We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

April 9.

P. M. — To Goose Pond. 

The wind is as strong, and yet colder, being more from the north, than before. Through, I think, all this windy weather, or at least for about three weeks, the wind has regularly gone down with the sun, strong as it has been each day. 

As we go up the hill in the woods east of Hubbard's Close, I hear a singular sound through the roaring of the wind amid the trees, which I think at first some creature forty rods off, but it proves to be the creaking of one bough on another. When I knew what it was I was surprised to find it so near, even within a rod. 

It was occasioned by two little dead limbs, an inch or less in diameter, on two different white pines which stood four or five feet apart, — such limbs as are seen on every white pine below the living ones, some twelve feet from the ground. These with every motion of the trees in the wind were grating back and forth on each other, and had worn into one another, and this produced, not a mere coarse, grating sound, but a perfect viol sound, such as I never heard from trees before, — a jarring or vibratory creak, as if the bow leaped on the strings, for one limb was bow and the other string. 

It was on one key or note when the trees approached, and quite another and very fine and sharp when they receded. I raised one limb with a pole, and the music ceased. This was as musical as a viol, a forest viol, which might have suggested that instrument to some Orpheus wandering in the wood. He would only have to place a box of resonant wood beneath to complete a simple viol. 

We heard several others afterward which made a coarse, squeaking noise like a bird, but this would have suggested music to any one. It was mythologic, and an Indian might have referred it to a departed spirit. The fiddles made by the trees whose limbs cross one another, — played on by the wind! 

When we listened, in the wood, we heard all kinds of creaking and groaning sounds from the laboring trees. 

We go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hollows, to walk in this cold and blustering day. We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it. Now it is nearly smooth, and then there drops down on to it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and narrow blast of the icy north wind careering above, striking it, perhaps, by a point or an edge, and swiftly spreading along it, making a dark-blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns beneath. 

You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. 

It reminds me, too, of the swift Camilla on a field [of] grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. 

It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more opposite to him, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for you now see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you. 

A large fox-hole in Britton's hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hill side. 

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. 

It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lake lets by fine points and edges from time to time. 

And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol-creaking of bough on bough, that you would think music was being born again, as in the days of Orpheus. Orpheus and Apollo are certainly there taking lessons; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their "thunder." They are perforce silent, meditating new strains. 

When the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them. Sometimes it merely raises a single wave at one point, as if a fish darted near the surface. 

While to you looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look thus dark-blue, almost black, they are seen by another, standing low and more opposite to the sun, as the most brilliant sheeny and sparkling surface, too bright to look at. 

Thus water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water, seen from this side or that, — that is, as you look at the inclined surface of the wave which reflects the sun, or at the shaded side. 

For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the north west, making high waves and much shadow. 

We can sit in the deep hollows in the woods, like Frosty Hollow near Ripple Lake, for example, and find it quite still and warm in the sun, as if a different atmosphere lurked there; but from time to time a cold puff from the rude Boreas careering overhead drops on us, and reminds us of the general character of the day. 

While we lie at length on the dry sedge, nourishing spring thoughts, looking for insects, and counting the rings on old stumps. 

These old gray or whitish stumps, with their porous structure where the ducts are seen, are very much like bones, — the bones of trees. I break a little cube out of this old oak stump, which was sawed off some thirty years ago, and which has about one hundred rings, — a piece sharply square-cornered and exactly the form of a square bunch of matches; and, the sawed end being regularly channelled by time in the direction of the ducts and of the silver grain, it looks precisely like the loose ends, or dipped end of the bunch, and would be mistaken for such on any shelf. 

Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. 

They may say to the first woodland flowers, We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 9, 1859

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. See March 2, 1860 ("The great phenomenon these days is the sparkling blue water, — a richer blue than the sky ever is. The flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. . . . These are ripple days begun, — not yet in woodland pools, where is ice yet. "); March 9, 1860 (“March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light-tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert to hear the first birds.”); March 14, 1860 ("I see some dark ripples already drop and sweep over the surface of [Walden], as they will ere long over Ripple Lake and other pools in the wood."); April 15, 1860 ("Ripples spread fan-like over Fair Haven Pond, from Lee's Cliff, as over Ripple Lake."); April 21, 1859 ("This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it,. . . this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real"); April 29, 1859 ("There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake.")

The flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the northwest. See April 9, 1856 ("The water on the meadows now, looking with the sun, is a far deeper and more exciting blue than the heavens."); see also March 29, 1852 ("The water on the meadows looks very dark from the street. Their color depends on the position of the beholder in relation to the direction of the wind.") Also seeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blue waters in Spring

A new species?

November 26. 

The various evergreens, large and small, may be said generally to turn green or to have turned reddish about the middle of November. 

Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual). 

