Nature works by contraries

February 11. 

P. M. — To Ball’s Hill over ice. 

February 11, 2019

Among the common phenomena of the ice are those triangular points of thick ice heaved up a couple of feet where the ice has recently settled about a rock. The rock looks somewhat like a dark fruit within a gaping shell or bur. 

Also, now, as often after a freshet in cold weather, the ice which had formed around and frozen to the trees and bushes along the shore, settling, draws them down to the ground or water, often breaking them extensively. It reminds you of an alligator or other evil genius of the river pulling the trees and bushes which had come to drink into the water. 

If a maple or alder is unfortunate enough to dip its lower limbs into the freshet, dallying with it, their fate is sealed, for the water, freezing that night, takes fast hold on them like a vise, and when the water runs out from beneath, an irresistible weight brings them down to the ground and holds them there. Only the spring sun will soften the heart of this relentless monster, when, commonly, it is too late. How the ice far in the meadows, thus settling, spreads the clumps — of willows, etc., on every side! 

Nature works by contraries. That which in summer was most fluid and unresting is now most solid and motionless. If in the summer you cast a twig into the stream it instantly moved along with the current, and nothing remained as it was. Now I see yonder a long row of black twigs standing erect in mid-channel where two months ago a fisherman set them and fastened his lines to them. They stand there motionless as guide-posts while snow and ice are piled up about them. 

Such is the cold skill of the artist. He carves a statue out of a material which is fluid as water to the ordinary workman. His sentiments are a quarry which he works. 

I see only the chain of sunken boats passing round a tree above the ice. 

The south side of Ball’s Hill, which is warm and half bare, is tracked up with partridges, and I start several there. So is it next Sunday with the Hill shore, east of Fair Haven Pond. These birds are sure to be found now on such slopes, where only the ground and dry leaves are exposed. 

The water lately went down, and the ice settled on the meadows, and now rain has come, and cold again, and this surface is alternate ice and snow. 

Looking from this hill toward the sun, they are seen to be handsomely watered all over with alternate waves of shining ice and white snow-crust, literally “watered” on the grandest scale, —this palace floor.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  February 11, 1859

The south side of Ball’s Hill, which is warm and half bare, is tracked up with partridges, and I start several there.See February 11, 1855 ("The dog scares up some partridges out of the soft snow under the apple trees in the Tommy Wheeler orchard."); February 11, 1856 ("See a partridge by the riverside, opposite Fair Haven Hill, which at first I mistake for the top of a fence-post above the snow, amid some alders. . . .Within three rods, I see it to be indeed a partridge, to my surprise, standing perfectly still, with its head erect and neck stretched upward. It is as complete a deception as if it had designedly placed itself on the line of the fence and in the proper place for a post. It finally steps off daintily with a teetering gait and head up, and takes to wing")


I see only the chain of sunken boats passing round a tree above the ice. See December 15, 1856 (“I observe B 's boat left out at the pond, as last winter. When I see that a man neglects his boat thus, I do not wonder that he fails in his business. It is not only shiftlessness or unthrift, but a sort of filthiness to let things go to wrack and ruin thus.”); January 5, 1856 ("Boats . . . half filled with ice and almost completely buried in snow, so neglected by their improvident owners . . ."); April 22, 1857 (“We pass a dozen boats sunk at their moorings, at least at one end, being moored too low.”).

Looking from this hill toward the sun . . . waves of shining ice and white snow-crust. See February 29, 1852 (" From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach . . . Where day before yesterday was half the ground bare, is this sheeny snow-crust to-day.")

Mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky.

January 22. 

Saw, January 20th, some tree sparrows in the yard. 

Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o'-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. 

Yesterday I saw a very permanent specimen, like a long knife-handle of mother-of-pearl, very pale with an interior blue with the rosaceous tinges. Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely. 

When I was at C.'s the other evening, he punched his cat with the poker because she purred too loud for him. 

R. Rice says he saw a white owl two or three weeks since. 

Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea. 

No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first. 

Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds in the little hollows of the snow-crust. These later falls of the leaf.

