Sunday. P. M. — Paddle to Puffer's and thence walk to Ledum Swamp and Conant's Wood.
A cold, clear, Novemberish day. The wind goes down and we do not sail. The button-bushes are just bare, and the black willows partly so, and the mikania all fairly gray now. I see the button-bush balls reflected on each side, and each wool-grass head and recurved withered sedge or rush is also doubled by the reflection. The Scirpus lacustris is generally brown, the Juncus militaris greener. It is rather too cool to sit still in the boat unless in a sunny and sheltered place.
I have not been on the river for some time, and it is the more novel to me this cool day.
When I get to Willow Bay I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores. To me this is an important and suggestive sight, as, perchance, in some countries new haystacks in the yards; as to the Esquimaux the erection of winter houses.
I remember this phenomenon annually for thirty years. A more constant phenomenon here than the new haystacks in the yard, for they were erected here probably before man dwelt here and may still be erected here when man has departed. For thirty years I have annually observed, about this time or earlier, the freshly erected winter lodges of the musquash along the riverside, reminding us that, if we have no gypsies, we have a more indigenous race of furry, quadrupedal men maintaining their ground in our midst still.
This may not be an annual phenomenon to you. It may not be in the Greenwich almanac or ephemeris, but it has an important place in my Kalendar. So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags.
There will be some reference to it, by way of parable or otherwise, in my New Testament.
Surely, it is a defect in our Bible that it is not truly ours, but a Hebrew Bible. The most pertinent illustrations for us are to be drawn, not from Egypt or Babylonia, but from New England.
Talk about learning our letters and being literate! Why, the roots of letters are things. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or types which express our thoughts and feelings, and yet American scholars, having little or no root in the soil, commonly strive with all their might to confine themselves to the imported symbols alone.
All the true growth and experience, the living speech, they would fain reject as "Americanisms." It is the old error, which the church, the state, the school ever commit, choosing darkness rather than light, holding fast to the old and to tradition. A more intimate knowledge, a deeper experience, will surely originate a word.
When I really know that our river pursues a serpentine course to the Merrimack, shall I continue to describe it by referring to some other river no older than itself which is like it, and call it a meander? It is no more meandering than the Meander is musketaquidding. As well sing of the nightingale here as the Meander.
What if there were a tariff on words, on language, for the encouragement of home manufactures? Have we not the genius to coin our own? Let the schoolmaster distinguish the true from the counterfeit.
They go on publishing the "chronological cycles" and "movable festivals of the Church" and the like from mere habit, but how insignificant are these compared with the annual phenomena of your life, which fall within your experience! The signs of the zodiac are not nearly of that significance to me that the sight of a dead sucker in the spring is. That is the occasion for an immovable festival in my church. Another kind of Lent then begins in my thoughts than you wot of. I am satisfied then to live on fish alone for a season.
Men attach a false importance to celestial phenomena as compared with terrestrial, as if it were more respect able and elevating to watch your neighbors than to mind your own affairs. The nodes of the stars are not the knots we have to untie.
The phenomena of our year are one thing, those of the almanac another. For October, for instance, instead of making the sun enter the sign of the scorpion, I would much sooner make him enter a musquash-house.
Astronomy is a fashionable study, patronized by princes, but not fungi. "Royal Astronomer." The snapping turtle, too, must find a place among the constellations, though it may have to supplant some doubtful characters already there. If there is no place for him overhead, he can serve us bravely underneath, supporting the earth.
This clear, cold, Novemberish light is inspiriting. Some twigs which are bare and weeds begin to glitter with hoary light. The very edge or outline of a tawny or russet hill has this hoary light on it.
Your thoughts sparkle like
the water surface
and the downy twigs.
Every rain exposes new arrowheads. We stop at Clamshell and dabble for a moment in the relics of a departed race.
Where we landed in front of Puffer's, found a jug which the haymakers had left in the bushes. Hid our boat there in a clump of willows, and though the ends stuck out, being a pale green and whitish, they were not visible or distinguishable at a little distance.
Passed through the sandy potato-field at Witherell's cellar-hole. Potatoes not dug; looking late and neglected now; the very vines almost vanished on some sandier hills.
When we emerged from the pleasant footpath through the birches into Witherell Glade, looking along it the westering sun, the glittering white tufts of the Andropogon scoparius, lit up by the sun, were affectingly fair and cheering to behold. It was already a cheerful Novemberish scene.
A narrow glade stretching east and west between a dense birch wood, now half bare, and a ruddy oak wood on the upper side, a ground covered with tawny stubble and fine withered grass and cistuses. Looking westward along it, your eye on these lit tufts of andropogon, their glowing half raised a foot or more above the ground, a lighter and more brilliant white ness than the downiest cloud presents (though seen on one side they are grayish).