A good many leaves of the sweet-fern, though withered now, still hold on; so that this shrub may be put with the oaks in this respect. So far as I remember, it is peculiar among shrubs in this.

Walden is very low, compared with itself for some years. The bar between pond and Hubbard’s pond hole is four feet wide, but the main bar is not bare. There is a shore at least six feet wide inside the alders at my old shore, and what is remarkable, I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes only four or five rods over, such as Little Goose Pond, shallow as they are. 

I begin to suspect, therefore, that this rise and fall extending through a long series of years is not peculiar to the Walden system of ponds, but is true of ponds generally, and perhaps of rivers, though in their case it may be more difficult to detect. Even around Little Goose Pond the shore is laid bare for a space even wider than at Walden, it being less abrupt. The Pout’s Nest, also, has lost ten feet on all sides. 

Those pouts’ nests which I discovered in the spring are high and dry six feet from the water. I overhauled one, ripping up the frozen roof with my hands. The roof was only three inches thick, then a cavity and a bottom of wet mud. In this mud I found two small frogs, one apparently a Rana palustris less than an inch long, the other apparently a young R. pipiens an inch and a half long. They were quite sluggish and had evidently gone into winter quarters there, but probably some mink would have got them. 

The Pout’s Nest was frozen just enough to bear, with two or three breathing-places left. The principal of these was a narrow opening about a rod long by eighteen inches wide within six feet of the southwest side of the pond-hole, and the immediately adjacent ice was darker and thinner than the rest, having formed quite recently. 

I observed that the water at this breathing-chink was all alive with pollywogs, mostly of large size, though some were small, which apparently had collected there chiefly, as the water-surface was steadily contracted, for the sake of the air (?). There [were] more than a hundred of them there, or ten or a dozen in a square foot, and many more under the ice. 

I saw one firmly frozen in and dead. One had legs, and his tail was half eaten off by some creature, yet he was alive. There were also one or two frogs stirring among them. Here was evidently warmer water, probably a spring, and they had crowded to it. 

Looking more attentively, I detected also a great many minnows about one inch long either floating dead there or frozen into the ice,—at least fifty of them. They were shaped like bream, but had the transverse bars of perch. 

There were more pollywogs in other parts of the pond-hole, and at the north end I saw two perch about seven inches long, dead, close to the shore, and turned a bright green,— which are commonly yellow, — as if poisoned by the water or something they had eaten. Perhaps the fishes had suffered by the falling of this pond-hole and consequent isolation from the main pond, which has left this part still more shallow and stagnant than before. It is full of the target-weed. 

If the pond continues to fall, undoubtedly all the fishes thus landlocked will die. I noticed at the above-named chink tracks which looked like those of an otter, where some animal had entered and come out of the water, leaving weeds and fragments of ice at the edge of the hole. No doubt several creatures, like otter and mink and foxes, know where to resort for their food at this season. This is now a perfect otter’s or mink’s preserve. 

Perhaps such a mass of decaying weeds is fatal to the fishes here. It is evident that those frogs would have been frozen stiff the first colder night in such a shallow retreat. It is very likely that that hole (i. e. pout’s hole) was under water when they took refuge there, and, the water going down, they were chilled. In such cases, then, pollywogs and fishes, and even frogs, resort to the last part to freeze, the warmest water, where it is open longest. 

Examining those minnows by day, I find that they are one and one sixth inches long by two fifths of an inch wide (this my largest); in form like a bream; of a very pale golden like a perch, or more bluish. Have but one dorsal fin and, as near as I can count, rays, dorsal 19 (first, 9 stouter and stiff and more distinctly pointed, then 10 longer and flexible, whole fin about three times as long as average height), caudal 17 [?], anal 13 or 14, ventral 6, pectoral 10 (?). They have about seven transverse dusky bars like a perch! Yet, from their form and single dorsal fin, I think they are breams. Are they not a new species? Have young breams transverse bars? A little narrower than this.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 26, 1858

Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual). See note to November 26, 1857 (“Got my boat up this afternoon. (It is Thanksgiving Day.) One end had frozen in. ”)

I find that not only Goose Pond also has fallen correspondingly within a month, but even the smaller pond-holes. See December 13, 1852 (“I judge from his account of the rise and fall of Flint's Pond that, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlet, it sympathizes with Walden. “)

The Pout’s Nest was frozen just enough to bear, with two or three breathing-places left. "Pout’s Nest": HDT's name for Wyman's Meadow near Walden. See note to July 26, 1860 (I see a bream swimming about in that smaller pool by Walden in Hubbard's Wood. . . So they may be well off in the Wyman meadow or Pout's Nest."); also June 7, 1858 ("Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to this meadow?")

