The Concord River at Lowell

September 9.

In Lowell.-- My host says that the thermometer was at 80° yesterday morning, and this morning is at 52º. 

Sudden coolness.

Clears up in afternoon, and I walk down the Merrimack on the north bank.

I see very large plants of the lanceolate thistle, four feet high and very branching.

Also Aster cordata with the corymbosus.

Concord River has a high and hard bank at its mouth, maybe thirty feet high on the east side; and my host thinks it was originally about as high on the west side, where now it is much lower and flat, having been dug down.

There is a small isle in the middle of the mouth.

There are rips in the Merrimack just below the mouth of the Concord.

There is a fall and dam in the Concord at what was Hurd's factory, — the principal fall on the Concord, in Lowell, — one at a bleachery above, and at Whipple's, — three in all below Billerica dam.

  

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, September 9, 1860

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

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").

The voice of the wood.

December 19.

December 19, 2021

I rode back to Nashua in the morning  —   Knew the road by some yellow birch trees in a swamp and some rails set on end around a white oak in a pasture. These it seems were the objects I had noticed. 

In Nashua observed, as I thought, some elms in the distance which had been whitewashed. It turned out that they were covered from top to bottom, on one side, with the frozen vapor from a fall on the canal.

Walked a little way along the bank of the Merrimack, which was frozen over, and was agreeably reminded of my voyage up it. 

The night previous, in Amherst, I had been awaked by the loud cracking of the 'ground, which shook the house like the explosion of a powder-mill. In the morning there was to be seen a long crack across the road in front. I saw several of these here in Nashua, and ran a bit of stubble into them but in no place more than five inches. This is a sound peculiar to the coldest nights. 

Observed that the Nashua in Pepperell was frozen to the very edge of the fall, and even further in some places. 

Got home at 1.30 p. m. 

P. M. — To Walden. 

Walden froze completely over last night. This is very sudden, for on the evening of the 15th there was not a particle of ice in it. In just three days, then, it has been completely frozen over, and the ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transparent green ice, through which I see the bottom where it is seven or eight feet deep. I detect its thickness by looking at the cracks, which are already very numerous, but, having been made at different stages of the ice, they indicate very various thicknesses. Often one only an inch deep crosses at right angles another two and a half inches deep, the last having been recently made and indicating the real thickness of the ice. 

I advance confidently toward the middle, keeping within a few feet of some distinct crack two inches or more deep, but when that fails me and I see only cracks an inch or an inch and a half deep, or none at all, I walk with great caution and timidity, though the ice may be as thick as ever, but I have no longer the means of determining its thickness. 

The ice is so transparent that it is too much like walking on water by faith. 

The portion of the pond which was last frozen is a thinner and darker ice stretching about across the middle from southeast to northwest, i. e. from the shoulder of the Deep Cove to nearly midway between the bar and Ice-Fort Cove Cape. 

Close to the northwest end of this, there is a small and narrow place twenty feet long east and west, which is still so thin that a small stone makes a hole. The water, judging from my map, may[be] seventy or seventy-five feet deep there. It looks as if that had been the warmest place in the surface of the pond and therefore the last to yield to the frost king. 

Into this, or into the thinner ice at this point, there empties, as it were, a narrow meandering creek from near the western shore, which was nearly as late to freeze as any part. All this, I think, I have noticed in previous years. 

About the edge of all this more recent and darker ice, the thicker ice is white with a feathery frost, which seems to have been produced by the very fine spray, or rather the vapor, blown from the yet unfrozen surface on to the ice by the strong and cold wind. Here is where, so to speak, its last animal heat escaped, the dying breath of the pond frozen on its lips. It had the same origin with the frost about the mouth of a hole in the ground whence warm vapors had escaped. 

The fluid, timid pond was encircled within an ever-narrowing circle by the icy grasp of winter, and this is a trace of the last vaporous breath that curled along its trembling surface. Here the chilled pond gave up the ghost. 

