Musquash Ripple

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 (Creator)

March 28, 1858

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Accompanying Journal Entry: "P.M. -- To Cliffs. After a cloudy morning, a warm and pleasant afternoon. I hear that a few geese were seen this morning. Israel Rice says that he heard two brown thrashers sing this morning! Is sure because he has kept the bird in a cage. I canít believe it. I go down the railroad, turning off in the cut. I notice the hazel stigmas in the warm hollow on the right there, just beginning to peep forth. This is an unobserved but very pretty and interesting evidence of the progress of the season. I should not have noticed it if I had not carefully examined the fertile buds. It is like a crimson star first dimly detected in the twilight. The warmth of the day, in this sunny hollow above the withered sedge, has caused the stigmas to show their lips through their scaly shield. They do not project more than the thirtieth of an inch, some not the sixtieth. The staminate catkins are also considerably loosened. Just as the turtles put forth their heads, so these put forth their stigmas in the spring. How many accurate thermometers there are on every hill and in every valley! Measure the length of the hazel stigmas, and you can tell how much warmth there has been this spring. How fitly and exactly any season of the year may be described by indicating the condition of some flower! I go by the springs toward the epigaea. It is a fine warm day with a slight haziness. It is pleasant to sit outdoors now, and, it being Sunday, neighbors walk about or stand talking in the sun, looking at and scratching the dry earth, which they are glad to see and small again. In the sunny epigaea wood I start up two Vanessa Antiopa, which flutter about over the dry leaves before, and are evidently attracted toward me, settling at last within a few feet. The same warm and placid day calls out men and butterflies. It is surprising that men can be divided into those who lead an indoor and those who lead an outdoor life, as if birds and quadrupeds were to be divided into those that lived a within nest or burrow life and [those] that lived without their nests and holes chiefly. How many of our troubles are house-bred! He lives an outdoor life; i.e., he is not squatted behind the shield of a door, he does not keep himself tubbed. It is such a questionable phrase as an ìhonest man, or the ìnaked eye, as if the eye which is not covered with a spyglass should properly be called naked. From Wheelerís plowed field on the top of Fair Haven Hill, I look toward Fair Haven Pond, now quite smooth. There is not a duck nor a gull to be seen on it. I can hardly believe that it was so alive with them yesterday. Apparently they improve this warm and pleasant day, with little or now wind, to continue their journey northward. The strong and cold northwest wind of about a week past has probably detained them. Knowing that the meadows and ponds were swarming with ducks yesterday, you go forth this particularly pleasant and still day to see tham at your leisure, but find that they are all gone. No doubt there are some left, and many more will soon come with the April rains. It is a wild life that is associated with stormy and blustering weather. When the invalid comes forth on his cane, and misses improve the pleasant air to look for signs of vegetation, that wild life has withdrawn itself. But when one kind of life goes, another comes. This plowed land on the top of the hill -- and all other fields as far as I observe -- is covered with cobwebs, which every few inches are stretch from root to root or clod to clod, gleaming and waving in the sun, the light flashing along them as they wave in the wind. How much insect life and activity connected with this peculiar state of the atmosphere these imply! Yet I do not notice a spider. Small cottony films are continually settling down or blown along through the air. (A gossamer day) Does not this gossamer answer to that of the fall? They must have sprung to with one consent last night or this morning and bent new cables to the clods and stubble all over this part of the world. The little fuzzy gants, too, are in swarms in the air, peopling that uncrowded space. They are not confined by any fence. Already the distant forest is streaked with lines of thicker and whiter haze over the successive valleys. Walden is open. When! On the 20th it was pretty solid. C. sees a very little ice in it to-day, but probably it gets entirely free to-night. Fair Haven Pond is open. (This and Flintís and Walden all open together this year, the latter was so thinly frozen! (For C. says Flintís and Walden were each a third open in the 25th.) Sitting on the top of the Cliffs, I look through my glass at the smooth river and see the long forked ripple made by a musquash swimming along over the meadow. While I sit on these warm rocks, turning my glass toward the mountains, I can see the sun reflected from the rocks on Monadnock, and I know that it would be pleasant to be there too to-day as well as here. I see, too, warm and cosy seats on the rocks, where the flies are buzzing, and probably some walker is enjoying the prospect. From this hilltop I overlook, again bare of snow, putting on a warm, hazy spring face, this seemingly concave circle of earth, in the midst of which I was born and dwell, which in the northwest and southeast has a more distant blue rim to it, as it were of more costly manufacture. On ascending the hill next his home, every man finds that he dwells in a shallow concavity whose sheltering walls are the convex surface of the earth, beyond which he cannot see. I see those familiar features, that large type, with which all my life is associated, unchanged. Cleaning out the spring on the west side of Fair Haven Hill, I find a small frog, apparently a bullfrog, just come forth, which must have wintered in the mud there. There is very little mud, however, and the rill never runs more than four or five rods before it is soaked up, and the whole spring often dries up in the summer. It seems, then, that two or three frogs, the sole inhabitants of so small a spring, will bury themselves at its head. A few frogs will be buried at the puniest spring-head. Coming home, I hear the croaking frogs in the pool on the south side of Hubbardís Grove. It is sufficiently warm for them at last. Near the sand path above Potterís mud-hole I find what I should call twenty and more mud turtlesí eggs close together, which appear to have been dug from a hole close by last year. They are all broken or cracked and more or less indented and depressed, and they look remarkably like my pigeonís egg fungi, a dirty white covered thickly with a pure white roughness, which through a glass is seen to be oftenest in the form of minute but regular rosettes of a very pure white substance. If these are turtlesí eggs, -- and there is no stem mark of a fungus, -- it is remarkable that they should thus come to resemble so closely another natural product, the fungus. The first lark of the 23d sailed through the meadow with that peculiar prolonged chipping or twittering sound, perhaps sharp clucking."

Journal XXV (1857-11-25 to 1858-06-04)

animalia
mammal
musquash
ripple

PJ13

M1302:31

TX