Measuring the depth of Gowing's Swamp

January 30. 

P. M. – To Gowing's Swamp. 

I thought it would be a good time to rake in the mud of that central pool, and see what animal or vegetable life might be there, now that it is frozen. I supposed that tortoises and frogs might be buried in the mud. 

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, with that large-seeded sedge in a border a rod wide about it. Only a third of this (on one side) appears as water now, the rest a level bed of green sphagnum frozen with the water, though rising three or four inches above the general level here and there. 

I cut a hole through the ice, about three inches thick, in what alone appeared to be water, and, after raking out some sphagnum, found that I could not fairly reach the mud and tortoises, – if there are any there, — though my rake was five feet and nine inches long; but with the sphagnum I raked up several kinds of bugs, or insects. 

I then cut a hole through the frozen sphagnum nearer the middle of the pool, though I supposed it would be a mere mass of sphagnum with comparatively little water, and more mud nearer the surface. To my surprise, I found clear water under this crust of sphagnum to about five feet in depth, but still I could not reach the mud with my rake through the more decayed sphagnum beneath.

I returned to the thicket and cut a maple about eighteen feet long. This dropped down five or six feet, and then, with a very slight pressure, I put it down the whole length. I then went to the thicket again, searched a long while for a suitable pole, and at last cut another maple thirty feet long and between four and five inches thick at the butt, sharpened and trimmed and carried it on my shoulder to the spot, and, rough as it was, it went down with very little pressure as much as twenty feet, and with a little more pressure twenty-six feet and one inch; and there I left it, for I had measured it first. If the top had not been so small that it bent in my hands, I could probably have forced it much further. 

I suspect that the depth of mud and water under where I walk in summer on the water andromeda, Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, sphagnum, etc., is about the same. The whole swamp would flow off down an inclined plane. 

Of course there is room enough for frogs and turtles, safe from frost. 

I noticed that the sap flowed very freely from one of the maples which I cut. 

In the meanwhile the hole which I had first cut had skimmed over. I stooped to look at the ice-crystals. The thin skimming, which did not yet cover the whole surface, was minutely marked with feathers, as in the frost on windows in the morning. The crystallization was, as usual, in deep furrows, some a third of an inch wide and finely grained or channelled longitudinally. These commonly intersected each other so as to form triangles of various sizes, and it was remarkable that there was an elevated space between the sides of the triangles, which in some cases was not yet frozen, while you could see and feel the furrow where the crystals had shot on each side much lower. The water crystallizes in certain planes only. 

It seems, then, that sphagnum will grow on the surface of water five feet deep!

What means the maple sap flowing in pleasant days in midwinter, when you must wait so late in the spring for it, in warmer weather? It is a very encouraging sign of life now.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 30, 1858

I supposed that tortoises and frogs might be buried in the mud. See November 23, 1857 ("Garfield, who was working in what was Moore's Swamp, tells me that he sometimes digs up frogs in the winter, when ditching in springy places, one at a time."); December 13, 1857 ("Apparently many [tortoises] winter in the mud of these ponds and pond-holes.")

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. See November 23, 1857 ("I looked down over the large open space with its navel pool in the centre."); See May 31, 1857 (“That central meadow and pool in Gowing's Swamp is its very navel,”); August 23, 1854 ("There is in the middle an open pool, twenty or thirty feet in diameter,. . .an abrupt edge next the water, this on a dense bed of quaking sphagnum, in which I sink eighteen inches in water, upheld by its matted roots, where I fear to break through. On this the spatulate sundew abounds.”). See also February 1, 1858 ("When the surface of a swamp shakes for a rod around you, you may conclude that it is a network of roots two or three feet thick resting on water or a very thin mud. The surface of that swamp, composed in great part of sphagnum, is really floating.")

What means the maple sap flowing in pleasant days in midwinter, when you must wait so late in the spring for it. See March 14, 1856 ("Tapped several white maples with my knife, but find no sap flowing; but, just above Pinxter Swamp, one red maple limb was moistened by sap trickling along the bark.")

