Another fine warm day, — 48° at 2 p. m.
P. M. — To Walden.
I call that ice marbled when shallow puddles of melted snow and rain, with perhaps some slosh in them, resting on old ice, are frozen, showing a slightly internal marbling, or alternation of light and dark spots or streaks.
I see, on a slender oak (not white oak) overhanging the pond, two knots which, though near, I at first mistook for vireo nests. One was in a fork, too, and both were just the right size and color, if not form. Thus, too, the nests may be concealed to some eyes.
I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond. There is an interesting variety in the colors of their bark, passing from bronze at the earth, through ruddy and copper colors to white higher up, with shreds of different color from that beneath peeling off. Going close to them, find that at first, or till ten feet high, they are a dark bronze brown, a wholly different-looking shrub from what they afterward become, with some ruddy tinges, and, of course, regular white specks; but when they get to be about two inches in diameter, the outmost cuticle bursts up and down the tree on the south side, and peels off each way, under the influence, probably, of the sun and rain and wind, and perhaps aided some times by birds. It is as if the tree unbuttoned a thin waistcoat and suffered it to blow aside, revealing its bosom or inner garment, which is a more ruddy brown, or sometimes greenish or coppery; and thus one cuticle peels off after another till it is a ruddy white, as if you saw to a red ground through a white wash; and at length it is snow-white, about five or six feet from the ground, for it is first white there, while the top, where it is smaller and younger, is still dark-brown. It may be, then, half a dozen years old before it assumes the white toga which is its distinctive dress.
After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring.
I hear that R. M , a rich old farmer who lives in a large house, with a male housekeeper and no other family, gets up at three or four o'clock these winter mornings and milks seventeen cows regularly.
When asked why he works so hard he answers that the poor are obliged to work hard. Only think, what a creature of fate he is, this old Jotun, milking his seventeen cows though the thermometer goes down to -25°, and not knowing why he does it, — draining sixty-eight cows' teats in the dark of the coldest morning! Think how helpless a rich man who can only do as he has done, and as his neighbors do, one or all of them! What an account he will have to give of himself! He spent some time in a world, alternately cold and warm, and every winter morning, with lantern in hand, when the frost goblins were playing their tricks, he resolutely accomplished his task and milked his seventeen cows, while the man housekeeper prepared his breakfast! If this were original with him, he would be a hero to be celebrated in history.
Think how tenaciously every man does his deed, of some kind or other, though it be idleness! He is rich, dependent on nobody, and nobody is dependent on him; has as good health as the average, at least, can do as he pleases, as we say. Yet he gravely rises every morning by candle-light, dons his cowhide boots and his frock, takes his lantern and wends to the barn and milks his seventeen cows, milking with one hand while he warms the other against the cow or his person. This is but the beginning of his day, and his Augean stable work. So serious is the life he lives.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 9, 1860
I call that ice marbled when shallow puddles of melted snow and rain are frozen, showing a slightly internal marbling. See January 31, 1859 ("Now we have quite another kind of ice. It has rained hard, converting into a very thin liquid the snow which had fallen on the old ice, and this, having frozen, has made a perfectly smooth but white snow ice. It is white like polished marble (I call it marble ice).")
I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond. See December 28, 1852 ("A clump of birches raying out from one centre make a more agreeable object than a single tree."); January 11, 1855 ("This air, thick with snowflakes, making a background, enables me to detect a very picturesque clump of trees on an islet . . .,—a red oak in midst, with birches on each side. ")
An interesting variety in the colors of the bark of young canoe birches.See November 30, 1851 ("Thick birch groves stand here and there, dark brown now with white lines more or less distinct."); January 24, 1858 ("The sprouts of the canoe birch are not reddish like the white, but a yellowish brown. The small white begin to cast off their red cuticle the third or fourth year and reveal a whitish one. "); December 8, 1859 ("The birches, seen half a mile off toward the sun, are the purest dazzling white of any tree.").
HDT distinguishes the canoe birch from the white (betula alba). Wikipedia lumps them as Betula papyrifera (paper birch, also known as white birch and canoe birch) -- a short-lived species of birch, whose thin white bark, often peels in layers from the trunk. In older trees, the bark is white, commonly brightly so, flaking in fine horizontal strips to reveal a pinkish or salmon-colored inner bark. It often has small black marks and scars. In individuals younger than five years, the bark appears a brown red colored with white lenticels, making the tree much harder to distinguish from other birches.~ wikipedia
It is as if the tree unbuttoned a thin waistcoat and suffered it to blow aside, revealing its bosom or inner garment. See January 4, 1853 ("Sometimes I was in doubt about a birch whose vest was buttoned smooth and dark, till I came nearer and saw the yellow gleaming through, or where a button was off."); February 18, 1854 ("The curls of the yellow birch bark form more or less parallel straight lines up and down on all sides of the tree, like parted hair blown aside by the wind, or as when a vest bursts and blows open.")
After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring. See
January 8, 1860 (“After December all weather that is not wintry is springlike.”)
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