Start for White Mountains

July 2. 

A. M. —Start for White Mountains in a private carriage with Edward Hoar. 

Notice in a shallow pool on a rock on a hilltop, in road in North Chelmsford, a rather peculiar-looking Alisma Plantago, with long reddish petioles, just budded. 

Spent the noon close by the old Dunstable graveyard, by a small stream north of it. Red lilies were abundantly in bloom in the burying-ground and by the river. Mr. Weld’s monument is a large, thick, naturally flat rock, lying flat over the grave. Noticed the monument of Josiah Willard, Esq., “Captain of Fort Dummer.” Died 1750, aged 58. 

Walked to and along the river and bathed in it. There were harebells, well out, and much Apocynum cannabinum, well out, apparently like ours, prevailing along the steep sandy and stony shore. A marked peculiarity in this species is that the upper branches rise above the flowers. Also get the A. androsoemifolium, quite downy beneath. 

The Smilacina stellata going to seed, quite common in the copse on top of the bank. 

What a relief and expansion of my thoughts when I come out from that inland position by the graveyard to this broad river’s shore! This vista was incredible there. Suddenly I see a broad reach of blue beneath, with its curves and headlands, liberating me from the. more terrene earth. What a difference it makes whether I spend my four hours’ nooning between the hills by yonder roadside, or on the brink of this fair river, within a quarter of a mile of that! Here the earth is fluid to my thought, the sky is reflected from beneath, and around yonder cape is the highway to other continents. This current allies me to all the world. Be careful to sit in an elevating and inspiring place. There my thoughts were confined and trivial, and I hid myself from the gaze of travellers. Here they are expanded and elevated, and I am charmed by the beautiful river reach. It is equal to a different season and country and creates a different mood. 

As you travel northward from Concord, probably the reaches of the Merrimack River, looking up or down them from the bank, will be the first inspiring sight. There is something in the scenery of a broad river equivalent to culture and civilization. Its channel conducts our thoughts as well as bodies to classic and famous ports, and allies us to all that is fair and great. I like to remember that at the end of half a day’s walk I can stand on the bank of the Merrimack. It is just wide enough to interrupt the land and lead my eye and thoughts down its channel to the sea. 

A river is superior to a lake in its liberating influence. It has motion and indefinite length. A river touching the back of a town is like a wing, it may be unused as yet, but ready to waft it over the world. With its rapid current it is a slightly fluttering wing. River towns are winged towns. 

I returned through the grass up the winding channel of our little brook to the camp again. Along the brook, in the rank grass and weeds, grew abundantly a slender umbelliferous plant mostly just out of bloom, one and a half to four feet high.

Either Thaspium aureum or Cryptotoenia Canadensis (Sison).

Saw also the scouring-rush, apparently just beginning to bloom! 

In the southern part of Merrimack, passed a singular “Horseshoe Pond” between the road and the river on the interval. Belknap says in his History, speaking of the changes in river-courses, “In some places these ancient channels are converted into ponds, which, from their curved form, are called horseshoe ponds.” 

Put up at tavern in Merrimack, some miles after passing over a pretty high, flat-topped hill in road, whence we saw the mountains (with a steep descent to the interval on right). 

7 P. M. — I walked by a path through the wood north east to the Merrimack, crossing two branches of Babboosuck Brook, on which were handsome rocky falls in the woods. 

The wood thrush sings almost wherever I go, eternally reconsecrating the world, morning and evening, for us. And again it seems habitable and more than habitable to us.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 2, 1858

Noticed the monument of Josiah Willard, Esq., “Captain of Fort Dummer.” The headstone reads:

"Here lyes interred ye body of Josiah Willard, Captain of Fort Dummer, formerly of Lancaster, Lunenburg, and Winchester, and Colonel of Regiment of foot, who died here December ye 8, Anno Domini, 1750, in ye 58 year of his age."  

~ Findagrave. See also Brattleboro Reformer, The three commanding 'Willards' of Fort Dummer (Feb 9, 2024)

Apocynum cannabinum, well out, apparently like ours, prevailing along the steep sandy and stony shore. See July 11, 1857 ("Apocynum cannabinum, with its small white flowers and narrow sepals")\ and note to September 2, 1856 ("Some years ago I sought for Indian hemp (Apocynum cannabinum) hereabouts in vain, and concluded that it did not grow here. A month or two ago I read again, as many times before, that its blossoms were very small, scarcely a third as large as those of the common species, and for some unaccountable reason this distinction kept recurring to me, and I regarded the size of the flowers I saw, though I did not believe that it grew here; and in a day or two my eyes fell on it, aye, in three different places, and different varieties of it.")


