9-A.
The Ponds
Sometimes, having had a surfeit
of human society and gossip, and worn out all my village friends, I rambled
still farther westward than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented
parts of the town, "to fresh woods and pastures new,(1)"
or, while the sun was setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries
on Fair Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do
not yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who raises
them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet few take that
way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries, ask the cowboy or the
partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose that you have tasted huckleberries
who never plucked them. A huckleberry never reaches Boston; they have not
been known there since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and
essential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off
in the market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal
Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither
from the country's hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day,
I joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since
morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and, after
practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded commonly, by the
time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient sect
of Coenobites.(2) There was one
older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who
was pleased to look upon my house as a building erected for the convenience
of fishermen; and I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange
his lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end of
the boat, and I at the other; but not many words passed between us, for
he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm,
which harmonized well enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse was thus
altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more pleasing to remember than
if it had been carried on by speech. When, as was commonly the case, I
had none to commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with a
paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling
and dilating sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild
beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing
the flute, and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around
me, and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with
the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventurously,
from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a companion, and, making
a fire close to the water's edge, which we thought attracted the fishes,
we caught pouts with a bunch of worms strung on a thread, and when we had
done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into the air like
skyrockets, which, coming down into the pond, were quenched with a loud
hissing, and we were suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this,
whistling a tune, we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I
had made my home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till
the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with
a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from
a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time
to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences
were very memorable and valuable to me--anchored in forty feet of water,
and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands
of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the
moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal
fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging
sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze,
now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life
prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there,
and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand
over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It
was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered
to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk,
which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed
as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward
into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes
as it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and,
though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern
one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond
is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description.
It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three
quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres;
a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible
inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills
rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though
on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred
and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They
are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have two colors at least;
one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand.
The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather,
in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated,
and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes
of a dark slate-color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one day and
green another without any perceptible change in the atmosphere. I have
seen our river, when, the landscape being covered with snow, both water
and ice were almost as green as grass. Some consider blue "to be the color
of pure water, whether liquid or solid." But, looking directly down into
our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden
is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view.
Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand
it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then
a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body
of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of a vivid
green next the shore. Some have referred this to the reflection of the
verdure; but it is equally green there against the railroad sandbank, and
in the spring, before the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the
result of the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is
the color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring,
the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom,
and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow
canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when
much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect
the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it,
it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and
at such a time, being on its surface, and looking with divided vision,
so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable
light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest,
more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the original dark green
on the opposite sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison.
It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of
the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet
a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as an
equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of glass will
have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body," but a small
piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body of Walden water would
be required to reflect a green tint I have never proved. The
water of our river is black or a very dark brown to one looking directly
down on it, and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing
in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline purity that
the body of the bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural,
which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous
effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.(3)
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily
be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over
it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch and
shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily distinguished
by their transverse bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish
that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago, when
I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as
I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil
genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of
the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity,
I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe
a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently
swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have
stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off,
if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an
ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could
find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached
to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of
the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe
out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded
white stones like paving-stones, excepting one or two short sand beaches,
and is so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water
over your head; and were it not for its remarkable transparency, that would
be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some
think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual observer would
say that there were no weeds at all in it; and of noticeable plants, except
in the little meadows recently overflowed, which do not properly belong
to it, a closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even
a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-leaves and potamogetons,(4)and
perhaps a water-target or two; all which however a bather might not perceive;
and these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow in. The
stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then the bottom is pure
sand, except in the deepest parts, where there is usually a little sediment,
probably from the decay of the leaves which have been wafted on to it so
many successive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on anchors
even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond,
in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I
am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre
I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive
nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away,
and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting
spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out
of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up
in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and
covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall,
when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to
rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue
they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond
in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who
knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian
Fountain?(5) or what nymphs presided
over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord
wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have
left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling
the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore,
a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and
falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably
as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still
from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.
This is particularly distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond
in winter, just after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating
white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of
a mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable
close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in
clear white type alto-relievo.(6)
The ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be built here may still
preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or
not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend
to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though
not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it
was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet higher,
than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-bar running into it, with
very deep water on one side, on which I helped boil a kettle of chowder,
some six rods from the main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not
been possible to do for twenty-five years; and, on the other hand, my friends
used to listen with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later
I was accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen
rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long since converted
into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years, and now,
in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher than when I lived there,
or as high as it was thirty years ago, and fishing goes on again in the
meadow. This makes a difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven
feet; and yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant
in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes which affect the
deep springs. This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is
remarkable that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus
to require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise
and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years hence
the water will again be as low as I have ever known it. Flint's Pond, a
mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and
outlets, and the smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden,
and recently attained their greatest height at the same time with the latter.
The same is true, as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves
this use at least; the water standing at this great height for a year or
more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the shrubs and
trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last rise--pitch pines,
birches, alders, aspens, and others--and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed
shore; for, unlike many ponds and all waters which are subject to a daily
tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the
pond next my house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, has been killed
and tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments;
and their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the last rise
to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts its title to a shore,
and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees cannot hold it by right
of possession. These are the lips of the lake, on which no beard grows.
