USA > New Hampshire > To Monadnock; the records of a mountain in New Hampshire through three centuries > Part 8
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15
We were wet up to our knees before reaching the woods or steep ascent where we entered the cloud. It was quite dark and wet in the woods, from which we emerged into the lighter cloud about 3 P. M., and proceeded to construct our camp, in the cloud occasionally amounting to rain, where I camped some two years ago. . .
140
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
Aug. 5. The wind changed to northerly toward morning, falling down from over the summit and sweeping through our camp, open on that side, and we found it rather cold ! ..
Had a grand view of the summit on the north now, it being clear. I set my watch each morning by sunrise, and this morn- ing the lichens on the rocks of the southernmost summit (south of us), just lit by the rising sun, presented a peculiar yellowish or reddish brown light (being wet) which they did not any morning afterward. The rocks of the main summit were olive- brown, and C. called it the Mount of Olives. . . Many of the names inscribed on the summit were produced by merely rub- bing off the lichens, and they are thus distinct for years. . .
I had gone out before sunrise to gather blueberries,-fresh, dewy (because wet with yesterday's rain), almost crispy blue- berries, just in prime, much cooler and more grateful at this hour,-and was surprised to hear the voice of people rushing up the mountain for berries in the wet, even at this hour. . . These blueberries grew and bore abundantly almost wherever anything else grew on the rocky part of the mountain,-except perhaps the very wettest of the little swamps and the thickest of the little thickets,-quite up to the summit, and at least thirty or forty people came up from the surrounding country this Sunday to gather them. When we behold this summit at this season of the year, far away and blue in the horizon, we may think of the blueberries as blending their color with the general blueness of the mountain. They grow alike in the midst of the cladonia lichens and of the lambkill and moss of the little swamps. No shelf amid the piled rocks is too high or dry for them, for everywhere they enjoy the cool and moist air of the mountain. They are evidently a little later than in Concord,-say a week or ten days later. Blueberries of every degree of blueness and of bloom. There seemed to be fewer of
141
TO MONADNOCK
them on the more abrupt and cold westerly and northwesterly sides of the summit, and most in the hollows and shelves of the plateau just southeast of the summit.
Perhaps the prettiest berry, certainly the most novel and in- teresting to me, was the mountain cranberry, now grown but yet hard and with only its upper cheek red. They are quite local, even on the mountain. The vine is most common close to the summit, but we saw very little fruit there; but some twenty rods north of the brow of this low southern spur we found a pretty little dense patch of them between the rocks, where we gathered a pint in order to make a sauce of them. They here formed a dense low flat bed, covering the rocks for a rod or two, some lichens, green mosses and the mountain potentilla mingled with them; and they rose scarcely more than one inch above the ground. These vines were only an inch and a half long, clothed with small, thick, glossy leaves, with two or three berries together, about as big as huckleberries, on the recurved end, with the red cheek uppermost and the other light- colored. It was thus a dense, firm sward of glossy little leaves dotted with bright-red berries. They were very easy to collect, for you only made incessant dabs at them with all your fingers together and the twigs and leaves were so rigid that you brought away only berries and no leaves.
I noticed two other patches where the berries were thick, viz. one a few rods north of the little rain-water lake of the rocks, at the first or small meadow (source of Contoocook) at north- east end of the mountain, and another not more than fifty rods northwest of the summit, where the vines were much ranker and the berries larger. Here the plants were four or five inches high, and there were three or four berries of pretty large huckle- berry size at the end of each, and they branched like little bushes. In each case they occupied almost exclusively a little
142
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
sloping shelf between the rocks, and the vines and berries were especially large and thick where they lay up against the sloping sunny side of the rock.
We stewed these berries for our breakfast the next morning, and thought them the best berry on the mountain, though, not being quite ripe, the berry was a little bitterish-but not the juice of it. It is such an acid as the camper-out craves .* ..
P. M .- Walked to the wild swamp at the northeast spur. That part is perhaps the most interesting for the wild confusion of its variously formed rocks, and is the least, if at all, fre- quented. .. Returned over the top at 5 P. M., after the visi- tors, men and women, had descended, and so to camp.
Aug. 6. The last was a clear, cool night. At 4 A. M. see local lake-like fogs in some valleys below, but there is none here.