A fine freezing rain on the night of the 19th produced a hard crust on the snow, which was but three inches deep and would not bear.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 22, 1854

Mother-o'-pearl tints in the western sky about an hour before sundown. . . .Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely. See January 22, 1852 ("One mother-o'-pearl tint is common to the winter sky half an hour before sundown."); See also December 18, 1852("Loring's Pond beautifully froze . . . it was so exquisitely polished that the sky and scudding dun-colored clouds, with mother-o'-pearl tints, were reflected in it as in the calmest water."); December 26, 1855 ("The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none,"); December 27, 1853 ("I look far, but see no rainbow flocks in the sky."); December 30, 1855 ("Looking up over the top of the hill now, southwest, at 3.30 P.M., I see a few mother-o’-pearl tints, and methinks the same or rainbow tints in the drifting snow there, against the bright light of the unseen sun. Only in such clear cold air as this have the small clouds in the west that fine evanishing edge. It requires a state of the air that quickly dissipates all moisture. It must be rare in summer. In this rare atmosphere all cloud is quickly dissipated and mother-o’-pearl tinted as it passes away."); January 9, 1854 ("Looking for rainbow-tinted clouds, small whiffs of vapor which form and disperse, this clear, cold afternoon"); January 13, 1852 ("Here I am on the Cliffs at half past three or four o'clock. . . .I see. . .in the west, flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds, which change their loose-textured form and melt rapidly away, even while I write."); February 13, 1860 ("It is surprising what a variety of distinct colors the winter can show us . . .There is the red of the sunset sky, and of the snow at evening, and in rainbow flocks during the day, and in sun-dogs."); February 24, 1860 ("some [clouds]most brilliant mother-o'-pearl. I never saw the green in it more distinct. This on the thin white edges of clouds as if it were a small piece of a rainbow.").

Rice says he saw a white owl. See  March 1, 1854 ("Have heard of two white owls, — one about Thanksgiving time and one in midwinter.")

Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea. See January 22, 1860 ("The snow-fleas are thickest along the edge of the wood here, but I find that they extend quite across the river . . . This must be as peculiarly a winter animal as any. It may truly be said to live in snow."). See also January 1, 1853 ("Agassiz told him that Harris [ the librarian of Harvard University, and one of Thoreau's professors] was the greatest entomologist in the world. "); January 15, 1852 ("For the first time this winter I notice snow-fleas this afternoon in Walden Wood . . .Their number is almost infinite."); February 2, 1854 ("As it is a melting day, the snow is everywhere peppered with snow-fleas.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snow Flea

Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds. See January 8, 1852 (" I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday. . .has got a dead leaf in it.."); January 15, 1856 ("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."); January 31, 1856 ("The fall of these withered leaves after each rude blast, so clean and dry that they do not soil the snow, is a phenomenon quite in harmony with the winter.") January 7, 1857("[E]ach track of the fox has proved a trap which has caught from three or four to eight or ten leaves each, snugly packed; and thus it is reprinted.")

Lichens from dry ash and leather-color turn a lively olive-green.

March 3

P. M. —To Fair Haven Hill. 

3 p.m., 24° in shade. 

The red maple sap, which I first noticed the 21st of February, is now frozen up in the auger-holes and thence down the trunk to the ground, except in one place where the hole was made in the south side of the tree, where it is melted and is flowing a little. Generally, then, when the thermometer is thus low, say below freezing-point, it does not thaw in the auger-holes. 

There is no expanding of buds of any kind, nor early birds, to be seen. 

Nature was thus premature — anticipated her own revolutions — with respect to the sap of trees, the buds (spiraea at least), and birds. The warm spell ended with February 26th. 

The crust of yesterday's snow has been converted by the sun and wind into flakes of thin ice from two or three inches to a foot in diameter, scattered like a mackerel sky over the pastures, as if all the snow had been blown out from beneath. Much of this thin ice is partly opaque and has a glutinous look even, reminding me of frozen glue. Probably it has much dust mixed with it. 

I go along below the north end of the Cliffs. The rocks in the usual place are buttressed with icy columns, for water in almost imperceptible quantity is trickling down the rocks. 

