It is morning and it is evening the first day

Morning. Awake at the lake. Unable to relax because of the business of the day. But force myself to sit on the dock for an hour until sunlight breaks the dawn and lights the fog in West Castleton bay. See one osprey, a busy muskrat, mallards floating and mallards in whistling fast flight, noisy geese all the way from Rabbit island around Neshobe island splash off the point, then cruise across the lake. Song sparrow, chickadee, phoebe all alive and singing behind me. It seems the sapsuckers have quieted down.


Evening. Home in the woods. Jane in the last two days with help of cortisone has been able to walk alone in the woods for the first time in two years since her operation. She takes me with her tonight and shows me where not to step on the woodland flowers now out: dutchmen's breeches; trout lily, trillium, wood violet, spring beauty and others. Hermit thrush is back! The first day. Perhaps five in one spot with their circular flute calling. She teaches me how to distinguish its  voice from the wood thrush. Arriving back at our driveway in just enough light to see we hear an extended throaty vocalization, exuberant i might say, of a barred owl. Well beyond "who cooks for you."

It is morning and it is evening 25 April 2009.

Zphx

April 24 Playing Bass

Beaver Dam Wisconsin

snow this weekend
on the ground for a day
i love my garage!

(ehk)

Geology camp: Pike's Peak 1984

All week long
wandering the Rockies

trying to imagine 

an erosional surface.


Zphx (to Bud Wobus)

Sitting on Lightning Hillside

April 24.

Sitting on Lightning Hillside and looking over Heywood's meadow, I am struck by the vivid greenness of the tips of the sedge just pushing up out of its dry tussocks in the water. All the lower part of the tussock is brown, sere, prostrate blades of last year, while from the amid the withered blades spring up ranks of green life like a fire.

The fallen dead and decaying last year's grass is dead past all resurrection, perfectly brown and lifeless, while this vivid green that has shot up from its midst -- close upon the heels of winter, even through snow -- is the renewal of life. The contrast of life with death, spring with winter, is nowhere more striking. I observed it here on the 22d.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 24, 1859

The contrast . . . is nowhere more striking. See March 20, 1853 ("It is the contrast between life and death. There is the difference between winter and spring. The bared face of the pond sparkles with joy.”)

Blake’s Riff on Thoreau’s Dream

In the crucible of my celibate life
purified of all desire

I dreamed that Truth appeared to me, a beautiful mountain lion.

"Oh Truth," said I, "my love is pure." "But is it good?" was Truth's reply.

She rode me through the wild night
burning like a fire.

In the crucible of my celibate life
I named her Simplify!

And this is what I learned that night:

Goodness, Truth and Beauty.
This was not a dream.

It seems that Men are all alike.
They all have one desire.

But Woman, Oh sweet Woman
is different every time.



Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 



Zphx

Ripple of life

April 21.

April 21, 2019

 Setting pines all day. This makes two and a half days, with two men and a horse and cart to help me. We have set some four hundred trees at fifteen feet apart diamondwise, covering some two acres. 

I set every one with my own hand, while another digs the holes where I indicate, and occasionally helps the other dig up the trees. 

We prefer bushy pines only one foot high which grow in open or pasture land, yellow-looking trees which are used to the sun, instead of the spindling dark-green ones from the shade of the woods. Our trees will not average much more than two feet in height, and we take a thick sod with them fifteen to eighteen inches in diameter. There are a great many more of these plants to be had along the edges and in the midst of any white pine wood than one would suppose. 

One man charged us five or six cents for them about a mile and a half distant! Got about one hundred and twenty from George Heywood's land and the rest from the Brister lot and this Wyman lot itself. 

R. W. E. has bought a quarter of a pound of white pine seed at $4.00 per pound. 

We could not dig up pines on the north side of the wood on the Brister lot to-day on account of frost! Though we had quite forgotten it, and put the winter so far behind us. 

See the Vanessa Antiopa. C. has seen it a week or so. C. sees a cicindela to-day. 

I hear of a robin's nest begun, and that geese go over to-day. 

Put out a fire in the woods, the Brister lot. Quite a warm day. 