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  January 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 ©  2009-2023

November Eatheart

November 25. 

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close and thence through woods to Goose Pond and Pine Hill. 

A clear, cold, windy afternoon. The cat crackles with electricity when you stroke her, and the fur rises up to your touch. 

This is November of the hardest kind, — bare frozen ground covered with pale-brown or straw-colored herbage, a strong, cold, cutting northwest wind which makes me seek to cover my ears, a perfectly clear and cloudless sky. 

The cattle in the fields have a cold, shrunken, shaggy look, their hair standing out every way, as if with electricity, like the cat's. 

Ditches and pools are fast skimming over, and a few slate-colored snowbirds, with thick, shuffling twitter, and fine-chipping tree sparrows flit from bush to bush in the other wise deserted pastures. This month taxes a walker's resources more than any. 

For my part, I should sooner think of going into quarters in November than in the winter. If you do feel any fire at this season out of doors, you may depend upon it, it is your own. 

It is but a short time, these afternoons, before the night cometh, in which no man can walk. If you delay to start till three o'clock, there will be hardly time left for a long and rich adventure, — to get fairly out of town. 

November 25, 2017

November Eatheart, — is that the name of it? 

Not only the fingers cease to do their office, but there is often a benumbing of the faculties generally. You can hardly screw up your courage to take a walk when all is thus tightly locked or frozen up and so little is to be seen in field or wood. 

I am inclined to take to the swamps or woods as the warmest place, and the former are still the openest. Nature has herself become like the few fruits which she still affords, a very thick-shelled nut with a shrunken meat within. If I find anything to excite or warm my thoughts abroad, it is an agreeable disappointment, for I am obliged to go abroad willfully and against my inclinations at first. 

The prospect looks so barren, so many springs are frozen up, not a flower perchance and but few birds left, not a companion abroad in all these fields for me, I am slow to go forth. I seem to anticipate a fruitless walk. I think to myself hesitatingly, Shall I go there, or there, or there? and cannot make up my mind to any route, all seem so unpromising, mere surface walking and fronting the cold wind, so that I have to force myself to it often and at random. 

November 25, 2020

But then I am often unexpectedly compensated, and the thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine they tell of; and then the mite which November contributes becomes equal in value to the bounty of July. I may meet with some thing which interests me, and immediately it is as warm as in July, as if it were the south instead of the north west wind that blowed.

I do not know if I am singular when I say that I believe there is no man with whom I can associate who will not, comparatively speaking, spoil my afternoon. That society or encounter may at last yield a fruit which I am not aware of, but I cannot help suspecting that I should have spent those hours more profitably alone. 

Pools under the north sides of hills are frozen pretty thick. That cold one of Stow's is nearly an inch and a half thick. It is already dusty, though the ice is but a day or two old. That of Jarvis's, opposite Breed's, is also skimmed over thinly, but Goose Pond very little way as yet. The main crystals of this new ice remind me where massed together sometimes of spiny cactus leaves. Meeting each other, they inclose figures of a more or less triangular form rather than squarish. Sometimes many are closely parallel, half an inch apart, and in favorable lights you see a resemblance to large feathers. Sometimes those large spiny crystals ray from a centre, star-like, somewhat like the folds of a garment taken up by a point. The plaited ice. Also you may say the waved ice, — still speaking of the first thin ice of the season. 

I notice a thimble-berry vine forming an arch four feet high, which has firmly rooted itself at the small end. 

The roar of the wind in the trees over my head sounds as cold as the wind feels. 

I come to what seems an old ditch a dozen feet long, in Hubbard's Close. It is skinned over, but I see where a spring wells up from its bottom under the ice. When I come to it, small black-looking fishes (?), four or five inches long, apparently trout, dart about it with incredible velocity, trying to escape or to bury themselves in the mud. It is some time before all have succeeded in burying themselves to their minds, but when I shake the bog they start again. 

