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
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.
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