This sixteen miles up river.

July 31. 

7.30 A. M. — Up river. 

C. and I, having left our boat at Rice's Bend last night, walk to it this forenoon on our way to Saxonville. Water three quarters of an inch above summer level. 

It is emphatically one of the dog-days. A dense fog, not clearing off till we are far on our way, and the clouds (which did not let in any sun all day) were the dog-day fog and mist, which threatened no rain. A muggy but comfortable day. As we go along the Corner road, the dense fog for a background relieves pleasantly the outlines of every tree, though only twenty rods off, so that each is seen as a new object, especially that great oak scrag behind Hubbard's, once bent into a fence, now like a double-headed eagle, dark on the white ground. 

We go in the road to Rice's on account of the heavy dew, yet the fine tops of red-top, drooping with dew over the path, with a bluish hue from the dew, — blue with dew, — wet our shoes through. 

The roads are strewn with meadow-hay, which the farmers teamed home last evening (Saturday). 

The grass is thickly strewn with white cobwebs, tents of the night, which promise a fair day. I notice that they are thickest under the apple trees. Within the woods the mist or dew on them is so very fine that they look smoke-like and dry, yet even there, if you put your finger under them and touch them, you take off the dew and they become invisible. They are revealed by the dew, and perchance it is the dew and fog which they reveal which are the sign of fair weather. 

It is pleasant to walk thus early in the Sunday morning, while the dewy napkins of the cobwebs are visible on the grass, before the dew evaporates and they are concealed. 

Returning home last evening, I heard that exceedingly fine z-ing or creaking of crickets (?), low in the grass in the meadows. You might think it was a confused ringing in your head, it is so fine. Heard it again toward evening. Autumnalish.

On the 26th I saw quails which had been picking dung in a cart-path. Probably their broods are grown. 

The goldfinch's note, the cool watery twitter, is more prominent now. 

We had left our paddles, sail, etc., under one of Rice's buildings, on some old wagon-bodies. Rice, who called the big bittern "cow-poke, baked-plum- pudding." 

It is worth the while to get at least a dozen miles on your journey before the dew is off. 

Stopped at Weir Hill Bend to cut a pole to sound with, and there came two real country boys to fish. One little fellow of seven or eight who talked like a man of eighty, — an old head, who had been, probably, brought up with old people. He was not willing to take up with my companion's jesting advice to bait the fish by casting in some of his worms, because, he said, "It is too hard work to get them where we live." 

Begin to hear the sharp, brisk dittle-ittle-ittle of the wren amid the grass and reeds, generally invisible. I only hear it between Concord line and Framingham line. 

What a variety of weeds by the riverside now, in the water of the stagnant portions! Not only lilies of three kinds, but heart-leaf, Utricularia vulgaris and purpurea, all (at least except two yellow lilies) in prime. Sium in bloom, too, and Bidens Beckii just begun, and Ranunculus Purshii still. 

The more peculiar features of Concord River are seen in these stagnant, lake-like reaches, where the pads and heart-leaf, pickerel-weed, button-bush, utricularias, black willows, etc., abound. 

Above the Sudbury causeway, I notice again that remarkable large and tall typha, apparently T. latifolia (yet there is at least more than an inch interval between the two kinds of flowers, judging from the stump of the sterile bud left on). It is seven or eight feet high (its leaves), with leaves flat on one side (only concave at base, the sheathing part) and regularly convex on the other. They are so much taller than any I see elsewhere as to appear a peculiar species. Long out of bloom. They are what you may call the tallest reed of the meadows, unless you rank the arundo with them, but these are hardly so tall. 

The button-bush, which is, perhaps, at the height of its bloom, resounds with bees, etc., perhaps as much as the bass has. It is remarkable that it is these late flowers about which we hear this susurrus. You notice it with your back to them seven or eight rods off. 

See a blue heron several times to-day and yesterday. They must therefore breed not far off. We also scare up many times green bitterns, perhaps young, which utter their peculiar note in the Beaver Hole Meadows and this side. 

For refreshment on these voyages, [we] are compelled to drink the warm and muddy-tasted river water out of a clamshell which we keep, — so that it reminds you of a clam soup, — taking many a sup, or else leaning over the side of the boat while the other leans the other way to keep your balance, and often plunging your whole face in at that, when the boat dips or the waves run. 

At about one mile below Saxonville the river winds from amid high hills and commences a great bend called the Ox-Bow. Across the neck of this bend, as I paced, it is scarcely twenty rods, while it must be (as I judged by looking, and was told) a mile or more round. Fisher men and others are accustomed to drag their boats overland here, it being all hard land on this neck. A man by the bridge below had warned us of this cut-off, which he said would save us an hour! 

A man fishing at the Ox-Bow said without hesitation that the stone-heaps were made by the sucker, at any rate that he had seen them made by the sucker in Charles River, — the large black sucker (not the horned one). 

Another said that the water rose five feet above its present level at the bridge on the edge of Framingham, and showed me about the height on the stone. It is an arched stone bridge, built some two years ago. 