It is interesting to see how the dry black or ash-colored umbilicaria, which get a little moisture when the snow melts and trickles down along a seam or shallow channel of the rock, become relaxed and turn olive-green and enjoy their spring, while a few inches on each side of this gutter or depression in the face of the rock they are dry and crisp as ever. Perhaps the greater part of this puny rill is drunk up by the herbage on its brink. 

These are among the consequences of the slight robin snow of yesterday. It is already mostly dissipated, but where a heap still lingers, the sun on the warm face of this cliff leads down a puny trickling rill, moistening the gutters on the steep face of the rocks where patches of umbilicaria lichens grow, of rank growth, but now thirsty and dry as bones and hornets' nests, dry as shells, which crackle under your feet. 

The more fortunate of these, which stand by the moistened seams or gutters of the rock, luxuriate in the grateful moisture — as in their spring. Their rigid nerves relax, they unbend and droop like limber infancy, and from dry ash and leather-color turn a lively olive-green. 

You can trace the course of this trickling stream over the rock through such a patch of lichens by the olive-green of the lichens alone. Here and there, too, the same moisture refreshes and brightens up the scarlet crowns of some little cockscomb lichen, and when the rill reaches the perpendicular face of the cliff, its constant drip at night builds great organ-pipes of a ringed structure, which run together, buttressing the rock. 

Skating yesterday and to-day.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 3, 1857

The red maple sap, which I first noticed the 21st of February, is now frozen up. See note to February 21, 1857 ("Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard's.”)

There is no expanding of buds of any kind, nor early birds, to be seen. Compare 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.”)

Nature . . . anticipated her own revolutions. See April 18, 1852 ("Can I not by expectation affect the revolutions of nature, make a day to bring forth something new?")

Great organ-pipes of a ringed structure, which run together, buttressing the rock. See February 14, 1852 ("icicles . . .hang perpendicularly, like organ pipes."); January 11, 1854 ("Now is the time to go out and see the ice organ-pipes.”)

Moisture refreshes and brightens up the scarlet crowns of some little cockscomb lichen, See January 26, 1852 ("The lichens look rather bright to-day, . . .The beauty of lichens, with their scalloped leaves, the small attractive fields, the crinkled edge! I could study a single piece of bark for hour.”);  February 5, 1853 ("It is a lichen day. . . . All the world seems a great lichen and to grow like one to-day, - a sudden humid growth.”); March 5, 1852 ("Such is the mood of my mind, and I call it studying lichens . . .really prevents my seeing aught else in a walk"); March 6, 1856 ("The snow is softening . Methinks the lichens are a little greener for it . "); See also  A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau   The Lichens and the lichenst

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

Lichens from dry ash 

and leather-color turn a 

lively olive-green. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,  Lichens turnng green

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

The month of the crusted snow.

February 28

P. M. —To Nut Meadow. 

How various are the talents of men! From the brook in which one lover of nature has never during all his lifetime detected anything larger than a minnow, an other extracts a trout that weighs three pounds, or an otter four feet long. How much more game he will see who carries a gun, i. e. who goes to see it! Though you roam the woods all your days, you never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it. 

February 28, 2021

I go on the crust which we have had since the 13th, i. e. on the solid frozen snow, which settles very gradually in the sun, across the fields and brooks. 

The very beginning of the river’s breaking up appears to be the oozing of water through cracks in the thinnest places, and standing in shallow puddles there on the ice, which freeze solid at night. The river and brooks are quite shrunken. The brooks flow far under the hollow ice and snow-crust a foot thick, which here and there has fallen in, showing the shrunken stream far below. The surface of the snow melts into a regular waved form, like raised scales. 

Miles is repairing the damage done at his new mill by the dam giving way. He is shovelling out the flume, which was half filled with sand, standing in the water. His sawmill, built of slabs, reminds me of a new country. He has lost a head of water equal to two feet by this accident. Yet he sets his mill agoing to show me how it works. 