It licks its chaps from time to time. When the water is at its height,
the alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots
several feet long from all sides of their stems in the water, and to the
height of three or four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain
themselves; and I have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore,
which commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became
so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the
tradition--the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth--that
anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose
as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and
they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of
which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the
hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped,
and from her the pond was named.(7)
It has been conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down
its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate,
that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian
fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient
settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came
here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and
the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.
As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to be accounted
for by the action of the waves on these hills; but I observe that the surrounding
hills are remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have
been obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut
nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones where the shore
is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a mystery to me.
I detect the paver. If the name was not derived from
that of some English locality--Saffron Walden,(8)
for instance--one might suppose that it was called originally Walled-in
Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in
the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and I think that
it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter,
all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and wells
which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond water which had
stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon till noon
the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the thermometer having been up
to 65 degrees or 70 degrees some of the time, owing partly to the sun on
the roof, was 42 degrees, or one degree colder than the water of one of
the coldest wells in the village just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling
Spring the same day was 45 degrees, or the warmest of any water tried,
though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when, beside, shallow
and stagnant surface water is not mingled with it. Moreover, in summer,
Walden never becomes so warm as most water which is exposed to the sun,
on account of its depth. In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful
in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and remained so during
the day; though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was
as good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the
pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a pond, needs
only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade of his camp to be
independent of the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing
seven pounds--to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with great
velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds because he
did not see him--perch and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds,
shiners, chivins or roach (Leuciscus pulchellus,) a very few breams
(Pomotis obesus,) (9)
and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds--I am thus particular because
the weight of a fish is commonly its only title to fame, and these are
the only eels I have heard of here;--also, I have a faint recollection
of a little fish some five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish
back, somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here chiefly
to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile
in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have
seen at one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different
kinds: a long and shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in
the river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and remarkably
deep, which is the most common here; and another, golden-colored, and shaped
like the last, but peppered on the sides with small dark brown or black
spots, intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones, very much like a trout.
The specific name reticulatus would not apply to this; it should
be guttatus rather. These are all very firm fish, and weigh more
than their size promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed
all the fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmer-fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the water
is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them. Probably
many ichthyologists (10) would
make new varieties of some of them. There are also a clean race of frogs
and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and minks leave their
traces about it, and occasionally a travelling mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes,
when I pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle
which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and geese
frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied swallows (Hirundo
bicolor) skim over it, kingfishers dart away from its coves, and the
peetweets (Totanus macularius) "teeter" along its stony shores all
summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting
on a white pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the
wind of a gull, like Fair Haven.(11)
At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of consequence
which frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the
sandy eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also
in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen feet
in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones less than a
hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if
the Indians could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so,
when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are too regular
and some of them plainly too fresh for that. They are similar to those
found in rivers; but as there are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know
not by what fish they could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the
chivin. These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous.
I have in my mind's eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder
northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where successive
capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves between. The forest
has never so good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen
from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from the water's
edge; for the water in which it is reflected not only makes the best foreground
in such a case, but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable
boundary to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there,
as where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.
The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each sends forth
its most vigorous branch in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural
selvage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low shrubs of the
shore to the highest trees. There are few traces of man's hand to be seen.
The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.
Notes
- more information
1. John Milton (1608-1674) English
poet, from Lycidas - back
2. religious communities - pronounced
"See no bites" (a pun!) - back
3. Michelangelo (1475-1564) Italian
sculptor, painter, architect, poet - back
4. water plants - back
5. in Greek mythology, source of
poetic inspiration - back
6. sculptural relief with at least
half the circumference of the modeled form projecting - back
7. "This is told of Alexander's
Lake in Killingly Ct. by Barber. v
his Con. Hist Coll" - note made
by Thoreau in his copy of Walden - back
8. Saffron Walden is an English
town - "Evelyn in his Diary (1645) mentions 'the parish of Saffron Walden,
famous for the abundance of Saffron there cultivated, and esteemed the
best of any foreign county'" - note made by Thoreau in his copy of Walden
- back
9. "Pomotis obesus [v Nov 26-58]
one trout weighing a little over 5 ibs--(Nov. 14-57)" - note made by Thoreau
in his copy of Walden - back
10. zoologists who study fish,
including their structure, classification, and habits - back
11. bay of the Sudbury River approximately
one mile from Walden - back
[ 홈 ] [ 위로 ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-C ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-D ] [ Walden - Chapter 1-E ] [ Walden - Chapter 2 ] [ Walden - Chapter 3 ] [ Walden - Chapter 4 ] [ Walden - Chapter 5 ] [ Walden - Chapter 6 ] [ Walden - Chapter 7 ] [ Walden - Chapter 8 ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-A ] [ Walden - Chapter 9-B ] [ Walden - Chapter 10 ] [ Walden - Chapter 11 ] [ Walden - Chapter 12 ] [ Walden - Chapter 13 ] [ Walden - Chapter 14 ] [ Walden - Chapter 15 ] [ Walden - Chapter 16 ] [ Walden - Chapter 17 ] [ Walden - Chapter 18 ] [ The Walden Express ]
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