The river, now that it is so clear and sunny, is better than any aquarium

August 8. 

P. M. — Up Assabet. 

I perceive that rocks on the bottom stretch across from Mantatuket Point to the Island, and probably make the ancient core of the shoals and islands, and the river has cut through above and between them and made them islands, just as it at high water cuts off and makes an island of Mantatuket Rock itself; i.e., the shallows below the junction are to be considered as the point of the hill, at least the rocky portion of them. 

I find the same curious eggs (which I saw at the Fordway on the 22d) on the rocks and trees on the Assabet, always on the upright, or steep, sides of rocks in the water or on bare-barked (or perhaps denuded of bark) trees on the edge of the river and overhanging it. Are they to be found up the main stream? They are not yet hatched.

Peetweets take their flight over the water, several together, apparently the old with their young now grown, the former (?) uttering a peculiarly soft rippling call. That is, it is not now a sharp, ringing note. 

The river, now that it is so clear and sunny, is better than any aquarium. Standing up and pushing gently up the stream, or floating yet more quietly down it, I can, in some places, see the secrets of half the river and its inhabitants,

• the common and familiar bream with the dusty light reflected from its fins,
•  the vigorous looking perch, tiger-like among fishes (I notice that many of the perch are poised head downward, peeping under the rocks), 
• the motionless pickerel with reticulated back and sides, as it were the seed-vessel of a water-plant, eyes set far back. 

It is an enchanter’s wand ready to surprise you with life. 

The weeds are as indispensable to the fishes as woods and shrubbery to us. I saw a perch conceal himself from my sight under a tuft of weeds at the bottom not much wider than its own length. That potamogeton (is it P. Robbinsii?) growing in dense beds under water, all immersed in shallow places, like a bed of brown and muddy ostrich-feathers, alternating with darker beds of Bidens Beckii, which show but a particle of green above the surface (I think of the latter in the South Branch), —what concealment these afford to turtles, frogs, fishes, etc.! The potamogetons are so thick in some places in the main stream that a frog might hop quite across the river on them without getting in over his head. 

Rice has had a little experience once in pushing a canal-boat up Concord River. Says this was the way they used to get the boat off a rock when by chance it had got on to one. If it had run quite on, so that the rock was partly under the main bottom of the boat, they let the boat swing round to one side and placed a stout stake underneath, a little aslant, with one end on the bottom of the river and the other ready to catch the bows of the boat, and while one held it, perhaps, the other pushed the boat round again with all his force, and so drove it on to the stake and lifted it up above the rock, and so it floated off.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 8, 1859

Rocks on the bottom stretch across from Mantatuket Point to the Island. See March 17, 1859; ("Mantatuket Rock, commonly a rocky peninsula with a low or swampy neck and all covered with wood . . .is now a small rocky island")

The river, now that it is so clear and sunny, is better than any aquarium. See August 8, 1854 ("This is a day of sunny water.. . .I look down a rod and see distinctly the fishes and the bottom."); see also July 18, 1854 ("On all sides, as I float along, the recesses of the water and the bottom are unusually revealed, and I see the fishes and weeds and shells. I look down into the sunny water. "); July 30, 1856 ("The water is suddenly clear.”); July 28, 1859 ("The season has now arrived when I begin to see further into the water . . “);. July 27, 1860 ("The water has begun to be clear and sunny, revealing the fishes and countless minnows of all sizes and colors”).

Peetweets the old with their young now grown, the former uttering a peculiarly soft rippling call. That is, it is not now a sharp, ringing note. See June 21, 1855 ("Peetweets make quite a noise calling to their young with alarm."); July 2, 1860 ("the alarm note of the peetweets, concerned about their young."); July 6, 1856 ("hear the distressed or anxious peet of a peetweet, and see it hovering over its young, half grown"); August 22, 1853 ("A peetweet flew along the shore and uttered its peculiar note")

This was the way they used to get the boat off a rock. Compare July 18, 1859 ("If you get on to a rock in the river, rock the boat, while you keep steadily pushing, and thus there will be moments when the boat does not rest on the rock at all, and you will rapidly get it off.")

August 8. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, August 8

 

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

The character of the river valley changes about at Hill's Bridge.

June 24. 

To Billerica dam, surveying the bridges. 

