6 A. M. — To Hill.
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| October 22, 2017 |
A very narrow strip of ice has formed along the riverside, in which I see a pad or two, wearing the same aggrieved look, like the face of the child that cried for spilt milk, its summer irrevocably gone.
Going through the stiff meadow-grass, I collect the particles of white frost on the top of my shoes. Under the ash trees their peculiar club-shaped leaf-stems thickly strew the ground.
The bright tints of autumn are now fairly and generally over. Perhaps the brightest trees I see this moment are some aspens. Large oaks are already generally brown. Reddish brown is the prevailing color of deciduous woods. The swamp white oaks are greener than the rest yet. The black willows along the river are about as bare as in November. The button-bushes are completely, bare, letting in more light to the water, and these days I see on their stems the ribbed reflections of the waves I have made.
Blackbirds go over, chattering, and a small hawk — pigeon or sparrow - glides along and alights on an elm.
P. M. — To and round Flint’s Pond.
Crossing my old bean-field, I see the blue pond between the green white pines in the field and am reminded that we are almost reduced to the russet (i. e. pale-brown grass tinged with red blackberry vines) of such fields as this, the blue of water, the green of pines, and the dull reddish brown of oak leaves. The sight of the blue water between the now perfectly green white pines, seen over the light-brown pasture, is peculiarly Novemberish, though it may be like this in early spring.
As I go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing. However, Nature in this may have intended some kindness to the ducks, which are now loitering hereabouts on their migration south ward, mostly young and inexperienced birds, for, as they are feeding [in] Goose Pond, for instance, the rustling of the leaves betrays the approach of the sports man and his dog, or other foe; so perhaps the leaves on the ground protect them more than when on the trees.
There is scarcely a square rod of sand exposed, in this neighborhood, but you may find on it the stone arrowheads of an extinct race. Far back as that time seems when men went armed with bows and pointed stones here, yet so numerous are the signs of it. The finer particles of sand are blown away and the arrow point remains. The race is as clean gone — from here — as this sand is clean swept by the wind. Such are our antiquities. These were our predecessors. Why, then, make so great ado about the Roman and the Greek, and neglect the Indian? We [need] not wander off with boys in our imaginations to Juan Fernandez, to wonder at footprints in the sand there. Here is a print still more significant at our doors, the print of a race that has preceded us, and this the little symbol that Nature has transmitted to us. Yes, this arrow-headed character is probably more ancient than any other, and to my mind it has not been deciphered. Men should not go to New Zealand to write or think of Greece and Rome, nor more to New England. New earths, new themes expect us. Celebrate not the Garden of Eden, but your own.
I see what I call a hermit thrush on the bushes by the shore of Flint’s Pond; pretty tame. It has an olive brown back, with a more ferruginous tail, which [is] very narrowly tipped with whitish; an apparently cream-colored throat; and dusky cream-color beneath. The breast is richly spotted with black. The legs are flesh-colored and transparent; the bill black. Yet Wilson says the legs are dusky. Can it be the Turdus olivaceus of Giraud?
Chestnut trees are almost bare. Now is just the time for chestnuts. The white oak generally withers earlier than other large oaks. On the north side of the chestnut oak hill, in the woods, I see a scarlet oak and even a white one, still almost entirely green! The chestnut oak there is also generally green still, some leaves turned yellow-brown and withering so.
Look from the high hill, just before sundown, over the pond. The mountains are a mere cold slate-color. But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? Even as pines and larches and hemlocks grow in communities in the wilderness, so, it seems, do mountains love society and form a community in the horizon. Though there may be two or more ranges, one behind the other, and ten or twelve miles between them, yet if the farthest are the highest, they are all seen as one group at this distance. I look up northwest toward my mountains, as a farmer to his hill lot or rocky pasture from his door. I drive no cattle to Ipswich hills. -I own no pasture for them there. My eyes it is alone that wander to those blue pastures, which no drought af fects. They are my flocks and herds. See how they look. They are shaped like tents, inclining to sharp peaks. What is it lifts them upward so? Why not rest level along the horizon? They seem not perfect, they seem not satisfied, until their central parts have curved upward to a sharp summit. They are a succession of pickets with scallops between. That side my pasture is well fenced. This being their upper side, I fancy they must have a corresponding under side and roots also. Might they not be dug up like a turnip? Perhaps they spring from seeds which some wind sowed. Can’t the Patent Office import some of the seed of Himmaleh with its next rutabagas? Spore of mountains has fallen there; it came from the gills of an agaric. Ah, I am content to dwell there and see the sun go down behind my mountain fence.
It is just about nine miles, as I walk, from here around Flint’s Pond. The hickory leaves, now after they have fallen, are often if not oftenest a dark rich yellow, very conspicuous upon the brown leaves of the forest floor, seeming to have more life in them than those leaves which are brown. I saw some hickory sprouts above the perfoliate bellwort near the pond, with very large leaves. One of five leafets had the terminal one fourteen inches long by ten and three quarters wide, and the general leaf-stalk was ten and a half inches long. The leaf-stalk commonly adheres to the leaf when fallen, but in the case of the ash, hickory, and probably other compound leaves, it separates from them and by its singular form puzzles the uninitiated.
