Awake in a morning fog

June 2.

3.30 A.M.- When I awake I hear the low universal chirping or twittering of the chip-birds, like the bursting bead on the surface of the uncorked day. First come first served.

4 A.M. - To Nawshawtuct. I go to the river in a fog through which I cannot see more than a dozen rods, -three or four times as deep as the houses. As I row down the stream, the dark, dim outlines of the trees on the banks appear, coming to meet me out of the mist on the one hand, while they retreat and are soon concealed in it on the other. My strokes soon bury them behind me. 

The birds are wide awake, as if knowing that this fog presages a fair day. I ascend Nawshawtuct from the north side.  My feet are soon wet with fog. It is, indeed, a vast dew.

Now I have reached the hill top above the fog at a quarter to five, about sunrise, and all around me is a sea of fog, level and white, reaching nearly to the top of this hill, only the tops of a few high hills appearing as distant islands in the main. It resembles nothing so much as the ocean.

An early freight-train of cars is heard, not seen, rushing through the town beneath it. Meanwhile my hands are numb with cold and my wet feet ache with it. 

Now, at 5.15, before this southwest wind, the fog is already grown thin as gossamer in that direction, and woods and houses are seen through it, while it is heaped up toward the sun, and finally becomes so thick there that for a short time it appears in one place a dark, low cloud; and now long, dark ridges of wood appear through it, and now the sun reflected from the river makes a bright glow in the fog, and now, at 5.30, I see the green surface of the meadows and the water through the trees, sparkling with bright reflections. 

Men will go further and pay more to see a tawdry picture on canvas, a poor painted scene, than to behold the fairest or grandest scene that nature ever displays in their immediate vicinity, though they may have never seen it in their lives. You must taste the first glass of the day's nectar, if you would get all the spirit of it.

***

Clintonia borealis, a day or two. 

clintonia borealis June 1, 2017

(avesong)

This is perhaps the most interesting and neatest of what I may call the liliaceous (?) plants we have  

Its beauty at present consists chiefly in its commonly three very handsome, rich, clear dark-green leaves, which Bigelow describes truly as "more than half a foot long, oblanceolate, smooth and shining.” They are perfect in form and color, broadly oblanceolate with a deep channel down the middle, uninjured by insects, arching over from a centre at the ground, sometimes very symmetrically disposed in a triangular fashion; and from their midst rises the scape [a] foot high, with one or more umbels of “green bell-shaped flowers,  yellowish-green, nodding or bent downward, but without fragrance. 

In fact, the flower is all green, both leaves and corolla. The leaves alone -- and many have no scape --  would detain the walker. Its berries are its flower. 

A single plant is a great ornament in a vase, from the beauty of its form and the rich, unspotted green of its leaves.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 2, 1853

The birds are wide awake, as if knowing that this fog presages a fair day. See July 22, 1851 (“These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog.”); July 25, 1852 (“his is one of those ambosial, white, ever-memorable fogs presaging fair weather”)

Clintonia berries. See August 27, 1856 ("the peculiar large dark blue indigo clintonia berries of irregular form and dark-spotted, in umbels of four or five on very brittle stems ")

June 2. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 2

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021