If the pond continues to fall, undoubtedly all the fishes thus landlocked will die. See August 28, 1854 (“The meadow is drier than ever, and new pools are dried up. The breams, from one to two and a half inches long, lying on the sides and quirking from time to time, a dozen together where there is but a pint of water on the mud, are a handsome but sad sight, — pretty green jewels, dying in the sun. I saved a dozen or more by putting them in deeper pools.”)

A new species? See November 30, 1858 ("When my eyes first rested on Walden the striped bream was poised in it, though I did not see it...I can only poise my thought there by its side and try to think like a bream for a moment. I can only see the bream in its orbit, as I see a star...The bream, appreciated, floats in the pond as the centre of the system, another image of God. Its life no man can explain more than he can his own."). The fish shaped like a bream but with markings like a perch.is presented at the next meeting of the Boston Natural History Society an later ridentified as the Pomotis obesus Girard 1854 (banded sunfish).

Old growth blueberry bushes.

February 8.

 P. M. — To Walden and Goose Pond. 

The ground is so completely bare this winter, and therefore the leaves in the woods so dry, that on the 5th there was a fire in the woods by Walden (Wheeler’s), and two or three-acres were burned over, set probably by the engine. Such a burning as commonly occurs in the spring. 

The ice which J. Brown is now getting for his ice house from S. Barrett’s is from eight to nine plus inches thick, but I am surprised to find that Walden ice is only six inches thick, or even a little less, and it has not been thicker. You can almost drive an axe through it at one blow. In many places about the shore it is open a dozen feet wide, as when it begins to break up in the spring. 

I observe, as usual, the shore heaved up near where my house was. It is evidently the result of its thawing. It is lifted up with an abrupt, nearly perpendicular edge nearly a foot high (but looks as if it had been crowded up by the ice), while the part under water probably has not been frozen, or has not been thawed. But in the water close to the shore I observe singular dimples in the sand, sometimes perfectly circular tunnels, etc., as if a stone had been turned round and round and then lifted out. Perhaps this ridge thus lifted up remains somewhat loose through the summer, not falling entirely back, and the next winter, therefore, freezes yet deeper and is heaved up yet higher, and so gains a little from year to year. Thus a pond may create a barrier for itself along an adjacent meadow. When it thus lifts up the shore, it lifts the trees with it, and they are upset.

 At Little Goose Pond, where I am surprised to find the ice no thicker than at Walden, I raked in the middle and brought up the branches of white pines two inches thick, but perfectly sound, four rods or more from the shore. The wood has been cut about seventeen years on one side, and at least twelve or fourteen on the other, pines that formerly fell into the pond. They would long since decayed on land.

I walked about Goose Pond, looking for the large blueberry bushes. I see many which have thirty rings of annual growth. These grow quite on the edge, where they have escaped being cut with the wood, and have all the appearance of age, gray and covered with lichens, commonly crooked, zigzag, and intertwisted with their neighbors,— so that when you have cut one off it is hard to extract it, —and bending over nearly to the ice, with lusty young shoots running up straight by their sides. I cut one, which measured eight and a half inches in circumference at the butt, and I counted pretty accurately forty-two rings. From another I cut a straight and sound club, four feet long and six and a half inches in circumference at the small end. It is a heavy and close-grained wood. 

This is the largest of the Vaccinieoa which grows here, or is described in Gray’s Botany. Some may have borne fruit before I was born, or forty and odd years ago. Older than my cultivated fruit trees. Nobody could tell me what kind of wood it was. 

The biggest panicled andromeda that I saw thereabouts was only a little more than an inch in diameter and apparently not half as old. It has a much more yellow wood, with a twist to its grain. 

Mrs. Monroe says that her mother respected my grandfather very much, because he was a religious man. She remembers his calling one day and inquiring where blue vervain grew, which he wanted, to make a syrup for his cough, and she, a girl, happening to know, ran and gathered some.

H. D. Thoreu, Journal, February 8, 1858

The ground is so completely bare this winter.  See February 8, 1857 ("The snow is gone off very rapidly in the night, and much of the earth is bare, and the ground partially thawed. ")

Two or three-acres were burned over, set probably by the engine. Such a burning as commonly occurs in the spring. See April 4, 1856 ("Already I hear of a small fire in the woods in Emerson’s lot, set by the engine, the leaves that are bare are so dry.")

The ice which J. Brown is now getting for his ice house from S. Barrett’s is from eight to nine plus inches thick, but I am surprised to find that Walden ice is only six inches thick. See January 27, 1854 ("Cut this afternoon a cake of ice out of Walden and brought it home in a pail, another from the river, and got a third, a piece of last year's ice from Sam Barrett's Pond, at Brown's ice-house, and placed them side by side . . .”); January 23, 1856 ("Brown is filling his ice-house. The clear ice is only from one and a half to four inches thick; all the rest, or nearly a foot, is snow ice, ")

I walked about Goose Pond, looking for the large blueberry bushes. See December 27, 1857 ("I cut a blueberry bush this afternoon, a venerable looking one bending over Goose Pond, . . . some of those old gray blueberry bushes which overhang the pond-holes have attained half the age of man.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 8

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season, 

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2023

Measuring Little Goose Pond

December 2. 