What a smell as of gun-wash when he raised the gate! He calls it the sulphur from the pond. It must be the carburetted hydrogen gas from the bottom of the pond under the ice. It powerfully scents the whole mill. A powerful smelling-bottle.

How pleasant are the surroundings of a mill! Here are the logs (pail stuff), already drawn to the door from a neighboring hill before the mill is in operation. The dammed-up meadow, the melted snow, and welling springs are the serf he compels to do his work. He is unruly as yet, has lately broken loose, filled up the flume, and flooded the fields below. He uses the dam of an old mill which stood here a hundred years ago, which now nobody knows anything about. The mill is built of slabs, of the worm-eaten sap-wood. The old dam had probably been undermined by muskrats. It would have been most prudent to have built a new one. Rude forces, rude men, and rude appliances.   

That strong gun-wash scent from the mill-pond water was very encouraging. I who never partake of the sacrament make the more of it. 

How simple the machinery of the mill! Miles has dammed a stream, raised a pond or head of water, and placed an old horizontal mill-wheel in position to receive a jet of water on its buckets, transferred the motion to a horizontal shaft and saw by a few cog wheels and simple gearing, and, throwing a roof of slabs over all, at the outlet of the pond, you have a mill. 

A weight of water stored up in a meadow, applied to move a saw, which scratches its way through the trees placed before it. So simple is a sawmill. A millwright comes and builds a dam across the foot of the meadow, and a mill-pond is created, in which, at length, fishes of various kinds are found; and muskrats and minks and otter frequent it.

The pond is like a weight wound up.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal,  February 28, 1856

You never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it. See April 8, 1856 ("Most countrymen might paddle five miles along the river now and not see one muskrat, while a sportsman a quarter of a mile before or behind would be shooting one or more every five minutes."); November 4, 1858 ("You will see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it  – if you look for it  . . . The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his windows. It comes and perches at last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it with the feathers on. He will keep himself supplied by firing up his chimney. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and honk when they get there.");  Compare August 5, 1851 ("The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”); August 21, 1851 ("You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying nor inquisitive, not bent upon seeing things"); November 18 1851 ("The chopper who works in the woods all day is more open in some respects to the impressions they are fitted to make than the naturalist who goes to see them. He really forgets himself, forgets to observe, and at night he dreams of the swamp, its phenomena and events. Not so the naturalist; enough of his unconscious life does not pass there. A man can hardly be said to be there if he knows that he is there, or to go there if he knows where he is going. The man who is bent upon his work is frequently in the best attitude to observe what is irrelevant to his work."); September 13, 1852 ("I must walk more with free senses. I must let my senses wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking. Carlyle said that how to observe was to look, but I say that it is rather to see, and the more you look the less you will observe. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye.”); March 23, 1853 ("Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.”); June 14, 1853 ("You are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see by a direct gaze before.”); December 11, 1855 ("I saw this familiar fact at a different angle. 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. To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired.”); April 13, 1860 (“It distinctly occurred to me that, perhaps, if I came against my will, as it were, to look at the sweet-gale as a matter of business, I might discover something else interesting.”)

I go on the crust which we have had since the 13th . . . across the fields and brooks.  See February 13, 1856 ("This fall of 42° from 8.30 A. M. yesterday to the same time to-day has produced not a thin and smooth, but a very firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction across the fields.); February 14, 1856 ("I can now walk on the crust in every direction at the Andromeda Swamp;"); February 25, 1856 ("The crust still bears, and I leave the railroad at Andromeda Ponds and go through on crust to Fair Haven."); See also February 9, 1851 ("Now I travel across the fields on the frozen crust . . . It is easier to get about the country than at any other season."); February 9, 1852 ("This is our month of the crusted snow."); February 14, 1852   ("Latterly we have had, i.e. within a week, crusted snow, made by thaw and rain."); February 17, 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 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 29, 1852 ("From Pine Hill, looking westward, I see the snowcrust shine in the sun as far as the eye can reach.")_

The carburetted hydrogen gas from the bottom of the pond under the ice. See July 9, 1857 ("Am surprised to find how much carburetted hydrogen gas there is in the beds of sawdust by the side of this stream."); July 14, 1857 ("Set fire to the carburetted hydrogen from the sawdust shoal with matches, and heard it flash.")