Even the lespedezas stand like frost-covered wands, and now hoary goldenrods and some bright-red blackberry vines amid the tawny grass are in harmony with the rest; and if you sharpen and rightly intend your eye you see the gleaming lines of gossamer (stretching from stubble to stubble over the whole surface) which you are breaking. How cheerful these cold but bright white waving tufts!
They reflect all the sun's light without a particle of his heat, or yellow rays. A thousand such tufts now catch up the sun and send to us its light but not heat. His heat is being steadily withdrawn from us. Light without heat is getting to be the prevailing phenomenon of the day now.
We economize all the warmth we get now. The frost of the 11th, which stiffened the ground, made new havoc with vegetation, as I perceive. Many plants have ceased to bloom, no doubt.
Many Diplopappus linariifolius are gone to seed, and yellowish globes.
Such are the stages in the year's decline.
The flowers are at the mercy of the frosts. Places where erechthites grows, more or less bare, in sprout- lands, look quite black and white (black withered leaves and white down) and wintry.
At Ledum Swamp, feeling to find the Vaccinium Oxycoccus berries, I am struck with the coldness of the wet sphagnum, as if I put my hands into a moss in Labrador, — a sort of winter lingering the summer through there.
To my surprise, now at 3.30 p. m., some of the sphagnum in the shade is still stiff with frost, and when I break it I see the glistening spiculae. This is the most startling evidence of winter as yet.
For only on the morning of the 11th was there any stiffening of the ground elsewhere. Also in the high sedgy sprout-land south of this swamp, I see hoary or frost-like patches of sedge amid the rest, where all is dry; as if in such places (the lowest) the frost had completely bleached the grass so that it now looks like frost. I think that that is the case.
It is remarkable how, when a wood has been cut (perhaps where the soil was light) and frosts for a long while prevent a new wood from springing up there, that fine sedge (Carex Pennsylvanica?) will densely cover the ground amid the stumps and dead sprouts. It is the most hardy and native of grasses there. This is the grass of the sprout-lands and woods. It wants only the sun and a reasonably dry soil.
Then there are the grasses and sedges of the meadows, but the cultivated fields and the pastures are commonly clothed with introduced grasses. The nesaea is all withered, also the woodwardia. The ledum and Andromeda Polijolia leaves have fallen. The Kalmia glauca is still falling. The spruce, also, has fallen.
The ledum smells like a bee, — that peculiar scent they have. C, too, perceives it.
See a hairy woodpecker on a burnt pitch pine. He distinctly rests on his tail constantly. With what vigor he taps and bores the bark, making it fly far and wide, and then darts off with a sharp whistle!
I remark how still it is to-day, really Sabbath-like. This day, at least, we do not hear the rattle of cars nor the whistle. I cannot realize that the country was often as still as this twenty years ago.
Returning, the river is perfectly still and smooth. The broad, shallow water on each side, bathing the withered grass, looks as if it were ready to put on its veil of ice at any moment. It seems positively to invite the access of frost. I seem to hear already the creaking, shivering sound of ice there, broken by the undulations my boat makes. So near are we to winter.
Then, nearer home, I hear two or three song sparrows on the button-bushes sing as in spring, — that memorable tinkle, — as if it would be last as it was first.
The few blackish leaves of pontederia rising above the water now resemble ducks at a distance, and so help to conceal them now that they are returning. The weeds are dressed in their frost jackets, naked down to their close-fitting downy or flannel shirts. Like athletes they challenge the winter, these bare twigs.
This cold refines and condenses us. Our spirits are strong, like that pint of cider in the middle of a frozen barrel. The cool, placid, silver-plated waters at even coolly await the frost.
The musquash is steadily adding to his winter lodge. There is no need of supposing a peculiar instinct telling him how high to build his cabin. He has had a longer experience in this river-valley than we.
Evergreens, I should say, fall early, both the coniferous and the broad-leaved.
That election-cake fungus which is still growing (as for some months) appears to be a Boletus.
I love to get out of cultivated fields where I walk on an imported sod, on English grass, and walk in the fine sedge of woodland hollows, on an American sward. In the former case my thoughts are heavy and lumpish, as if I fed on turnips. In the other I nibble ground nuts.
Your hands begin to be cool, rowing, now.
At many a place in sprout-lands, where the sedge is peculiarly flat and white or hoary, I put down my hand to feel if there is frost on it. It must be the trace of frost. Since the frost of the 11th, the grass and stubble has received another coat of tawny.
That andropogon bright feathery top may be put with the clematis seed and tail. Only this cold, clear sky can light them up thus.