Ascending the hill on the east of the Close, I find, in the pine wood on its top, some fragments of a frozen white fungus or toadstool, which apparently a squirrel has eaten, for he has also dropped some at the base of a pine. These look almost exactly like asbestos, so white and stringy to the eye. 

Methinks there has been more pine-sap than usual the past summer. I never saw a quarter part so much. It stands there withered in dense brown masses, six or eight inches high, partly covered with dead leaves. The tobacco-pipes are a darker brown. 

You see here and there, under pitch pines, bits of gray bark which have fallen, reminding you very strongly of the scaly armor, perhaps, of fossil fishes or other creatures. I see, under a large white pine, three quarts at least of scales in a heap, where a squirrel has sat on the instep of the tree and stripped the cones. Further in Ebby Hubbard’s wood, I see a great two-storied mass of black spunk which has fallen. 

I shiver about awhile on Pine Hill, waiting for the sun to set. Methinks the air is dusky soon after four these days. The landscape looks darker than at any season, — like arctic scenery. There is the sun a quarter of an hour high, shining on it through a perfectly clear sky, but to my eye it is singularly dark or dusky. And now the sun has disappeared, there is hardly less light for half a minute. I should not know when it was down, but by looking for it as I stand at this height. 

Returning, I see a fox run across the road in the twilight from Potter’s into Richardson’s woods. He is on a canter, but I see the whitish tip of his tail. I feel a certain respect for him, because, though so large, he still maintains himself free and wild in our midst, and is so original so far as any resemblance to our race is concerned. Perhaps I like him better than his tame cousin the dog for it. 

It is surprising how much, from the habit of regarding writing as an accomplishment, is wasted on form. A very little information or wit is mixed up with a great deal of conventionalism in the style of expressing it, as with a sort of preponderating paste or vehicle. Some life is not simply expressed, but a long-winded speech is made, with an occasional attempt to put a little life into it. 

H. D. Thoreau Journal, November 25, 1857

November Eatheart. See November 13, 1851 ("Now is there nothing, not even the cold beauty of ice crystals and snowy architecture, nothing but the echo of your steps over the frozen ground"); November 27, 1853 (“Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow”) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau This is glorious November weather.

I believe there is no man with whom I can associate who will not, comparatively speaking, spoil my afternoon. See August 31, 1856 (“Some are so inconsiderate as to ask to walk or sail with me regularly every day”); September 16, 1859 ("Ask me for a certain number of dollars if you will, but do not ask me for my afternoons.")

The thinnest yellow light of November is more warming and exhilarating than any wine.  See November 9, 1858  (“We had a true November sunset . . . a cold, yellow sunlight suddenly illumined the withered grass of the fields around, near and far, eastward. Such a phenomenon as, when it occurs later, I call the afterglow of the year.”); November 15, 1853 ("The clear yellow light of the western sky is handsomely reflected in the water,");  November 18, 1857 ("The sunlight is a peculiarly thin and clear yellow, falling on the pale-brown bleaching herbage of the fields at this season. There is no redness in it. This is November sunlight."); November 29, 1853 (""Suddenly a glorious yellow sunlight falls on all the eastern landscape.  . . I think that we have some such sunsets as this, and peculiar to the season, every year. I should call it the russet afterglow of the year.)

Methinks the air is dusky soon after four these days . . . There is the sun a quarter of an hour high, shining on it through a perfectly clear sky, but to my eye it is singularly dark or dusky. And now the sun has disappeared. See November 25, 1851 ("The sun had set . . .we were surprised at the darkness in the east, the crescent of night, almost as if the air were thick, a thick snow-storm were gathering, which, as we had faced the west, we were not prepared for;."); November 27, 1853 ("The days are short enough now. The sun is already setting before I have reached the ordinary limit of my walk."); November 28, 1859 ("We make a good deal of the early twilights of these November days, they make so large a part of the afternoon."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, November Sunsets

November 25. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  November 25

The unexpected

exhilarating yellow 

light of November.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, November Eatheart

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/hdt-571125

Thin and fragile leaf crystals melt under my breath.