Across fields and brooks

I go on the crust, on the 

solid frozen snow.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The month of the crusted snow

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-560228

The bee tree felled

February 25

P. M. — To Walden and Fair Haven. 

The only bare ground is the railroad track, where the snow is thin. The crust still bears, and I leave the railroad at Andromeda Ponds and go through on crust to Fair Haven. 

Am surprised to see some little minnows only an inch long in an open place in Well Meadow Brook. 

As I stand there, see that they have just felled my bee tree, the hemlock. The chopper even now stands at its foot. I go over and see him cut into the cavity by my direction. He breaks a piece out of his axe as big as my nail against a hemlock knot in the meanwhile. There is no comb within. 

They have just been cutting wood at Bittern Cliff. The sweet syrup is out on the ends of the hickory logs there.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 25, 1856

The crust still bears, and I leave the railroad at Andromeda Ponds and go through on crust to Fair Haven. See February 8, 1856 ("Yesterday’s snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now . . . a thin crust over all the snow."); February 12, 1856 ("The snow or crust and cold weather began December 26th, and not till February 7th was there any considerable relenting, when it rained a little . . .and no serious thaw till the 11th, or yesterday."); February 13, 1856 ("Avery firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction."); February 14, 1856 ("I can now walk on the crust in every direction at the Andromeda Swamp;");  February 28, 1856 ("I go on the crust which we have had since the 13th,")

Am surprised to see some little minnows only an inch long. See March 18, 1856 ("Within the brook I see quite a school of little minnows, an inch long . . . Notwithstanding the backwardness of the season, all the town still under deep snow and ice, here they are, in the first open and smooth water, governed by the altitude of the sun.");  March 19, 1856 ("No sooner is some opening made in the river, a square rod in area, where some brook or rill empties in, than the fishes apparently begin to seek it for light and warmth . . . They are seen to ripple the water, darting out as you approach. ")See also March 9, 1854 ("I detect the trout minnows not an inch long by their quick motions or quirks, soon concealing themselves.") and A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Ripples made by Fishes

Felled my bee tree. See September 30, 1852 ("Custom gives the first finder of the nest a right to the honey and to cut down the tree "); February 10, 1852 ("I saw yesterday on the snow on the ice, on the south side of Fair Haven Pond, some hundreds of honey-bees, dead and sunk half an inch below the crust. They had evidently come forth from their hive (perhaps in a large hemlock on the bank close by), and had fallen on the snow chilled to death. Their bodies extended from the tree to about three rods from it toward the pond. Pratt says he would advise me to remove the dead bees, lest somebody else should be led to discover their retreat, and I may get five dollars for the swarm, and perhaps a good deal of honey.");  March 4, 1852 (" I cut my initials on the bee tree")

February 25. See  Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, February 25

Well Meadow Brook–

am surprised to see minnows

in an open place. 

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The bee tree felled

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-560225

The dispersion of seed on the snow crust

February 14

Still colder this morning, -7° at 8.30 A. M. 

P. M. — To Walden.

I find that a great many pine-needles, both white and pitch, of ’54 still hold on, bristling around the twigs, especially if the tree has not grown much the last year. So those that strew the snow now are of both kinds. 

I can now walk on the crust in every direction at the Andromeda Swamp; can run and stamp without danger of breaking through, raised quite above the andromeda (which is entirely concealed), more than two feet above the ground. But in the woods, and even in wood-paths, I slump at every other step. 

In all the little valleys in the woods and sprout-lands, and on the southeast sides of hills, the oak leaves which have blown over the crust are gathered in dry and warm-looking beds, often five or six feet in diameter, about the base of the shrub oaks. So clean and crisply dry and warm above the cold, white crust, they are singularly inviting to my eye. No doubt they are of service to conceal and warm the rabbit and partridge and other beasts and birds. They fill every little hollow, and betray thus at a distance a man’s tracks made a week ago, or a dog’s many rods off on a hillside. If the snow were not crusted, they would not be gathered thus in troops. 

