September 27.
Here is a cloudy day, and now the fisherman is out.
Some tall, many-flowered, bluish-white asters are still abundant by the brook-sides.
I never found a pitcher-plant without an insect in it. The bristles about the nose of the pitcher all point inward, and insects which enter or fall in appear for this reason unable to get out again. It is some obstacle which our senses cannot appreciate.
Pitcher-plants more obvious now.
***
The maples by the riverside look very green yet, have not begun to blush, nor are the leaves touched by frost. Not so on the uplands.
The river is so low that, off N. Barrett's shore, some low islands are exposed, covered with a green grass like mildew.
There are all kinds of boats chained to stumps and trees by the riverside —some from Boston and the salt — but I think that none after all is so suitable and convenient as the simple flat-bottomed and light boat that has long been made here by the farmers themselves. They are better adapted to the river than those made in Boston.
From Ball's Hill the Great Meadows, now smoothly shorn have a quite imposing appearance, so spacious and level. There is so little of this level land in our midst.
There is a shadow on the sides of the hills surrounding (a cloudy day), and where the meadow meets them it is darkest. The shadow deepens down the woody hills and is most distinctly dark where they meet the meadow line.
Now the sun in the west is coming out and lights up the river a mile off, so that it shines with a white light like a burnished silver mirror.
The poplar tree seems quite important to the scene.
The pastures are so dry that the cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way.
The patches of sunlight on the meadow look luridly yellow, as if flames were traversing it.
It is a day for fishermen.
The farmers are gathering in their corn.
The Mikania scandens and the button-bushes and the pickerel-weed are sere and flat with frost.
We looked down the long reach toward Carlisle Bridge. The river, which is as low as ever, still makes a more than respectable appearance here and is of generous width.
Rambled over the hills toward Tarbell's. The huckleberry bushes appear to be unusually red this fall, reddening these hills.
We scared a calf out of the meadow which ran like a ship tossed on the waves, over the hills toward Tarbell's. They run awkwardly , red oblong squares tossing up and down like a vessel in a storm, with great commotion. We fell into the path,printed by the feet of the calves, with no cows' tracks.
The note of the yellow-hammer is heard from the edges of the fields.
The soapwort gentian looks like a flower prematurely killed by the frost.
The soil of these fields looks as yellowish white as the corn-stalks themselves.
Tarbell's hip roofed house looked the picture of retirement, -of cottage size, under its noble elm with its heap of apples before the door and the wood coming up within a few rods, it being far off the road. The smoke from his chimney so white and vapor-like, like a winter scene.
The lower limbs of the willows and maples and button bushes are covered with the black and dry roots of the water-marigold and the ranunculi, plants with filiform, capillary, root-like submerged leaves.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 27, 1851
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 27, 1851
Pitcher-plants more obvious now. See September 11, 1851 ("We have had no rain for a week, and yet the pitcher-plants have water in them. Are they ever quite dry? Are they not replenished by the dews always, and, being shaded by the grass, saved from evaporation?"); September 28, 1851 ("This swamp contains beautiful specimens of the sidesaddle-flower (Sarracenia purpurea), better called pitcher-plant . . .These leaves are of various colors from plain green to a rich striped yellow or deep red. No plants are more richly painted and streaked than the inside of the broad lips of these."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant
There are all kinds of boats chained to stumps and trees by the riverside. See October 15, 1851 ("We comment on the boats of different patterns, – dories (?), punts, bread-troughs, flatirons, etc., etc., — which we pass, the prevailing our genuine dead-river boats, not to be matched by Boston carpenters."); April 22, 1857 (“We pass a dozen boats sunk at their moorings, at least at one end, being moored too low.”).
Cows all feeding one way. See July 5, 1853 ("Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding that, in surveying on the Great Fields to-day, I was interrupted by a herd of a dozen cows, which successively passed before my line of vision, feeding forward, and I had to watch my opportunity to look between them.")
