Thoreau on Ice

by George Howe Colt

Hawthorne had grown up skating on Sebago Lake in Maine, and during his winters in Concord often skated alone before breakfast. Emerson, despite his fatigue that afternoon (he would eventually retreat to the Old Manse for a rest) was no weak-ankled slouch. “His old pair of skates always hung in his study-closet, and he went to the solitary coves of Walden with his children when he was fifty years old,” his son Edward recalled. But despite Sophia Hawthorne’s appraisal of Thoreau’s skating as “ugly”—perhaps a backhanded way of sticking up for her adored husband’s less expressive style—Thoreau was the strongest skater of the three.

As delicious as the scene is, it is Sophia Hawthorne’s thumbnail portrait of the 25-year-old Thoreau, with his “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps” (I had to resort to Webster’s to learn that a dithyramb is a short poem “in an inspired wild irregular strain”) that most surprises and delights. It contradicts the image most people have of Thoreau, as the awkward, crotchety, contrary Hermit of Walden. (It is hard to believe that the man with the grave expression in the familiar 1856 daguerreotype was capable of breaking into leaps, dithyrambic or otherwise.) But in our determination to confine Thoreau to his cabin in the woods, we often overlook the Thoreau who threw annual melon parties for his Concord neighbors; who played with kittens, according to a friend, “by the half hour;” who loved singing and dancing and occasionally burst into an impromptu jig. One early biographer admitted that the stereotype of Thoreau as misanthropic loner was so ingrained it would be a challenge to convince his readers that “most of the time Thoreau was happy.” In Sophia Hawthorne’s description, Thoreau is manifestly happy. Indeed, anyone who reads Thoreau’s journals could have no doubt that, on skates at least, Thoreau was among the happiest of men.

***

Thoreau was drawn to water in all its shapes and forms. “I was born upon thy bank, river,” he wrote in one early poem. “My blood flows in thy stream,/ And thou meanderest forever/ At the bottom of my dream.” Three of his books—Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod—take place on or near water. He loved swimming, sailing and rowing. He even liked walking in the rain, albeit under an umbrella, and at twenty-two confided in his journal that his idea of a good time was “to stand up to one’s chin in some retired swamp for a whole summer’s day, scenting the sweet-fern and bilberry blows, and lulled by the minstrelsy of gnats and mosquitos.” Fortunately for Thoreau, his hometown was a watery place: The Sudbury and Assabet rivers met just above the town center to form the Concord (the river he saluted in his poem), and it would be hard to find a spot within a ten-mile radius more than a stone’s throw from a brook, pond or bog. In winter, Thoreau could skate not just on the town’s rivers and ponds but, because the Concord often flooded the surrounding lowlands, on its marshes and meadows as well. (Hawthorne’s favorite place to skate was the meadow behind the Old Manse, which, in winter, his wife wrote, became “a small frozen sea.”) On occasion, when rain froze on top of snow and made it crusty, even Concord’s roads were skateable. These days, most people know skating as something done indoors, in endlessly repeated ovals, on artificial ice. In Thoreau’s day, there were winters when all of Concord became a vast natural rink, when its inhabitants could, literally, skate out their back doors. “If you will stay here awhile I will promise you strange sights,” Thoreau wrote. “You shall walk on water; all these brooks and rivers and ponds shall be your highway.” 

Thoreau’s love of skating was entwined with his love of winter. The man who urged his readers to “simplify, simplify” felt a special kinship with a season in which nature itself was pared down to its essence. “Here I am at home,” he wrote. “In the bare and bleached crust of the earth I recognize my friend.” That he was less likely to encounter others of his own species was another point in winter’s favor: “I love to wade and flounder through the swamp now, these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude.” Finding in the season “a Puritan toughness,” Thoreau preferred a winter that lived up to its reputation. “What is a winter without snow and ice in this latitude?” he grumbled at the end of a January so mild he hadn’t yet had a skate worth mentioning in his journal. “The bare earth is unsightly. This winter is but unburied summer.” 