I walk in the bare maple swamps and detect the minute pensile nests of some vireo high over my head, in the fork of some unattainable twig, where I never suspected them in summer, —a little basket cradle that rocked so high in the wind. And where is that young family now, while their cradle is filled with ice?

I was struck to-day by the size and continuousness of the natural willow hedge on the east side of the railroad causeway, at the foot of the embankment, next to the fence. Some twelve years ago, when that causeway was built through the meadows, there were no willows there or near there, but now, just at the foot of the sand-bank, where it meets the meadow, and on the line of the fence, quite a dense willow hedge has planted itself.  

I used to think that the seeds were brought with the sand from the Deep Cut in the woods, but there is no golden willow there; but now I think that the seeds have been blown hither from a distance, and lodged against the foot of the bank, just as the snow-drift accumulates there, for I see several ash trees among them, which have come from an ash ten rods east in the meadow, though none has sprung up elsewhere. There are also a few alders, elms, birch, poplars, and some elder. 

For years a willow might not have been persuaded to take root in that meadow; but run a barrier like this through it, and in a few years it is lined with them. They plant themselves here solely, and not in the open meadow, as exclusively as along the shores of a river. The sand-bank is a shore to them, and the meadow a lake. 

How impatient, how rampant, how precocious these osiers! They have hardly made two shoots from the sand in as many springs, when silvery catkins burst out along them, and anon 

 Thus they multiply and clan together. Thus they take advantage even of the railroad, which elsewhere disturbs and invades their domains. 

May I ever be in as good spirits as a willow! How tenacious of life! How withy! How soon it gets over its hurts! They never despair. Is there no moisture longer in nature which they can transmute into sap?

They are emblems of youth, joy, and everlasting life. Scarcely is their growth restrained by winter, but their silvery down peeps forth in the warmest days in January (?). 

The very trees and shrubs and weeds, if we consider their origin, have drifted thus like snow against the fences and hillsides. Their growth is protected and favored there. Soon the alders will take their places with them. This hedge is, of course, as straight as the railroad or its bounding fence. 

Over this crust, alder and birch and pine seeds, etc., which in summer would have soon found a resting place, are blown far and wide.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, February 14, 1856

I can now walk on the crust in every direction at the Andromeda Swamp; can run and stamp without danger of breaking through. See February 13, 1856 ("This fall of 42° from 8.30 A. M. yesterday to the same time to-day has produced not a thin and smooth, but a very firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction across the fields"); See also  February 8, 1852 ("This afternoon, the first crust to walk on.");   February 9, 1851 ("Now I travel across the fields on the frozen crust. and can walk across the river in most places. It is easier to get about the country than at any other season."); February 14, 1852   ("Latterly we have had, i.e. within a week, crusted snow, made by thaw and rain.")

In all the little valleys in the woods and sprout-lands, and on the southeast sides of hills, the oak leaves which have blown over the crust are gathered in dry and warm-looking beds, . . and betray thus at a distance a man’s tracks made a week ago. See January 8, 1852 ("Almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow - perhaps ten inches deep - has got a dead leaf in it, though none is to be seen on the snow around."); January 24, 1852 ("The oaks are made thus to retain their leaves, that they may play over the snow - crust and add variety to the winter landscape");  February 4, 1856 ("The oak leaves which have blown over the snow are collected in dense heaps on the still side of the bays at Walden, where I suspect they make warm beds for the rabbits to squat on.”)  December 9, 1856 ("Coming through the Walden woods, I see already great heaps of oak leaves collected in certain places on the snow-crust by the roadside, where an eddy deposited them."); December 11, 1858 ("Already, in hollows in the woods and on the sheltered sides of hills, the fallen leaves are collected in small heaps on the snow-crust, simulating bare ground and helping to conceal the rabbit and partridge, etc. They are not equally diffused, but collected together here and there as if for the sake of society. ")