Storer's account of the salamanders concludes with these words, "All the salamanders here described, feed upon insects, which they devour in very large numbers, and hence their utility cannot be questioned." The same might be said in behalf of the creatures that devour the salamanders. 

In those little Ripple Lakes in the cool hollows in the woods, there you find these active bright-spotted salamanders, — S. dorsalis, the brown (olive-brown or palish-brown), with carinated and wave-crenate thin tail, and the S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, — both with vermilion spots on back and countless fine black dots above and beneath. 

The first-named is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, in fact depopulating it. He gulps them down very deliberately after catching them.

What pretty things go to make up the sum of life in any valley! 

This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, the bright spotted butterflies that flutter from time to time over the dry leaves, and the minnows and salamanders that dart in the water itself. Beneath this play of ripples which reflect the sky, — a darker blue than the real, — the vermilion-spotted salamanders are darting at the various grotesque-formed larva? of the lake.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1859

Setting pines all day. See April 19, 1859 ("Began to set white pines in R.W.E.'s Wyman lot."); April 22, 1859 ("When setting the pines at Walden the last three days, I was sung to by the field sparrow.")

The first-named [salamander] is quite voracious, catching many of the larvae in the aquarium, See April 18, 1859 (("Ed Emerson shows me his aquarium. He has two . . . salamanders, one from Ripple Lake and the other from the pool behind my house . . . One some four inches long, with a carinated and waved (crenated) edged tail as well as light-vermilion spots on the back, evidently the Salamandra dorsalis.")

The S. symmetrica, the bright orange salmon, with a thick, straight-edged tail, See April 18, 1859 (“The other two thirds as large, a very handsome bright orange salmon, also with vermilion spots, which must be the true S. symmetrica.”); see also  December 5, 1858 ('Its back is indeed ornamented with two rows of bright vermilion spots, but these can only be detected on the very closest inspection”); December 3, 1858 ("a row of very minute vermilion spots, not detected but on a close examination, on each side of the back”) 

The sum of life. See Darwin, Origin of the Species (November 24, 1859) (Imagine a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.)

This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it, ... this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real ... See 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.”)

Spring hum

April 17.

April 17, 2019

How pleasing and soothing are some of the first and least audible sounds of awakened nature in spring. The first humming of the bees, a noise so slight, reminds me of the increased genialness of nature.

The air which was so lately void and silent begins to resound as it were with the breathing of a myriad fellow-creatures. Even the unhappy man is soothed by this din of neighbors.

Go ten feet that way, to where the northwest wind comes around the hill, and you hear only the dead mechanical sound of the the blast; your thoughts recur to winter. But stand as much this way, in the sun in the lee of this bush, and your charmed ears hear the faint hum of bees weaving the web of summer. Gradually thus the spaces of the air are filled.

Little music in the world charms us more than this sound produced by the vibration of an insect's wing in some still and sunny nook in spring.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 17, 1859

How pleasing and soothing are some of the first and least audible sounds of awakened nature in spring.  See April 3, 1858 ("There is no pause to the hum of the bees all this warm day. It is a very simple but pleasing and soothing sound, this susurrus, thus early in the spring.")

The vibration of an insect's wing in some still and sunny nook in spring. See April 20, 1854 ("A willow coming out fairly, with honey-bees humming on it, in a warm nook.”)

See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Bees

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.")

And so it always is in April.

April 8. 

Cold as it is and 
has been for several weeks
in all exposed places,

I find it unexpectedly warm
in perfectly sheltered places
where the sun shines.

And so it always is in April.

In a warm and sheltered hollow in the woods, I feel the cold currents drop in from time to time, just as they are seen to ripple a small lake.

But this cold northwest wind is distinct and
separable from the air here warmed by the April sun.


The epigaea is not quite out. The earliest peculiarly woodland herbaceous flowers are epigaea, anemone, thalictrum, and — by the first of May — Viola pedata. These grow quite in the woods amid dry leaves, nor do they depend so much on water as the very earliest flowers. 

