It takes my feet a few moments to get used to the skates. I see the track of one skater who has preceded me this morning. This is the first skating. I keep mostly to the smooth ice about a rod wide next the shore commonly, where there was an overflow a day or two ago. There is not the slightest overflow to-day, and yet it is warm (thermometer at 25 at 4.30 p. m.). It must be that the river is falling.
Now I go shaking over hobbly places, now shoot over a bridge of ice only a foot wide between the water and the shore at a bend, — Hubbard Bath, — always so at first there. Now I suddenly see the trembling surface of water where I thought were black spots of ice only around me.
The river is rather low, so that I cannot keep the river above the Clamshell Bend. I am confined to a very narrow edging of ice in the meadow, gliding with unexpected ease through withered sedge, but slipping sometimes on a twig; again taking to the snow to reach the next ice, but this rests my feet; straddling the bare black willows, winding between the button-bushes, and following narrow threadings of ice amid the sedge, which bring me out to clear fields unexpectedly.
Occasionally I am obliged to take a few strokes over black and thin-looking ice, where the neighboring bank is springy, and am slow to acquire confidence in it, but, returning, how bold I am!
Where the meadow seemed only sedge and snow, I find a complete ice connection.
At Cardinal Shore, as usual, there is a great crescent of hobbly ice, where, two or three days ago, the northwest wind drove the waves back up-stream and broke up the edge of the ice. This crescent is eight or ten rods wide and twice as many long, and consists of cakes of ice from a few inches to half a dozen feet in diameter, with each a raised edge all around, where apparently the floating sludge has been caught and accumulated. (Occasionally the raised edge is six inches high!) This is mottled black and white, and is not yet safe. It is like skating over so many rails, or the edges of saws.
Now I glide over a field of white air-cells close to the surface, with coverings no thicker than egg-shells, cutting through with a sharp crackling sound. There are many of those singular spider-shaped dark places amid the white ice, where the surface water has run through some days ago.
As I enter on Fair Haven Pond, I see already three pickerel-fishers retreating from it, drawing a sled through the Baker Farm, and see where they have been fishing, by the shining chips of ice about the holes.
Others were here even yesterday, as it appears. The pond must have been frozen by the 4th at least.
Some fisherman or other is ready with his reels and bait as soon as the ice will bear, whether it be Saturday or Sunday. Theirs, too, is a sort of devotion, though it be called hard names by the preacher, who perhaps could not endure the cold and wet any day. Perhaps he dines off their pickerel on Monday at the hotel.
Some fisherman or other is ready with his reels and bait as soon as the ice will bear, whether it be Saturday or Sunday. Theirs, too, is a sort of devotion, though it be called hard names by the preacher, who perhaps could not endure the cold and wet any day. Perhaps he dines off their pickerel on Monday at the hotel.
The ice appears to be but three or four inches thick.
That grand old poem called Winter is round again without any connivance of mine. As I sit under Lee's Cliff, where the snow is melted, amid sere pennyroyal and frost-bitten catnep, I look over my shoulder upon an arctic scene.
I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water.
I see with surprise the pond a dumb white surface of ice speckled with snow, just as so many winters before, where so lately were lapsing waves or smooth reflecting water.
I see the holes which the pickerel-fisher has made, and I see him, too, retreating over the hills, drawing his sled behind him. The water is already skimmed over again there. I hear, too, the familiar belching voice of the pond.
It seemed as if winter had come without any interval since midsummer, and I was prepared to see it flit away by the time I again looked over my shoulder. It was as if I had dreamed it.
But I see that the farmers have had time to gather their harvests as usual, and the seasons have revolved as slowly as in the first autumn of my life.
The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It is wonderful that old men do not lose their reckoning. It was summer, and now again it is winter. Nature loves this rhyme so well that she never tires of repeating it.
So sweet and wholesome is the winter, so simple and moderate, so satisfactory and perfect, that her children will never weary of it. What a poem! an epic in blank verse, enriched with a million tinkling rhymes. It is solid beauty.
It has been subjected to the vicissitudes of millions of years of the gods, and not a single superfluous ornament remains. The severest and coldest of the immortal critics have shot their arrows at and pruned it till it cannot be amended.
The swamp white oak leaves are like the shrub oak in having two colors above and beneath. They are considerably curled, so as to show their silvery lining, though firm. Hardy and handsome, with a fair silver winter lining.
Am pleased to see the holes where men have dug for money, since they remind me that some are dreaming still like children, though of impracticable things, — dreaming of finding money, and trying to put their dream in practice. It proves that men live Arabian nights and days still. I would they should have even that kind of faith than none at all.
If any silly or abominable or superstitious practice ever prevailed among any savage race, just that may be repeated in the most civilized society to-day.
You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines, growing in squares or other rectilinear figures, because different lots were cut at different times.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 7, 1856
Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. See December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture."); December 13, 1859 ("My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. . . . Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also."); December 14, 1850 ("I walk on Loring's Pond to three or four islands there which I have never visited, not having a boat in the summer."); December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business."): December 15, 1855 ("The boys have skated. a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet."); December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before."); December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)
The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It was summer, and now again it is winter. See July 19, 1851 (" Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn. Where is the summer then?”)
Take my first skate to Fair Haven Pond. See December 6, 1854 ("I see thick ice and boys skating all the way to Providence, but know not when it froze, I have been so busy writing my lecture."); December 13, 1859 ("My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. . . . Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also."); December 14, 1850 ("I walk on Loring's Pond to three or four islands there which I have never visited, not having a boat in the summer."); December 14. 1851 ("The boys have been skating for a week, but I have had no time to skate for surveying. I have hardly realized that there was ice, though I have walked over it about this business."): December 15, 1855 ("The boys have skated. a little within two or three days, but it has not been thick enough to bear a man yet."); December 19, 1854 (" Last night was so cold that the river closed up almost everywhere, and made good skating where there had been no ice to catch the snow of the night before."); December 20, 1854 ( P. M. — Skate to Fair Haven.”)
The winters come now as fast as snowflakes. It was summer, and now again it is winter. See July 19, 1851 (" Yesterday it was spring, and to-morrow it will be autumn. Where is the summer then?”)
That grand old poem called Winter is round again . . . See December 5, 1856 ("I love the winter, with its imprisonment and its cold,"); December 8, 1850 ( "The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible!"); December 11, 1855 ("The winter, with its snow and ice, . . . is as it was designed and made to be."); December 20, 1854 ("It has been a glorious winter day, its elements so simple . . ."); December 21, 1855 ("A few simple colors now prevail.”)
You will see full-grown woods where the oaks and pines or birches are separated by right lines. See October 16, 1860 ("I observe at a distance an oak wood- lot some twenty years old, with a dense narrow edging of pitch pines . . . I understand it and read its history easily before I get to it.")
That grand old poem
called Winter is round again –
Nature loves this rhyme.
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, That grand old poem called Winter
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 © 2009-2024
tinyurl.com/HDT561207
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