I walk in the bare maple swamps and detect the minute pensile nests of some vireo high over my head. See  December 30, 1855 (“He who would study birds’ nests must look for them in November and in winter as well as in midsummer, for then the trees are bare and he can see them, and the swamps and streams are frozen and he can approach new kinds”); January 24, 1856 ("The snow is so deep along the sides of the river that I can now look into nests which I could hardly reach in the summer."); January 13, 1856 ("What a wonderful genius it is that leads the vireo to select the tough fibres of the inner bark, instead of the more brittle grasses, for its basket, the elastic pine-needles and the twigs, curved as they dried to give it form, and, as I suppose, the silk of cocoons, etc., etc., to bind it together with!”); February 9, 1856 ("See a pensile nest eighteen feet high, within a lichen clad red maple on the edge of the Assabet Spring or Pink Azalea Swamp . . . Is it a yellow throat vireo’s? It is not shaped like the red-eye’s, on a side twig to one of the limbs and about a foot from the end of the twig."); February 24, 1858 ("What art in the red-eye to make these two adjacent maple twigs serve for the rim of its pensile basket, inweaving them! Surely it finds a place for itself in nature between the two twigs of a maple.");  

I was struck to-day by the size and continuousness of the natural willow hedge on the east side of the rail road causeway . . . now I think that the seeds have been blown hither from a distance. See June 9, 1854 ("The willow down and seeds are blowing over the causeway."); May 12, 1857 ("When I consider how many species of willow have been planted along the railroad causeway within ten years, of which no one knows the history, and not one in Concord beside myself can tell the name of one, so that it is quite a discovery to identify a single one in a year, and yet within this period the seeds of all these kinds have been conveyed from some other locality to this, I am reminded how much is going on that man wots not of. "); March 11, 1861("We have many kinds, but each is confined to its own habitat. I am not aware that the S. nigra has ever strayed from the river's brink. Though many of the S. alba have been set along our causeways, very few have sprung up and maintained their ground elsewhere. . .  I have but little doubt that the seed of four of those that grow along the railroad causeway was blown from the river meadows, viz. S. pedicellaris, lucida, Torreyana, and petiolaris."); See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Propogation of the Willow.

May I ever be in as good spirits as a willow! See May 14, 1852  ("Going over the Corner causeway, the willow blossoms fill the air with a sweet fragrance, and I am ready to sing, Ah! willow, willow! "); See also  A Book of the Seasons,, by Henry Thoreau,  by Henry Thoreau. Willows on the Causeway.

Scarcely is their growth restrained by winter, but their silvery down peeps forth. See  March 10, 1853 ("Methinks the first obvious evidence of spring is the pushing out of the swamp willow catkins, then the relaxing of the earlier alder catkins, then the pushing up of skunk-cabbage spathes."); March 21, 1855 ("Early willow and aspen catkins are very conspicuous now. The silvery down of the former has in some places crept forth from beneath its scales a third of an inch at least. This increased silveriness was obvious, I think, about the first of March, perhaps earlier. It appears to be a very gradual expansion, which begins in the warm days of winter. It would be well to observe them once a fortnight through the winter.) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring: Alder and Willow Catkins Expanding

Over this crust, alder and birch and pine seeds, etc., which in summer would have soon found a resting place, are blown far and wide. See December 30, 1855 ("For a few days I have noticed the snow sprinkled with alder and birch scales. I go now through the birch meadow southwest of the Rock. The high wind is scattering them over the snow there."); January 7, 1856 ("I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it."); February 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed, blown thirty rods from J. Hosmer’s little grove."); March 1, 1856 ("I see a pitch pine seed with its wing, far out on Walden."); December 4 1856 ("I see where the pretty brown bird-like birch scales and winged seeds have been blown into the numerous hollows of the thin crusted snow. ")

Golden blossoms and 

downy seeds, spreading their race 

with rapidity.

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau,  The dispersion of seed on the snow crust

 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-560214

The crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points.

February 8

9 A. M. —To Fair Haven Pond. 

A clear and a pleasanter and warmer day than we have had for a long time. 

For two or three weeks, successive light and dry snows have fallen on the old crust and been drifting about on it, leaving it at last three quarters bare and forming drifts against the fences, etc., or here and there low, slaty, fractured ones in mid-field, or pure white hard-packed ones. These drifts on the crust are commonly quite low and flat.

