October 14.
9 a. m. — To and around Flint's Pond with Blake.
A fine Indian-summer day.
The 6th and 10th were quite cool, and any particularly warm days since may be called Indian summer (?), I think.
We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden.
 |
Overlooking Walden Pond from Pine Hill
April 28, 1906 |
There is a thick haze almost entirely concealing the mountains. There is wind enough to raise waves on the pond and make it bluer. What strikes me in the scenery here now is the contrast of the unusually blue water with the brilliant-tinted woods around it.
The tints generally may be about at their height. The earth appears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red, or with imbricated scales of that color, and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, and a distant circumference of whitish haze.
The nearer woods, where chestnuts grow, are a mass of warm, glowing [yellow] (though the larger chestnuts have lost the greater part of their leaves and generally you wade through rustling chestnut leaves in the woods), but on other sides the red and yellow are intermixed. The red, probably of scarlet oaks on the south of Fair Haven Hill, is very fair. The beech tree at Baker's fence is past prime and many leaves fallen.
The shrub oak acorns are now all fallen, — only one or two left on, — and their cups, which are still left on, are apparently somewhat incurved at the edge as they have dried, so that probably they would not hold the acorn now.
The ground is strewn also with red oak acorns now, and, as far as I can discover, acorns of all kinds have fallen.
At Baker's wall two of the walnut trees are bare but full of green nuts (in their green cases), which make a very pretty sight as they wave in the wind. So distinct you could count every one against the sky, for there is not a leaf on these trees, but other walnuts near by are yet full of leaves. You have the green nut contrasted with the clean gray trunks and limbs. These are pig nut-shaped.
The chestnuts generally have not yet fallen, though many have. I find under one tree a great many burs, apparently not cast down by squirrels — for I see no marks of their teeth — and not yet so opened that any of the nuts fall out. They do not all wait till frosts open the burs before they fall, then.
I see a black snake, and also a striped snake, out this warm day.
***
Some Rhus radicans was leafless on the 13th, and some tupelos bare maybe a week or more, and button-bushes nearly bare.
My little white pines by Walden are now conspicuous in their rows, the grass, etc., having withered to tawny and the blackberry turned to scarlet. They have been almost inobvious through the summer.
The dark evergreen leaves of the checkerberry also attract us now amid the shrub oaks, as on the southwest of Pine Hill.
I hear a man laughed at because he went to Europe twice in search of an imaginary wife who, he thought, was there, though he had never seen nor heard of her. But the majority have gone further while they stayed in America, have actually allied themselves to one whom they thought their wife and found out their mistake too late to mend it. It would be cruel to laugh at these.
Wise, the balloonist, says that he lost a balloon "in a juniper bog in the State of Maine," which he mistook for a "prairie." Does he mean a larch swamp?
Balloonists speak of hearing dogs bark at night and wagons rumbling over bridges.
Arbor-vitae falling (seeds), how long?
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 14, 1859
A fine Indian-summer day. See
October 14, 1853 ("Fine, clear Indian-summer weather.")
We sit on the rock on Pine Hill overlooking Walden. See
October 1, 1859 ("Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden.");
October 22, 1852 ("Looking over the forest on Pine Hill, I can hardly tell which trees are lit up by the sunshine and which are the yellow chestnut-tops.");
October 20, 1852 (“Picking chestnuts on Pine Hill. . . . I see the mountains in sunshine, all the more attractive from the cold I feel here, with a tinge of purple on them”); October 25, 1858 ("Returning in an old wood-path from top of Pine Hill to Goose Pond, I see many goldenrods turned purple");
November 4, 1857 ("I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting, this cool evening. Sitting with my back to a thick oak sprout whose leaves still glow with life, Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length, or half a mile, — I sit high.");
November 5, 1857 ("I shiver about awhile on Pine Hill, waiting for the sun to set.");
November 30, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, Wachusett is seen over Walden. The country seems to slope up from the west end of Walden to the mountain");
February 29, 1852 ("The ice on Walden is of a dull white as I look directly down on it, but not half a dozen rods distant on every side it is a light-blue color.From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach. . .");
April 27, 1859 ("Through the cemetery, and over Pine Hill, where I heard a strange warbler, methought, a dark-colored, perhaps reddish-headed bird");
May 15, 1856 (“Checker-berries very abundant on south side of Pine Hill, by pitch pine wood. Now is probably best time to gather them.”);
June 12, 1853 ("Going up Pine Hill, disturbed a partridge and her brood. She ran indeshabille directly to me, within four feet, while her young, not larger than a chicken just hatched, dispersed. ");
July 29, 1858 ("To Pine Hill, looking for the
Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum berries. I find plenty of bushes, but these bear very sparingly. They appear to bear but one or two years before they are overgrown."); August 27, 1854 ("I am surprised to see the top of Pine Hill wearing its October aspect, — yellow with changed maples and here and there faintly blushing with changed red maples. . . .. As I go up Pine Hill, gather the shrivelled
Vaccinium vacillans berries, many as hard as if dried on a pan. They are very sweet and good.");
September 12, 1851 ("Found a violet, apparently Viola cucullata, or hood-leaved violet, in bloom in Baker's Meadow beyond Pine Hill.")
The earth appears like a great inverted shield painted yellow and red. . .and a blue navel in the middle where the pond lies, and a distant circumference of whitish haze. See
October 13, 1852 (" The water or lake from however distant a point seen is always the centre of the landscape. The pond is now most beautifully framed with the autumn-tinted woods and hills.");
November 4, 1857 ("I climb Pine Hill just as the sun is setting. . . Walden lies an oblong square endwise to, beneath me. Its surface is slightly rippled, and dusky prolonged reflections of trees extend wholly across its length");See also
June 3, 1850 ("The landscape is a vast amphitheatre rising to its rim in the horizon."):
June 25, 1852 ("The earth appears like a vast saucer sloping upward to its sharp mountain rim.")
The ground is strewn also with red oak acorns now, and, as far as I can discover, acorns of all kinds have fallen. See September 12, 1854 ("White oak acorns have many of them fallen. . . .. Some black scrub oak acorns have fallen, and a few black oak acorns also have fallen. The red oak began to fall first."); September 30, 1854 ("Acorns are generally now turned brown and fallen or falling; the ground is strewn with them and in paths they are crushed by feet and wheels.");
October 1, 1859 ("The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit. . . .Now is the time for shrub oak acorns if not for others.");
October 11, 1860 ("There is a remarkably abundant crop of white oak acorns this fall, also a fair crop of red oak acorns; but not of scarlet and black, very few of them. The acorns are now in the very midst of their fall."); October 12, 1858 ("Acorns, red and white (especially the first), appear to be fallen or falling. They are so fair and plump and glossy that I love to handle them, and am loath to throw away what I have in my hand."); October 13, 1859 ("I see no acorns on the trees. They appear to have all fallen before this."); October 13, 1860 ("This is a white oak year, . . . I should think that there might be a bushel or two of acorns on and under some single trees.")
Some tupelos bare maybe a week or more. Compare
October 14, 1857 ("Near by is a tupelo which is all a distinct yellow with a little green. ")
