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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.
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