THE POND IN WINTER |
AFTER A still winter night I awoke with
the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had
been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what- how- when-
where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live,
looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no
question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and
daylight. The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines,
and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to
say, Forward! Nature puts no question and answers none which we
mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution. "O Prince,
our eyes contemplate with admiration and transmit to the soul the
wonderful and varied spectacle of this universe. The night veils
without doubt a part of this glorious creation; but day comes to
reveal to us this great work, which extends from earth even into the
plains of the ether."
Then to my morning work. First I
take an axe and pail and go in search of water, if that be not a
dream. After a cold and snowy night it needed a divining-rod to find
it. Every winter the liquid and trembling surface of the pond, which
was so sensitive to every breath, and reflected every light and
shadow, becomes solid to the depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so
that it will support the heaviest teams, and perchance the snow
covers it to an equal depth, and it is not to be distinguished from
any level field. Like the marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes
its eyelids and becomes dormant for three months or more. Standing on
the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my
way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a
window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the
quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a
window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in
summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber
twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the
inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our
heads.
Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with
frost, men come with fishing-reels and slender lunch, and let down
their fine lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch;
wild men, who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other
authorities than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings
stitch towns together in parts where else they would be ripped. They
sit and eat their luncheon in stout fear- naughts on the dry oak
leaves on the shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in
artificial. They never consulted with books, and know and can tell
much less than they have done. The things which they practice are
said not yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown
perch for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer
pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had
retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he got worms
out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught them. His
life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of the
naturalist penetrate; himself a subject for the naturalist. The
latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of
insects; the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and
moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking trees.
Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried
out in him. The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows
the perch, and the fisher-man swallows the pickerel; and so all the
chinks in the scale of being are filled.
When I strolled
around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes amused by the
primitive mode which some ruder fisher-man had adopted. He would
perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in the ice,
which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance from the
shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent
its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of
the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry oak leaf to
it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a bite. These
alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as you walked
half way round the pond.
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I
see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in
the ice, making a little hole to admit the water, I am always
surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they
are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia
to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent
beauty which separates them by a wide interval from the cadaverous
cod and haddock whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not
green like the pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the
sky; but they have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like
flowers and precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the
animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course,
are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in
the animal kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught
here- that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the
rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the
Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced
to see its kind in any market; it would be the cynosure of all eyes
there. Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their
watery ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin
air of heaven.
As I was desirous to recover the long lost
bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke
up, early in '46, with compass and chain and sounding line. There
have been many stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of
this pond, which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is
remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond
without taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such
Bottomless Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed
that Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe.
Some who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down
through the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the
bargain, and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold
in their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay
might be drived," if there were anybody to drive it, the
undoubted source of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions
from these parts. Others have gone down from the village with a
"fifty-six" and a wagon load of inch rope, but yet have
failed to find any bottom; for while the "fifty-six" was
resting by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vain attempt
to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness. But I
can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a
not unreasonable, though at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily
with a cod-line and a stone weighing about a pound and a half, and
could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom, by having to
pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me. The
greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet; to which may be
added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and
seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an
inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were
shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that
this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in
the infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A
factory-owner, bearing what depth I had found, thought that it could
not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams, sand would
not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are not so deep
in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if drained, would
not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like cups between the
hills; for this one, which is so unusually deep for its area, appears
in a vertical section through its centre not deeper than a shallow
plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a meadow no more hollow than
we frequently see. William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that
relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head
of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt
water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth, and
about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If
we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or
whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed
in, what a horrid chasm must it have appeared!
"So high
as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom
broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters." But if, using
the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these proportions to
Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a vertical section
only like a shallow plate, it will appear four times as shallow. So
much for the increased horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when
emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching
cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from
which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the
far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitants
of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the shores of a
primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no subsequent elevation
of the plain have been necessary to conceal their history. But it is
easiest, as they who work on the highways know, to find the hollows
by the puddles after a shower. The amount of it is, the imagination,
give it the least license, dives deeper and soars higher than Nature
goes. So, probably, the depth of the ocean will be found to be very
inconsiderable compared with its breadth.
As I sounded through
the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater
accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze
over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest
part there are several acres more level than almost any field which
is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line
arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in
thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the
variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand
within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and
dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, but the effect
of water under these circumstances is to level all inequalities. The
regularity of the bottom and its conformity to the shores and the
range of the neighboring hills were so perfect that a distant
promontory betrayed itself in the soundings quite across the pond,
and its direction could be determined by observing the opposite
shore. Cape becomes bar, and plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep
water and channel.
When I had mapped the pond by the scale of
ten rods to an inch, and put down the soundings, more than a hundred
in all, I observed this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that
the number indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre
of the map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then
breadthwise, and found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest
length intersected the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point
of greatest depth, notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly
level, the outline of the pond far from regular, and the extreme
length and breadth were got by measuring into the coves; and I said
to myself, Who knows but this hint would conduct to the deepest part
of the ocean as well as of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule
also for the height of mountains, regarded as the opposite of
valleys? We know that a hill is not highest at its narrowest
part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded,
were observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper
water within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water
within the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a
basin or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the
course of the bar. Every harbor on the sea-coast, also, has its bar
at its entrance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider
compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared
with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the
cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have almost
elements enough to make out a formula for all cases.
In order
to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience, at the deepest
point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a surface and the
character of its shores alone, I made a plan of White Pond, which
contains about forty-one acres, and, like this, has no island in it,
nor any visible inlet or outlet; and as the line of greatest breadth
fell very near the line of least breadth, where two opposite capes
approached each other and two opposite bays receded, I ventured to
mark a point a short distance from the latter line, but still on the
line of greatest length, as the deepest. The deepest part was found
to be within one hundred feet of this, still farther in the direction
to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely, sixty
feet. Of course, a stream running through, or an island in the pond,
would make the problem much more complicated.
