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Start listening today at P-O-D-C-A-S-T-L-I-B-R-A-R-Y.org. Start listening today at P-O-D-C-A-S-T-L-I-D-R-A-R-Y.org. The pond in winter. After a still 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, what 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.
Oh, 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 axon pale 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 looked down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softening 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 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 pickerall 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 knots on the dry oak leaves on the shore, as wise and local 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 pickerall with grown perch for bait. You look into his pale with wonder as into a summer pond, as if he kept summer locked up at home or knew where she had retreated. How prey did he get these in mid-winter? 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 a 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 grubworm, the pickerall swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerall, 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 rudar 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 equal distance from the shore.
And having fastened the end of the line to a stick to prevent it being pulled through, have passed the slack line over a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and hide 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 around the pond. Ah, the pickerall 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 hadic, whose fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green, like the pines, nor grey, 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, Waldens'us. It is surprising that they are caught here, that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and shezes and tinkling slays that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims. I'd have a chance to see its kind in any market. It would be the sinissure 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 forty-six, 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 elusive 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 anybody to drive it, the undoubted source of the sticks 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. Four, while the fifty-six was resting, by the way, they were paying out the rope in the vein 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 to 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 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 center 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 Fine 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 deluvian 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 two mid-hills, so low down sunk a hollow bottom broad in deep, capacious bed of waters.
But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fine, 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 Fine when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching corn fields occupies exactly such a horrid chasm, from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and the far side of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting inhabitant 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 to 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 the 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 to 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 center 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 41 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 100 feet of this, still farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one foot deeper, namely 60 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 are points of view, as to the traveler, a mountain outline varies with each 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 Achillesan shore who's peaks over shadow 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 landlocked. 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, where 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 harboured, 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. Our conversant only with the bites of the bays of poosy, 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 46-47, 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 leech 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 leech 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 16 inches thick, undulated under a slight wind like water.
It is well known that a level cannot be used on ice, and 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 not 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 sites 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 overall, 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 center.
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. Impresively, 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 pool, unroofs the house of the fishes, and carts off their very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes in the air. Fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the favoring winter air to wintery sellers, to underlie the summer there. It looks like solidified as your. 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, want to invite me to saw pit-fashion with them, eye-standing underneath. In the winter of 4647 there came a hundred men of hyperborean extraction, swooping down onto our pond one morning, with many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools. Sleds, plows, drill-barrows, turf-nights, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as he's 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 head-laying 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, eye 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 hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, cleaned down to the sand, or rather the water, for it was a very springy soil.
Indeed, all the terra firmer there was, and hauled 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 snowbirds. But sometimes, while Walden had her revenge, and a hired man walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he 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, onto an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses onto a stack. As surely as so many barrels of flour, and they were placed evenly side by side and row upon row, as if they formed a 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 valhala, but when they began to tuck the course of meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rhyme and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary rune 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 estimate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five percent of this would reach its destination, and that two or three percent would be wasted in the cars. However, still great a 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, more for some other reason. It never got to market.
This heap made in the winter of 4647 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 remained exposed to the sun. It stood over that summer in the next winter, and was not quite melted till September of 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. Like the water, the walled in 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 bons, quarter of a mile off.
Sometimes one of these great cakes slips from the ice-man 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 the greenish, water somewhat like its own, but the next day will be 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 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 16 days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husband men, 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 sewer, 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 evaporation and 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 fissure in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely laboured.
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 cosmodional philosophy of the begot gita, 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 Brahmin, 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, walled in water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favouring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the paraplyse of Hano, and floating by tournate and tydore, 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.
End of chapter 16.