The wood thrush sings almost wherever I go, eternally reconsecrating the world, morning and evening, for us. See  August 12, 1851 ( "The wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods.") See also May 10, 1858 ("Toward night wood thrush ennobles the wood and the world with his strain."); May 17, 1853 ("The wood thrush . . . touches a depth in me which no other bird's song does.."); June 22, 1853 ("I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination."); July 5, 1852 ("The wood thrush's . . is not so much the composition as the strain, the tone, — cool bars of melody from the atmosphere of everlasting morning or evening").

December on the Concord: a Mink.

December 2.

Started in boat before 9 A.M. down river to Billerica with W.E.C.  I do not remember when I have taken a sail or a row on the river in December before. 

  December 2, 2017

We had to break the ice about the boat-house for some distance. Still no snow. The banks are white with frost. The air is calm, and the water smooth.

Some parts of the meadow are covered with thin ice, through which we row, and the waves we make in the river nibble and crumble its edge, and produce a rustling of the grass and reeds, as if a muskrat were stirring. 

The distant sounds of cars, cocks, hounds, etc., as we glide past N. Barrett's farm, remind me of spring. There is a certain resonance and elasticity in the air that makes the least sound melodious as in spring. It is an anticipation, a looking through winter to spring. 

There goes a muskrat. He leaves so long a ripple behind that in this light you cannot tell where his body ends, and think him longer than he is. 

Above the bridge on the road from Chelmsford to Bedford we see a mink, slender, black, very like a weasel in form. He alternately runs along on the ice and swims in the water, now and then holding up his head and long neck looking at us. 

Not so shy as a muskrat.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 2, 1852

I do not remember when I have taken a sail or a row on the river in December before. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it. I took my new boat out. Flint's and Fair Haven being frozen up. Ground bare. River open"); December 28, 1852 ("Brought my boat from Walden in rain. No snow on ground.") See also November 26, 1857 ("Got my boat up this afternoon. . . .One end had frozen in.”); November 26, 1858 ("Got in boat on account of Reynolds’s new fence going up (earlier than usual”); November 29, 1860 ("Get up my boat, 7 a. m. Thin ice of the night is floating down the river.”); November 30, 1855 (“Got in my boat. River remained iced over all day.”); December 2, 1854 ("Got up my boat and housed it, ice having formed about it."); December 2, 1856 ("Got in my boat, which before I had got out and turned up on the bank."); December 5, 1853 ("Got my boat in."); December 8, 1855 ("Still no snow, — nor ice noticeable. I might have left my boat out till now."); December 10, 1859 ("Get in my boat, in the snow. The bottom is coated with a glaze”); ) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Boat in. Boat out.

 The waves we make in the river nibble and crumble its edge, and produce a rustling of the grass and reeds, as if a muskrat were stirring.  See November 14, 1855 ("The motion of my boat sends an undulation to the shore, which rustles the dry sedge half immersed there, as if a tortoise were tumbling through it. ")

There is a certain resonance and elasticity in the air that makes the least sound melodious as in spring. It is an anticipation, a looking through winter to spring. See December 2, 1859 ("The crowing of cocks and other sounds remind you of spring, such is the state of the air.") See also December 1, 1852 (“The year looks back toward summer, and a summer smile is reflected in her face”)

There goes a muskrat. He leaves so long a ripple behind. See March 28, 1858 ("Sitting on the top of the Cliffs, I look through my glass at the smooth river and see the long forked ripple made by a musquash swimming along over the  meadow.")

Above the bridge . . .we see a mink, slender, black. See November 13, 1855 (“Going over Swamp Bridge Brook at 3 P. M., I saw in the pond by the roadside, a few rods before me, the sun shining bright, a mink swimming . . . It was a rich brown fur . . . not black as it sometimes appears, especially on ice.”);  November 17, 1855 ("Mink seem to be more commonly seen now.”); November 27, 1855 ("A mink skin which he showed me was a darker brown than the one I saw last (he says they changed suddenly to darker about a fortnight since); and the tail was nearly all black.”); April 15, 1858 ("I looked round and saw a mink under the bushes within a few feet. It was pure reddish-brown above, with a blackish and somewhat bushy tail, a blunt nose, and somewhat innocent-looking head. It crept along toward me and around me, within two feet.")

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