Message #136467

[Mindwarp]

One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have
leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in the pond
at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel in it as I
walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting the snow;
the days have grown sensibly longer; and I see how I shall get through
the winter without adding to my woodpile, for large fires are no
longer necessary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring,
to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped
squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or
see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of
March, after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the
ice was still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer it was
not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken up and floated off
as in rivers, but, though it was completely melted for half a rod in
width about the shore, the middle was merely honeycombed and saturated
with water, so that you could put your foot through it when six inches
thick; but by the next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain
followed by fog, it would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with
the fog, spirited away. One year I went across the middle only five
days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Walden was first
completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th of March; in
'47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52, the 18th
of April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of April.

  Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and
ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to
us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days
come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a
startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were
rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going
out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth.
One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and seems as
thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had been put
upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her
keel- who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire more of
natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah- told me-
and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of Nature's
operations, for I thought that there were no secrets between them-
that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought that he
would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on the
meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down
without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven
Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a
firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surprised to see so
great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat
on the north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed
himself in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was
melted for three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth
and warm sheet of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks
love, within, and he thought it likely that some would be along pretty
soon. After he had lain still there about an hour he heard a low and
seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and impressive,
unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing
as if it would have a universal and memorable ending, a sullen rush
and roar, which seemed to him all at once like the sound of a vast
body of fowl coming in to settle there, and, seizing his gun, he
started up in haste and excited; but he found, to his surprise, that
the whole body of the ice had started while he lay there, and
drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made by its
edge grating on the shore- at first gently nibbled and crumbled off,
but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island to
a considerable height before it came to a standstill.

  At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm
winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun,
dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his
way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling
rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter
which they are bearing off.

  Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which
thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut
on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a
phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of
freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly
multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of
every degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed
with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even
in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the
slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and
overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little
streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of
hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way
that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves
or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and
resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and
imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of
leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and
excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose
forms and color we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural
foliage more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine,
or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under some circumstances,
to become a puzzle to future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as
if it were a cave with its stalactites laid open to the light. The
various shades of the sand are singularly rich and agreeable,
embracing the different iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and
reddish. When the flowing mass reaches the drain at the foot of the
bank it spreads out flatter into strands, the separate streams
losing their semicylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and
broad, running together as they are more moist, till they form an
almost flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which
you call trace the original forms of vegetation; till at length, in
the water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off
the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the
ripple- marks on the bottom.