Thoreau looked forward to winter with the eagerness of a child. Each year, in a ritual familiar to all skaters, he watched and waited for ice to appear; tossed pebbles (and then stones) onto the pond’s first frozen skin to see if it would hold; took a few tentative steps onto it when it seemed thick enough to bear his weight; and, finally, strapped on skates and pushed away from shore. Thoreau loved the speed of skating. “A man feels like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate,” he wrote. “He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty.” He could cover more ground on skates; “annihilators of distance,” he called them. “I am surprised to find how rapidly and easily I get along, how soon I am at this brook or that bend in the river, which it takes me so long to reach on the bank or by water,” he wrote after a journey up the Assabet. “I can go more than double the usual distance before dark.” On skates he could get to places he couldn’t get to in summer: “The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded, and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand railroads had been made into it.” A hawk soaring over Concord on a winter afternoon in the 1850s would have seen people picking their way along the icy streets of the village, while, behind the town, a solitary man on skates whooshed up the river and across the meadows.

Indoor skaters, accustomed to gliding over a surface whose imperfections are wiped clean every few hours, may find outdoor skating daunting. A pond that from a distance seems smooth as glass can be an obstacle course of lumps, nubbles, fissures, and corrugations; minor ridges loom like mountains, slight cracks like crevasses. Thoreau welcomed such idiosyncrasies. “It was pleasant to dash over the ice, feeling the inequalities which we could not see,” he wrote after skating home from Fair Haven Pond one evening with Ellery Channing, “now rising over considerable hillocks . . . now descending into corresponding hollows.” (Thoreau had no desire to smooth nature’s edges. Launching a new boat one spring, he was disappointed to find how steady it was--“too steady for me; does not toss enough and communicate the motion of the waves.”) Describing some of his skating excursions, Thoreau could have been describing a Coney Island thrill ride: “Now I go shaking over hobbly places, now shoot over a bridge of ice only a foot wide between the water and the shore at a bend. . . . Now I suddenly see the trembling surface of water where I thought were black spots of ice only around me.” Moments later, he is “straddling the bare black willows, winding between the button-bushes, and following narrow threadings of ice amid the sedge.” (It is clear that Thoreau’s parents, unlike mine, did not impress upon him that it was safe to skate only on ice at least four inches thick.)

Thoreau loved skating, in large measure, because it was so wild. In this, he parted ways with his mentor, Emerson. “Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go,” Emerson observed, before cautioning that writing, like skating, was at its best “when to all its beauty and speed a subserviency to the will, like that of walking, is added.” For Thoreau, skating and writing were at their best when marked by lack of restraint: a willingness to straddle willows, to leap across open water, to shoot over a bridge of ice. When Sophia Hawthorne captured the skating styles of her husband and his friends--Hawthorne elegant, Emerson purposeful, Thoreau extravagant--she captured their writing styles as well. 

***

Thoreau’s adventures on the ice were not only athletic but scientific. He watched and waited for ice to form each year because he wanted to skate but also because he was keeping track of exactly when the ponds and rivers of Concord iced over--something he had started doing that first winter in his Walden cabin. (Thoreau was literally a man patient enough--and obsessed enough--to watch water freeze.) It was part of his ongoing project to document the natural history of Concord. In spring, that meant, among other things, keeping track of the order in which the wildflowers bloomed; in winter, that meant measuring the thickness of the ice and the depth of the snow. Armed with notebook, pencil, and two-foot ruler, Thoreau regularly made his way from pond to pond, taking measurements and recording the results in his journal with the care of a father charting his children’s growth on the kitchen wall. As winter withdrew, he kept watch over the melting ice and noted the dates when, once again, the ponds were ice-free.

“What a floor it is I glide thus swiftly over!” wrote Thoreau after a skate to Pantry Brook. “It is a study for the slowest walker.” He spent countless hours on his hands and knees examining the texture and composition of ice, filling his journal with minutely-detailed descriptions illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings. “Surely the ice is a great and absorbing phenomenon,” he wrote. “Consider how much of the surface of the town it occupies, how much attention it monopolizes! We do not commonly distinguish more than one kind of water in the river, but what various kinds of ice there are!” He devised his own taxonomy: marble ice (when melting snow and rain froze into a smooth new surface “as if it were the marble floor of some stupendous hall”); mackerel-sky ice (soft ice inset with small polygonal figures outlined in white); phlogistic ice (“a sort of fibrous structure of waving lines  . . . like perhaps a cassowary’s feathers”); biscuit ice (dotted with frozen  puddles that crackled underfoot “like dry hard biscuit”). Where most see ice as coming in only one color—gray and its variations–Thoreau, depending on weather and time of day, saw yellows, browns, blues, greens, and, once, a “delicate rose tint, with internal bluish tinges like mother-o’-pearl,” a sight that caused him to exclaim in his journal, “This beautiful blushing ice! What are we coming to?” Ice inspired some of Thoreau’s most exuberant similes. Turning over a chunk of ice to find a mass of crystals, Thoreau saw “the roofs and steeples of a Gothic city.” Ice that had formed during a big wind was “uneven like frozen suds, in rounded pancakes, as when bread spews out in baking.” Leaves of ice standing on edge brought to mind “a fleet of a thousand mackerel-fishers under a press of sail careering before a smacking breeze.” (Thoreau couldn’t resist; like a mischievous child, he skated right through them “and strewed their wrecks around.”)