The farmer begins to calculate how much longer he can safely leave his potatoes out.
Each ball of the button-bush reflected in the silvery water by the riverside appears to me as distinct and important as a star in the heavens viewed through "optic glass." This, too, deserves its Kepler and Galileo.
As nature generally, on the advent of frost, puts on a russet and tawny dress, so is not man clad more in harmony with nature in the fall in a tawny suit or the different hues of Vermont gray? I would fain see him glitter like a sweet-fern twig between me and the sun.
A few green yellow lily pads lie on the surface waiting to be frozen in.
All the Lycopodium complanatum I see to-day has shed its pollen.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 16, 1859
I see the new musquash-houses erected, conspicuous on the now nearly leafless shores To me this is an important and suggestive sight, as, perchance, in some countries new haystacks in the yards. . . .So surely as the sun appears to be in Libra or Scorpio, I see the conical winter lodges of the musquash rising above the withered pontederia and flags. See September 20, 1855 ("Open a new and pretty sizable muskrat-house with no hollow yet made in it. "); September 26, 1857 ("The pickerel-weed is brown, and I see musquash-houses"); October 15, 1851 ("The muskrat-houses appear now for the most part to be finished. Some, it is true, are still rising. They line the river all the way. Some are as big as small hay cocks"); October 18, 1852 ("A few muskrat houses are going up abrupt and precipitous on one side sloped on the other I distinguish the dark moist layer of weeds deposited last night on what had dried in the sun."): November 2, 1851 ("The muskrat-houses are mostly covered by the rise of the river! — not a very unexpected one either"); November 4, 1855 ("Many new muskrat-houses have been erected this wet weather."); November 5, 1853 ("muskrat-cabins were lately covered by the flood, but now that it has gone down in a great measure, . . . I notice that they have not been washed away or much injured. . ..Moreover, for the most part they are protected, as well as concealed, by the button-bushes, willows, or weeds about them.What exactly are they for?"); November 7, 1855 ("Opened a muskrat-house nearly two feet high, but there was no hollow to it. Apparently they do not form that part yet."); November 11, 1855 ("The bricks of which the muskrat builds his house are little masses or wads of the dead weedy rubbish on the muddy bottom, which it probably takes up with its mouth. It consists of various kinds of weeds, now agglutinated together by the slime and dried confervae threads, utricularia, hornwort, etc., — a streaming, tuft-like wad. The building of these cabins appears to be coincident with the commencement of their clam diet, for now their vegetable food, excepting roots, is cut off.”); November 16, 1852 ("Muskrat-houses completed. Interesting objects looking down a river-reach at this season, and our river should not be represented without one or two of these cones. They are quite conspicuous half a mile distant, and are of too much importance to be omitted in the river landscape."); December 3, 1853 ("I see that muskrats have not only erected cabins, but, since the river rose, have in some places dug galleries a rod into the bank,")
This clear, cold, Novemberish light. Your thoughts sparkle like the water surface. See October 25, 1858 ("Call these November Lights. Hers is a cool, silvery light.”)
When we emerged from the pleasant footpath through the birches into Witherell Glade, looking along it the westering sun, the glittering white tufts of the Andropogon scoparius, lit up by the sun, were affectingly fair and cheering to behold. See November 8, 1859 (“The tufts of purplish withered andropogon in Witherell Glade are still as fair as ever, soft and trembling and bending from the wind; of a very light mouse-color seen from the side of the sun, and as delicate as the most fragile ornaments of a lady's bonnet; but looking toward the sun they are a brilliant white, each polished hair (of the pappus?) reflecting the November sun without its heats, not in the least yellowish or brown like the goldenrods and asters.”); November 10, 1858 (“This a November phenomenon, — the silvery light reflected from a myriad of downy surfaces. A true November seat is amid the pretty white-plumed Andropogon scoparius, the withered culms of the purple wood grass which covers so many dry knolls.. . .Looking toward the sun, as I sit in the midst of it rising as high as my head, its countless silvery plumes are a very cheerful sight. At a distance they look like frost on the plant.”); November 15, 1858 ("[T]he silver-haired andropogon grass [belongs] to the first half of November.”); November 15, 1859 (“I turn down Witherell Glade, only that I may bring its tufts of andropogon between me and the sun for a moment. They are pretty as ever.”).
Two or three song sparrows on the button-bushes sing as in spring, See October 26, 1855 (“The song sparrow still sings on a button-bush.”)
The farmer begins to calculate how much longer he can safely leave his potatoes out. See October 16, 1856 ("The ground was so stiff on the 15th, in the morning, that some could not dig potatoes.")
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