The brown panicles of the June-grass now paint some fields with the color of early summer.

May 30 .

May 30, 2020

P. M. – To Second Division. A washing southwest wind. 

George Melvin said yesterday that he was still grafting, and that there had been a great blow on the apple trees this year, and that the blossoms had held on unusually long. I suggested that it might be because we had not had so much wind as usual. 

On the wall, at the brook behind Cyrus Hosmer’s barn, I start a nighthawk within a rod or two. It alights again on his barn-yard board fence, sitting diagonally. I see the white spot on the edge of its wings as it sits. It flies thence and alights on the ground in his corn-field, sitting flat, but there was no nest under it. This was unusual. Had it not a nest nearby? 

I observed that some of the June-grass was white and withered, being eaten off by a worm several days ago, or considerably before it blossoms. 

June-grass fills the field south of Ed. Hosmer’s ledge by the road, and gives it now a very conspicuous and agreeable brown or ruddy(?)-brown color, about as ruddy as chocolate, perhaps. This decided color stretching afar with a slightly undulating surface, like a mantle, is a very agreeable phenomenon of the season. The brown panicles of the June-grass now paint some fields with the color of early summer. 

Front-yard grass is mowed by some. 

The stems of meadow saxifrage are white now. 

The Salix tristis generally shows its down now along dry wood-paths. 

The Juncus filiformis not out yet, though some panicles are grown nearly half an inch. Much of it seems to be merely chaffy or effete, but much also plumper, with green sepals and minute stamens to be detected within. It arises, as described, from matted running rootstocks. Perhaps will bloom in a week. 

A succession of moderate thunder and lightning storms from the west, two or three, an hour apart. 

Saw some devil’s-needles (the first) about the 25th. 

I took refuge from the thunder-shower this afternoon by running for a high pile of wood near Second Division, and while it was raining, I stuck three stout cat-sticks into the pile, higher than my head, each a little lower than the other, and piled large flattish wood on them and tossed on dead pine-tops, making a little shed, under which I stood dry.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 30, 1860

A nighthawk alights on the ground in his corn-field, sitting flat, but there was no nest under it. See June 1, 1853 ("Walking up this side-hill, I disturb a nighthawk eight or ten feet from me . .Without moving, I look about and see its two eggs on the bare ground, on a slight shelf of the hill, on the dead pine-needles and sand, without any cavity or nest whatever.") and note to June 3, 1859 ("Nighthawk, two eggs, fresh. ")

The brown panicles of the June-grass now paint some fields with the color of early summer. See June 11, 1853 ("The upland fields are already less green where the June-grass is ripening its seeds.")

I took refuge from the thunder-shower this afternoon by running for a high pile of wood.  See May 30, 1857 ("When first I had sheltered myself under the rock, I began at once to look out on the pond with new eyes, as from my house. I was at Lee's Cliff as I had never been there before. .. .  This Cliff thus became my house. I inhabited it. . . I think that such a projection as this, or a cave, is the only effectual protection that nature affords us against the storm. ") See also  August 9, 1851 ("I meet the rain at the edge of the wood, and take refuge under the thickest leaves, where not a drop reaches me, and, at the end of half an hour, the renewed singing of the birds alone advertises me that the rain has ceased, and it is only the dripping from the leaves which I hear in the woods."); June 14, 1855 (“It suddenly begins to rain with great violence, and we in haste draw up our boat on the Clamshell shore, upset it, and get under, sitting on the paddles, . . .  It is very pleasant to lie there half an hour close to the edge of the water and see and hear the great drops patter on the river, each making a great bubble”); July 22, 1858 ("Took refuge from a shower under our boat at Clamshell; staid an hour at least. A thunderbolt fell close by."); August 17, 1858 (“Being overtaken by a shower, we took refuge in the basement of Sam Barrett’s sawmill, where we spent an hour, and at length came home with a rainbow over arching the road before us.”); October 17, 1859 ("The rain drives me from my berrying and we take shelter under a tree. It is worth the while to sit under the lee of an apple tree trunk in the rain, if only to study the bark and its inhabitants. ")

May 30 See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, May 30

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 old writers have left a more lively and lifelike account of the gorgon than modern writers give us of real animals.

February 18.

A snow-storm, falling all day; wind northeast. The snow is fine and drives low; is composed of granulated masses one sixteenth to one twentieth of an inch in diameter. Not in flakes at all. I think it is not those large-flaked snow-storms that are the worst for the traveller, or the deepest.

It would seem as if the more odd and whimsical the conceit, the more credible to the mass. They require a surprising truth, though they may well be surprised at any truth. For example, Gesner says of the beaver: “The biting of this beast is very deep, being able to crash asunder the hardest bones, and commonly he never loseth his hold until he feeleth his teeth gnash one against another. Pliny and Solinus affirm, that the person so bitten cannot be cured, except he hear the crashing of the teeth, which I take to be an opinion without truth.”

