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 Walden Study Text
Chapter 13: House-WarmingIN OCTOBER I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded myself with clusters
more precious for their beauty and fragrance than for food. There, too, I admired,
though I did not gather, the cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the
meadow grass, pearly and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving
the smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel and the
dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and New York; destined
to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of Nature there. So butchers rake
the tongues of bison out of the prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping
plant. The barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely;
but I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the proprietor
and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe I laid up half a bushel
for winter. It was very exciting at that season to roam the then boundless chestnut
woods Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next the water. Ah, many a tale their color told! And gradually from week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls. The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning, when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did not trouble myself much to get rid of them; I even felt complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never molested me seriously, though they bedded with me; and they gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding winter and unspeakable cold. Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore, made the fireside of the pond; it is so much pleasanter and wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.  When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks, being second-hand
ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so that I learned more than usual
of the qualities of bricks and trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old,
and was said to be still growing harder; but this is one of those sayings which
men love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings themselves grow
harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would take many blows with a
trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them. Many of the villages of Mesopotamia
are built of second-hand bricks of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins
of Babylon, and the cement on them is older and probably harder still. However
that may be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been in a chimney
before, though I did not read the name of Nebuchadnezzar The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it took many weeks
of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep. When I began to have a fire
at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly
well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful
evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards
full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house never pleased
my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obliged to confess that
it was more comfortable. Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty
enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play
at evening about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and
imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive furniture. I now
first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth
as well as shelter. I had got a couple of old fire-dogs to keep the wood from
the hearth, and it did me good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney
which I had built, and I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction
than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it;
but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and remote from neighbors.
All the attractions of a house were concentrated in one room; it was kitchen,
chamber, parlor, and keeping-room; I sometimes dream It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve
and degenerate into parlaver However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to stay and eat
a hasty-pudding I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over some whiter
and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite shore of the pond in a boat,
a sort of conveyance which would have tempted me to go much farther if necessary.
My house had in the meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side.
In lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a single blow
of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the plaster from the board
to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered the story of a conceited fellow,
who, in fine clothes, was wont to lounge about the village once, giving advice
to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his
cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap,
with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward;
and straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in
his ruffled bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering,
which so effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned
the various casualties The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the little air-guns which contribute to make the ice crack and whoop. At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering,
and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission
to do so till then. Night after night the geese came lumbering in the dark with
a clangor and a whistling of wings, even after the ground was covered with snow,
some to alight in Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven,
bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten or eleven
o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or else ducks, on the
dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where they had come
up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off.
In 1845 Walden froze entirely over Gilpin, It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and
in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold.
After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It
is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made
their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it. Michaux, Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice—once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true. A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the woodchopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my chimney, that I was awake.—
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that, answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon; and when I returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that lived there; and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire; it was the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this score; so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in the middle of almost any winter day. The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper; for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's existence on the globe. The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since I did not own the forest; but it did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day. But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent words of a poet recurred to me with new force.—
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