Tuesday, March 19, 2019

It blows so hard that you walk aslant against the wind.

March 19.

 7 a. m. — Fair weather and a very strong southwest wind, the water not quite so high as day before yesterday, — just about as high as yesterday morning, — notwithstanding yesterday's rain, which was pretty copious.

March 19, 2019

 P.  M.  — To Tarbell's via J.  P.  Brown's. 

 The wind blows very strongly from the southwest, and, the equal violence from the north, the river would probably have risen on account of yesterday's rain. 

 On the northeast sides of the broadest expanses the waves run very high, quite sea-like, and their tumult is exciting both [to] see and [to] hear. 

 All sorts of lumber is afloat. 

 Rails, planks, and timber, etc., which the unthrifty neglected to secure now change hands. 

 Much railroad lumber is floated off. 

 While one end rests on the land, it is the railroad's, but as soon as it is afloat it is made the property of him who saves it. 

 I see some poor neighbors as earnest as the railroad employees are negligent, to secure it. 

 It blows so hard that you walk aslant against the wind. 

 Your very beard, if you wear a full one, is a serious cause of detention. 

 Or if you are fortunate enough to go before the wind, your carriage can hardly be said to be natural to you. 

 A new ravine has begun at Clamshell this spring. 

 That other, which began with a crack in the frozen ground, I stood at the head of and looked down and out through the other day. 

 It not only was itself a new feature in the landscape, but it gave to the landscape seen through [it] a new and remarkable character, as does the Deep Cut on the railroad. 

 It faces the water, and you look down on the shore and the flooded meadows between its two sloping sides as between the frame of a picture. 

 It affected me like the descriptions or representations of much more stupendous scenery, and to my eyes the dimensions of this ravine were quite in definite, and in that mood I could not have guessed if it were twenty or fifty feet wide. 

 The landscape has a strange and picturesque appearance seen through it, and it is itself no mean feature in it. 

But a short time ago I detected here a crack in the frozen ground. 

Now I look with delight as it were at a new landscape through a broad gap in the hill. 

 Walking afterward on the side of the hill behind Abel Hosmer's, overlooking the russet interval, the ground being bare where com was cultivated last year, I see that the sandy soil has been washed far down the hill for its whole length by the recent rains combined with the melting snow, and it forms on the nearly level ground at the base very distinct flat yellow sands, with a convex edge, contrasting with the darker soil there. 

 Such slopes must lose a great deal of this soil in a single spring, and I should think that was a sound rea son in many cases for leaving them woodland and never exposing and breaking the surface. 

 This, plainly, is one reason why the brows of such hills are commonly so barren. 

 They lose much more than they gain annually. 

 It is a question whether the farmer will not lose more by the wash in such cases than he will gain by manuring. 

 The meadows are all in commotion. 

 The ducks are now concealed by the waves, if there are any floating there. 

 While the sun is behind a cloud, the surface of the flood is almost uniformly yellowish or blue, but when the sun comes out from behind the cloud, a myriad dazzling white crests to the waves are seen. 

 The wind makes such a din about your ears that conversation is difficult; your words are blown away and do not strike the ear they were aimed at. 

 If you walk by the water, the tumult of the waves confuses you. 

 If you go by a tree or enter the woods, the din is yet greater. 

 Nevertheless this universal commotion is very interesting and exciting. 

 The white pines in the horizon, either single trees or whole woods, a mile off in the southwest or west, are particularly interesting. 

 You not only see the regular bilateral form of the tree, all the branches distinct like the frond of a fern or a feather (for the pine, even at this distance, has not merely beauty of outline and color, — it is not merely an amorphous and homogeneous or continuous mass of green, — but shows a regular succession of flatfish leafy boughs or stages, in flakes one above another, like the veins of a leaf or the leafets of a frond; it is this richness and symmetry of detail which, more than its outline, charms us), but that fine silvery light reflected from its needles (perhaps their under sides) incessantly in motion. 

 As a tree bends and waves like a feather in the gale, I see it alternately dark and light, as the sides of the needles, which reflect the cool sheen, are alternately withdrawn from and restored to the proper angle,1 and the light appears to flash upward from the base of the tree incessantly. 

 In the intervals of the flash it is often as if the tree were withdrawn altogether from sight. 

 I see one large pine wood over whose whole top these cold electric flashes are incessantly passing off harmlessly into the air above. 

 I thought at first of some fine spray dashed upward, but it is rather like broad flashes of pale, cold light. 

