Walking on the River.

February 5

The weather is still clear, cold, and unrelenting. 

I have walked much on the river this winter, but, ever since it froze over, it has been on a snow-clad river, or pond. They have been river walks because the snow was shallowest there. 

Even the meadows, on account of the firmer crust, have been more passable than the uplands. 

In the afternoons I have walked off freely up or down the river, without impediment or fear, looking for birds and birds’ nests and the tracks of animals; and, as often as it was written over, a new snow came and presented a new blank page. 

Fisher tracks

February 5, 2017

If it were still after it, the tracks were beautifully distinct. If strong winds blew, the dry leaves, losing their holds, traversed and scored it in all directions. 

The sleighing would have been excellent all the month past if it had not been for the drifting of the surface snow into the track whenever the wind blew, but that crust on the old snow has prevented very deep drifts.

I should say the average cold was about 8° at 8 A. M. and 18° or 20° at 3 P. M.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1856

The weather is still clear, cold, and unrelenting. See February 5, 1855 ("In a journal it is important in a few words to describe the weather.")

As often as it was written over, a new snow came and presented a new blank page. See January 31, 1856  ("The old tracks are blotted out, and new and fresher ones are to be discerned. It is a tabula rasa. These fresh falls of snow are like turning over a new leaf of Nature’s Album."); and note to February 2, 1856 ("Snows again last night, perhaps an inch, erasing the old tracks and giving us a blank page again, restoring the purity of nature.")

 I have walked much on the river this winter . . .because the snow was shallowest there. See January 20, 1856 ("Here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter."); 

I should say the average cold [the month past]was about 8° at 8 A. M. and 18° or 20° at 3 P. M. See January 26, 1856 ("Methinks it is a remarkably cold, as well as snowy, January, for we have had good sleighing ever since the 26th of December and no thaw."); February 1, 1856 ("It has been what is called “an old-fashioned winter.”")

February 5. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  February 5

In the afternoons

I have walked off freely up

or down the river.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Walking on the River

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560205

Walking without gloves

January 15

A fine, clear winter day. 

P. M. —To Hemlocks on the crust, slumping in every now and then. 

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. 

I cross the river on the crust with some hesitation. The snow appears considerably deeper than the 12th, maybe four or five inches deeper, and the river is indicated by a mere depression in it.

In the street not only fences but trees are obviously shortened, as by a flood. You are sensible that you are walking at a level a foot or more above the usual one. 

Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. 

I find under the hemlocks, in and upon the snow, apparently brought down by the storm, an abundance of those little dead hemlock twigs described on the 13th. They are remarkably slender, and without stiffness like the fir (and I think spruce) twigs, and this gives the hemlock its peculiar grace. These are not yet curved much, and perhaps they got that form from being placed in the nest.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1856

A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves. See  January 25, 1855 ("It is a rare day for winter, clear and bright, yet warm . . . You dispense with gloves.")  See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Walking without Gloves

My shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. See February 10, 1855 (“My shadow is blue. It is especially blue when there is a bright sunlight on pure white snow. It suggests that there may be some thing divine, something celestial, in me.”); January 18, 1856 ("I am in raptures at my own shadow.")   Also see note to January 6, 1856 ("The blue shadows are very distinct on the snow-banks.”)

Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I think it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. See January 7, 1857 ("Some might not suspect the cause of these fine and delicate traces, for the cause is no longer obvious.”)

January 15. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, January 15

A bright day, not cold.

Celestial blue shadow,

walking without gloves.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Walking without gloves.

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 ©  2009-2026

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-560115

A morning of creation.

December 31

It is one of the mornings of creation, and the trees, shrubs, etc., etc., are covered with a fine leaf frost, as if they had their morning robes on, seen against the sun. There has been a mist in the night. 

Now, at 8.30 A. M., I see, collected over the low grounds behind Mr. Cheney’s, a dense fog (over a foot of snow), which looks dusty like smoke by contrast with the snow. Though limited to perhaps twenty or thirty acres, it is as dense as any in August. 

