Staying out late miles from home.

June 13.

June 13.

I hear the muttering of thunder and see a dark cloud in the west-southwest horizon; am uncertain how far up-stream I shall get. An opposite cloud rises fast in the east-northeast, and now the lightning crinkles and I hear the heavy thunder.

My boat passes over beds of potamogetons, pressing their spikes under water. I paddle slowly by farmers in small parties, busily hoeing corn and potatoes. The boy rides the horse dragging the cultivator. They have a jug of sweetened water in the grass at the end of the row.

Lambkill (Kalmia augustifolia)

How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset, — small ten-sided, rosy-crimson basins, about two inches above the recurved, drooping dry capsules of last year, — and sometimes those of the year before are two inches lower. The first rose-bug on one of these flowers.

Stop to pick strawberries on Fair Haven. 

How thickly stewn our soil is with arrowheads. I never see the surface broken in sandy places but i think of them. I find them on all sides, not only in corn and grain and potato and bean fields, but in pastures and woods, by woodchucks' holes and pigeon beds and, as to-night, in a pasture where a cow has pawed the ground.

When I have stayed out thus late many miles from home, and have heard a cricket beginning to chirp louder near me in the grass I have felt that I was not far from home after all, -- began to be weaned from my village home. 

I float homeward over water almost perfectly smooth, my sail so idle that I count ten devil's-needles resting along it at once.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, June 13, 1854

How beautiful the solid cylinders of the lamb-kill now just before sunset. See June 13, 1852 ("Lambkill is out. I remember with what delight I used to discover this flower in dewy mornings.All things in this world must be seen with the morning dew on them, must be seen with youthful, early-opened, hopeful eyes."); June 13, 1858 ("To Ledum Swamp. Lambkill, maybe one day.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Lambkill (Kalmia augustifolia)

When I have stayed out thus late many miles from home . . . I have felt that I was not far from home after all. See  April 16, 1855 ('We are glad that we stayed out so late and feel no need to go home now in a hurry");May 23, 1853 ("When the chaste and pensive eve draws on...a certain lateness ... releases me from the obligation to return in any particular season. I have passed the Rubicon of staying out. I have said to myself, that way is not homeward; I will wander further from what I have called my home — to the home which is forever inviting me. In such an hour the freedom of the woods is offered me, . . .") ; June 14, 1853 ("home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you") 

This hour far from home

open to great impressions

coolness in your mind.

June 14, 1853

Also June 13, 1851 (" I listen to the ancient, familiar, immoral, dear cricket sound under all others, and as these cease I become aware of the general earth-song."); January 27, 1858 ("You can not go home yet; you stay and sit in the rain.")

June 13. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, June 13

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Staying out late miles from home.

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

*****

And the rain stops and Jane and i and the dogs head out. We haven’t been for a walk in a few days. and dogs are full of energy. Everything is green. The spring green is gone. Wet leaves are green and trunks are dark. The sun momentaily dapples the whole woods. Wet at the junction and beyond . 

An easy walk to the view. Blue low clouds  moving over the lake hide the Adirondacks. We sit a long time. Jane digs around the fire pit. Mist sometimes squeezes between the trees and floats in the clearing in front of us. 

It is 6 or 7. 

The rain stops 

and everything is green.

Wet leaves, dark trunks.

The sun momentarily  dapples the whole woods.

At the view low clouds over the lake hide the Adirondacks.

We sit a long time. 

Mist squeezes between

the trees and floats

into the clearing

in front of us

We take the Pritchard trail up then cut off towards the logging cable. There we flush a family of grouse. The little ones fly only a short distance then sit still -- one on a hemlock in clear view. The hemlock now in their prime with new green growth.

Following a deer trail we reach  the mountain trail go down to the pond.  It is full. Now dusk, the pond reflects what light there is.

We cut through the ravine at the headwater of the stream back to the junction then down on the edge of the cliff looking for the lady slipper.  It is there, blossom gone by. 

Then down along the cliff under the lower view past a Thrush nest on the cliff face and ultimatley down to the boulder trail. Between the boulders we have a close encounter with two barred owls. Noisy and curious. Good view of them in trees and in silent flight. 

A satisfying walk. The birds are more quiet but ovenbird thrushes and black throated green still prominent. At the end, a pewee.  Wet green dark woods and mushrooms.

Hemlock new green growth

wet green dark woods and mushrooms

grouse and two barred owls.

June 13, 2014

zphx

Early Strawberries

June 14

P. M. — To Flint's Pond. 

Early strawberries begin to be common. The lower leaves of the plant are red, concealing the fruit. 

Violets, especially of dry land, are scarce now. 

Eleocharis palustris abundant in Stow's meadow, by railroad. 

See a rose-bug. 

A pout's nest (at Pout's Nest) with a straight entrance some twenty inches long and a simple round nest at end. The young just hatched, all head, light-colored, under a mass of weedy hummock which is all under water. 

The common utricularia out. 

Hear the phebe note of a chickadee.

Cow-wheat, how long ? 

A rose-breasted grosbeak betrays itself by that peculiar squeak, on the Britton path. It is evident that many breed in the low woods by Flint's Pond. 

Catbird's nest with four eggs in a swamp-pink, three and a half feet up. 

The rose-breasted grosbeak is common now in the Flint's Pond woods. It is not at all shy, and our richest singer, perhaps, after the wood thrush. The rhythm is very like that of the tanager, but the strain is perfectly clear and sweet. 

One sits on the bare dead twig of a chestnut, high over the road, at Gourgas Wood, and over my head, and sings clear and loud at regular intervals, — the strain about ten or fifteen seconds long, rising and swelling to the end, with various modulations.

Another, singing in emulation, regularly answers it, alternating with it, from a distance, at least a quarter of a mile off. It sings thus long at a time, and I leave it singing there, regardless of me.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, June 14, 1859

Early strawberries begin to be common. The lower leaves of the plant are red, concealing the fruit. See June 2, 1859 ("Strawberries reddening on some hills"}; June 10, 1856 ("Ripe strawberries . . . hard at first to detect amid the red radical leaves.”)

A rose-breasted grosbeak. It is evident that many breed in the low woods by Flint's Pond See June 2, 1859 ("Found within three rods of Flint's Pond a rose-breasted grosbeak's nest.") See also A Book of Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, , the Rose-breasted Grosbeak

A pout's nest (at Pout's Nest).The young just hatched. See April 25, 1859 ("Young Stewart tells me that he saw last year a pout's nest at Walden in the pond-hole by the big pond. The spawn lay on the mud quite open and uncovered, and the old fish was tending it. A few days after, he saw that it was hatched and little pouts were swimming about.") "Pout’s Nest": HDT's name for Wyman's Meadow near Walden. See note to July 26, 1860 (I see a bream swimming about in that smaller pool by Walden in Hubbard's Wood. . . So they may be well off in the Wyman meadow or Pout's Nest."); see also June 7, 1858 ("Pouts, then, make their nests in shallow mud-holes or bays, in masses of weedy mud, or probably in the muddy bank; and the old pout hovers over the spawn or keeps guard at the entrance.Where do the Walden pouts breed when they have not access to this meadow?")