I am, perhaps, more surprised by the growth of the Viola pedata leaves, by the side of paths amid the shrub oaks and half covered with oak leaves, than by any other growth, the situation is so dry and the surrounding bushes so apparently lifeless.

The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime considerably later than the incana, for those of the former which I notice to-day have scarcely begun, while the latter chance to be done. The fertile flowers are an interesting bright crimson in the sun.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 8, 1859

Unexpectedly warm in perfectly sheltered places where the sun shines . . .but this cold northwest wind is distinct andseparable from the air here warmed by the April sun. See March 8, 1860 ("Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere."); April 13, 1855 ("A cool wind still, from the snow covered country in the northwest. It is, however, pleasant to sit in the sun in sheltered places."); April 26, 1857 ("At this season still we go seeking the sunniest, most sheltered, and warmest place. . . .There our thoughts flow and we flourish most. .”)

The epigaea is not quite out. The earliest peculiarly woodland herbaceous flowers are epigaea, anemone, thalictrum, and — by the first of May — Viola pedata. See April 8, 1855 ("As to which are the earliest flowers, it depends on the character of the season, and ground bare or not, meadows wet or dry, etc., etc., also on the variety of soils and localities within your reach."); April 10, 1859 ("I might class the twenty-two herbaceous flowers which I have known to be open before the first of May thus: . . .Woodland flowers Epigaea, anemone, and thalictrum.");  May 5, 1860 ("Anemone and Thalictrum anemonoides are apparently in prime about the 10th of May.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Epigaea

The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime while the incana chance to be done. See. April 8, 1852 (" I notice the alder, the A. serrulata, in blossom, its reddish-brown catkins now lengthened and loose."); April 8, 1855  (“I find also at length a single catkin of the Alnus incana, with a few stamens near the peduncle discolored and shedding a little dust when shaken; so this must have begun yesterday”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Alders

First Phoebe

April 1.

At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first phoebe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-VEE, as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 1, 1859

I see my first phoebe. See April 2, 1852 (“For a long distance, as we paddle up the river, we hear the two-stanza'd lay of the pewee on the shore, - pee-wet, pee-wee, etc. Those are the two obvious facts to eye and ear, the river and the pewee. ”)

April 1. Some have planted peas and lettuce. Melvin, the sexton, says that when Loring's Pond was drained once — perhaps the dam broke — he saw there about all the birds he has seen on a salt marsh. Also that he once shot a mackerel gull in Concord, — I think he said it was in May; that he sees the two kinds of yellow-legs here; that he has shot at least two kinds of large gray ducks, as big (one, at least) as black ducks. He says that one winter (it may have been the last) there were caught by him and others at one place in the river below Ball's Hill, in sight of Carlisle Bridge, about two hundred pounds of pickerel within a week, — something quite unprecedented, at least of late years. This was about the last of February or first of March. No males were caught! and he thinks that they had collected there in order to spawn. Perhaps perch and pickerel collect in large numbers for this purpose.

P. M. — To Assabet over meadows in boat; a very strong and a cold northwest wind. I land again at the (now island) rock, on Simon Brown's land, and look for arrowheads, and picked up two pieces of soapstone pottery. One was probably part of the same which C. found with me there the other day. C.'s piece was one side of a shallow dish, say an inch and a half deep, four eighths to six eighths of an inch thick, with a sort of ear for handle on one side, — almost a leg. His piece, like mine, looks as if it had been scratched all  over on the outside by a nail, and it is evident that this is the way it was fashioned. It was scratched with some hard, sharp-pointed stone and so crumbled and worn away. This little knoll was half plowed (through its summit) last fall in order to be cultivated this spring, and the high water standing over all but the apex has for a fortnight been faithfully washing away the soil and leaving the stones — Indian relics and others — exposed. The very roots of the grass, yellowish-brown fibres, are thus washed clean and exposed in considerable quantity there. You could hardly have contrived a better way to separate the arrowheads that lay buried in that sod between the rocks from the sod and soil.

At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first phcebe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-vEE, as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis.

The villagers remark how dark and angry the water looks to-day. I think it is because it is a clear and very windy day and the high waves cast much shadow. Crow blackbirds common.