If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat.

July 18. 

One tells me that he stopped at Stedman Buttrick's on the 10th, and found him sitting under a cherry tree ringing a bell, in order to keep the birds off! 

If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat, while you keep steadily pushing, and thus there will be moments when the boat does not rest on the rock at all, and you will rapidly get it off. 

The river is getting low, so that the entrances to musquash-holes in the bank are revealed and often laid bare, with fresh green rushes or flags, etc., in them. 

Nathan Hosmer remembers that when the two new stone piers at Hunt's Bridge were built, about 1820, one Nutting went under water to place the stones, and he was surprised to see how long he would remain under about this business.

Nothing has got built without labor. Past generations have spent their blood and strength for us. They have cleared the land, built roads , etc., for us. In all fields men have laid down their lives for us. Men are industrious as ants. 

I find myself very heavy-headed these days. It occurs to me that probably in different states of what we call health, even in morbid states, we are peculiarly fitted for certain investigations, — we are the better able to deal with certain phenomena.

N. Barrett says that he has formerly cut six cocks of hay on his bar.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 18, 1859

If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat, and you will rapidly get it off. Compare August 8, 1859 ("Rice has had a little experience once in pushing a canal-boat up Concord River. Says this was the way they used to get the boat off a rock when by chance it had got on to one. If it had run quite on, so that the rock was partly under the main bottom of the boat, they let the boat swing round to one side and placed a stout stake underneath, a little aslant, with one end on the bottom of the river and the other ready to catch the bows of the boat, and while one held it, perhaps, the other pushed the boat round again with all his force, and so drove it on to the stake and lifted it up above the rock, and so it floated off.")

July 18. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 18

A Book of 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