Gesner (unless we owe it to the translator) has a livelier conception of an animal which has no existence, or of an action which was never performed, than most naturalists have of what passes before their eyes. The ability to report a thing as if [it] had occurred, whether it did or not, is surely important to a describer. They do not half tell a thing because you might expect them to but half believe it.

I feel, of course, very ignorant in a museum. I know nothing about the things which they have there, — no more than I should know my friends in the tomb. I walk amid those jars of bloated creatures which they label frogs, a total stranger, without the least froggy thought being suggested. Not one of them can croak. They leave behind all life they that enter there, both frogs and men.

For example, Gesner says again, “The tree being down and prepared, they take one of the oldest of their company, whose teeth could not be used for the cutting, (or, as others say, they constrain some strange beaver whom they meet withal, to fall flat on his back),... and upon his belly lade they all their timber, which they so ingeniously work and fasten into the compass of his legs that it may not fall, and so the residue by the tail draw him to the water side, where those buildings are to be framed, and this the rather seemeth to be true, because there have been some such taken that had no hair on their backs, but were pilled, which being espied by the hunters, in pity of their slavery or bondage, they have let them go away free.” Gives Albertus and Olaus Magnus as authorities for this.

Melvin tells me that he went a day or two ago to where G. M. Barrett had placed a dead cow of his, and that he found the snow thickly tracked by foxes to within five feet around the carcass, and they appeared to have sat down there, but so suspicious of some trick were they that they had not touched it.

Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P. M., there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. The history of the sky for that after noon will be but the development of that cloud.

I think that the most important requisite in describing an animal, is to be sure and give its character and spirit, for in that you have, without error, the sum and effect of all its parts, known and unknown. You must tell what it is to man. Surely the most important part of an animal is its anima, its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by which it most concerns us. Yet most scientific books which treat of animals leave this out altogether, and what they describe are as it were phenomena of dead matter. What is most interesting in a dog, for example, is his attachment to his master, his intelligence, courage, and the like, and not his anatomical structure or even many habits which affect us less.

If you have undertaken to write the biography of an animal, you will have to present to us the living creature, i. e., a result which no man can understand, but only in his degree report the impression made on him.

Science in many departments of natural history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; i. e., it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of animated nature must itself be animated.

The ancients, one would say, with their gorgons, sphinxes, satyrs, mantichora, etc., could imagine more than existed, while the moderns cannot imagine so much as exists.

In describing brutes, as in describing men, we shall naturally dwell most on those particulars in which they are most like ourselves, — in which we have most sympathy with them.

We are as often injured as benefited by our systems, for, to speak the truth, no human system is a true one, and a name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it. As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. To know the names of creatures is only a convenience to us at first, but so soon as we have learned to distinguish them, the sooner we forget their names the better, so far as any true appreciation of them is concerned.

I think, therefore, that the best and most harmless names are those which are an imitation of the voice or note of an animal, or the most poetic ones. But the name adheres only to the accepted and conventional bird or quadruped, never an instant to the real one.

There is always something ridiculous in the name of a great man, — as if he were named John Smith. The name is convenient in communicating with others, but it is not to be remembered when I communicate with myself.

If you look over a list of medicinal recipes in vogue in the last century, how foolish and useless they are seen to be! And yet we use equally absurd ones with faith to-day.

When the ancients had not found an animal wild and strange enough to suit them, they created one by the mingled [traits] of the most savage already known, - as hyenas, lionesses, pards, panthers, etc., etc., - one with another. Their beasts were thus of wildness and savageness all compact, and more ferine and terrible than any of an unmixed breed could be. They allowed nature great license in these directions. The most strange and fearful beasts were by them supposed to be the off spring of two different savage kinds. So fertile were their imaginations, and such fertility did they assign to nature.

In the modern account the fabulous part will be omitted, it is true, but the portrait of the real and living creature also. The old writers have left a more lively and lifelike account of the gorgon than modern writers give us of real animals.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1860

Gesner (unless we owe it to the translator) has a livelier conception of an animal which has no existence than most naturalists have of what passes before their eyes See February 17, 1860 ("Edward Topsell in his translation of Conrad Gesner, in 1607, called “The History of Four-footed Beasts”")

Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P.M. there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. Compare October 28, 1852 ("The clouds lift in the west, — indeed the horizon is now clear all around. Suddenly the light of the setting sun yellows and warms all the landscape. . .”); August 25, 1852 ("What a salad to my spirits is this cooler, darker day!”); April 15, 1856 (" By 9 A. M. the wind has risen, the water is ruffled, the sun seems more permanently obscured, and the character of the day is changed."); See also February 5, 1855 ("In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather, or character of the day, as it affects our feelings.")