 Surely you can never see a pine wood so expressive, so speaking. 

 This reflection of light from the waving crests of the earth is like the play and flashing of electricity. 

 No deciduous tree exhibits these fine effects of light. 

 Literally incessant sheets, not of heat- but cold- lightning, you would say were flashing there. 

 Seeing some just over the roof of a house which was far on this side, I thought at first that it was something like smoke even — though a rare kind of smoke — that went up from the house. 

 In short, you see a play of light over the whole pine, similar in its cause, but far grander in its effects, than that seen in a waving field of grain. 

 Is not this wind an awaking to life and light [of] the pines after their winter slumber? The wind is making passes over them, magnetizing and electrifying them. 

 Seen at midday, even, it is still the light of dewy morning alone that is reflected from the needles of the pine. 

 This is the brightening and awakening of the pines, a phenomenon perchance connected with the flow of sap in them. 

 I feel somewhat like the young Astyanax at sight of his father's flashing crest. 

 As if in this wind-storm of March a certain electricity was passing from heaven to earth through the pines and calling them to life. 

 That first general exposure of the russet earth, March 16th, after the soaking rain of the day before, which washed off most of the snow and ice, is a remarkable era in an ordinary spring. 

 The earth casting off her white mantle and appearing in her homely russet garb. 

 This russet — including the leather-color of oak leaves — is peculiar and not like the russet of the fall and winter, for it reflects the spring light or sun, as if there were a sort of sap in it. 

 When the strong northwest winds first blow, drying up the superabundant moisture, the withered grass and leaves do not present a merely weather-beaten appearance, but a washed and combed springlike face. 

 The knolls forming islands in our meadowy flood are never more interesting than then. 

 This is when the earth is, as it were, re-created, raised up to the sun, which was buried under snow and ice. 

 To continue the account of the weather [seven] pages back : To-day it has cleared off to a very strong south west wind, which began last evening, after the rain, — strong as ever blows all day, stronger than the north west wind of the 16th and hardly so warm, with flit ting wind-clouds only. 

 It differs from the 16th in being yet drier and barer, — the earth, — scarcely any snow or ice to be found, and, such being the direction of the wind, you can hardly find a place in the after noon which is both sunny and sheltered from the wind, and there is a yet greater commotion in the water. 

 We are interested in the phenomena of Nature mainly as children are, or as we are in games of chance. 

 They are more or less exciting. 

 Our appetite for novelty is insatiable. 

 We do not attend to ordinary things, though they are most important, but to extraordinary ones. 

 While it is only moderately hot or cold, or wet or dry, nobody attends to it, but when Nature goes to an extreme in any of these directions we are all on the alert with excitement. 

 Not that we care about the philosophy or the effects of this phenomenon. 

 E.  g. , when I went to Boston in the early train the coldest morning of last winter, two topics mainly occupied the attention of the passengers, Morphy's chess victories and Nature's victorious cold that morning. 

 The inhabitants of various towns were comparing notes, and that one whose door opened upon a greater degree of cold than any of his neighbors' doors chuckled not a little. 

 Almost every one I met asked me almost before our salutations were over "how the glass stood" at my house or in my town, — the librarian of the college, the registrar of deeds at Cambridgeport, — a total stranger to me, whose form of inquiry made me think of another sort of glass, — and each rubbed his hands with pretended horror but real delight if I named a higher figure than he had yet heard. 

 It was plain that one object which the cold was given us for was our amusement, a passing excitement. 

 It would be perfectly consistent and American to bet on the coldness of our respective towns, of  the morning that is to come. 

 Thus a greater degree of cold may be said to warm us more than a less one. 

 We hear with ill-concealed disgust the figures reported from some localities, where they never enjoy the luxury of severe cold. 

 This is a perfectly legitimate amusement, only we should know that each day is peculiar and has its kindred excitements. 

 In those wet days like the 12th and the 15th when the browns culminated, the sun being concealed, I was drawn toward and worshipped the brownish light in the sod, — the withered grass, etc. , on barren hills. 

 I felt as if I could eat the very crust of the earth; I never felt so terrene, never sympathized so with the surface of the earth. 

 From whatever source the light and heat come, thither we look with love. 

 The newspapers state that a man in Connecticut lately shot ninety-three musquash in one day. 

 Melvin says that in skinning a mink you must cut round the parts containing the musk, else the operation will be an offensive one; that Wetherbee has already baited some pigeons (he hears); that he last year found a hen-hawk's egg in March and thinks that woodcocks are now laying. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 19, 1858

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