January 1

P. M. —To Walden. 

January 1, 2016

Walden is covered with white snow ice six inches thick, for it froze while it was snowing, though commonly there is a thin dark beneath. This is now, therefore, bare, while the river, which was frozen before, is covered with snow.

A very small patch of Walden, frozen since the snow, looks at a little distance exactly like open water by contrast with the snow ice, the trees being reflected in it, and indeed I am not certain but a very small part of this patch was water.

The track-repairers have shovelled four little paths by the sides of the rails, all the way from the depot to Walden. As I went by the engine-house, I saw great icicles four feet long hanging from the eastern eaves, like slender pointed spears, the last half blown aside by the wind: and still more.

By the side of the Deep Cut are the tracks of probably tree sparrows about the weeds, and of partridges.

On the ice at Walden are very beautiful great leaf crystals in great profusion. 

The ice is frequently thickly covered with them for many rods. They seem to be connected with the rosettes,—a running together of them. They look like a loose web of small white feathers springing from a tuft of down, for their shafts are lost in a tuft of fine snow like the down about the shaft of a feather, as if a feather bed had been shaken over the ice.

They are, on a close examination, surprisingly perfect leaves, like ferns, only very broad for their length and commonly more on one side the midrib than the other. They are from an inch to an inch and a half long and three quarters wide, and slanted, where I look, from the southwest.

They have, first, a very distinct midrib, though so thin that they cannot be taken up; then, distinct ribs branching from this, commonly opposite, and minute ribs springing again from these last, as in many ferns, the last running to each crenation in the border. How much further they are subdivided, the naked eye cannot discern.

They are so thin and fragile that they melt under your breath while looking closely at them.

A fisherman says they were much finer in the morning. In other places the ice is strewn with a different kind of frostwork in little patches, as if oats had been spilled, like fibres of asbestos rolled, a half or three quarters of an inch long and an eighth or more wide. Here and there patches of them a foot or two over. Like some boreal grain spilled.

Here are two fishermen, and one has preceded them. They have not had a bite, and know not why. It has been a clear winter day. 

January 1, 2017

On the north shore, near the railroad, I see the tracks apparently of a white rabbit, afterward many tracks of gray rabbits, and where they had squatted under or rather by the side of an alder stem or the like, and left many balls in the pure snow. Many have run in one course.

In the midst of them I see the track of a large rabbit, probably a white one, which was evidently on the full spring. Its tracks are four feet apart, and, unlike the others, which are on the surface even of this light snow, these break through deep, making a hole six inches over. Why was this one in such haste?

I conclude to trace him back and find out. His bounds grow greater and greater as I go back, now six feet quite, and a few rods further are the tracks of a fox (possibly a dog, but I think not) exactly on the trail! A little further, where the rabbit was ascending a considerable slope, through this snow nearly a foot deep, the bounds measure full seven feet, leaving the snow untouched for that space between.

It appears that the fox had started the rabbit from a bank on which it was resting, near a young hemlock, and pursued it only a dozen rods up the hill, and then gave up the chase,—and well he might, methought.

In a rabbit’s track the two forefeet are the furthest apart. This chase occurred probably in the night, either the last or night before, when there was not a man within a mile; but, treading on these very deep and distinct tracks, it was as if I had witnessed it, and in imagination I could see the sharp eyes of the crafty fox and the palpitating breast of the timorous rabbit, listening behind.

We unwittingly traverse the scenery of what tragedies! Every square rod, perchance, was the scene of a life or death struggle last night. As you track the rabbit further off, its bounds becoming shorter and shorter, you follow also surely its changing moods from desperate terror till it walks calmly and reassured over the snow without breaking its very slight crust, — perchance till it gnaws some twig composedly, —and in the other direction you trace the retreating steps of the disappointed fox until he has forgotten this and scented some new game, maybe dreams of partridges or wild mice.