This accounts for the frost on the twigs. It consists of minute leaves, the longest an eighth of an inch, all around the twigs, but longest commonly on one side, in one instance the southwest side. 

Clearing out the paths, which the drifting snow had filled, I find already quite a crust, from the sun and the blowing making it compact; but it is soft in the woods. 

9 A. M. — To Partridge Glade.

I see many partridge-tracks in the light snow, where they have sunk deep amid the shrub oaks; also gray rabbit and deer mice tracks, for the last ran over this soft surface last night. 

In a hollow in the glade, a gray rabbit’s track, apparently, leading to and from a hole in the snow, which, following, and laying open, I found to extend curving about this pit, four feet through and under the snow, to a small hole in the earth, which apparently led down deep. 

At ten the frost leaves are nearly all melted. 

It is invariably the east track on the railroad causeway which has the least snow on it. Though it is nearly all blown off elsewhere on the causeway, Trillium Woods have prevented its being blown off opposite to them. 

The snow-plow yesterday cast the snow six feet one side the edge of the cars, and it fell thick and rich, evenly broken like well-plowed land. It lies like a rich tilth in the sun, with its glowing cottony-white ridges and its shadowy hollows.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 31, 1855

One of the mornings of creation. See January 26, 1860 ("There are from time to time mornings, both in summer and winter, when especially the world seems to begin anew.”)

The trees, shrubs, etc., etc., are covered with a fine leaf frost. See January 6, 1853 ("This morning the weeds and twigs and fences were covered with what I may call a leaf frost."; February 12, 1855 (“All trees covered this morning with a hoar frost, very handsome looking toward the sun, —the ghosts of trees.”); February 14, 1855 ("There is also another leaf or feather frost on the trees, weeds, and rails, — slight leaves or feathers, a quarter to a half inch long by an eighth wide, standing out around the slightest core . . . These ghosts of trees are very handsome and fairy-like.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The weather, New Year's Eve

This [dense fog] accounts for the frost on the twigs. It consists of minute leaves, the longest an eighth of an inch, all around the twigs, but longest commonly on one side, in one instance the southwest side. See December 31, 1859 (''There has evidently been a slight fog generally in the night, and the trees are white with it. The crystals are directed southwesterly, or toward the wind.")

I see many partridge-tracks in the light snow . . . also gray rabbit and deer mice tracks. See December 31, 1854 ("I see mice and rabbit and fox tracks on the meadow. Once a partridge rises from the alders and skims across the river") See also December 27, 1853 ("It is surprising what things the snow betrays . . . no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals.")

A mist in the night,

frost now seen against the sun –

morning creation.

Fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears.

December 26

After snow, rain, and hail yesterday and last night, we have this morning quite a glaze, there being at last an inch or two of crusted snow on the ground, the most we have had. 

The sun comes out at 9 A. M. and lights up the ice-incrusted trees, but it is pretty warm and the ice rapidly melts. 

I go to Walden 'via the almshouse and up the railroad. 

Trees seen in the West against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as frostwork, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, with recurved twigs. 

The walls and fences are encased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. 

Already the wind is rising and a brattling is heard overhead in the street. 

The sun, shining down a gorge over the woods at Brister’s Hill, reveals a wonderfully brilliant as well as seemingly solid and diversified region in the air. 

The ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine-needles, only half as thick commonly on one side. Their heads are bowed; their plumes and needles are stiff, as if preserved under glass for the inspection of posterity. 

Thus is our now especially slow-footed river laid up not merely on the meadows, but on the twigs and leaves of the trees, on the needles of the pines. 

The pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top and remind me of firs and even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. The crust is already strewn with bits of the green needles which have been broken ofl. Frequently the whole top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches are drooping and massed together, resting on one another. 

But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. 

Here are asters, savory-leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are surmounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent icebutton, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx. These are very common. 

Each little blue-curls calyx has a spherical button like those brass ones on little boys’ jackets, — little sprigs on them, —and the pennyroyal has still smaller spheres, more regularly arranged about its stem, chandelier-wise, and still smells through the ice. 

The finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice and most branched on their minute threads. These weeds are spread and arched over into the snow again, — countless little arches a few inches high, each cased in ice, which you break with a tinkling crash at each step. 

The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all, for the scarlet is increased and multiplied by reflection through the bubbles and hemispherical surfaces of the crust, as if it covered some vermilion grain thickly strewn. 

And the brown cup lichens stand in their midst. The whole rough bark, too, is encased.

Already a squirrel has perforated the crust above the mouth of his burrow, here and there by the side of the path, and left some empty acorn shells on the snow. He has shovelled out this morning before the snow was frozen on his door-step. 

Now, at 10 A. M., there blows a very strong wind from the northwest, and it grows cold apace.

Particularly are we attracted in the winter by greenness and signs of growth, as the green and white shoots of grass and weeds, pulled or floating on the water, and also by color, as cockspur lichens and crimson birds, etc. 

Thorny bushes look more thorny than ever; each thorn is prolonged and exaggerated. 

Some boys have come out to a wood-side hill to coast. It must be sport to them, lying on their stomachs, to hear their sled crouching the crystalled weeds when they have reached the more weedy pasture below.

4 P. M. — Up railroad. 

Since the sun has risen higher and fairly triumphed over the clouds, the ice has glistened with all the prismatic hues. On the trees it is now considerably dissipated, but rather owing to the wind than the sun. 

The ice is chiefly on the upper and on the storm side of twigs, etc. The whole top of the pine forest, as seen miles off in the horizon, is of sharp points.  

It has grown cold, and the crust bears. The weeds and grasses, being so thickened by this coat of ice, appear much more numerous in the fields. It is surprising what a bristling crop they are. 

The sun is gone before five. 

Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none, only some small pink-dun (?) clouds. In the east still larger ones, which after sunset turned to pale slate.

In a true history or biography, of how little consequence those events of which so much is commonly made! For example, how difficult for a man to remember in what towns or houses he has lived, or when! Yet one of the first steps of his biographer will be to establish these facts, and he will thus give an undue importance to many of them. 

I find in my Journal that the most important events in my life, if recorded at all, are not dated.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 26, 1855

But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. See December 26, 1853 ("All weeds, with their seeds, rising dark above the snow, are now remarkably conspicuous, which before were not observed against the dark earth.”); November 18, 1855 ("Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character.”); December 6, 1856  ("Not till the snow comes are the beauty and variety and richness of vegetation ever fully revealed. Some plants are now seen more simply and distinctly and to advantage.”); February 6, 1857 ("Insignificant weeds and stubble along the railroad causeway and elsewhere are now made very conspicuous, both by their increased size and bristling stiffness and their whiteness.”)

The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump. [British soldier lichen (Cladonia_cristatella).] See  December 6, 1859 ("It is somewhat of a lichen day . . .What surprising forms and colors! Designed on every natural surface of rock or tree."); December 31, 1851 ("Nature has a day for each of her creatures, her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall.”); February 7, 1859 ("To study lichens is to get a taste of earth and health, to go gnawing the rails and rocks. This product of the bark is the essence of all times. The lichenist extracts nutriment from the very crust of the earth. . . .  It fits a man to deal with the barrenest and rockiest experience.  A little moisture, a fog, or rain, or melted snow makes his wilderness to blossom like the rose.") See also  Jim Cornish, Lichens: Thoreau's Leaves of Winter and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Lichens and the lichenst

The scarlet fruit of 

cockspur lichen seen glowing 

through the snowy crust.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A myriad of crystal spears

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 © 2009-2025

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-551226

Damp snow frozen solid

December 5.

