Color after so much brown.

May 4.

May 4, 2015

Looking across the Peninsula toward Ball's Hill, I am struck by the bright blue of the river (a deeper blue than the sky), contrasting with the fresh yellow green of the meadow (coarse sedges just starting), and, between them, a darker or greener green next the edge of the river, especially where that small sand-bar island is (the green of the early rank river-grass). 

This is the first painting or coloring in the meadows. These several colors are as distinct and simple as a child's painting.

The sun sets red, shorn of its beams.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, May 4, 1860

The sun sets red, shorn of its beams. See May 5, 1859 ("The sun sets red (first time), followed by a very hot and hazy day.”)

May 4. River three and one fourth inches below summer level. Scales of turtles are coming off (painted turtle). Quite a warm day, — 70 at 6 P. M. 

Currant out a day or two at least, and our first gooseberry a day later.

P. M. – To Great Meadows by boat. I see Haynes with a large string of pickerel, and he says that he caught a larger yesterday. There were none of the brook pickerel in this string. He goes every day, and has good luck. It must be because the river is so low. Fishing, then, has fairly commenced. It is never any better pickerel - fishing than now. 

He has caught three good - sized trout in the river within a day or [ two ]; one would weigh a pound and a half. One above the railroad bridge, and one off Abner Buttrick’s, Saw Mill Brook. He has caught them in the river before, but very rarely. He caught these as he was fishing for pickerel. This, too, may be because the river is low and it is early in the season. 

He says that he uses the Rana halecina for bait; that a pickerel will spit out the yellow legged one. 

Walking over the river meadows to examine the pools and see how much dried up they are, I notice, as usual, the track of the musquash, some five inches wide always, always exactly in the lowest part of the muddy hollows connecting one pool with another, winding as they wind, as if loath to raise itself above the lowest mud. 

At first he swam there, and now, as the water goes down, he follows it steadily, and at length travels on the bare mud, but as low and close to the water as he can get. Thus he first traces the channel of the future brook and river, and deepens it by dragging his belly along it. He lays out and engineers its road. As our roads are said to follow the trail of the cow, so rivers in another period follow the trail of the musquash. 

They are perfect rats to look at, and swim fast against the stream. When I am talking on a high bank I often see one swimming along within half a dozen rods and land openly, as if regardless of us. Probably, being under water at first, he did not hear us. 

When the locomotive was first introduced into Concord, the cows and horses ran in terror to the other sides of their pastures as it passed along, and I suppose that the fishes in the river manifested equal alarm at first; but I notice (to - day, the 11th of May) that a pickerel by Derby’s Bridge, poised in a smooth bay, did not stir perceptibly when the train passed over the neighboring bridge and the locomotive screamed remarkably loud. The fishes have, no doubt, got used to the sound.

 I see a bullfrog under water. Land at the first angle of the Holt. 

Looking across the Peninsula toward Ball’s Hill, I am struck by the bright blue of the river (a deeper blue than the sky), contrasting with the fresh yellow green of the meadow (i. e. of coarse sedges just starting), and, between them, a darker or greener green next the edge of the river, especially where that small sand - bar island is, — the green of that early rank river - grass. 

This is the first painting or coloring in the meadows. These several colors are, as it were, daubed on, as on chinaware, or as distinct and simple as a child’s painted [ sic ]. 

I am struck by the amount and variety of color after so much brown. As I stood there I heard a thumping sound, which I referred to Peter’s, three quarters of a mile off over the meadow. But it was a pigeon woodpecker excavating its nest within a maple within a rod of me. Though I had just landed and made a noise with my boat, he was too busy to hear me, but now he hears my tread, and I see him put out his head and then withdraw it warily and keep still, while I stay there. Pipes (Equisetum limosum) are now generally three to seven inches high, but so brown as yet that I mistook them at a little distance for a dead brown stubble amid the green of springing sedge, and not a fresh growth at all. 

They are at last a very dark green still, if I remember. The river is very low, but I find that the meadows, though bare, are not very dry, except for the season, and I am pretty sure that within two or three years, and at this season, I have seen the pools on the meadows drier when there was more water in the river. · 

The Great Meadows are wet to walk over, after all, and the great pools on them are rather unapproachable, even in india - rubber boots. Apparently it is impossible for the meadows to be so dry at this season, however low the river may be, as they may be at midsummer and later. Their own springs are fuller now. 

A Nuphar advena in one of these pools what you may call out, for it is rather stale, though no pollen is shed. 

What little water there is amid the pipes and sedge is filled and swarming with apparently the larva of some insect, perhaps ephemeræ. They keep up an undulating motion, and have many feathery fringes on the sides.

 I observe fishes close inshore, active and rippling the water when not scared, as if breeding; often their back fins out. 

The sun sets red, shorn of its beams.

 Those little silvery beetles in Ed. Emerson’s aquarium that dash about are evidently the Notonecta, or water boatmen. I believe there is a larger and somewhat similar beetle, which does not swim on its back, called Dytiscus. 

Missouri currant out; how long?