Thoreau studied not only what was on the ice—including the tracks of rabbits, otters, foxes, and men—but what was preserved, at least temporarily, in the ice. Early one January, with the ice on Walden barely an inch thick (“will not bear me without much cracking”), he crawled onto the pond to measure the air bubbles encased in the ice. Another day, he wrote what amounted to an extended prose poem to an entombed oak leaf. If the pond was shallow and the ice transparent, Thoreau lay on his belly and studied what was under the ice: pollywogs, caddis-worms, shiners, pickerel, and turtles going about their business among the bulrushes. Once, he saw a “ furred fish” flash past—a muskrat. “When the pond is frozen,” he admitted, “I do not suspect the wealth under my feet.”

Thoreau liked looking at ice; he also liked listening to it—the rumbles and whoops it made as it expanded and contracted in response to changes in temperature. Some skaters find the sound unsettling. It can seem as if the very pond is about to split open and swallow them up. Thoreau, calling it “a sort of belching,” deemed it a most agreeable phenomenon. “Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to be so sensitive?” he wrote. “Yet it has its law to which [it] thunders obedience when it should, as surely as the buds expand in the spring.” Noting that ice was often at its noisiest as the sun went down, Thoreau sometimes headed out to a nearby pond in the late afternoon just to hear its “voice,” like a music-lover attending a concert. Skating up the Concord one day, he was treated to a veritable symphony: “Quite a musical cracking,” he wrote, “running like chain lightning of sound athwart my course, as if the river, squeezed, thus gave its morning’s milk with music. A certain congealed milkiness in the sound, like the soft action of piano keys,—a little like the cry of a pigeon woodpecker,—a-week a-week, etc. A congealed gurgling, frog-like.” In Walden he recalled nights lying awake in his cabin, listening to the pond, “my great bed-fellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its bed and would fain turn over.” Years later, out at dusk and hearing pond ice boom in the distance, Thoreau would think of it as the pond’s way of calling people home.

***  

As the solitary Thoreau skated in Concord, skaters were crowding ponds across the country, part of a mania for skating that swept Europe and America in the mid-nineteenth century. On December 11, 1858, a day when, according to his journal, Thoreau was checking the ice at Walden, three hundred New Yorkers thronged Central Park for the opening day of skating on a former swamp transformed into an 18-acre skating pond. (They were a harbinger of the 30,000 skaters who would soon flock to the pond on some winter days.) Cities and towns formed their own skating clubs—Philadelphia had seven— and some even employed their own meteorologists. Though Concord had no such club, and, in any case, Thoreau wasn’t much of a joiner, he and his neighbors traded skating news. In an 1856 journal entry, Thoreau noted: “Mr. Emerson, who returned last week from lecturing on the Mississippi, having been gone but a month, tells me that he saw boys skating on the Mississippi and on Lake Erie and on the Hudson, and has no doubt they are skating on Lake Superior.” Thoreau’s friend Daniel Ricketson, a New Bedford abolitionist who shared Thoreau’s love of skating and of solitude, wrote Thoreau to say that, out on the Acushnet River one day, he’d seen more than a thousand other skaters. Concord was hardly the sort of town to get swept up in fads, but on bright winter days as many as a dozen skaters might be found on the ice at Walden.