This forenoon, after a breakfast on cranberries, leaving as usual our luggage concealed under a large rock with other rocks placed over the hole, we moved about a quarter of a mile along the edge of the plateau eastward and built a new camp there.t It was a place which I had noticed the day before, where, shel- tered by a perpendicular ledge some seven feet high and close to the brow of the mountain, grew five spruce trees. Two of these stood four feet from the rock and six or more apart; so, clearing away the superfluous branches, I rested stout rafters from the rock-edge to limbs of the two spruces and placed a plate beam across, and, with two or three cross-beams or girders, soon had a roof which I could climb and shingle. After filling the in- equalities with rocks and rubbish, I soon had a sloping floor on
*Brought some home, and stewed them the 12th, and all thought them quite like, and as good as, the common cran- berry. Yet George Emerson [Trees and Shrubs of Massa- chusetts ] speaks of it as "austere" and inferior to the com- mon cranberry. [See post; 1885, page 205.]
t[Channing and also Franklin B. Sanborn report on this camp (see pages 182 and 189).]
143
TO MONADNOCK
which to make our bed. Lying there on that shelf just on the edge of the steep declivity of the mountain, we could look all over the south and southeast world without raising our heads. The rock running east and west was our shelter on the north.
Our huts, being built of spruce entirely, were not noticeable two or three rods off, for we did [not] cut the spruce amid which they were built more than necessary, bending aside their boughs in order to enter. My companion, returning from a short walk, was lost when within two or three rods, the differ- ent rocks and clumps of spruce looked so much alike, and in the moonlight we were liable to mistake some dark recess between two neighboring spruce ten feet off for the entrance to our house. . .
This afternoon again walked to the larger northeast swamp, going directly, i.e. east of the promontories or part way down the slopes. Bathed in the small rocky basin above the smaller meadow. These two swamps are about the wildest part of the mountain and most interesting to me. The smaller occurs on the northeast side of the main mountain, i.e. at the northeast end of the plateau. It is a little roundish meadow a few rods over, with cotton-grass in it, the shallow bottom of a basin of rock, and out the east side there trickles a very slight stream, just moistening the rock at present and collecting enough in one cavity to afford you a drink. This is evidently a source of the Contoocook, the one I noticed two years ago as such. The larger swamp is considerably lower and more northerly, separat- ing the northeast spur from the main mountain, probably not far from the line of Dublin. It extends northwest and south- east some thirty or forty rods, and probably leaked out now under the rocks at the northwest end-though I found water only half a dozen rods below-and so was a source probably of the Ashuelot. .. I noticed a third, yet smaller, quite small
144
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
swamp, yet more southerly, on the edge of the plateau, evidently another source of a river, where the snows melt.
At 5 P. M. we went to our first camp for our remaining baggage. . . Returned to enjoy the evening at the second camp.
Evening and morning were the most interesting seasons, espe- cially the evening. Each day, about an hour before sunset, I got sight, as it were accidentally, of an elysium beneath me. The smoky haze of the day, suggesting a furnace-like heat, a trivial dustiness, gave place to a clear transparent enamel, through which houses, woods, farms and lakes were seen as in [a] picture indescribably fair and expressly made to be looked at. At any hour of the day, to be sure, the surrounding country looks flatter than it is. Even the great, steep, furrowed and rocky pastures, red with hardhack and raspberries, which creep so high up the mountain amid the woods, in which you think already that you are halfway up perchance, seen from the top or brow of the mountain are not for a long time distinguished for elevation above the surrounding country, but they look smooth and tolerably level; and the cattle in them are not noticed or distinguished from rocks unless you search very par- ticularly. At length you notice how the houses and barns keep a respectful, and at first unaccountable distance from these near pastures and woods, though they are seemingly flat; that there is a broad neutral ground between the roads and the mountain ; and yet when the truth flashes upon you, you have to imagine the long, ascending path through them. . .
The nearest house to the mountain which we saw from our camp-one on the Jaffrey road-was in the shadow even of the low southern spur of the mountain which we called the Old South, just an hour before the sun set, while a neighbor on a hill within a quarter of a mile eastward enjoyed the, sunlight at least half an hour longer. So much shorter are their days,
145
TO MONADNOCK
and so much more artificial light and heat must they obtain, at the former house. It would be a serious loss, methinks, one hour of sunlight every day. We saw the sun so much longer. Of course the labors of the day were brought to an end, the sheep began to bleat, the doors were closed, the lamps were lit, and preparations for the night were made there, so much the earlier.
