I see under the railroad bridge a mass of meadow which lodged there last spring, not revealed till this low water, and this is now dense with a thrifty growth of bulrushes.
Minott says that some used to wonder much at the windings of the Mill Brook and could not succeed in accounting for them, but his Uncle Ben Prescott settled the difficulty by saying that a great eel came out of Flint’s Pond and rooted its way through to the river and so made the channel of the Mill Brook.
Minott says that he can remember when (it may be forty or fifty years ago) the Great Meadows were so dry one year that, they having got off all the grass and cut it quite smoothly, they talked seriously of having a regimental muster there. He assured me it would have been a good place, for the grass was cut smooth, and the earth was baked so hard that you could ride in a carriage right through the middle from the west end clear to Neck. Cannon could have been dragged about there perfectly well. I was thinking it would be rather tussocky ground for soldiers to wheel and manoeuvre on, and rather damp to camp on, but he declared not.
This appeared to be good evidence for the river meadow proprietors.
But when I asked him if he thought the meadows were more wet now than fifty years ago, he answered that he did “not think they were,” nor the grass any poorer.
As he remembered, in one of those years, not far from the dry one referred to, there came a rain in August, when the meadows were partly cut, which raised the water so that it floated off what was left cut and went over the tops of the standing grass, and you could have gone all over the meadows in a boat, and he saw there on the meadows such an immense swarm of sea-birds of various kinds — peeps, plover, yellow-legs, etc. — as he never saw before nor since. He thinks he saw so many in one flock as could not have been packed into his kitchen. He had never seen anything at all like it but once since, and that was the day after he had been to a muster with his company at Waltham — when he was a young man — and had saved the greater part of his allowance of powder all the field. The next day, after getting home, the yellow-legs were so thick on the Mill Brook meadows that he killed a bushel of them.
I saw the tortoises shedding their scales a week ago. Many of the scales two-thirds off, turned up all around.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 9, 1859
I see under the railroad bridge a mass of meadow which lodged there last spring. See April 12, 1859 ("I look again at the meadow-crust carried off by the ice. There is one by the railroad bridge, say three rods by one, covered with button-bushes and willows. "); August 3, 1859 ("The low water reveals a mass of meadow sunk under the railroad bridge. Both this and Lee’s Bridge are thus obstructed this year.")
Evidence for the river meadow proprietors. HDT had been frequently called as an expert witness to give testimony against dams, which he did in 1851 1853 and 1854. On June 4, 1859 Simon Brown and three other men commissioned HDT to study and measure all the bridges from Wayland to Billerica. On June 20 the ConcordTownship hired him to survey the entire river bed. The Middlesex Canal Company had recently added a 3 foot riser to Billerica dam, and the meadow farmers brought suit. See August 25, 1856 ("It is commonly supposed that our river meadows were much drier than now originally, or when the town was settled. They were probably drier before the dam was built at Billerica"); August 31, 1856 ("Hubbard says he has heard that they have just lowered their dam a foot at Billerica. He sees that the water has fallen a little in his meadow. It leaves a scum on the grass and gives it a smell and taste, which makes the cattle reject it.");;June 24, 1859 ("The 22d, 23d, and 24th, I have been surveying the bridges and river from Heard's Bridge to the Billerica dam.”). See also THE GREAT BILLERICA DAM CONTROVERSY ("Witnesses from Sudbury, Concord, Bedford, Carlisle, Wayland, Lincoln and Billerica testified to recent changes from the good old days, when they could drive wagons onto the meadows to harvest the hay. Now only an inferior type of grass grew there, and the meadows were so soggy that it could not even be harvested. The damage was caused by the wetness which made access onto the meadows impossible, and by the stagnant water which spoiled the quality of the grass.")
I saw the tortoises shedding their scales a week ago. See August 31, 1856 ("A painted tortoise shedding its scales"); September 15, 1855 ("See many painted tortoise scales being shed, half erect on their backs. ") September 22, 1855 ("Many tortoise-scales about the river now."); October 12, 1855 ("Is not this the only way they get rid of the moss, etc., which adhere to them?")
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 © 2009-2021
No comments:
Post a Comment