A name is at most a mere convenience and carries no information with it. As soon as I begin to be aware of the life of any creature, I at once forget its name. See February 12, 1860 ("Whatever aid is to be derived from the use of a scientific term, we can never begin to see anything as it is so long as we remember the scientific term which always our ignorance has imposed on it. Natural objects and phenomena are in this sense forever wild and unnamed by us. "). See also Walking (1861) The names of men are meaningless. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. Compare January 15, 1853 ("Science suggests the value of mutual intelligence. I have long known this dust, but, as I did not know the name of it, i. e . what others called it, I therefore could not conveniently speak of it. . ."); Sepptember 24, 1854 ("What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it , who has known it longest and best.");  and Claude Monet ("To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.")

Like a bullet that strikes a wall.

January 28. 

Melvin tells me that one with whom he deals below says that the best musquash skins come from Concord River, and it is because our musquash are so fat. M. says that they eat apples, and he has seen where they have eaten acorns, and Isaiah Green told him and convinced him that they ate his seed-corn in the hill. He weighed a very large one the other day, and it weighed five pounds. Thinks they would not commonly weigh more than three. 

January 28, 2019

When you have been deprived of your usual quantity of sleep for several nights, you sleep much more soundly for it, and wake up suddenly like a bullet that strikes a wall.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 28, 1859

The best musquash skins. See August 2, 1858 (“Their skins used to be worth fifty cents apiece.”) See also January 29, 1859 ("Many are out in boats, steering outside the ice of the river over the newly flooded meadows, shooting musquash. ");A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Musquash

Pickerel in a ditch.

May 11. 

May 11, 2018

P. M. – Wishing to get one of the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard's ditches, in the arethusa meadow, I took a line in my pocket, and, baiting with a worm and cutting a pole there, I caught two directly. 

The biggest was nine inches long and thickly barred transversely with broken dark greenish brown lines, alternating with golden ones. The back was the dark greenish brown with a pale-brown dorsal line. Both have the vertical dark or black line beneath the eyes and appearing, with the pupil and a mark above, to pass through it. Noticed the same in the reticulatus the other day. 

The head, i. e. to the rear of the gills, just one fourth the whole length. From the front of the eye to the end of the lower jaw about one ninth the whole length. In the largest specimen the lower jaw projects one eleventh of an inch beyond the upper. I put the small one, six or seven inches long, in spirits.

Opening the larger, I found that it was a female, and that the ova were few and small as yet!! I also found that apparently its last food was another pickerel two thirds as big as itself, the tail end not yet digested. So it appears that you may dig a ditch in the river meadow, for the sake of peat, and though it have no other connection with brook or river except that it is occasionally overflowed, though only twenty or thirty feet long by three or four wide and one to three deep, you may have pickerel in it nine inches long, at least, and these live in part by devouring one another. 

Surely it cannot be many pickerel that the bigger ones find to devour there. You might think they would have more sympathy with their fellow-prisoners. This ditch, or these ditches—for I caught one in two ditches— have not been overflowed or connected with the brook or river since the spring of '57, I think, – certainly not any of them since last fall. 

Yet you may find a few sizable pickerel in such narrow quarters. I have seen them several together in much smaller and shallower ditches there, and they will bury themselves in the mud at your approach. Yet, opening one, you may perchance discover that he has just swallowed his sole surviving companion! 

You can easily distinguish the transverse bars a rod off, when the fish is in the water. 

Melvin says they get to weigh about two pounds.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, May 11, 1858

Wishing to get one of the little brook (?) pickerel, of Hubbard's ditches. See April 18, 1858 ("I saw in those ditches many small pickerel, landlocked, which appeared to be transversely barred! They bury themselves in the mud at my approach.")

Melvin says they get to weigh about two pounds. See April 21, 1858 ("Melvin says that those short-nosed brook pickerel are caught in the river also, but rarely weigh more than two pounds.")

See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond.

April 21. 

April 21, 2018

George Melvin says that Joshua Haynes once saw a perch depositing her spawn and the male following behind and devouring it! (?) Garlick in his book on pisciculture says that the perch spawn in May. 

Melvin says that those short-nosed brook pickerel are caught in the river also, but rarely weigh more than two pounds. 

The puddles have dried off along the road and left thick deposits or water-lines of the dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. You could collect great quantities of them. 

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. 

P. M. — To Easterbrooks’s and Bateman’s Pond. 

The benzoin yesterday and possibly the 19th, so much being killed. It might otherwise have been earlier yet. 

Populus grandidentata some days at least. 

The Cornus florida flower-buds are killed. 

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. I see some very large leather apron umbilicaria there. They are flaccid and unrolled now, showing most of the olivaceous-fuscous upper side. This side feels cold and damp, while the other, the black, is dry and warm, notwithstanding the warm air. This side, evidently, is not expanded by moisture. It is a little exciting even to meet with a rock covered with these livid (?) green aprons, betraying so much life. Some of them are three quarters of a foot in diameter. What a growth for a bare rock!