Another foggy [sic], amounting from time to time to a fine rain, and more, even to a shower, though the grass was thickly covered with cobwebs in the morning. Yet it was a condensed fog, I should say. Its value appeared to be as a veil to protect the tender vegetation after the long rainy and cloudy weather.

The 22d, 23d, and 24th, I have been surveying the bridges and river from Heard's Bridge to the Billerica dam. 

I hear of two places in Wayland where there was formerly what was called a hay bridge, but no causeway, at some narrow and shallow place, a hundred years ago or more. Have looked after all the swift and the shallow places also. The testimony of the farmers, etc., is that the river thirty to fifty years ago was much lower in the summer than now. 

Deacon Richard Heard spoke of playing when a boy on the river side of the bushes where the pads are, and of wading with great ease at Heard's Bridge, and I hear that one Rice (of Wayland or Sudbury), an old man, remembers galloping his horse through the meadows to the edge of the river. 

The meadow just above the causeway on the Wayland side was spoken of as particularly valuable. 

Colonel David Heard, who accompanied me and is best acquainted of any with the details of the controversy, — has worked at clearing out the river (I think about 1820), — said that he did not know of a rock in the river from the falls near the Framingham line to perhaps the rear of Hubbard's in Concord. 

The grass not having been cut last year, the ice in the spring broke off great quantities of pipes, etc., immense masses of them, which were floated and drifted down against the causeways and bridges; and there they he still, almost concealing any green grass, like a raft on the meadows, along the south side the causeways. 

The inhabitants of Wayland used a good deal for mulching trees. One told me that at Sherman's Bridge they stretched quite across the river above the bridge, so that a man "could walk across on them," — perhaps "did walk across on them," — but on inquiring of one who lived by the bridge I learned that "a dog could not have walked across on them." 

Daniel Garfield, whom I met fishing on the river, and who has worked on Nine-Acre Corner and Lee's Bridges for fifty years or more, could remember one year when Captain Wheeler dug much mud from the river, when the water was so low that he could throw out pickerel on each side outside the bushes (where the pads now are). 

Says that his old master with whom he lived in Lincoln when he was young told him that he wheeled the first barrow-load at the building of Lee's Bridge and road, and that if he were alive now he would be a good deal over a hundred years old. Yet Shattuck says that bridge was a new bridge in 1660. 

Ebenezer Conant remembers when the Canal dam was built, and that before that it used to be dry at midsummer outside the bushes on each side. 

Lee says that about 1819 the bridge near him was rebuilt and the mud-sills taken up. These are said to remain sound an indefinite while. When they put in a new pile (Buttrick the carpenter tells me) they find the mortise in the mud-sill and place it in that. 

Deacon Farrar says that he can remember Lee's Bridge seventy-five years ago, and that it was not a new bridge then. That it is sometimes obstructed by hay in the spring. That he has seen a chip go faster up-stream there than ever down. His son said this was the case considerably further up in the meadows toward Rice's, and he thought it the effect of Stow River backing up. 

Deacon Farrar thought the hay bridge called Farrar's Bridge was for foot-passengers only. 

I found the water in Fair Haven Pond on the 22d twelve to thirteen feet deep in what I thought the channel, but in Purple Utricularia Bay, half a dozen rods from the steep hill, twenty-two and a half feet was the most I found. 

John Hosmer tells me that he remembers Major Hosmer's testifying that the South Bridge was carried up-stream, before the court, at the beginning of the controversy. 

Simonds of Bedford, who is measuring the rapidity of the current at Carlisle Bridge, says that a board with a string attached ran off there one hundred yards in fifteen minutes at the height of water (in May, and pretty high), when the Commissioners were here. That he has found it to be swiftest just after the water has begun to fall. 

The character of the river valley changes about at Hill's Bridge. The meadows are quite narrow and of a different character, — higher and firmer, — a long hill bounds the meadow, and almost the river, on the west for a good way, and high land on the east, and the bottom is harder and said to be often rocky (?). The water was about four and a half feet deep — sounded with a paddle and guessed at — at the Fordway, and at that stage so swift and strong that you could not row a boat against it in the swiftest part of the falls.

July 22d, the average depth of water at the Fordway was two feet, it having fallen in Concord two feet nine and three fourths inches since June 23d; so that the water fell possibly as much in this month at the Fordway as at Concord, — I think surely within half a foot as much.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 24, 1859