2 p. m. — To Bedford Level.
Thermometer 45. Fair but all overcast. Sun's place quite visible. Wind southwest.
Went to what we called Two-Boulder Hill, behind the house where I was born. There the wind suddenly changed round 90° to northwest, and it became quite cold (had fallen to 24° at 5.30).
Called a field on the east slope Crockery Field, there were so many bits in it.
Saw a pitch pine on a rock about four feet high, but two limbs flat on the ground. This spread much and had more than a hundred cones of different ages on it. Such are always the most fertile.
Can look a great way northeast along the Bedford Swamp.
Saw a large hawk, probably hen-hawk.
The ice that has been rotting and thawing from time to time on the meadows — the water run out from below — has many curious marks on it. There are many ingrained waving lines more or less parallel. Often they make circular figures, or oval, and are concentric, as if they marked the edge of a great bubble or the like.
I notice the ice on a ditched brook so far worn by the current as to be mackerelled in color, white and dark, all along the middle, making a figure two or three rods long which reminds me forcibly of the flat skin of a boa-constrictor, — marked just like it.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 31, 1860
The house where I was born. See About Thoreau Farm (“[I was] born July 12, 1817 in the Minott House, on the Virginia Road," Concord); and note to December 27. 1855 ("the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived")
A pitch pine on a rock about four feet high had more than a hundred cones of different ages on it. See April 29, 1857 ("See old cones within two feet of the ground on the trunk, — sometimes a circle of them around it, — which must have been formed on the young tree some fifteen years ago."); pitch pine cones two years old still closed on felled trees, two to six together recurved, in the last case closely crowded and surrounding the twig in a ring, forming very rich-looking clusters eight to ten inches from the extremity, and, within two or three inches of the extremity, maybe one or two small ones of the last year. Low down on twigs around the trunks of old trees, and sometimes on the trunk itself, you see old gray cones which have only opened or blossomed at the apex, covered with lichens; which have lost their spines. February 18, 1855 ("I see pitch pine cones two years old still closed on felled trees, two to six together recurved, in the last case closely crowded and surrounding the twig in a ring, forming very rich-looking clusters eight to ten inches from the extremity, and, within two or three inches of the extremity, maybe one or two small ones of the last year. Low down on twigs around the trunks of old trees, and sometimes on the trunk itself, you see old gray cones which have only opened or blossomed at the apex, covered with lichens; which have lost their spines."); see also T. Evans, Forest Trees of Vemont ("Cones often remain on the trees 10-12 years.") and A Book of the Seasons, The Pitch Pine in Winter
The ice that has been rotting and thawing has many curious marks on it. See January 26, 1859 ("The ice, having fairly begun to decompose, is very handsomely marked . . . with a sort of graphic character, or bird-tracks, very agreeable and varied.")
I notice the ice so far worn by the current as to be mackerelled in color, white and dark, all along the middle. See March 3, 1857 ("Flakes of thin ice from two or three inches to a foot in diameter, scattered like a mackerel sky over the pastures"); January 25, 1860 ("When the river begins to break up, it becomes clouded like a mackerel sky, but in this case the blue portions are where the current, clearing away the ice beneath, begins to show dark."); February 12, 1860 ("Above me is a cloudless blue sky; beneath, the sky-blue, sky-reflecting ice with patches of snow scattered over it like mackerel clouds");
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| JANUAR 28, 2018 |
A mackerel sky
of pine boughs sunny above
and shaded beneath.
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