Your own feelings are fluttered proportionately.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 1, 1856 

A very small patch of Walden looks at a little distance exactly like open water, the trees being reflected in it, and indeed I am not certain but a very small part of this patch was water. See April 13, 1856 (“[D]ark-green clear ice . . . At a little distance you would mistake it for water; further off still . . .it is blue as in summer.“); December 18, 1852 ("I slid over it with a little misgiving, mistaking the ice before me for water. “)

Here are two fishermen, and one has preceded them. They have not had a bite, and know not why. It has been a clear winter day. See December 28, 1856 ("There they sit, ever and anon scanning their reels to see if any have fallen, and, if not catching many fish, still getting what they went for, though they may not be aware of it, i. e. a wilder experience than the town affords");  June 26, 1853 ("Fishing is often the young man's introduction to the forest and wild. As a hunter and fisher he goes thither until at last the naturalist or poet distinguishes that which attracted him first, and he leaves the gun and rod behind.”); December 22, 1859 ("The fisherman stands erect and still on the ice, awaiting our approach, as usual forward to say that he has had no luck. He has been here since early morning, and for some reason or other the fishes won't bite. You won't catch him here again in a hurry. They all tell the same story. The amount of it is he has had "fisherman's luck," and if you walk that way you may find him at his old post to-morrow. . . .[T]he pond floor is not a bad place to spend a winter day"); May 6, 1858 ("One man shall derive from the fisherman’s story more than the fisher has got who tells it")

Your own feelings are fluttered proportionately. See January 2, 1856 (“As for the fox and rabbit race described yesterday, I find that the rabbit was going the other way, and possibly the fox was a rabbit, for, tracing back the rabbit, I found that it had first been walking with alternate steps, fox-like.”)

January 1. See A Book of the Seasons,   by Henry Thoreau, January 1

While looking closely,

thin and fragile leaf crystals

melt under my breath.

Here two fishermen

know not why they have no bites

this clear winter day.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, A clear winter day.

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-560101

The writer in repose

December 10.

These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness. 

Paddled Cheney’s boat up Assabet. 

Passed in some places between shooting ice-crystals, extending from both sides of the stream. Upon the thinnest black ice-crystals, just cemented, was the appearance of broad fern leaves, or ostrich-plumes, or flat fir trees with branches bent down. The surface was far from even, rather in sharp-edged plaits or folds. The form of the crystals was oftenest that of low, flattish, three-sided pyramids; when the base was very broad the apex was imperfect, with many irregular rosettes of small and perfect pyramids, the largest with bases equal to two or three inches. All this appeared to advantage only while the ice (one twelfth of an inch thick, perhaps) rested on the black water.

What I write about at home I understand so well, comparatively! and I write with such repose and freedom from exaggeration.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 10, 1853

These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness. See December 10, 1856 ("A fine, clear, cold winter morning, . . . a warm, clear, glorious winter day."); December 21, 1854 (“We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year.”; October 10, 1857 (" The sixth day of glorious weather, which I am tempted to call the finest in the year. "); October 10, 1856 ("These are the finest days in the year, Indian summer.” ); September 18, 1858 ("It is a wonderful day."); September 18, 1860 ("If you are not happy to-day you will hardly be so to-morrow.”); August 19, 1853 (“A glorious and ever-memorable day.”); July 22, 1851 ("These are our fairest days, which are born in a fog."); May 21, 1854 (“the finest days of the year, days long enough and fair enough for the worthiest deeds.”); May 18, 1852 (The world can never be more beautiful than now”); May 5, 1852 ("Every part of the world is beautiful today.”). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The world can never be more beautiful than now.

. . I write with such repose . . .See July 7, 1851 (“All the faculties in repose but the one you are using, the whole energy concentrated in that.”)