As I stand here, I hear the hooting of my old acquaintance the owl in Wheeler's Wood. Do I not oftenest hear it just before sundown? This sound, heard near at hand, is more simply animal and guttural, without resonance or reverberation, but, heard here from out the depths of the wood, it sounds peculiarly hollow and drum-like, as if it struck on a tense skin drawn around, the tympanum of the wood, through which all we denizens of nature hear. 

Thus it comes to us an accredited and universal or melodious sound; is more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well. The owl only touches the stops, or rather wakes the reverberations. For all Nature is a musical instrument on which her creatures play, celebrating their joy or grief unconsciously often. It sounds now, hoo | hoo hoo (very fast) | hoo-rer | hoo. 

Withered leaves! this is our frugal winter diet, in stead of the juicy salads of spring and summer. I think I could write a lecture on "Dry Leaves," carrying a specimen of each kind that hangs on in the winter into the lecture-room as the heads of my discourse. They have long hung to some extent in vain, and have not found their poet yet. 

The pine has been sung, but not, to my knowledge, the shrub oak. Most think it is useless. How glad I am that it serves no vulgar use! It is never seen on the woodman's cart. The citizen who has just bought a sprout-land on which shrub oaks alone come up only curses it. But it serves a higher use than they know. Shrub oak! how true its name! 

Think first what a family it belongs to. The oak, the king of trees, is its own brother, only of ampler dimensions. The oaks, so famous for grandeur and picturesqueness, so prized for strength by the builder, for knees or for beams; and this is the oak of smaller size, the Esquimau of oaks, the shrub oak! The oaken shrub! I value it first for the noble family it belongs to. 

It is not like brittle sumach or venomous dogwood, which you must beware how you touch, but wholesome to the touch, though rough; not producing any festering sores, only honest scratches and rents.

Dr. Kane says in his "Arctic Explorations," page 21, that at Fiskernaes in Greenland "the springs, which well through the mosses, frequently remain unfrozen throughout the year."

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 19, 1856

In Amherst, I had been awaked by the loud cracking of the 'ground, which shook the house like the explosion of a powder-mill. See December 23, 1856 (“The cracking of the ground is a phenomenon of the coldest nights”); February 7, 1855 (“The ground cracked in the night as if a powder-mill had blown up, ”)

Walden froze completely over last night. .. . See December 21, 1856 ("The pond is open again in the middle, owing to the rain of yesterday."); December 24, 1856 ("Am surprised to find Walden still open in the middle.”); December 27, 1856 "Walden is still open in one place of considerable extent, just off the east cape of long southern bay.”); December 28, 1856 ("Walden completely frozen over again last night.”)  Also December 20, 1858 ("Walden is frozen over, except two small spots, less than half an acre in all, in middle"); December 21, 1855 (" Walden is skimmed over, all but an acre, in my cove. It will probably be finished to-night. (No, it proved too warm.)"); December 21, 1854 ("Walden is frozen over, apparently about two inches thick. It must have frozen, the whole of it, since the snow of the 18th,-— probably the night of the 18th");   December 25, 1858 ("Walden at length skimmed over last night, i. e. the two holes that remained open. One was very near the middle and deepest part, the other between that and the railroad.");  December 26, 1850 ("Walden not yet more than half frozen over."); December 27, 1857 ("Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night."); December 29, 1855 ("Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open, notwithstanding the cold of the 26th, 27th, and 28th and of to-day. It must be owing to the wind partly."); December 30, 1853 ("The pond [Walden] not yet frozen entirely over; about six acres open, the wind blew so hard last night."); December 31, 1850 ("Walden pond has frozen over since I was there last.”).

The ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transparent green ice, through which I see the bottom where it is seven or eight feet deep. See November 23, 1850 (“I lay down on the ice and look through at the bottom.”) Also Walden (“The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass.”)

I detect its thickness by looking at the cracks..See December 19, 1854 ("It takes a little while to learn to trust the new black ice; I look for cracks to see how thick it is.")

