It is surprising what things the snow betrays.

December 27

High wind with more snow in the night. The snow is damp and covers the panes, darkening the room. At first I did not know that more snow had fallen, it was so drifted. Snowy ridges cross the village street and make it look as wild and bleak as a pass of the Rocky Mountains or the Sierra Nevada. 

P. M. — To Fair Haven Pond up meadows and river. 

The snow blows like spray, fifteen feet high, across the fields, while the wind roars in the trees as in the rigging of a vessel. It is altogether like the ocean in a storm. The snow blowing over the ice is like a vapor rising or curling from a roof.

Most plowed fields are quite bare, but I am surprised to find behind the walls on the south side, like a skulking company of rangers in ambuscade or regular troops that have retreated to another parallel, a solid column of snow six or eight feet deep. The wind, eddying through and over the wall, is scooping it out in fantastic forms, — shells and troughs and glyphs of all kinds. Sometimes the drift is pierced with many holes as big as one's fist, where the fine snow-drift is passing through like steam. As it flows over, it builds out eaves to the bank of razor sharpness. 

It is surprising what things the snow betrays. I had not seen a meadow mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals. I see where the mouse has dived into a little hole in the snow, not larger than my thumb, by the side of a weed, and a yard further reappeared again, and so on alternately above and beneath. A snug life it lives. 

The crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, apparently being put to it for food. I saw them yesterday also. 

The wind has now shaken the snow from the trees, and it lies in irregular little heaps on the snow beneath, except that there is a white ridge up and down their trunks on the northwest side, showing which side the storm came from, which, better than the moss, would enable one to find his way in the night. 

I went to hear the pond whoop, but did not hear much. 

I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky. 

It is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold indigo-y along the horizon. The evening (?) star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun. A rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. 

A TRUE WINTER SUNSET
December 27, 2017

The outline of the mountains is wonderfully distinct and hard, and they are a dark blue and very near. 

Wachusett looks like a right whale over our bow, plowing the continent, with his flukes well down. He has a vicious look, as if he had a harpoon in him.

I wish that I could buy at the shops some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all that in my writing which it now costs me so many perusals, so many months if not years, and so much reluctance, to erase.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 27, 1853

It is surprising what things the snow betrays. See February 16, 1854 ("That Indian trail on the hillside about Walden is revealed with remarkable distinctness to me standing on the middle of the pond, by the slight snow which had lodged on it forming a clear white line unobscured by weeds and twigs. (For snow is a great revealer not only of tracks made in itself, but even in the earth before it fell.)"); December 8, 1855 (" Let a snow come and clothe the ground and trees, and I shall see the tracks of many inhabitants now unsuspected")

The crows come nearer to the houses, alight on trees by the roadside, apparently being put to it for food. See January 23, 1852 ("The snow is so deep and the cold so intense that the crows are compelled to be very bold in seeking their food, and come very near the houses in the village."); January 7, 1856 ("The cold weather has brought the crows, and for the first time this winter I hear them cawing amid the houses. "); January 14, 1856 (" The crows are flitting about the houses and alight upon the elms. "); February 1, 1856 ("The crows have been remarkably bold, coming to eat the scraps cast out behind the houses. They alight in our yard")

There is a white ridge up and down their trunks on the northwest side, showing which side the storm came from, which, better than the moss, would enable one to find his way in the night. See note to December 23, 1851 ("There is a narrow ridge of snow, a white line, on the storm side of the stem of every exposed tree.")

It is a true winter sunset, almost cloudless, clear, cold indigo-y along the horizon. The evening star is seen shining brightly, before the twilight has begun.

The evening star seen 

shining brightly before the 

twilight has begun.

December 27, 1853 

See December 27, 1851 ("The man is blessed who every day is permitted to behold anything so pure and serene as the western sky at sunset . . . Venus - I suppose it is - is now the evening star, and very bright she is immediately after sunset in the early twilight."); Compare December 23, 1851 ("The evening star is shining brightly, and, beneath all, the west horizon is glowing red, . . . and I detect, just above the horizon, the narrowest imaginable white sickle of the new moon."); September 18, 1858 ("The cooler air is so clear that we see Venus plainly some time before sundown.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Serene as the Sky.

A rosy tint suffuses the eastern horizon. See December 9, 1856 ("A slight blush begins to suffuse the eastern horizon, and so the picture of the day is done and set in a gilded frame. Such is a winter eve."); January 10, 1859 ("This is one of the phenomena of the winter sunset, this distinct pink light reflected from the brows of snow-clad hills on one side of you as you are facing the sun.").  Compare January 14, 1852 ("I notice to-night, about sundown, that the clouds in the eastern horizon are the deepest indigo-blue of any I ever saw. Commencing with a pale blue or slate in the west, the color deepens toward the east.")

The mountains are a dark blue and very near. See November 13, 1851("The mountains are of an uncommonly dark blue to-day. Perhaps this is owing . . . to the greater clearness of the atmosphere, which brings them nearer")

December 27. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, December 27

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 ©  2009-2023

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