***

The winter of 1854-55 started late—Thoreau complained that there was no “tolerable” skating until December 19—but once it did, conditions conspired to keep the ice frozen and largely snow-free. “We are tempted to call these the finest days of the year,” wrote Thoreau, after a stretch of good skating near the end of the month. On January 14, he skated to Baker Farm “with a rapidity which astonished myself . . .  There was I, and there, and there, as Mercury went down the Idaean Mountains. I judged that in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion.” (The following afternoon, Mercury got his comeuppance: “Skated into a crack, and slid on my side twenty-five feet.”) 

On the last day of January, Thoreau set off on the Concord River to explore “further than I had been.” One by one the hours and miles passed. From time to time he took a break, sitting on old trees that had fallen and frozen into the ice, quenching his thirst by slurping up river water—which of course was perfectly drinkable—where the ice had melted. When he came to open water beneath a bridge, he caught hold of some willow branches and swung himself up, Tarzan-style, onto the causeway, where he put on homemade skate guards (“bits of wood with a groove in them”) to avoid scratching the blades and tottered across the road to resume his journey. He skated past Sudbury, past Wayland. He was approaching Framingham when he found he could go no farther: Open water lay ahead as far as he could see. He turned and skated home. Later, thinking back on the day, he realized that he’d skated 30 miles. More important, he realized that in giving him what he called “a birds-eye view of the river,” his all-day skate had enabled him, for the first time, to “connect one part (one shore) with another in my mind, and realize what was going on upon it from end to end,—to know the whole as I ordinarily knew a few miles of it only.” It was a window into what years later would be called ecology. 

It was a day Thoreau would long remember—an epic skate in an epic winter. But the good conditions continued, and Thoreau took full advantage. On February 2, he skated twice: once in the afternoon, on a thin coating of snow that enabled him to track rabbits, and then again that night, to the hooting of a distant owl. The skating had been so good for so long that Thoreau was certain an ice-spoiling blizzard was on the way; superstition had it that good skating was the surest sign of bad weather. Indeed, on February 3 he woke to a snow squall. He headed out anyway and, with a young friend, William Tappan, skated upriver into the storm. “It was a novel experience, this skating through snow, sometimes a mile without a bare spot, this blustering day,” he wrote, “ . . .  and I would not have missed the experience for a good deal.” On the way home, they skated down Pantry Meadow with the wind at their backs, “spreading our coat-tails, like birds, though somewhat at the risk of our necks if we had struck a foul place. I found that I could sail on a tack pretty well, trimming with my skirts.”

He skated almost every day that winter—“the winter of skating,” he called it—and then wrote about it in his journal. “So with reading and writing and skating the night comes round again,” he concluded in a letter to Ricketson, And then one day in March he arrived at the Great Meadows to find the ice “perceptibly softened.” Thoreau’s winter of skating had come to an end.

***

That spring, Thoreau’s legs inexplicably grew weak; in June, he told a friend that he felt “good for nothing but to lie on my back.” Ailing legs and a series of blizzards kept Thoreau from skating the following winter, but he continued to make the rounds of his rivers and ponds, measuring the snow and ice. His strength gradually returned—though he would never be at full health—and his journal once again filled with entries about skating. He still traveled to ponds at dusk to listen to them belch. He still wrote long, ardent journal entries about ice, though they took on an increasingly spiritual cast. Watching children skate on Mantatuket Meadow, he suggested that skaters belonged as much to the sky as to the earth. “They appear decidedly elevated,—not by their skates merely,” he wrote. “What is the cause? Do we take the ice to be air?” Out on Fair Haven Pond one evening, he was taken by the way the ice mirrored the sunset. “Thus all of heaven is realized on earth. . . . That is what the phenomenon of ice means. The earth is annually inverted and we walk upon the sky.” Although there would be no more thirty-mile skates, Thoreau continued to find adventure on the ice. “Skated to Bound Rock,” he noted on February 15, 1860. “. . . From the pond to Lee’s Bridge I skated so swiftly before the wind, that I thought it was calm, for I kept pace with it, but when I turned about I found that quite a gale was blowing.”  

It would be the last time Thoreau skated--or at least the last time he recorded in his journal that he did. The following December, on a damp, frigid day, he spent an afternoon counting the rings on a hickory stump (there were 112). He caught a cold, which gave way to bronchitis, which gave way to tuberculosis, the illness to which his father, brother, and sister had succumbed. Thoreau’s decline can be charted in his journal, as the scope of his expeditions contracted like pond ice in spring. Eventually he grew so weak that he was confined to the house and had to depend on Ellery Channing for scouting reports as to the thickness of the ice on Concord’s ponds. Never again would a journal entry begin with the words that would quicken the pulses of generations of readers: “To Walden.” 