Very cold last night. Probably river skimmed over in some places. The damp snow with water beneath (in all five or six inches deep and not drifted, notwithstanding the wind) is frozen solid, making a crust which bears well. This, I think, is unusual at this stage of the winter.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 5, 1854

Probably river skimmed over in some places. See December 4, 1853 ("Flint's Pond only skimmed a little at the shore, like the river.") December 5, 1853 ("The river frozen over thinly in most places . . . Fair Haven Pond is skimmed completely over."); December 5, 1856 (The river is well skimmed over in most places, though it will not bear")

We head out around 7 pm in a light snow. thirty degrees. o the view. on the way trim the branches from the hemlock that has fallen over the trial. the valley is illuminated by a dome of clouds back lit by the full moon.  it is light enough to walk without a headlamp where there is snow .  We go over the east side and up the gulf to the top of the mountain and sit. Deccember 5, 2014

At Gowing's Swamp

February 17.

At Gowing's Swamp I see where someone hunted white rabbits yesterday, and perhaps the day before, with a dog. The hunter has run round and round it on firm ground, while the hare and dog have cut across and circled about amid the blueberry bushes. 

The track of the white rabbit is gigantic compared with that of the gray one. Indeed few of our wild animals make a larger track with their feet alone. Where I now stand, the track of all the feet has an expanse of seven to fifteen inches, — this at intervals of from two to three feet, — and the width at the two fore feet is five inches. There is a considerable but slighter impression of the paw behind each foot.

The mice-tracks are very amusing. It is surprising how numerous they are, and yet I rarely ever see one. They must be nocturnal in their habits. Any tussocky ground is scored with them. I see, too, where they have run over the ice in the swamp, there is a mere sugaring of snow on it, ever trying to make an entrance to get beneath it. 

You see deep and distinct channels in the snow in some places, as if a whole colony had long travelled to and fro in them, a highway, a well-known trail, — but suddenly they will come to an end; and yet they have not dived beneath the surface, for you see where the single traveller who did it all has nimbly hopped along as if suddenly scared, making but a slight impression, squirrel like, on the snow. The squirrel also, though rarely, will make a channel for a short distance.

 

These mice tracks are of various sizes, and sometimes, when they are large and they have taken long and regular hops nine or ten inches apart in a straight line, they look at a little distance like a fox-track. 

I suspect that the mice sometimes build their nests in bushes from the foundation, for, in the swamp-hole on the new road, where I found two mice-nests last fall, I find one begun with a very few twigs and some moss, close by where the others were, at the same height and also on prinos bushes, - plainly the work of mice wholly. 

In the open part of Gowing's Swamp I find the Andromeda Polifolia. Neither here nor in Beck Stow's does it grow very near the shore. In these swamps, then, you have three kinds of andromeda. The main swamp is crowded with high blueberry, panicled andromeda, prinos, swamp-pink, etc., etc., and then in the middle or deepest part will be an open space not yet quite given up to water, where the Andromeda calyculata and a few A. Polifolia reign almost alone. 

These are pleasing gardens.

In the early part of winter there was no walking on the snow, but after January, perhaps, when the snow-banks had settled and their surfaces, many times thawed and frozen, become indurated, in fact, you could walk on the snow-crust pretty well.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 17, 1854

The open part of Gowing's Swamp. See August 23, 1854 (I improve the dry weather to examine the middle of Gowing's Swamp. There is in the middle an open pool, twenty or thirty feet in diameter . . .”); May 31, 1857 ("That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel, omphalos, where the umbilical cord was cut that bound it to creation's womb.. . .”); January 30 1858 ("The pool, where there is nothing but water and sphagnum to be seen and where you cannot go in the summer, is about two rods long and one and a half wide")

The track of the white rabbit. See February 3, 1856 ("You may now observe plainly the habit of the rabbits to run in paths about the swamps.")