About the Sudbury line the river becomes much narrower and generally deeper, as it enters the first large meadows, the Sudbury meadows, and is very winding, — as indeed the Ox-Bow was. It is only some thirty or forty feet wide, yet with firm upright banks a foot or two high, — canal-like. This canal-like reach is the transition from the Assabet to the lake-like or Musketaquid portion. 

At length, off Pelham Pond, it is almost lost in the weeds of the reedy meadow, being still more narrowed and very weedy, with grassy and muddy banks. This meadow, which it enters about the Sudbury line, is a very wild and almost impenetrable one, it is so wet and muddy. It is called the Beaver-Hole Meadows and is a quite peculiar meadow, the chief growth being, not the common sedges, but great bur-reed, five or six feet high and all over it, mixed with flags, Scirpus fluviatilis, and wool-grass, and rank canary grass. Very little of this meadow can be worth cutting, even if the water be low enough.

This great sparganium was now in fruit (and a very little in flower). I was surprised by the sight of the great bur-like fruit, an inch to an inch and a half in diameter, the fruit-stems much branched and three or four feet high. It is a bur of sharp-pointed cones; stigmas linear. I can hardly believe that this is the same species that grows in C. It is apparently much earlier than ours. Yet ours may be a feeble growth from its very seeds floated down. Can it be that in this wild and muddy meadow the same plant grows so rankly as to look like a new species? It is decidedly earlier as well as larger than any I find in C. It does not grow in water of the river, but densely, like flags, in the meadow far and wide, five or six feet high, and this, with the Scirpus fluviatilis, etc., makes a very novel sight. 

Where there are rare, wild, rank plants, there too some wild bird will be found. The marsh wrens and the small green bitterns are especially numerous there. Doubtless many rails here. They lurk amid these reeds.

Behind the reeds on the east side, opposite the pond, was a great breadth of pontederia. Zizania there just begun. 

This wren (excepting, perhaps, the red-wing black bird) is the prevailing bird of the Sudbury meadows, yet I do not remember to have heard it in Concord. I get a nest, suspended in a patch of bulrush (Scirpus lacustris) by the river's edge, just below the Sudbury causeway, in the afternoon. It is a large nest (for the bird), six inches high, with the entrance on one side, made of coarse material, apparently withered bulrush and perhaps pipes and sedge, and no particular lining; well woven and not very thick; some two and a half or three feet above water. The bird is shy and lurks amid the reeds. 

We could not now detect any passage into Pelham Pond, which at the nearest, near the head of this reach, came within thirty rods of the river. 

Do not the lake-like reaches incline to run more north and south? 

The potamogetons do not abound anywhere but in shallows, hence in the swifter places. The lake-like reaches are too deep for them. 

Cardinal-flower. Have seen it formerly much earlier. Perhaps the high water in June kept it back. 

This sixteen miles up, added to eleven down, makes about twenty-seven that I have boated on this river, to which may be added five or six miles of the Assabet.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 31, 1859


The grass is thickly strewn with white cobwebs, tents of the night, which promise a fair day. . . . perchance it is the dew and fog which they reveal which are the sign of fair weather. See July 22, 1851 ( These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog.") July 25, 1852 ("This is one of those ambosial, white, ever-memorable fogs presaging fair weather. ")

The goldfinch's note, the cool watery twitter, is more prominent now. See July 31, 1855 ("Have observed the twittering over of goldfinches for a week."); August 4, 1852 ("I hear the singular watery twitter of the goldfinch, ter tweeter e et or e ee, as it ricochets over, he and his russet ( ?) female."); August 6, 1852 (“With the goldenrod comes the goldfinch. About the time his cool twitter is heard, does not the bobolink, thrasher, catbird, oven-bird, veery, etc., cease?”); August 9, 1856 (“The notes of the wood pewee and warbling vireo are more prominent of late, and of the goldfinch twittering over.”)

See a blue heron several times to-day and yesterday. They must therefore breed not far off. August 12, 1853 ("See the blue herons opposite Fair Haven Hill, as if they had bred here."); ;August 19, 1858 (" Blue herons, which have bred or been bred not far from us (plainly), are now at leisure, or are impelled to revisit our slow stream. I have not seen the last since spring. ") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Blue Heron

Where there are rare, wild, rank plants, there too some wild bird will be found. See May 29, 1856 ("Where you find a rare flower, expect to find more rare ones.")

This sixteen miles up, added to eleven down, makes about twenty-seven that I have boated on this river. See January 31, 1855 ("I skated up as far as the boundary between Wayland and Sudbury just above Pelham’s Pond, about twelve miles, . . . It was, all the way that I skated, a chain of meadows, with the muskrat-houses still rising above the ice. I skated past three bridges above Sherman’s —or nine in all—and walked to the fourth."); September 14, 1854 ("To opposite Pelham’s Pond by boat. . . We went up thirteen or fourteen miles at least, and, as we stopped at Fair Haven Hill returning, rowed about twenty-five miles to-day.")