If we knew all
the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description
of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that
point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not,
of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our
ignorance of essential elements in the calculation. Our notions of
law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we
detect; but the harmony which results from a far greater number of
seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws, which we have not
detected, is still more wonderful. The particular laws are as our
points of view, as, to the traveller, a mountain outline varies with
every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though
absolutely but one form. Even when cleft or bored through it is not
comprehended in its entireness.
What I have observed of the
pond is no less true in ethics. It is the law of average. Such a rule
of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system
and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth
of the aggregate of a man's particular daily behaviors and waves of
life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the
height or depth of his character. Perhaps we need only to know how
his shores trend and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer
his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous
circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are
reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him.
But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our
bodies, a bold projecting brow falls off to and indicates a
corresponding depth of thought. Also there is a bar across the
entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is our
harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially
land-locked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their
form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the
shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually
increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of
the waters, so that it reaches to the surface, that which was at
first but an inclination in the shore in which a thought was harbored
becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the
thought secures its own conditions- changes, perhaps, from salt to
fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of
each individual into this life, may we not suppose that such a bar
has risen to the surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor
navigators that our thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on
upon a harborless coast, are conversant only with the bights of the
bays of poesy, or steer for the public ports of entry, and go into
the dry docks of science, where they merely refit for this world, and
no natural currents concur to individualize them.
As for the
inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any but rain and
snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a thermometer and a line,
such places may be found, for where the water flows into the pond it
will probably be coldest in summer and warmest in winter. When the
ice-men were at work here in '46-7, the cakes sent to the shore were
one day rejected by those who were stacking them up there, not being
thick enough to lie side by side with the rest; and the cutters thus
discovered that the ice over a small space was two or three inches
thinner than elsewhere, which made them think that there was an inlet
there. They also showed me in another place what they thought was a
"leach-hole," through which the pond leaked out under a
hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing me out on a cake of ice to
see it. It was a small cavity under ten feet of water; but I think
that I can warrant the pond not to need soldering till they find a
worse leak than that. One has suggested, that if such a "leach-hole"
should be found, its connection with the meadow, if any existed,
might be proved by conveying some, colored powder or sawdust to the
mouth of the hole, and then putting a strainer over the spring in the
meadow, which would catch some of the particles carried through by
the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen
inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well
known that a level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore
its greatest fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land
directed toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of
an inch, though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was
probably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our instruments were
delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of the
earth? When two legs of my level were on the shore and the third on
the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a rise or fall
of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a difference of
several feet on a tree across the pond. When I began to cut holes for
sounding there were three or four inches of water on the ice under a
deep snow which had sunk it thus far; but the water began immediately
to run into these holes, and continued to run for two days in deep
streams, which wore away the ice on every side, and contributed
essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface of the pond; for, as
the water ran in, it raised and floated the ice. This was somewhat
like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship to let the water out.
When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds, and finally a new
freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is beautifully mottled
internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like a spider's web, what
you may call ice rosettes, produced by the channels worn by the water
flowing from all sides to a centre. Sometimes, also, when the ice was
covered with shallow puddles, I saw a double shadow of myself, one
standing on the head of the other, one on the ice, the other on the
trees or hillside.
While yet it is cold January, and snow and
ice are thick and solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village
to get ice to cool his summer drink; impressively, even pathetically,
wise, to foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January- wearing
a thick coat and mittens! when so many things are not provided for.
It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool
his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond,
unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and
air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the
favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer there.
It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn through the
streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest and sport,
and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw
pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.
In the winter of
'46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down
on to our pond one morning, with many carloads of ungainly-looking
farming tools-sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws,
rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such
as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator. I
did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or
some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw
no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done,
thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said
that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double
his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million
already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another,
he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the
midst of a hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing,
barrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were
bent on making this a model farm; but when I was looking sharp to see
what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by
my side suddenly began to book up the virgin mould itself, with a
peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water- for it
was a very springy soil- indeed all the terra firma there was- and
haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be cutting
peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar
shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the polar
regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But
sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking
behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward
Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the
ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad to
take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue
in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of
a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to be cut
out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee
overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They
divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require
description, and these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly
hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and
block and tackle, worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so
many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row
upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to
pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out
a thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and
"cradle-holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by
the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses
invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like
buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile
thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square,
putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when
the wind, though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear
large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there,
and finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort
or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into
the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it
looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of
azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the
almanac- his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They
calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its
destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the
cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different
destiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice was found
not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than usual,
or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in
the winter of '46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was
finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the
following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining
exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter,
and was not quite melted till September, 1848. Thus the pond
recovered the greater part.
Like the water, the Walden ice,
seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully
blue, and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, or
the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off.
Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into
the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald,
an object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion
of Walden which in the state of water was green will often, when
frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. So the hollows about
this pond will, sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish
water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue.
Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air
they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an
interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had
some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good
as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but
frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the
difference between the affections and the intellect.
Thus for
sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy
husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements
of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of the
almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of
the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like;
and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more, probably, I shall
look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there,
reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending up its evaporations
in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood
there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and
plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a
floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where
lately a hundred men securely labored.
Thus it appears that
the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras
and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my
intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the
Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have
elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its
literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is
not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well
for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of
Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the
Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his
crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his
master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.
The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous
islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno,
and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian
Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in
ports of which Alexander only heard the names.
SPRING
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