The mice-tracks are very amusing. It is surprising how numerous they are, and yet I rarely ever see one. They must be nocturnal. See January 31, 1856 ("Perhaps the tracks of the mice are the most amusing of any, they take such various forms and, though small, are so distinct. . . .The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding. They commence and terminate in the most insignificant little holes by the side of a twig or tuft, and occasionally they give us the type of their tails very distinctly, even sidewise to the course on a bank-side.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

In the swamp-hole on the new road, where I found two mice-nests last fall, I find one begun with a very few twigs and some moss, close by where the others were. See October 8, 1853 ("Find a bird's nest converted into a mouse's nest in the prinos swamp, while surveying on the new Bedford road to-day, topped over with moss, and a hole on one side, like a squirrel-nest."); February 3, 1856 ("Track some mice to a black willow by riverside, just above spring, against the open swamp; and about three feet high, in apparently an old woodpecker’s hole, was probably the mouse-nest") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Wild Mouse

In the open part of Gowing's Swamp I find the Andromeda Polifolia. Neither here nor in Beck Stow's does it grow very near the shore. See November 23, 1857 ("This swamp appears not to have had any natural outlet, though an artificial one has been dug. The same is perhaps the case with the C. Miles Swamp. And is it so with Beck Stow's These three are the only places where I have found the Andromeda Polifolia.")

In the early part of winter there was no walking on the snow, but after January. . . you could walk on the snow-crust pretty well. See January 27, 1860 ("After the January thaw we have more or less of crusted snow, i. e. more consolidated and crispy. When the thermometer is not above 32 this snow for the most part bears"); February 8, 1852 ("Night before last, our first rain for a long time; this afternoon, the first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level, and the prospect is altogether new."); February 13, 1856 (" A very firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction across the fields, stepping over the fences."); February 19, 1855 ("Rufus Hosmer says that in the year 1820 there was so smooth and strong an icy crust on a very deep snow that you could skate everywhere over the fields and for the most part over the fences.")

February 17. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 17

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  At Gowing's Swamp

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

 tinyurl.com/hdt-540217

The inverted head experiment

February 9.

At 9 A. M. up river to Fair Haven Pond. 

This is our month of the crusted snow. Was this the Indians? I get over the half-buried fences at a stride, and the drifts slope up to the tops of the walls on each side. The crust is melted on the south slopes and lets me in, or where the sun has been reflected (yesterday) from a wood-side and rotted it, but the least inclination to the north is evidence of a hard surface. On the meadows and in level open fields away from the reflection of pines and oak leaves, it will generally bear.

Met Sudbury Haines on the river before the Cliffs , come a - fishing . Wearing an old coat, much patched, with many colors . . . He tells me that he caught three pickerel here the other day that weighed seven pounds all together. 

It is the old story. The fisherman is a natural story-teller. No man's imagination plays more pranks than his, while he is tending his reels and trotting from one to another, or watching his cork in summer. He is ever waiting for the sky to fall. He has sent out a venture. He has a ticket in the lottery of fate, and who knows what it may draw? He ever expects to catch a bigger fish yet. 

He is the most patient and believing of men. Who else will stand so long in wet places? When the haymaker runs to shelter, he takes down his pole and bends his steps to the river, glad to have a leisure day. He is more like an inhabitant of nature. The weather concerns him. He is an observer of her phenomena. 

February 9, 2022

The inverted head experiment

A man goes to the end of his garden, inverts his head, and does not know his own cottage. The novelty is in us, and it is also in nature. The mirage is constant.

The state of the atmosphere is continually varying. If we incline our heads never so little, the most familiar things begin to put on some new aspect. If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imaginations.

Objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 9, 1852

If we invert our heads completely our wood-lot appears far off. But if I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the horizon, they do not look so far off as in the afternoon. The prospect is a constantly varying mirage. See 1850 ("What shall we make of the fact that you have only to stand on your head a moment to be enchanted with the beauty of the landscape ?");  August 8, 1851 ("Turning away from the sun, we get this enchanting view, as when a man looks at the landscape with inverted head ."); January 25, 1852 ("when I invert my head and look at the woods down the stream, I seem to see every stem and twig with beautiful distinctness, the fine tops of the trees relieved against the sky.”); March 4, 1852 ("I look between my legs up the river across Fair Haven. The landscape thus at this season is a plain white field hence to the horizon.");  January 8, 1854 ("Gilpin, in his essay on the "Art of Sketching Landscape," says: "When you have finished your sketch . . . tinge the whole over with some light horizon hue." . . .I have often been attracted by this harmonious tint in his and other drawings, and sometimes, especially, have observed it in nature when at sunset I inverted my head."); 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.");  September 18, 1858 ("Some long amber clouds in the horizon, all on fire with gold, were more glittering than any jewelry. . . .And when you looked with head inverted the effect was increased tenfold, till it seemed a world of enchantment.") See Also December 11, 1855 ("It is only necessary to behold thus the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair’s breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.”) and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Inverted Head experiment.

