The sounds of skating in the dark.

February 2

Quite clear and colder, yet it could not refrain from snowing half an inch more in the night, whitening the ground now, as well as the ice. 

Brown is again filling his ice-house, which he commenced to do some weeks ago. 

I got another skate this afternoon, in spite of the thin coating of snow. This  then, is the fourth day of this rare skating, though since yesterday noon the slight whitening of snow has hurt it somewhat. 

The river at 4 P. M. has fallen some eight or ten inches. In some places there are thin flakes of ice standing on their edges within an inch or two of each other over more than a quarter of an acre, either ice blown into that position (which in this case is not likely, since there is a great deal too much for that surface) or crystallized so while the water suddenly ran off below. 

There are large tracts of thin white ice, where the water ran off before it had time to freeze hard enough to bear. This last half-inch of snow, which fell in the night, is just enough to track animals on the ice by. 

All about the Hill and Rock I see the tracks of rabbits which have run back and forth close to the shore repeatedly since the night. . . .

Snowed again half an inch more in the evening, after which, at ten o'clock, the moon still obscured, I skated on the river and meadows. The water falling, the ice on the meadow occasionally settles with a crack under our weight. It is pleasant to feel these. swells and valleys occasioned by the subsidence of the water, in some cases pretty abrupt. 

Also to hear the hollow, rumbling sound in such rolling places on the meadow where there is an empty chamber beneath, the water being entirely run out  Our skates make but little sound in this coating of snow about an inch thick, as if we had on woollen skates  and we can easily see our tracks in the night. 

We seem thus to go faster than before by day, not only because we do not see (but feel and imagine) our rapidity, but because of the impression which the mysterious muffled sound of our feet makes. 

In the meanwhile we hear the distant note of a hooting owl, and the distant rumbling of approaching or retreating cars sounds like a constant waterfall. 

Now and then we skated into some chippy, crackling white ice, where a superficial puddle had run dry before freezing hard, and got a tumble. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 2, 1855

Brown is again filling his ice-house, which he commenced to do some weeks ago. See January 23, 1856 ("Brown is filling his ice-house. The clear ice is only from one and a half to four inches thick; all the rest, or nearly a foot, is snow ice, "); January 27, 1854 ("Cut this afternoon a cake of ice out of Walden and brought it home in a pail, another from the river, and got a third, a piece of last year's ice from Sam Barrett's Pond, at Brown's ice-house, and placed them side by side . . .”);  February 8, 1858 ("The ice which J. Brown is now getting for his ice house from S. Barrett’s is from eight to nine plus inches thick, but I am surprised to find that Walden ice is only six inches thick."); February 23, 1855 ("See at Walden this afternoon that the grayish ice formed over the large square where ice has been taken out for Brown’s ice-house has a decided pink or rosaceous tinge.")

The moon still obscured, I skated on the river and meadows. See February 3, 1852 ("The landscape covered with snow two feet thick, seen by moonlight from these Cliffs, gleaming in the moon and of spotless white."); February 3, 1855 ("This will deserve to be called the winter of skating.") See also 
A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February Moonlight  and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Winter of Skating

Now and then we skated into some chippy, crackling white ice . . . and got a tumble. See January 15, 1855 ("Skate into a crack, and slide on my side twenty-five feet. The river-channel dark and rough with fragments of old ice")

In the meanwhile we hear the distant note of a hooting owl, and the distant rumbling of approaching or retreating cars sounds like a constant waterfall. See February 3, 1852 ("I hear my old acquaintance, the owl . . . Floundering through snow, sometimes up to my middle, my owl sounds hoo hoo hoo, ho-O."); January 4, 1859 ("When it grew late . . . I mistook the distant sound of the locomotive whistle for the hoot of an owl. It was quite like it.");  December 9, 1856 ("I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance, and the melodious hooting of an owl, which is as common and marked a sound as the axe or the locomotive whistle."); December 15, 1856 ("The melodious hooting of the owl, heard at the same time with the yet more distant whistle of a locomotive."); See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Voice of the Barred Owl

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

This coating of snow

mysterious muffled sounds

the moon still obscured. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The sounds of skating in the dark

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 ©  2009-2025

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