April 21, 2018

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 21, 1858

The dark-purple anthers of the elm, coloring the ground like sawdust. See  April 13, 1859 (“The streets are strewn with the bud-scales of the elm”); April 15, 1852 (“The broad flat brown buds on Mr. Cheney's elm, containing twenty or thirty yellowish-green threads, surmounted with little brownish-mulberry cups, which contain the stamens and the two styles, -- these are just expanding or blossoming now.”); April 15, 1854 ("The arrival of the purple finches appears to be coincident with the blossoming of the elm, on whose blossom it feeds.”); April 16, 1856 (“Cheney’s elm shows stamens on the warm side pretty numerously.”);  April 24, 1852 ("he elms are now fairly in blossom.")

The arbor-vitae is apparently effete already. See April 20, 1857 ("Arbor-vitae? apparently in full bloom.”) 

Ed. Hoar says he heard a wood thrush the 18th. See  April 21, 1855 (“I hear at a distance a wood thrush. It affects us as a part of our unfallen selves.”); April 20, 1860 ("C. sees . . . some kind of thrush to-day, size of wood thrush, — he thought probably hermit thrush."): see also May 22, 1852 ("On my way to Plymouth, looked at Audubon in the State-House. The female (and male?) wood thrush spotted the whole length of belly; the hermit thrush not so.”); A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of Spring: The Arrival of the Hermit Thrush and note to April 24, 1856 ("Behold my hermit thrush, with one companion, flitting silently through the birches.”)

The rocks on the east side of Bateman’s Pond are a very good place for ferns. See September 4, 1857 (“The sides of Cornus florida Ravine at Bateman’s Pond are a good place for ferns. ”);  November 2, 1857 (“A patch of polypody . . . in abundance on hillside between Calla Swamp and Bateman’s Pond ”)

First snow of any consequence.

December 26. 

Snows all day, — first snow of any consequence, three or four inches in all. 

At the double-chair December 26, 2017

Humphrey Buttrick tells me that he has shot little dippers. He also saw the bird which Melvin shot last summer (a coot), but he never saw one of them before. The little dipper must, therefore, be different from a coot. Is it not a grebe?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1857

Snows all day, — first snow of any consequence, three or four inches in all. See December 26, 1853 ("The first snow of any consequence thus far. It is about three inches deep.”) See also note to November 29, 1856 ("This is the first snow.”)

The little dipper must be different from a coot. Is it not a grebe?  See November 27, 1857 ("Mr. Wesson says . . .that the little dipper is not a coot. . - but he appears not to know a coot”); April 24, 1856 ("Goodwin shot, about 6 P. M., and brought to me a cinereous coot (Fulica Americana) . . .”) See also December 26, 1853  ("Saw in [Walden] a small diver, probably a grebe or dobchick, dipper, or what-not, ... It had a black head, a white ring about its neck, a white breast, black back, and apparently no tail.”)

***

The day after Christmas in the late afternoon we walk to the double-chair via the view, stopping there only briefly because of the strong northwest wind and cold.

Near the junction we hear a raven, turn and see it fly overhead. On the walk we also hear chickadees and downy or hairy woodpecker

Deep in winter woods

we turn to see the raven

soaring overhead.

At the view low clouds are illuminated by the westering sun–- brighter than the landscape below.

I  bushwhack up the mountain  and come across an area that has been trampled down by deer. There are deer bed is all around and she is calling me from above with the same news. As we hike up there are dozens and dozens of deer beds —More than I’ve ever seen in one place.

I use their tracks to find the easiest way up.

When we get to the double-chair, clear the chairs of ice and sit -- there is the first quarter moon in a clear sky. It is 16°.

As we come down the mountain trail, cross the ice on  middle pond and skid  down over the cliff trail, I am thinking what a gift to have this land and these walks together all these years.

What a gift to have 

this land our dogs and these walks--

these years together.

zphz 20171226

To preserve the fruit of our experience

March 24.

P. M. — Paddle up Assabet. 

The water is fast going down. See a small water bug. It is pretty still and warm. 

As I round the Island rock, a striped squirrel that was out the steep polypody rock scampered up with a chuckle. 

On looking close, I see the crimson white maple stigmas here and there, and some early alder catkins are relaxed and extended and almost shed pollen. 

I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water like ephemerae. They have two pairs of wings indistinctly spotted dark and light. 

Humphrey Buttrick says he saw two or three fish hawks down the river by Carlisle Bridge yesterday; also shot three black ducks and two green-winged teal, — though the latter had no green on their wings, it was rather the color of his boat, but Wesson assured him that so they looked in the spring. 

Buttrick had a double barrelled gun with him, which he said he bought of a broker in Boston for five dollars! Thought it had cost eighteen dollars. He had read Frank Forester and believed him, and accordingly sent to New York and got one of Mullin’s guns for sixty dollars. It was the poorest gun he ever had. He sold it for forty. 

As for cheap or old-fashioned guns bursting, there was Melvin; he had used his long enough, and it had not burst yet. He had given thirty-five dollars for it, say thirty years ago. Had had but one, or no other since. Melvin’s —and Minott’s still more — is such a gun as Frank Forester says he would not fire for a hundred dollars, and yet Melvin has grown gray with using it; i. e., he thinks that it would not be safe to fire a two barrelled gun offered new for less than fifty dollars.