The air changes from hour to hour of every day. It paints and glasses everything. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour.. See September 10, 1851 ("As I watch the groves on the meadow opposite our house, I see how differently they look at different hours of the day."); February 5, 1852 ("The trunks and branches of the trees are of different colors at different times and in different lights and weathers, - in sun, rain, and in the night.”); July 14, 1851 ("If I take the same walk by moonlight an hour later or earlier in the evening, it is as good as a different one."); July 23, 1851("The mind is subject to moods, as the shadows of clouds pass over the earth."); February 18, 1860 ("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.")

February 9. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, February 9

Lichens in the shade

concealing an owl sitting

in the bright sunlight.

February 9, 2022

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

tinyurl.com/hdt520902

The ease of winter walking

February 8

Night before last, our first rain for a long time; this afternoon, the first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over fields raised a foot or more above their summer level, and the prospect is altogether new. 

In this winter often no apparent difference between rivers, ponds and fields.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 8, 1852

Night before last,

our first rain 

          for a long time;

Night before last, our first rain for a long time. See  February 8, 1853 ("The warm rains have melted off the surface snow or white ice on Walden, down to the dark ice"); February 8, 1854 ("Rain, rain, rain, carrying off the snow and leaving a foundation of ice"); February 8, 1856 ("But yesterday’s snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now a glaze on the trees,  . . .and thin crust over all the snow. At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points . . .The snow is soft, and the eaves begin to run as not for many weeks."); February 8, 1857 ("The snow is gone off very rapidly in the night, and much of the earth is bare, and the ground partially thawed.") February 8, 1858 ("The ground is so completely bare this winter, and therefore the leaves in the woods so dry, that on the 5th there was a fire in the woods by Walden . . .Such a burning as commonly occurs in the spring."); February 8, 1860 ("40° and upward may be called a warm day in the winter. We have had much of this weather for a month past, reminding us of spring. ")

this afternoon,

     the first crust 

       to walk on.

The first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level, and the prospect is altogether new. See January 24, 1856 ("When the snow raises us one foot higher than we have been accustomed to walk, we are surprised at our elevation! So we soar."); January 27, 1860 ("After the January thaw we have more or less of crusted snow, i. e. more consolidated and crispy. When the thermometer is not above 32 this snow for the most part bears"); February 13, 1856 (" A very firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction across the fields, stepping over the fences."); February17, 1854 ("In the early part of winter there was no walking on the snow, but after January. . . you could walk on the snow-crust pretty well.") 

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

First crust to walk on.

Now no difference between

rivers ponds and fields.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The ease of winter walking

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

Night before last, our first rain for a long time; this afternoon, the first crust to walk on.

 It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level, and the prospect is altogether new. 

Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph - post.

I have not got out of hearing of one before I hear a new harp. 

Thoughts of different dates will not cohere. 

Carried a new cloak to Johnny Riordan.

I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish.

On Sunday they come from the town and stand in the doorway and so keep out the cold.

One is not cold among his brothers and sisters.

What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart! 

These Irish are not succeeding so ill after all.

The little boy goes to the primary school and proves a forward boy there, and the mother's brother, whohas let himself in the village, tells me that he takes the Flag of our Union (if that is the paper edited by an Irish man).

It is musical news to hear that Johnny does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows. 

In this winter often no apparent difference between rivers, ponds  and fields.

The French respected the Indians as a separate and independent people , and speak of them and contrast themselves with them , as the English have never done . They not only went to war with them , but they lived at home with them . There was a much less interval between them/