In January of 1862, H. G. O. Blake and Theo Brown, old friends and occasional skating companions of Thoreau’s, skated through a snowstorm from Framingham to visit him. “He seemed glad to see us; said we had not come much too soon,” recalled Brown. Inspired, it may be, by the sight of snow outside his window, Thoreau felt well enough to sit up in a chair. He was, as ever, philosophical.“You have been skating on this river,” he told his guests. “Perhaps I am going to skate on some other.” Four months later, at the age of 44, he died.

***

Twenty years ago, I moved with my family from New York City to a small farming town in Western Massachusetts. Our first Christmas in our new home, my wife gave me a volume from the 1887 Riverside edition of Thoreau’s works, a selection of excerpts from his journals titled Winter. We had moved north in part because my wife and I longed for the winters we had known growing up in New England. We missed the cold, we missed snow, we missed skating on ice that wasn’t made by pipes. 

To read Winter was to rediscover my youth. (It was also to discover a different Thoreau, not the Thoreau I’d met in high school, the Thoreau of Walden, but the Thoreau of the journals: Thoreau unplugged.) I had spent a good portion of that youth skating on the ponds of eastern Massachusetts in the 1960s, and Thoreau’s exploits on the rivers and ponds of Concord returned me to my own icy kingdom: Weld Pond, where we played crack the whip with a whip a dozen kids long; Kittredge’s Swamp, where we dodged skunk cabbage and cattails; Motley Pond, where an errant puck in a game of shinny could carry a quarter-mile before making landfall; the Charles River, on which one could skate, it was said, all the way to Boston—and on which I once made it as far as Needham, the next town, though to my childhood self those three miles seemed thirty.

And then I was in New York, and had to content myself with Wollman Rink, where I would teach my children to skate, even as I told them skating was meant to be done on ponds. (The Central Park lake had been closed to skating since the 1950s: liability reasons.) I would give a lot to read what Thoreau would have said about artificial rinks, not to mention Zambonis. No nubbles to dash over, no shrubs to straddle, no open water to vault across, no fish to lie down and scrutinize. 

We’ve had some memorable skates since our move north: on a mountain lake, on an icy depression in the middle of a cornfield, and even, one magical morning, in our back yard, when we woke to find it frozen, like Hawthorne’s backyard meadow, into a crust hard enough for my children (but, alas, not for me) to skate on. New England winters, however, are no longer the winters of my youth, much less of Thoreau’s. Days when the ice is thick enough to skate are increasingly rare. Even in the two decades we’ve been here, we’ve noticed a change. The nearby pond where we used to skate most winter afternoons after school was declared unsafe and closed more than a decade ago. My son, whose high school Nordic ski team was recently disbanded after several snowless years, keeps telling me we should have moved to northern Vermont. 

It is a cliché for each generation to insist that the snow was deeper and the ice thicker when they were young. Even in 1855, Thoreau’s “winter of skating,” Concord elder Rufus Hosmer told Thoreau it couldn’t compare to the winter of 1820, when the snow had been so deep and crusty you could skate over every field in town and over most of the fences, too. But the cliché is true, and today’s climate scientists are using all those measurements Thoreau made on Concord’s ponds and rivers to prove it. Their findings are depressing. In Thoreau’s day, the Concord River was frozen solid almost all winter; these days it is frozen how long TK. In Thoreau’s day, Walden Pond was iced over an average of 98 days a year; these days that number is down to TK. In Thoreau’s day, Walden didn’t lose its ice, on average, till April 1; these days, its average “ice-out” date is March 17. In the winter of 2012, for the first time in memory, there was no skating on Walden Pond.  

***

Thoreau squeezed the most he could out of winter. Each March, as the ice receded, he prided himself on knowing where to find the last skateable patches—usually on some secluded pond “under the north side of a hill or wood.” Long after his neighbors had put away their skates, Thoreau was still out there. As our own ice recedes in the face of global warming, I like to imagine Thoreau out there now, on some secret pond, on a last island of skateable ice, perhaps executing a dithyrambic leap.

Sign found next to a shallow pond in Upper Slaughter, Gloucestershire, UK