If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times. Though you may think you have said all, you will to-morrow remember a whole new class of facts which perhaps interested most of all at the time, but did not present themselves to be reported. If we have recently met and talked with a man, and would report our experience, we commonly make a very partial report at first, failing to seize the most significant, picturesque, and dramatic points; we describe only what we have had time to digest and dispose of in our minds, without being conscious that there were other things really more novel and interesting to us, which will not fail to recur to us and impress us suitably at last. 

How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate! We discriminate at first only a few features, and we need to reconsider our experience from many points of view and in various moods, to preserve the whole fruit of it. 

H.  D.  Thoreau, Journal, March 24, 1857

As I round the Island rock, a striped squirrel that was out the steep polypody rock scampered up with a chuckle. See. March 10,1852 (" I am pretty sure that I hear the chuckle of a ground squirrel among the warm and bare rocks of the Cliffs. "); . March 17, 1859 ("As I float by the Rock, I hear rustling amid the oak leaves above that new water-line, and, there being no wind, I know it to be a striped squirrel, and soon see its long-unseen striped sides . . . a type which I have not seen for a long time, or rather a punctuation-mark, the character to indicate where a new paragraph commences in the revolution of the seasons.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,Signs of the Spring, the striped squirrel comes out

I see many of those narrow four-winged insects (perla?) of the ice now fluttering on the water .See
May 9, 1854("That early narrow curved-winged insect on ice and river which I thought an ephemera [Harris ]says is a Sialis, or maybe rather a Perla.");  March 17, 1858 ("As usual, I have seen for some weeks on the ice these peculiar (perla?) insects with long wings and two tails."); March 22, 1856 (“On water standing above the ice under a white maple, are many of those Perla(?) insects, with four wings, drowned.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Insect Hatches in Spring;and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,Signs of the Spring: insects and worms come forth and are active

Frank Forester: Henry William Herbert (April 3, 1807 – May 17, 1858), pen name Frank Forester, was an English novelist, poet, historian, illustrator, journalist and writer on sport. See July 12, 1855 (quoting Forester’s  “Manual for Young Sportsmen,”)

[Forester] thinks that it would not be safe to fire a two barrelled gun offered new for less than fifty dollars. See Forester’s Manual at 58 ("I do not, of course, mean to say that every cheap gun must necessarily burst ; but I do say that, against each one, severally, the odds are heavy that it will . . .By the word low-priccd guns, I mean, as a general rule, in reference to buying a safe and serviceable piece, any thing like new, with two barrels and the smallest show of exterior ornament, cheaper than fifty dollars.”)

If you are describing any occurrence, or a man, make two or more distinct reports at different times. . . . How little that occurs to us in any way are we prepared at once to appreciate. See March 27, 1857 ("I would fain make two reports in my Journal, first the incidents and observations of to-day; and by tomorrow I review the same and record what was omitted before, which will often be the most significant and poetic part. I do not know at first what it is that charms me. The men and things of to-day are wont to lie fairer and truer in to-morrow’s memory."); October 1, 1856 (“I do not perceive the poetic and dramatic capabilities of an anecdote or story which is told me, its significance, till some time afterwards. . ."); April 20, 1854 ("I find some advantage in describing the experience of a day on the day following. At this distance it is more ideal, like the landscape seen with the head inverted, or reflections in water”); January 10, 1854 ("What you can recall of a walk on the second day will differ from what you remember on the first day, ... as any view changes to one who is journeying amid mountains when he has increased the distance.”); May 5, 1852 ("I succeed best when I recur to my experience not too late, but within a day or two; when there is some distance, but enough of freshness.”); July 23, 1851 ("Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Put an interval between the impression and the expression, - wait till the seed germinates naturally.”)

March 24. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, March 24

We are not at once

conscious of the whole fruit of

our experience.

How little occurs

that we are prepared at once

to appreciate.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, 

To preserve the fruit of our experience.

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 © 2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt570324

Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river.

March 18. 

9 A. M. —Up Assebet. 

A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain. 

I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard a day or two. 

The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside. 

I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking driftwood—logs and boards, etc.— out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with. He says that the frost is not out so that he can lay wall, and so he thought he go and see what there was at Fair Haven. 

Says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. 

While Emerson sits writing [in] his study this still, overcast, moist day, Goodwin is paddling up the still, dark river. Emerson burns twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen tons of coal; Goodwin perhaps a cord and a half, much of which he picks out of the river.

He says he’d rather have a boat leak some for fishing. 

I hear the report of his gun from time to time for an hour, heralding the death of a muskrat and reverberating far down the river. Goodwin had just seen Melvin disappearing up the North River, and I turn up thither after him. 