What a perfect chest the chestnut is packed in! I now hold a green bur in my hand which, round, must have been two and a quarter inches in diameter, from which three plump nuts have been extracted. It has a straight, stout stem three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, set on strongly and abruptly. It has gaped in four segments or quarters, revealing the thickness of its walls, from five eighths to three quarters of an inch. With such wonderful care Nature has secluded and defended these nuts, as if they were her most precious fruits, while diamonds are left to take care of them selves.
First it bristles all over with sharp green prickles, some nearly half an inch long, like a hedgehog rolled into a ball; these rest on a thick, stiff, bark-like rind, one sixteenth to one eighth of an inch thick, which, again, is most daintily lined with a kind of silvery fur or velvet plush one sixteenth of an inch thick, even rising in a ridge between the nuts, like the lining of a casket in which the most precious commodities are kept. I see the brown-spotted white cavities where the bases of the nuts have rested and sucked up nour ishment from the stem. The little stars on the top of the nuts are but shorter and feebler spines which mingle with the rest. They stand up close together, three or more, erecting their tiny weapons, as an infant in the brawny arms of its nurse might put out its own tiny hands, to fend off the aggressor.
There is no waste room. The chest is packed quite full; half-developed nuts are the waste paper used in the packing, to fill the vacancies. At last Frost comes to unlock this chest; it alone holds the true key. Its lids straightway gape open, and the October air rushes in, dries the ripe nuts, and then with a ruder gust shakes them all out in a rattling shower down upon the withered leaves. Such is the cradle, thus daintily lined, in which they have been rocked in their infancy. With what steadiness the nuts must be held within these stout arms, – there can be no motion on their base, — and yet how tenderly, by a firm hold that relaxes only as they grow, the walls that confine them, superfluously strong as they seem, expanding as they grow!
The chestnut, with its tough shell, looks as if it were able to protect itself, but see how tenderly it has been reared in its cradle before its green and tender skin hardened into a shell. The October air comes in, as I have said, and the light too, and proceed to paint the nuts that clear, handsome reddish (?) brown which we call chestnut. Nowadays the brush that paints chestnuts is very active. It is entering into every open bur over the stretching forests’ tops for hundreds of, miles, without horse or ladder, and putting on rapid coats of this wholesome color. Otherwise the boys would not think they had got perfect nuts. And that this may be further protected, perchance, both within the bur and afterward, the nuts themselves are partly covered toward the top, where they are first exposed, with that same soft velvety down.
And then Nature drops it on the rustling leaves, a done nut, prepared to begin a chestnut's course again. Within itself, again, each individual nut is lined with a reddish velvet, as if to preserve the seed from jar and injury in falling and, perchance, from sudden damp and cold, and, within that, a thin white skin enwraps the germ. Thus it is lining within lining and unwearied care,—not to count closely, six coverings at least before you reach the contents!
But it is a barbarous way to jar the tree, and I trust I do repent of it. Gently shake it only, or let the wind shake it for you. You are gratified to find a nut that has in it no bitterness, altogether palatable.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 22, 1857
The sight of the blue water between the now perfectly green white pines, seen over the light-brown pasture, is peculiarly Novemberish, though it may be like this in early spring. See November 14, 1853 (“All waters — the rivers and ponds and swollen brooks — and many new ones are now seen through the leafless trees — are blue reservoirs of dark indigo amid the general russet and reddish-brown and gray.”) ;November 25, 1853 ("There is first the clean light-reflecting russet earth, the dark-blue water, the dark or dingy green evergreens, the dull reddish-brown of young oaks and shrub oaks, the gray of maples and other leafless trees, and the white of birch stems. . . .”); Compare March 12, 1854 ("The scenery is like, yet unlike, November; you have the same barren russet, but now, instead of a dry, hard, cold wind, a peculiarly soft, moist air, or else a raw wind.”)
As I go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing. See October 22, 1854 ('Now they rustle as you walk through them in the woods."); October 25, 1858 (Now, as you walk in woods, the leaves rustle under your feet as much as ever. In some places you walk pushing a mass before you. "); October 28, 1860 ("We make a great noise going through the fallen leaves in the woods and wood-paths now, so that we cannot hear other sounds. . .”)
But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? See August 14, 1854(“I have come forth to this hill at sunset to see the forms of the mountains in the horizon.— to behold and commune with something grander than man. “); June 5, 1854 ("I have come to this hill to see the sun go down, to recover sanity and put myself again in relation with Nature.”) Also October 20, 1852 (“Picking chestnuts on Pine Hill. . . . I see the mountains in sunshine, all the more attractive from the cold I feel here, with a tinge of purple on them”)
I see what I call a hermit thrush on the bushes by the shore of Flint’s Pond; pretty tame. . . . Can it be the Turdus olivaceus of Giraud? See September 29, 1855 ("At Natural History Library saw Dr. Cabot, who says that he has heard either the hermit, or else the olivaceous, thrush sing,—very like a wood thrush, but softer. Is sure that the hermit thrush sometimes breeds hereabouts.”).and note to April 24, 1856 ("Behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches.")
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