The landscape is shown to be not flat, but hilly, when the sun is half an hour high, by the shadows of the hills. But, above all, from half an hour to two hours before sunset many western mountain-ranges are revealed, as the sun declines, one behind another, by their dark outlines and the intervening haze; i.e. the ridges are dark lines, while the intervening valleys are a cloudlike haze. It was so, at least, from 6 to 6.30 P. M. on the 6th; and, at 5 P. M. on the 8th, it being very hazy still, I could count in the direction of Saddleback Mountain eight dis- tinct ranges, revealed by the darker lines of the ridges rising above this cloud-like haze. And I might have added the ridge of Monadnock itself within a quarter of a mile of me. . . I never saw a mountain that looked so high, and so melted away at last cloud-like into the sky, as Saddleback this eve, when your eye had clomb to it by these eight successive terraces. You had to begin at this end and ascend step by step to recognize it for a mountain at all. If you had first rested your eye on it, you would have seen it for a cloud, it was so incredibly high in the sky.
After sunset the ponds are white and distinct. Earlier we could distinguish the reflections of the woods perfectly in ponds three miles off.
I heard a cock crow very shrilly and distinctly early in the evening of the 8th. This was the most distinct sound from the lower world that I heard up there at any time, not excepting
146
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
even the railroad whistle, which was louder. It reached my ear perfectly, to each note and curl, from some submontane cock. We also heard at this hour an occasional bleat from a sheep in some mountain pasture, and a lowing of a cow. And at last we saw a light here and there in a farmhouse window. We heard no sound of man except the railroad whistle and, on Sunday, a church-bell. Heard no dog that I remember. There- fore I should say that, of all the sounds of the farmhouse, the crowing of the cock could be heard furthest or most distinctly under these circumstances. It seemed to wind its way through the layers of air as a sharp gimlet through soft wood, and reached our ears with amusing distinctness.
Aug. 7. Morning-dawn and sunrise-was another interest- ing season. I rose always by four or half past four to observe the signs of it and to correct my watch. From our first camp I could not see the sun rise, but only when its first light . . . was reflected from the lichen-clad rocks of the southern spur. But here, by going eastward some forty rods, I could see the sun rise, though there was invariably a low stratum or bar of cloud in the horizon. The sun rose about five. The tawny or yellow- ish pastures about the mountain (below the woods; what was the grass?) reflected the auroral light at 4.20 A. M. remark- ably, and they were at least as distinct as at any hour.
There was every morning more or less solid white fog to be seen on the earth, though none on the mountain. I was struck by the localness of these fogs. For five mornings they occupied the same place and were about the same in extent. It was obvious that certain portions of New Hampshire and Massa- chusetts were at this season commonly invested with fog in the morning, while others, or the larger part, were free from it. The fog lay on the lower parts only, . . in great spidery lakes and streams answering to the lakes, streams and meadows be-
147
TO MONADNOCK
neath, especially over the sources of Miller's River and the region of primitive woods thereabouts; but it did not rest on lakes always, i.e. where they were elevated, as now some in Jaffrey were quite clear. It suggested that there was an im- portant difference, so far as the health and spirits of the in- habitants were concerned, between the town where there was this regular morning fog and that where there was none. I shall always remember the inhabitants of State Line as dwellers in the fog. The geography and statistics of fog have not been ascertained. If we awake into a fog, it does not occur to us that the inhabitants of a neighboring town which lies higher may have none, neither do they, being ignorant of this happi- ness, inform us of it. Yet, when you come to look down thus on the country every morning, you see that here this thick white veil of fog is spread and not there. It was often several hun- dred feet thick, soon rising, breaking up and drifting off, or rather seeming to drift away, as it evaporated. There was commonly such a risen fog drifting through the interval between this mountain and Gap Monadnock. . .
This forenoon I cut and measured a spruce on the north side of the mountain, and afterwards visited the summit, where one of the coast surveyors had been signalling, as I was told, to a mountain in Laconia some fifty-five miles off, with a glass re- flector. After dinner, descended into the gulf and swamp be- neath our camp. At noon every roof in the southern country sloping toward the north was distinctly revealed,-a lit gray. In the afternoon, walked to the Great Gulf and meadow, in the midst of the plateau just east of and under the summit. (One of the grandest views of the summit is from the east side of the central meadow of the plateau, which I called the Gulf, just beneath the pinnacle on the east, with the meadow in the foreground.)
148
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
Aug. 8. Wednesday. 8.30 A. M. Walk round the west side of the summit. Bathe in the rocky pool there, collect mountain cranberries on the northwest side, return over the summit, and take the bearings of the different spurs, etc. Re- turn to camp at noon. Toward night, walk to east edge of the plateau.
Aug. 9. At 6 A. M. leave camp for Troy, where we arrive, . after long pauses, by 9 A. M., and take the cars at 10.5.
