September 27
Here is a cloudy day, and now the fisherman is out.
Some tall, many-flowered, bluish-white asters are still abundant by the brook-sides.
I never found a pitcher-plant without an insect in it. The bristles about the nose of the pitcher all point inward, and insects which enter or fall in appear for this reason unable to get out again. It is some obstacle which our senses cannot appreciate.
Pitcher-plants more obvious now.
***
2 P. M. Rowed down the river to Ball's Hill.
The maples by the riverside look very green yet, have not begun to blush, nor are the leaves touched by frost. Not so on the uplands.
The river is so low that, off N. Barrett's shore, some low islands are exposed, covered with a green grass like mildew.
There are all kinds of boats chained to stumps and trees by the riverside —some from Boston and the salt — but I think that none after all is so suitable and convenient as the simple flat-bottomed and light boat that has long been made here by the farmers themselves. They are better adapted to the river than those made in Boston.
From Ball's Hill the Great Meadows, now smoothly shorn have a quite imposing appearance, so spacious and level. There is so little of this level land in our midst.
There is a shadow on the sides of the hills surrounding (a cloudy day), and where the meadow meets them it is darkest. The shadow deepens down the woody hills and is most distinctly dark where they meet the meadow line.
Now the sun in the west is coming out and lights up the river a mile off, so that it shines with a white light like a burnished silver mirror.
The poplar tree seems quite important to the scene.
The pastures are so dry that the cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way.
The patches of sunlight on the meadow look luridly yellow, as if flames were traversing it.
It is a day for fishermen.
The farmers are gathering in their corn.
The Mikania scandens and the button-bushes and the pickerel-weed are sere and flat with frost.
We looked down the long reach toward Carlisle Bridge. The river, which is as low as ever, still makes a more than respectable appearance here and is of generous width.
Rambled over the hills toward Tarbell's. The huckleberry bushes appear to be unusually red this fall, reddening these hills.
We scared a calf out of the meadow which ran like a ship tossed on the waves, over the hills toward Tarbell's. They run awkwardly , red oblong squares tossing up and down like a vessel in a storm, with great commotion. We fell into the path, printed by the feet of the calves, with no cows' tracks.
The note of the yellow-hammer is heard from the edges of the fields.
The soapwort gentian looks like a flower prematurely killed by the frost.
The soil of these fields looks as yellowish white as the corn-stalks themselves.
Tarbell's hip roofed house looked the picture of retirement, - of cottage size, under its noble elm with its heap of apples before the door and the wood coming up within a few rods, it being far off the road. The smoke from his chimney so white and vapor-like, like a winter scene.
The lower limbs of the willows and maples and button bushes are covered with the black and dry roots of the water-marigold and the ranunculi, plants with filiform, capillary, root-like submerged leaves.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, September 27, 1851
Pitcher-plants more obvious now. See September 11, 1851 ("We have had no rain for a week, and yet the pitcher-plants have water in them. Are they ever quite dry? Are they not replenished by the dews always, and, being shaded by the grass, saved from evaporation?"); September 28, 1851 ("This swamp contains beautiful specimens of the sidesaddle-flower (Sarracenia purpurea), better called pitcher-plant . . .These leaves are of various colors from plain green to a rich striped yellow or deep red. No plants are more richly painted and streaked than the inside of the broad lips of these."). See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Purple Pitcher Plant
Here is a cloudy day, and now the fisherman is out. September 25, 1851 ("Both air and water are so transparent that the fisherman tries in vain to deceive the fish with his baits")
There are all kinds of boats chained to stumps and trees by the riverside. See October 15, 1851 ("We comment on the boats of different patterns, – dories (?), punts, bread-troughs, flatirons, etc., etc., — which we pass, the prevailing our genuine dead-river boats, not to be matched by Boston carpenters."); April 22, 1857 (“We pass a dozen boats sunk at their moorings, at least at one end, being moored too low.”).
Cows all feeding one way. See July 5, 1853 ("Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding that, in surveying on the Great Fields to-day, I was interrupted by a herd of a dozen cows, which successively passed before my line of vision, feeding forward, and I had to watch my opportunity to look between them.")
The farmers are gathering in their corn. See August 27, 1853 ("Topping corn now reveals the yellowing pumpkins."); September 4, 1859 ("Topping the corn, which has been going on some days, now reveals the yellow and yellowing pumpkins."); September 5, 1851 ("A field of ripening corn, now at night, that has been topped, with the stalks stacked up to dry, – an inexpressibly dry, rich, sweet ripening scent."); September 14,1851 ("The corn-stalks standing in stacks, in long rows along the edges of the corn-fields, remind me of stacks of muskets."); September 16, 1852 ("The jay screams; the goldfinch twitters; the barberries are red. The corn is topped"); September 17, 1852 ("The corn-stalks are stacked like muskets along the fields."); October 6, 1858 ("The corn stands bleached and faded — quite white in the twilight"); October 10, 1857 ("See the heaps of apples in the fields and at the cider mill, of pumpkins in the fields, and the stacks of corn stalks and the standing corn. Such is the season.") See also September 27, 1858 ("The farmers digging potatoes on shore pause a moment to watch my sail and bending mast.")
We looked down the long reach toward Carlisle Bridge. See October 6, 1851 ("The reach of the river between Bedford and Carlisle, seen from a distance in the road to-day, as formerly, has a singularly ethereal, celestial, or elysian look.. . . I have often noticed it. I believe I have seen this reach from the hill in the middle of Lincoln."); April 10, 1852 ("This meadow is about two miles long at one view from Carlisle Bridge southward, appearing to wash the base of Pine hill, and it is about as much longer northward and from a third to a half a mile wide."); August 24, 1858 ("I look down a straight reach of water to the hill by Carlisle Bridge, —and this I can do at any season, — the longest reach we have. It is worth the while to come here for this prospect, — to see a part of earth so far away over the water"); July 14, 1859 ("There extends from Tarbell Hill to Skelton Bend what I will call the Straight Reach, a mile and a third long and quite straight. This is the finest water view, making the greatest impression of size, of any that I know on the river.")
The soapwort gentian looks like a flower prematurely killed by the frost. See September 6, 1857 ("
Soapwort gentian, out not long."); September 8, 1852 ("
Gentiana saponaria out.");
September 19, 1851 ("The soapwort gentian now.");
September 19, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian cheers and surprises, -- solid bulbs of blue from the shade, the stale grown purplish. It abounds along the river, after so much has been mown");
September 22, 1852 ("The soapwort gentian the flower of the river-banks now.")
September 25, 1857 ("You notice now the dark-blue dome of the soapwort gentian in cool and shady places under the bank.") See also
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Soapwort Gentian (Gentiana saponaria)
Now the sun lights up
the river so it shines like
a silver mirror.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality.”
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025