December 2, 2017

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow. I put them back through the hole; else they might have frozen outside. There was a brown leech spread broad and flat and roundish on the sternum of one, nearly an inch and a half across, apparently going to winter with it. 

Where are the respectabilities of sixty years ago, the village aristocracy, the Duncan Ingrahams who lived in the high house? An Englishman lived in the Vose house. How poor and short-lived a distinction to strive after! 

I find that, according to the deed of Duncan Ingraham to John Richardson in 1797, my old bean-field on Walden Pond then belonged to George Minott. (Minott thinks he bought it of an Allen.) This was Deacon George Minott, who lived in the house next below the East Quarter schoolhouse, and was a brother of my grandfather-in-law. He was directly descended from Thomas Minott, who, according to Shattuck, was secretary of the Abbot of Walden (!) in Essex, and whose son George was born at Saffron Walden (!) and afterwards was one of the early settlers of Dorchester. 

Roads were once described as leading to a meeting house, but not so often nowadays.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 2, 1857

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. See December 13, 1857 ("This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear,. . . I see those same two tortoises (of Dec. 2d), moving about in the same place under the ice, which I can not crack with my feet.”); December 4, 1853 ("Goose Pond apparently froze over last night, all but a few rods, but not thick enough to bear. I see a lizard on the bottom under the ice.“) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)

A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day.

November 30

A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. 

Surveying the J. Richardson lot. 

The air is full of geese. I saw five flocks within an hour, about 10 A. M., containing from thirty to fifty each, and afterward two more flocks, making in all from two hundred and fifty to three hundred at least, all flying southwest over Goose and Walden Ponds. The former was apparently well named Goose Pond. 

You first hear a faint honking from one or two in the northeast and think there are but few wandering there, but, looking up, see forty or fifty coming on in a more or less broken harrow, wedging their way southwest. I suspect they honk more, at any rate they are more broken and alarmed, when passing over a village, and are seen falling into their ranks again, assuming the perfect harrow form. Hearing only one or two honking, even for the seventh time, you think there are but few till you see them. 

According to my calculation a thousand or fifteen hundred may have gone over Concord to-day. When they fly low and near, they look very black against the sky. [I hear that one was killed by Lee in the Corner about this time.]

Northwest of Little Goose Pond, on the edge of Mrs. Bigelow's wood-lot, are several hornbeams (Carpinus). Looking into a cleft in one of them about three feet from the ground, which I thought might be the scar of a blazing, I found some broken kernels of corn, probably placed there by a crow or jay. This was about half a mile from a corn-field. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 30, 1857

A still, warm, cloudy, rain-threatening day. The air is full of geese all flying southwest. See November 8 , 1857 ("A warm, cloudy, rain-threatening morning. About 10 A.M. a long flock of geese are going over from northeast to southwest  . . .  In the afternoon. . .was the third flock to-day. Now if ever, then, we may expect a change in the weather."); November 13, 1855 ("Seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest—pretty well west—over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. "); November 18, 1854 (" Sixty geese go over the Great Fields, in one waving line, broken from time to time by their crowding on each other and vainly endeavoring to form into a harrow, honking all the while."); November 20, 1853 ("Methinks the geese are wont to go south just before a storm");  December 1, 1857 ("I hear of two more flocks of geese going over to-day.”)

A time to watch ripples on Ripple Lake

April 9.

We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it.

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days.

Ripple Lake is now nearly smooth. Then the wind drops down spreading along and making a dark-blue ripple. 

Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. Often the wind touches the water only by the finest points or edges.

You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. Looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look dark-blue, almost black.

Standing low and more opposite to the sun, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at.

Water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 9, 1859 

[for the full entry of this date see We played with the north winds here before ye were born.]

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. See March 2, 1860 ("The great phenomenon these days is the sparkling blue water, — a richer blue than the sky ever is. The flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. . . . These are ripple days begun, — not yet in woodland pools, where is ice yet. "); March 9, 1860 (“March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light-tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert to hear the first birds.”); March 14, 1860 ("I see some dark ripples already drop and sweep over the surface of [Walden], as they will ere long over Ripple Lake and other pools in the wood."); April 15, 1860 ("Ripples spread fan-like over Fair Haven Pond, from Lee's Cliff, as over Ripple Lake."); April 21, 1859 ("This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it,. . . this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real"); April 29, 1859 ("There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake.")