The Pond
inWinter
fter 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.”
A
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 eye-lids
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
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serenity reigns as in the amber
twilight sky, corresponding to the cool
and even temperament of the
inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as
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
practise 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
mid-winter? O, 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
fisherman 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 fisherman 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
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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 driven,” if there were
any body 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
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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.
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A factory owner, hearing 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 it must 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
has 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
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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 plough. 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.
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In order to see how nearly I
could guess, with this experience, at
the deepest point in a pond, by
observing the outlines of its 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 draw 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
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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
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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 hill-side.
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 car-
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loads of ungainly-looking farming
tools, sleds, ploughs, drillbarrows,
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, ploughing,
harrowing, 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 hook
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 ploughshare, or a plough
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
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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 azuretinted
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,
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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.
ምንም አስተያየቶች የሉም:
አስተያየት ይለጥፉ