I hear the hooting of my old acquaintance the owl in Wheeler's Wood. Do I not oftenest hear it just before sundown? Compare December 19, 1851 ("In all woods is heard now far and near the sound of the woodchopper's axe, a twilight sound, now in the night of the year")

For all Nature is a musical instrument on which her creatures play, celebrating their joy or grief unconsciously often. See June 22, 1851 ("The world is a musical instrument. The very touch affords an exquisite pleasure. I awake to its music with the calmness of a lake when there is not a breath of wind. . . .And without effort our depths are revealed to ourselves.”); July 16, 1851 ("This earth was the most glorious musical instrument, and I was audience to its strains.); October 26, 1851 ("The instant that I awoke, methought I was a musical instrument ")

December 19. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, December 19

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/hdt561219

Ice breaks up and red maple sap flows to the sea.

March 16.

7 A. M. —The sap of that red maple has not begun to flow yet. The few spoonfuls in the pail and in the hole are frozen. 

These few rather warmer days have made a little impression on the river. It shows a rough, snowy ice in many places, suggesting that there is a river beneath, the water having probably oozed up or the snow blown and melted off there. A rough, softening snowy ice, with some darker spots where you suspect weakness, though it is still thick enough. 

2 P. M. — The red maple sap is now about an inch deep in a quart pail, nearly all caught since morning. It now flows at the rate of about six drops in a minute. Has probably flowed faster this forenoon. It is perfectly clear, like water. 

Going home, slip on the ice, throwing the pail over my head to save myself, and spill all but a pint. So it is lost on the ice of the river. 

When the river breaks up, it will go down the Concord into the Merrimack, and down the Merrimack into the sea, and there get salted as well as diluted, part being boiled into sugar. It suggests, at any rate, what various liquors, beside those containing salt, find their way to the sea,—the sap of how many kinds of trees! 

There is, at any rate, such a phenomenon as the willows shining in the spring sun, however it is to be accounted for.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 16, 1856

The red maple sap is now about an inch deep in a quart pail, nearly all caught since morning. See March 14, 1856 ("[J]ust above Pinxter Swamp, one red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark. Tapping this, I was surprised to find it flow freely . . . "); March 15, 1856 ("Put a spout in the red maple of yesterday, and hang a pail beneath to catch the sap."); March 24, 1856 ("9 A. M. -- Start to get two quarts of white maple sap and home at 11.30"). See also February 21, 1857 ("Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard's. It runs freely. The earliest sap I made to flow last year was March 14th . . .The river for some days has been open and its sap visibly flowing, like the maple."); February 23, 1857 ("I have seen signs of the spring. . . .. I have seen the clear sap trickling from the red maple."); March 2, 1860 ("The red maple sap flows freely, and probably has for several days."); March 3, 1857 ("The red maple sap, which I first noticed the 21st of February, is now frozen up in the auger-holes ."); March 4, 1852 (I see where a maple has been wounded the sap is flowing out. Now, then, is the time to make sugar."); March 5, 1852 ("As I sit under their boughs, looking into the sky, I suddenly see the myriad black dots of the expanded buds against the sky. Their sap is flowing.”); March 7, 1855 ("To-day, as also three or four days ago, I saw a clear drop of maple sap on a broken red maple twig, which tasted very sweet.") March 24, 1855 ("It is too cold to think of those signs of spring which I find recorded under this date last year. The earliest signs of spring in vegetation noticed thus far are the maple sap, the willow catkins, grass on south banks, and perhaps cowslip in sheltered places. Alder catkins loosened, and also white maple buds loosened."); March 28, 1857 ("The maple sap has been flowing well for two or three weeks."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Red Maple Sap Flows

When the river breaks up, it will go down the Concord into the Merrimack, and down the Merrimack into the sea . . .See April 14, 1852 ("The streams break up; the ice goes to the sea. Then sails the fish hawk overhead, looking for his prey.")

There is, at any rate, such a phenomenon as the willows shining in the spring sun, however it is to be accounted for. See February 24, 1855 ("The brightening of the willows or of osiers, —that is a season in the spring. . .You will often fancy that they look brighter before the spring has come, and when there has been no change in them."); March 2, 1860 ("Notice the brightness of a row of osiers this morning. This phenomenon, whether referable to a change in the condition of the twig or to the spring air and light, or even to our imaginations, is not the less a real phenomenon, affecting us annually at this season.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Osier in Winter and early Spring