Feb. 16, 1855. Still rains a little this morning. .... Ground half bare, but frozen and icy yet.
P.M. To Cliff via Spanish Brook.
A thick fog without rain. Sounds sweet and musical through this air, as crows, cocks, and striking on the rails at a distance. In the woods by the [Deep] Cut [along the train tracks], in this soft air, under the pines draped with mist, my voice and whistling are peculiarly distinct and echoed back to me, as if the fog were a ceiling which made this hollow an apartment. Sounds are not dissipated and lost in the immensity of the heavens above you, but your voice, being confined by the fog, is distinct, and you hear yourself speak. It is a good lichen day. Every crust is colored and swollen with fruit.... The fog is so thick we cannot see the [train] engine till it is almost upon us, and then its own steam, hugging the earth, greatly increases the mist. As usual, it is still more dense over the ice at the pond.
The ground is more than half bare, especially in open fields and level evergreen woods. It is pleasant to see there the bright evergreens of the forest floor, undimmed by the snow, the wintergreen, the great-leaved pyrola, the shin-leaf, the rattlesnake-plantain, and the lycopodiums [clubmoss]. .... It is pleasant to see elsewhere, in fields and on banks, so many green radical leaves only half killed by the winter. Are those little scratches across pallescent lichens which C. notices made by squirrels? ....
The drooping oak leaves show more red amid the pines this wet day, agreeably so, and I feel as if I stood a little nearer to the heart of nature. ….
Where snow is left on banks I see the galleries of mice(?) or moles(?) unroofed.
-H.D.T.
Feb. 16, 2021.
A strong rain through much of the night and morning finally subsided this afternoon, leaving a moist warm fog in the air. The wet, foggy atmospherics are ideally similar to what Thoreau experienced this calendar day. It is in the upper 30s around 4:30 p.m. as I enter Walden Woods, stopping by Deep Cut. A train, blasting its horn, rolls by on its way east, its white headlights cutting through but softened by the fog. The tall trunks of the pines in the unusually curved hillocks to the east of Deep Cut are blackened from the wet. The snow has turned to a dense slush into which my feet sink deep, making my steps difficult and tiring on the trail to Ice Fort Cove on Walden Pond. In the distance ahead, the fog appears thicker. As Thoreau did, I yell and whistle, testing the acoustics of the soupy, thick air; feeling more isolated and enshrouded, my voice feels more encased and protected from the unfortunate nearby white noise of Route 2.
So often, on days after rain storms like this day in 1855, Thoreau proclaims it to be a "good lichen day," and today I clearly see what he means. Soaked with water, the colors of the lichens stand out brilliantly, lush in their own right, and this effect is even more exaggerated against the wet darkened bark of the trees. The shapes and types of the lichens - from tufted hair, and interconnecting flowers, to speckled patterns like spattered paint - bring added life to the scenery. I find lying on the snow a piece of variable-wrinkle lichen, not unlike a piece of endive lettuce, having been torn off a tree by the wind.
Walden is dramatically changed since yesterday, all snow being gone and replaced with bare ice. The fog is thicker above it than in the woods, particularly in the distance to the southeast. Along the ridge through the trees I look down on the ice and see it has a distinct etherial light blue tone, as if lit from below. In a small exposed space of bare ground at the base of a tree, I see, as Thoreau did, a single sprig of clubmoss.
I follow Fire Road South by Heywood’s Meadow and ascend Emerson Cliff for my first time. The cliff is both taller and more oriented toward the meadow (versus Walden Pond) than I had imagined. I linger to enjoy the view of the clouded meadow through the tall lichen-decorated trunks. The scene is enhanced further by the deeper red of the soaked oak leaves against the dark evergreen branches.
As I climb up and over the tracks to Spanish (Heywood’s) Brook to turn home, I see additional melt-exposed holes of squirrels (or mice) in the snowbanks. The dark water of the brook runs freely toward Fairhaven Bay through a concourse of snow. With light disappearing, I walk back as quickly as possible, but it is slow-going - my wet feet constantly slipping and sinking into deep trenches of slush. Near the trail's end, in the dark, I hear the calls of two great-horned owls, speaking to one another high in the trees overhead.
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