A new season has come..

March 16. 

6 a. m. — The water is just over the slanting iron truss, four feet from its east end, and still rising. 

P. M. — Launch my boat and sail to Ball's Hill. It is fine clear weather and a strong northwest wind. 

What a change since yesterday! Last night I came home through as incessant heavy rain as I have been out in for many years, through the muddiest and wettest of streets, still partly covered with ice, and the rain water stood over shoes in many places on the sidewalks. I heard of several who went astray in this water and had adventures in the dark. You require india-rubber boots then. 

But to-day I see the children playing at hop-scotch on those very sidewalks, with a bed marked in the dry sand. So rapid are the changes of weather with us, and so porous our soil. 

With a strong wind we sail over the Red Bridge road. The water is falling over the lower side of the road as over a dam. For the road really operates as a dam, the water being much lower on the east side. 

A new phase of the spring is presented; a new season has come. By the soaking rain and the wind of yesterday especially, the remaining snow and ice has been almost entirely swept away, and the ice has been broken, floated off, and melted, and much frost taken out of the ground; and now, as we glide over the Great Meadows before this strong wind, we no longer see dripping, saturated russet and brown banks through rain, hearing at intervals the alarm notes of the early robins, — banks which reflect a yellowish light, — but we see the bare and now pale-brown and dry russet hills. 

The earth has cast off her white coat and come forth in her clean-washed sober russet early spring dress. As we look over the lively, tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and northward, our eyes fall on these shining russet hills, and Ball's Hill appears in this strong light at the verge of this undulating blue plain, like some glorious newly created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. 

The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the hill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind, just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky. 

Look toward the sun, the water is yellow, as water in which the earth has just washed itself clean of its winter impurities; look from the sun and it is a beautiful dark blue; but in each direction the crests of the waves are white, and you cannot sail or row over this watery wilderness without sharing the excitement of this element. 

Our sail draws so strongly that we cut through the great waves without feeling them. And all around, half a mile or a mile distant, looking over this blue foreground, I see the bare and peculiarly neat, clean- washed, and bright russet hills reflecting the bright light (after the storm of yesterday) from an infinite number of dry blades of withered grass. 

The russet surfaces have now, as it were, a combed look, — combed by the rain. And the leather-color of withered oak leaves covering Ball's Hill, seen a mile or two off in the strong light, with a few pines intermixed, as if it were an island rising out of this blue sea in the horizon. 

This sight affects me as if it were visible at this season only. What with the clear air and the blue water and the sight of the pure dry withered leaves, that distant hill affects me as something altogether ethereal. 

After a day of soaking rain, concluded with a double rainbow the evening before, — not to mention the rain of the evening, — go out into the sparkling spring air, embark on the flood of melted snow and of rain gathered from all hillsides, with a northwest wind in which you often find it hard to stand up straight, and toss upon a sea of which one half is liquid clay, the other liquid indigo, and look round on an earth dressed in a home spun of pale sheeny brown and leather-color. 

Such are the blessed and fairy isles we sail to! 

We meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind, at Flint's Bridge. (One says they were seen about a week ago, but there was very little water then.) Its is a very leisurely sort of limp ing flight, tacking its way along like a sailing vessel, yet the slow security with which it advances suggests a leisurely contemplativeness in the bird, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure. As often as its very narrow, long, and curved wings are lifted up against the light, I see a very narrow distinct light edging to the wing where it is thin. Its black- tipped wings. 

Afterwards, from Ball's Hill, looking north, I see two more circling about looking for food over the ice and water. 

There is an unexpected quantity of ice in that direction, not on the channel, but the meadows east of it, all the way from Ball's Hill to Carlisle Bridge, — large masses, which have drifted from the channel and from above, for there the wind has blown more directly across the river. These great masses have been driven and wedged one against another, and ground up on the edges. 

This first sight of the bare tawny and russet earth, seen afar, perhaps, over the meadow flood in the spring, affects me as the first glimpse of land, his native land, does the voyager who has not seen it a long time. 

But in a week or two we get used to it. 

I look down over Tarbell's Bay, just north of Ball's Hill. Not only meadows but potato and rye fields are buried deep, and you see there, sheltered by the hills on the northwest, a placid blue bay having the russet hills for shores. This kind of bay, or lake, made by the freshet — these deep and narrow "fiords" — can only be seen along such a stream as this, liable to an annual freshet. 

The water rests as gently as a dewdrop on a leaf, laving its tender temporary shores. It has no strand, leaves no permanent water-mark, but though you look at it a quarter of a mile off, you know that the rising flood is gently overflowing a myriad withered green blades there in succession. 

There is the magic of lakes that come and go. The lake or bay is not an institution, but a phenomenon. You plainly see that it is so much water poured into the hollows of the earth


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1859

I see the children playing at hop-scotch on those very sidewalks. See February 25, 1860 ("I noticed yesterday in the street some dryness of stones at crossings and in the road and sidewalk here and there, and even two or three boys beginning to play at marbles, so ready are they to get at the earth.") March 19, 1858 ("One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side.") March 30, 1860("The boy's sled gets put away by degrees, or when it is found to be in the way, and his thoughts are directed gradually to more earthy games. There are now water privileges for him by every roadside."); April 10, 1856 ("Some fields are dried sufficiently for the games of ball with which this season is commonly ushered in. I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of baseball played over behind the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow,") See also February 9, 1854 ("The voices of the school-children sound like spring"); April 24, 1859 ("So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the State. A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it."); November 2, 1857 ("How contagious are boys' games! A short time ago they were spinning tops, as I saw and heard, all the country over. Now every boy has a stick curved at the end, a hawkie (?), in his hand")

Launch my boat and sail to Ball's Hill. It is fine clear weather and a strong northwest wind. . . .in each direction the crests of the waves are white, and you cannot sail or row over this watery wilderness without sharing the excitement of this element. See  March 16, 1854 (“See and hear honey-bees about my boat in the yard, attracted probably by the beeswax in the grafting-wax which was put on it a year ago. It is warm weather. A thunder-storm in the evening.”);March 16, 1860 (“The ice of the night fills the river in the morning, and I hear it go grating downward at sunrise. As soon as I can get it painted and dried, I launch my boat and make my first voyage for the year up or down the stream, on that element from which I have been de barred for three months and a half.”) See also March 8, 1855 (“This morning I got my boat out of the cellar and turned it up in the yard to let the seams open before I calk it. The blue river, now almost completely open, admonishes me to be swift.”); March 9, 1855 (“Painted the bottom of my boat.”); March 12, 1854 (“A new feature is being added to the landscape, and that is expanses and reaches of blue water. . . .Toward night the water becomes smooth and beautiful. Men are eager to launch their boats and paddle over the meadows.”); March 15, 1854 (“Paint my boat.”);; March 17, 1857 (“This morning it is fair, and I hear the note of the woodpecker on the elms (that early note) and the bluebird again. Launch my boat.”); March 18, 1854 (“Took up my boat, a very heavy one, which was lying on its bottom in the yard, and carried it two rods.”); March 19, 1855 (“A fine clear and warm day for the season. Launch my boat.”); March 19, 1858 ("Another pleasant and warm day. Painted my boat afternoon.”); March 20, 1855 ("A flurry of snow at 7 A. M. I go to turn my boat up.”);  March 22, 1854 ("Launch boat and paddle to Fair Haven. Still very cold.”); March 22, 1858 ("Launch my boat and row down stream.”)