The ice-belt still clings to the bank on each side, a foot or more above the water, and is now fringed with icicles of various lengths, only an inch or two apart, where it is melting by day and dripping into the river. Being distinctly reflected, you think you see two, two feet apart, the water-line not being seen. 

I land and walk half-way up the hill. 

A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock. 

The reindeer lichens on the pitch pine plain are moist and flacid. 

I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines, a pair of them, one answering to the other, as it were like a vibrating watch-spring. Then, at a distance, that whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all I suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker.

And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, —probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree. 

Also I hear the chill-lill or tchit-a-tchit of the slate-colored sparrow, and see it. 

On the pitch pine plain, nearly the whole of a small turtle’s egg, by the side of its excavated nest. 

Save with my boat the dead top of (apparently) a pine, divested of its bark and bleached. Before the bark fell off it was curiously etched by-worms in variously curved lines and half-circles, often with regular short recurving branches.

Pere Buteux, going on commission to the Attikamegues in 1651, describes a fall away up there, where a river falls into a sort of trough or cradle a hundred paces long. 

“In this cradle the river boils (bouillonne) in such a fashion, that if you cast a stick (baston) into it, it remains some time without appearing, then all at once it elevates itself (il s’éléve en haut) to the height of two pikes, at forty or fifty paces from the place where you cast it in.” 

It is to be observed that in the old deed of the Hunt farm, written in 1701, though the whole, consisting of something more than one hundred and fifty acres, is minutely described in thirteen different pieces, no part is described as woodland or wood-lot, only one piece as partly unimproved. This shows how little account was made of wood. Mr. Nathan Brooks reminds me that not till recently, i. e. not till within forty years, have wood-lots begun to be taxed for anything like their full value.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 18, 1857

I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two. See March 18, 1852 ("I hear the song sparrow's simple strain, most genuine herald of the spring.”); March 11, 1854 ("On Tuesday, the 7th, I heard the first song sparrow chirp, and saw it flit silently from alder to alder. This pleasant morning after three days' rain and mist, they generally forthburst into sprayey song from the low trees along the river. The developing of their song is gradual but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard."); March 27, 1857 ("But now chiefly there comes borne on the breeze the tinkle of the song sparrow along the river side”); March 18, 1858 (“Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides.”). See also Henry Thoreau,  A Book of the Seasons: the Song Sparrow (Fringilla melodia).
[Goodwin] says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-tat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. See March 18, 1853 ("The tapping of the woodpecker about this time.”); March 11, 1859 (“But methinks the sound of the woodpecker tapping is as much a spring note as any these mornings.");  March 13, 1855 (“I hear the rapid tapping of the woodpecker from over the water.”); March 15, 1854 ("I hear that peculiar, interesting loud hollow tapping of a woodpecker from over the water.”)  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Pigeon Woodpecker (flicker).

That whar-whar whar-whar-whar-whar . . .  may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker.  See March 13, 1853 (“But what was that familiar spring sound from the pine wood across the river, a sharp vetter vetter vetter vetter,”); February 18, 1857 (" I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.”) ; March 17, 1857 (“It is only some very early still, warm, and pleasant morning in February or March that I notice that woodpecker-like whar-whar-whar-whar-whar-whar, earliest spring sound.”);  March 5, 1859 ("I heard a white-bellied nuthatch on an elm within twenty feet, uttering peculiar notes and more like a song than I remember to have heard from it.. . .It was something like to-what what what what what, rapidly repeated, and not the usual gnah gnah; and this instant it occurs to me that this may be that earliest spring note which I hear, and have referred to a woodpecker!  . . .  It is the spring note of the nuthatch")

The slate-colored sparrow/dark-eyed junco. See March 20, 1852 ("And now, within a day or two, I have noticed the chubby slate-colored snowbird (Fringilla hyemalis?), and I drive the flocks before me on the railroad causeway as I walk. It has two white feathers in its tail.”); March 15, 1854 (“Hear on the alders by the river the lill lill lill lill of the first F. hyemalis,”)

The pine forest's edge seen against the winter horizon (a poet's account of a steam-engine.)

December 3. 

December 3, 2016

About as much more snow as fell on the 29th November has fallen in the night upon that, so stilly that we were not aware of it till we looked out. It has not even lodged on the window-sashes, and I am first convinced it has fallen by seeing the old tracks in the road covered and the roofs uniformly white. 

It is now somewhat misty, or perhaps a fine rain beginning. 

Yarrow in snow
December 3, 2016

Fewer weeds now rise above the snow. Pinweed (or sarothra) is quite concealed. It is a uniform white napkin in many fields. But not yet are the Great Meadows fairly whitened. There, as I look sideways at them, I see still the stretching acres of straw-colored brown grass and weeds. The pastures are uniformly white, but the meadows are that rich, wild brown straw-color, or only white in ridges where there is less grass, reminding of the fall, and of water beneath. 

The steam of the locomotive stretches low over the earth, enveloping the cars. 