 

February 8, 2020

But yesterday’s snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now a glaze on the trees, giving them a hoary look, icicles like rakes’ teeth on the rails, and a thin crust over all the snow. At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points or mirrors, one to every six inches, at least. This crust is cracked like ice into irregular figures a foot or two square. 

Perhaps the snow has settled considerably, for the track in the roads is the highest part. Some heard a loud cracking in the ground or ice last night. 

I cut through, five or six rods from the east shore of Fair Haven, and find seven inches of snow, nine inches of snow ice and eight of water ice, — seventeen of both. The water rises to within half an inch of the top of the ice. 

Isaac Garfield has cut a dozen holes on the west side. The ice there averages nineteen inches in thickness. Half the holes are five or six rods from the shore, and the rest nine or ten, the water from three  to seven feet deep. In some places more than half the whole depth is ice. The thinnest ice is 17 inches; the thickest, 20+. The inner row invariably the thickest. The water rises above the ice in some cases.

The snow begins (at noon) to soften somewhat in the road. Coming home at twelve, the ice is fast melting on the trees, and I see in the drops the colors of all the gems. 

The snow is soft, and the eaves begin to run as not for many weeks. Thermometer at 3.30 P. M., 31°.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal. February 8, 1856

Yesterday’s snow turning to rain, which froze as it fell, there is now a glaze on the trees. See February 7, 1856 ("Begins to snow at 8 A.M.; turns to rain at noon, and clears off, or rather ceased raining, at night, with some glaze on the trees."); See also February 6, 1857 ("Down railroad to see the glaze, the first we have had this year, but not a very good one.");  February 8, 1852 ("Night before last, our first rain for a long time; this afternoon, the first crust to walk on."); February 26, 1854 ("This morning it began with snowing, turned to a fine freezing rain producing a glaze, but in the afternoon changes to pure rain.") and  Yesterday's ice storm today.

At this hour the crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points or mirrors. See February 3, 1852 (“This snow . . . is two feet deep, pure and powdery. From a myriad little crystal mirrors the moon is reflected, which is the untarnished sparkle of its surface.”); ; February 13, 1859 ("A dry, powdery snow about one inch deep, from which, as I walk toward the sun, this perfectly clear, bright afternoon, at 3.30 o’clock, the colors of the rainbow are reflected from a myriad fine facets.");.January 12, 1860 ("Going from the sun, I see a myriad sparkling points scattered over its surface, — little mirror-like facets, . . .which has fallen in the proper position, reflecting an intensely bright little sun. Such is the glitter or sparkle on the surface of a snow freshly fallen when the sun comes out and you walk from it, the points of light constantly changing."); January 29, 1860 ("A parabola of rainbow-colored reflections, from the myriad reflecting crystals of the snow as I walk toward the sun.")

The ice there [Fair Haven] averages nineteen inches in thickness. See February 6, 1856 ("Cut a cake of ice out of the middle of Walden . . . On the 18th of January the ice had been about seven inches thick here . . . It was now 19 inches thick.")

The ice is fast melting on the trees, and I see in the drops the colors of all the gems. See February 8, 1857 ("My diffuse and vaporous life becomes as the frost leaves and spiculae radiant as gems on the weeds and stubble in a winter morning.") See also  December 6, 1858 ("Looking at a dripping tree between you and the sun, you may see here or there one or another rainbow color, a small brilliant point of light.");  December 11, 1855 ("Great winter itself looked like a precious gem, reflecting rainbow colors from one angle.")

The eaves begin to run as not for many weeks. See February 1, 1856 ("The eaves have scarcely run at all. It has been what is called 'an old-fashioned winter.'"); February 11, 1856 ("It is now fairly thawing, the eaves running; and puddles stand in some places.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Signs of the Spring; The Eaves Begin to Run

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

Snow turning to rain 

froze as it fell – there is now 

a glaze on the trees.

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, 

The crust sparkles with a myriad brilliant points.

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-560208