white sheet. Some small ones stand stiflly upright like a soldier’s plume. 

Several trees will be so fallen together and intermingled that you do not see them distinctly. At the same time the lowermost small black and dead horizontal limbs near the ground, where there is least wind and jar, — these almost exclusively, — say for six or eight feet up, are covered with upright walls of snow five or six times their own height and zigzagging with them like the Wall of China; or like great white cater pillars they lie along them, these snowy sloths; or rather it is a labyrinth, a sort of cobweb, of broad white belts in the air. 

Only a dim twilight struggles through to this lower region, and the sight of these snowy walls or labyrinths suggests a rare stillness, freedom from wind and jar. If you try to stoop and wind your way there, you get your neck and ears full of snow. 

I can’t draw it. 

That is, for each dead pine branch you have a thin flat branch of snow resting on it, an exaggeration of the former. 

It is a still white labyrinth of snowy purity, and you can look far into its recesses under the green and snowy canopy, — a labyrinth of which, perchance, a rabbit may have the clue. 

I noticed one pitch pine about three feet high so snowed up, and its branches all drooping, it looked like a draped statue or a white-ant hill. 

In the woods the snow is often two feet deep, and you must walk at a very deliberate pace if you would keep it up. 

Still the withered hoary goldenrods (chiefly S. nemoralis) and asters (perhaps oftenest A. dumosus) rise above the snow here and there, — gray weeds, sufficiently dry and everlasting. 

The oak leaves, especially the black oak leaves, are very agreeable and wholesome colors. The deeper the snow, the more universal the whiteness, the more agreeable is this color. 

Your breath causes the snow to turn to ice in your beard; a shaggy mass of icicles it becomes, which makes you look like a man from the extreme north. 

When it grew late, the air being thick and unelastic in this storm, I mistook the distant sound of the locomotive whistle for the hoot of an owl. It was quite like it. 

I see, nevertheless, a few tree sparrows about, looking chubbier than ever, their feathers being puffed up, and flitting and twittering merrily along the fence. 

Turning north, the large rather moist flakes actually put out your eyes, and you must manage to look through the merest crack. 

Even in the midst of the storm I see where great clouds of fine snow roll down the wood-side, the wind shaking the snow from the trees. It looks like the vapor from the locomotive.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, January 4, 1859

A north snow-storm, very hard to face. It snows very hard, driving along almost horizontally,.  See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow, drifting nearly horizontally from the north, so that it is quite blinding to face"); January 19, 1857 ("A fine dry snow, intolerable to face. ")

I mistook the distant sound of the locomotive whistle for the hoot of an owl. See November 21, 1857 ("I hear, I think, a boy whistling upon the bank above me, but immediately perceive that it is the whistle of the locomotive a mile off in that direction."); August 15, 1854 ("The locomotive whistle, far southwest, sounds like a bell.”); March 22, 1856 ("I thought I heard the hum of a bee, but perhaps it was a railroad whistle on the Lowell Railroad") Compare December 9, 1856 ("I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance, and the melodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as the axe or the locomotive whistle.")