Up River on Ice to Fair Haven Pond: changing seasons.

March 4. 

We have this morning the clear, cold, continent sky of January. 

Now I take that walk along the river highway and the meadow. The river is frozen solidly, and I do not have to look out for openings. A liberal walk, so level and wide and smooth, without underbrush.


I see the shore from the waterside and easily approach and study the boughs of the maples and the swamp white oaks, etc., which usually overhang the water. There I now stand at my ease, and study their phenomena, amid the sweet-gale and button-bushes projecting above the snow and ice.


Seeking a sunny nook on the south side of a wood which keeps off the cold wind, sitting among the maples and the swamp white oaks which are frozen in, I hear the chickadees and the belching of the ice. The sun has got a new power in his rays after all, cold as the weather is. He could not have warmed me so much a month ago, nor should I have heard such rumblings of the ice in December. 

I see where a maple has been wounded the sap is flowing out. Now, then, is the time to make sugar.


I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. The landscape thus at this season is a plain white field hence to the horizon. Now, at 11.30 perhaps, the sky begins to be slightly overcast. Thus, as the fishes look up at the waves, we look up at the clouds.


I cut my initials on the bee tree.  

Crossing the shrub oak plain to the Cliffs, I find a place on the south side of this rocky hill where the snow is melted and the bare gray rock appears, covered with mosses and lichens and beds of oak leaves in the hollows. As I sit an invisible flame and smoke seems to ascend from the leaves, and the sun shines with a genial warmth.


The snow is melting on the rocks; the water trickles down in shining streams; the mosses look bright; the first awakening of vegetation at the root of the saxifrage. An oasis in the snow.


H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 4, 1852

I cut my initials on the bee tree. See February 25, 1856 ( "As I stood there, I saw that they had just felled my bee tree, the hemlock. The chopper even then stood at its foot. I went over and saw him cut into the cavity at my direction. He broke a piece out of his axe as big as my nail against a hemlock knot in the meanwhile. There was no comb within.”)


I see where a maple has been wounded the sap is flowing out. Now, then, is the time to make sugar. See February 21, 1857 ("Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard's.”); March 5, 1852 ("As I sit under their boughs, looking into the sky, I suddenly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing.”); See March 14, 1856 ("Tapped several white maples with my knife, but find no sap flowing; but, just above Pinxter Swamp, one red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark. Tapping this, I was surprised to find it flow freely. . . . "); March 15, 1856 ("Put a spout in the red maple of yesterday, and hang a pail beneath to catch the sap.”)

As I sit an invisible flame and smoke seems to ascend from the leaves, and the sun shines with a genial warmth. See March 4, 1855 (“Though a cold and strong wind, it is very warm in the sun, and we can sit in the sun where sheltered on these rocks with impunity. It is a genial warmth. The rustle of the dry leaves . . . reminds me of fires in the woods. They are almost ready to burn.”)