The sight of the sedgy meadows that are not yet snowed up while the cultivated fields and pastures are a uniform white, — fenny places which are longer enabled to resist the aggressions of winter! It takes a deep snow to blot out the traces of summer there, for the grass did not get cut this year. 

Mizzles and rains all day, making sloshy walking which sends us all to the shoemaker's. Bought me a pair of cowhide boots, to be prepared for winter walks. The shoemaker praised them because they were made a year ago. 

I feel like an armed man now. The man who has bought his boots feels like him who has got in his winter's wood. There they stand beside me in the chamber, expectant, dreaming of far woods and wood-paths, of frost-bound or sloshy roads, or of being bound with skate-straps and clogged with ice-dust. 

For years my appetite was so strong that I fed — I browsed — on the pine forest's edge seen against the winter horizon. 

How cheap my diet still! Dry sand that has fallen in railroad cuts and slid on the snow beneath is a condiment to my walk. I ranged about like a gray moose, looking at the spiring tops of the trees, and fed my imagination on them, — far-away, ideal trees not disturbed by the axe of the wood-cutter, nearer and nearer fringes and eyelashes of my eye. Where was the sap, the fruit, the value of the forest for me, but in that line where it was relieved against the sky?

That was my wood-lot; that was my lot in the woods. The silvery needles of the pine straining the light.

A man killed at the fatal Lincoln Bridge died in the village the other night. The only words he uttered while he lingered in his delirium were "All right," probably the last which he had uttered before he was struck, — brave, prophetic words to go out of the world with! good as "I still live," but on no razors.

How I love the simple, reserved countrymen, my neighbors, who mind their own business and let me alone, who never waylaid nor shot at me, to my knowledge, when I crossed their fields, though each one has a gun in his house! For nearly twoscore years I have known, at a distance, these long-suffering men, whom I never spoke to, who never spoke to me, and now feel a certain tenderness for them, as if this long probation were but the prelude to an eternal friendship. What a long trial we have withstood, and how much more admirable we are to each other, perchance, than if we had been bedfellows! I am not only grateful because Veias, and Homer, and Christ, and Shakespeare have lived, but I am grateful for Minott, and Rice, and Melvin, and Goodwin, and Puffer even. I see Melvin all alone filling his sphere, in russet suit, which no other could fill or suggest. He takes up as much room in nature as the most famous. 

Six weeks ago I noticed the advent of chickadees and their winter habits. As you walk along a wood-side, a restless little flock of them, whose notes you hear at a distance, will seem to say, "Oh, there he goes! Let's pay our respects to him." And they will flit after and close to you, and naively peck at the nearest twig to you, as if they were minding their own business all the while without any reference to you.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 3, 1856

The grass did not get cut this year. See September 30, 1856 (“Speaking of the meadow-hay which is lost this year, Minott said that the little they had got since the last flood before this was good for nothing,”)

Fewer weeds now rise above the snow. Pinweed (or sarothra) is quite concealed. It is a uniform white napkin in many fields. Compare November 30, 1856 ("Several inches of snow . . . Now see the empty chalices of the blue-curls and the rich brown-fruited pinweed above the crust."); November 18, 1855 ("Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character. “); December 5 1856 ("The johnswort and the larger pinweed are conspicuous above the snow.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, St. Johns-wort (Hypericum)

The sight of the sedgy meadows that are not yet snowed up while the cultivated fields and pastures are a uniform white. See November 8, 1853 ("The snow begins to whiten the plowed ground now, but it has not overcome the russet of the grass ground."); November 24, 1858 ("Plowed ground is quite white.); November 24, 1860 (“The plowed fields were for a short time whitened”); October 19, 1854 (“The country above Littleton (plowed ground) more or less sugared with snow,”); December 16, 1857 ("Plowed grounds show white first.”)

.

Bought me a pair of cowhide boots, to be prepared for winter walks. See November 28, 1850 ("Within a day or two the walker finds gloves to be comfortable, and begins to think of an outside coat and of boots. Embarks in his boots for the winter voyage"); December 4, 1856 ("When I bought my boots yesterday, Hastings ran over his usual rigmarole."); December 6, 1859 ("I I took out my boots, which I have not worn since last spring, with the mud and dust of spring still on them, and went forth in the snow. That is an era, when, in the beginning of the winter, you change from the shoes of summer to the boots of winter."); December 8, 1852 ("One cannot burn or bury even his old shoes without a feeling of sadness and compassion");Compare March 30, 1860 (“It is time to begin to leave your greatcoat at home, to put on shoes instead of boots and feel lightfooted.”) See also September 1, 1859 "Bought a pair of shoes the other day, and, observing that as usual they were only wooden-pegged at the toes, I required the seller to put in an extra row of iron pegs there while I waited for them. So he called to his boy to bring those zinc pegs, but I insisted on iron pegs and no zinc ones. He gave me considerable advice on the subject of shoes, but I suggested that even the wearer of shoes, of whom I was one, had an opportunity to learn some of their qualities. I have learned to respect my own opinion in this matter.")

