November 5.
Blood's oak lot may contain about a dozen acres. It consists of red, black, white, and swamp white oaks, and a very little maple. This is quite a dense wood-lot, even without considering the size of the trees, and I am surprised to see how much spread there is to the tops of the trees in it, especially to the white oaks.
The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core. I think that the same is true of human beings. We do not wish to see children precocious, making great strides in their early years like sprouts, producing a soft and perishable timber, but better if they expand slowly at first, as if contending with difficulties, and so are solidified and perfected.
Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age. This wood is a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old.
I am struck by the orderly arrangement of the trees, as if each knew its own place. As if in the natural state of things, when sufficient time is given, trees will be found occupying the places most suitable to each, but when they are interfered with some are prompted to grow where they do not belong and a certain degree of confusion is produced. That is, our forest generally is in a transition state to a settled and normal condition.
Many young white pines — the largest twenty years old — are distributed through this wood, and I have no doubt that if let alone this would in a hundred years look more like a pine wood than an oak one Hence we see that the white pine may introduce itself into a primitive oak wood of average density.
The only sounds I hear are the notes of the jays, evidently attracted by the acorns, and the only animal I see is a red squirrel, while there are the nests of several gray squirrels in the trees.
Last evening, the weather being cooler, there was an arch of northern lights in the north, with some redness. Thus our winter is heralded.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 5, 1860
This wood is a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old. See
October 20, 1860 ("I examine Ebby Hubbard's old oak and pine wood. The trees may be a hundred years old.”);
November 2, 1860 ("Wetherbee's oak wood ... The trees would average probably between a hundred and fifty and two hundred years. Such a wood has got to be very rare in this neighborhood.”); (
November 10, 1860 ("Inches Wood . . .as fine an oak wood as there is in New England.").
The more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core. I think that the same is true of human beings. See
October 29, 1860 ("It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long.)
Northern lights. See
September 7, 1851 ("I see the northern lights over my shoulder, to remind me of the Esquimaux and that they are still my contemporaries on this globe, that they too are taking their walks on another part of the planet, in pursuit
476of seals, perchance . . . The northern lights now, as I descend from the Conantum house, have become a crescent of light crowned with short, shooting flames,—or the shadows of flames, for sometimes they are dark as well as white. . . .Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all the hoes in heaven couldn’t stop it. It spread from west to east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush, or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the gods by great exertions have got it under, and the stars have come out without fear, in peace.");
February 19, 1852 ("A fine display of the northern lights after 10 p. m., flashing up from all parts of the horizon to the zenith, where there was a kind of core formed, stretching south southeast [and] north-northwest, surrounded by what looked like a permanent white cloud, which, however, was very variable in its form. The light flashes or trembles upward, as if it were the light of the sun reflected from a frozen mist which undulated in the wind in the upper atmosphere.");
April 22, 1852 ("At 10 P. M. the northern lights are flashing, like some grain sown broadcast in the sky.");
May 10, 1852 ("There is an aurora borealis to-night.");
May 19, 1852 ("Lightning here this evening and an aurora in form of a segment of a circle.");
June 16, 1852 ("There are northern lights, shooting high up withal.");
July 12, 1852 ("As I sit on the river-bank beyond the ash tree there is an aurora, a low arc of a circle, in the north. The twilight ends to-night apparently about a quarter before ten. There is no moon.");
March 13, 1855 ("Northern lights last night. Rainbow in east this morning.");
January 28, 1858 ("Coming through the village at 11 P.M., the sky is completely overcast, and the (perhaps thin) clouds are very distinctly pink or reddish, somewhat as if reflecting a distant fire, but this phenomenon is universal all round and overhead. I suspect there is a red aurora borealis behind.");
August 29, 1859 ("There was a remarkable red aurora all over the sky last night."). See also
Wikipedia (Solar Cycle 10
beginning in December 1855 and the Solar storm (
Carrington Event.) of
September 1–2, 1859) and
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,
Northern Lights