The steam of the locomotive stretches low over the earth, enveloping the cars. See November 23, 1852 ("The steam of the engine hugs the earth in the Cut, concealing all objects for a great distance.”); December 29, 1851 ("In the clear atmosphere I see, far in the eastern horizon, the steam from the steam-engine, like downy clouds above the woods."); January 3, 1860 ("When a locomotive came in, just before the sun set, I saw a small cloud blown away from it which was a very rare but distinct violet purple."); February 16, 1855 ("The fog is so thick we cannot see the engine till it is almost upon us, and then its own steam, hugging the earth, greatly increases the mist."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Steam of the Engine

A man killed at the fatal Lincoln Bridge. See December 10, 1856 ("Yesterday I walked under the murderous Lincoln Bridge, where at least ten men have been swept dead from the cars within as many years. I looked to see if their heads had indented the bridge,")

Hearing the whistle

of the locomotive takes

me out of body.

I see clearly what

at other times I only

dimly remember.

The earth's extent

the freedom of all nature

and the sky's depth.

December 31, 1853

I am grateful for Minott, and Rice, and Melvin, and Goodwin, and Puffer even. 

• Minott. See note to October 4, 1851 ("Minott is, perhaps, the most poetical farmer — who most realizes to me the poetry of the farmer's life — that I know.") 
• Rice.See March 11, 1857 ("I see and talk with Rice, sawing off the ends of clapboards which he has planed, to make them square, for an addition to his house. He has got a fire in his shop, and plays at house-building there. His life is poetic. He does the work himself.He combines several qualities and talents rarely combined. Though he owns houses in the city, whose repair he attends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the rent, he also has his Sudbury farm and bean-fiolds. Though he lived in a city, he would still be natural and related to primitive nature around him. Though he owned all Beacon Street, you might find that his mittens were made of the skin of a woodchuck that had ravaged his bean-field, which he had cured.")
• Melvin. See December 2, 1856 ("I thank my stars for Melvin. I think of him with gratitude when I am going to sleep, grateful that he exists, — . . . he is agreeable to me as a tinge of russet on the hillside. I would fain give thanks morning and evening for my blessings. Awkward, gawky, loose-hung, dragging his legs after him. He is my contemporary and neighbor. He is one tribe, I am another, and we are not at war. ")
• Goodwin See  December 3, 1855 ("Met Goodwin going out with his gun."); October 22, 1853 ("Yesterday . . . one-eyed John Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a hand-cart and conveying home the piles of driftwood which of late he had collected with his boat. It was a beautiful evening, and a clear amber sunset lit up all the eastern shores; and that man's employment, so simple and direct, — though he is regarded by most as a vicious character, — whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, — thus to obtain his winter's wood, — charmed me unspeakably.")
• Puffer.even. See May 17, 1858 (“While I was measuring the tree, Puffer came along, and I had a long talk with him, standing under the tree in the cool sprinkling rain till we shivered.”); November 8, 1858 ("Goodwin, laying wall at Miss Ripley’s, observed to me going by, “Well, it seems that [Puffer] thought that he had lived long enough.” He committed suicide within a week, at his sister’s house in Sudbury. . . . Garfield said it was about time, for [Puffer] , in revenge for being sent to the house of correction, had set fire to a pile of wood of his, that long pile by the road side beyond William Wheeler’s, that I stood under in a rain once.")

The silvery needles of the pine straining the light. See November 30, 1851 ("My eye wanders across the valley to the pine woods which fringe the opposite side,. . .now reflecting a silvery light, the infinite stories of their boughs, tier above tier, a sort of basaltic structure, a crumbling precipice of pine horizontally stratified . . . like a great green feather stuck in the ground."); January 19, 1859 ("I know of no more agreeable object to bound our view . . .than the pyramidal tops of a white pine forest in the horizon."); February 4, 1852 ("The needles of the pine are the touchstone for the air; any change is revealed by their livelier green or increased motion. Now the white pine are a misty blue; anon a lively, silvery light plays on them.”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The White Pines

Six weeks ago I noticed the advent of chickadees and their winter habits. See October 15, 1856 (“The chickadees are hopping near on the hemlock above. They resume their winter ways before the winter comes.”); see also October 10, 1851 ("The chickadee, sounding all alone, now that birds are getting scarce, reminds me of the winter . . . flitting ever nearer and nearer and nearer, inquisitively, till the boldest was within five feet of me"); November 8, 1857 ("The chickadee / Hops near to me."); November 9, 1850 ("The chickadees, if I stand long enough, hop nearer and nearer inquisitively, from pine bough to pine bough, till within four or five feet, occasionally lisping a note.”); December 1, 1853 (“[T]he little chickadees . . . inquisitively hop nearer and nearer to me. They are our most honest and innocent little bird, ”). Also A Book of the Seasons: the Chickadee in Winter

December 3. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 3

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

tinyurl.com/HDT561203