I observed these plants on the rocky summit of the mountain, above the forest :-*
Raspberry, not common.
Low blueberries of two or three varieties. (Beside the kinds (black and blue Pennsylvanicum) common with us, there was the downy Vaccinium Canadense and a form or forms intermediate between this and the former, i.e. of like form but less hairy.)
Bunchberry.
Solidago thyrsoidea.
Fetid currant, common; leaves beginning to be scarlet; grows amid loose fallen rocks.
Red cherry, some ripe, and handsome.
Black choke-berry.
Potentilla tridentata, still lingering in bloom.
Aralia hispida, still lingering in bloom.
Cow-wheat, common, still in bloom.
Mountain cranberry, not generally abundant; full grown earlier than lowland ditto.
Black spruce.
Lambkill, lingering in flower in cool and moist places.
Aster acuminatus, abundant; not generally open, but fairly begun to bloom.
Red elder, ripe, apparently in prime, not uncommon.
Arenaria Grænlandica, still pretty common in flower.
Solidago lanceolata, not uncommon; just fairly begun.
Epilobium angustifolium, in bloom; not common, however.
Epilobium palustre, some time, common in mosses, small and slender.
Wild holly, common; berries not quite ripe.
Viburnum nudum, common; berries green.
White pine; saw three or four only, mostly very small.
*[For The Flora of Mt. Monadnock [1885] by William H. Stone, page 202.]
149
TO MONADNOCK
Mountain-ash, abundant; berries not ripe; generally very small, largest in swamps.
Diervilla, not uncommon, still.
Rhodora, abundant; low, i.e. short.
Meadow-sweet, abundant, apparently in prime.
Hemlocks; two little ones with rounded tops.
Chelone glabra, not yet; at northeast swamp-side.
Yarrow.
Canoe birch, very small.
Clintonia borealis, with fruit.
Checkerberry.
Gold-thread.
One three-ribbed goldenrod, northwest side (not Canadense).
Tall rough goldenrod, not yet; not uncommon.
Populus tremuliformis, not very common.
Polygonum cilinode, in bloom.
Yellow birch, small.
Fir, a little ; four or five trees noticed.
Willows, not uncommon, four or five feet high.
Red maple, a very little, small.
Water andromeda, common about the bogs.
Trientalis.
Pearly everlasting, out.
Diplopappus umbellatus, in bloom, not common (?) ; northeast swamp-side, also northwest side of mountain.
Juncus trifidus.
Some Juncus paradoxus ?
Some Juncus acuminatus ? ¿about edge of marshes.
CYPERACEÆE
Eriophorum gracile, abundant, whitening the little swamps.
Eriophorum vaginatum, abundant, little swamps, long done, (this the coarse grass in tufts, in marshes).
Wool-grass, not uncommon, (common kind).
Carex trisperma (?) or Deweyana, with large seeds, slender and drooping, by side of northeast swamp. Vide press. Carex scoparia? or straminea? a little. C. debilis.
Carex, small, rather close-spiked, C. canescens-like (?), com- mon.
A fine grass-like plant very common, perhaps Eleocharis tenuis; now without heads, but marks of them.
GRASSES
Aira flexuosa.
Glyceria elongata, with appressed branches (some purplish), in swamp.
Blue-joint, apparently in prime, one place.
150
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
Festuca ovina, one place.
Cinna arundinacea, one place.
Agrostis scabra (?), at our spring, q.v.
FERNS AND LICHENS, ETC.
A large greenish lichen flat on rocks, of a peculiarly con- centric growth, q.v.
Some common sulphur lichen.
The very bright handsome crustaceous yellow lichen, as on White Mts., q.v.
Two or three umbilicaria lichens, q.v., giving the dark brown to the rocks.
A little, in one place, of the old hat umbilicaria, as at Flint's Pond Rock.
Green moss and sphagnum in the marshes.
Two common cladonias, white and greenish.
Stereocaulon.
Lycopodium complanatum, one place.
Lycopodium annotinum, not very common.
Common polypody.
Dicksonia fern, q.v.
Sensitive fern, and various other common ones.
I see that in my last visit, in June '58, I also saw here Labra- dor tea (on the north side), two-leaved Solomon's seal, Amelan- chier Canadensis var. oligocarpa and var. oblongifolia, one or two or three kinds of willows, a little mayflower, and chiogenes, and Lycopodium clavatum.
The prevailing trees and shrubs of the mountain-top are, in order of commonness, etc., low blueberry, black spruce, lambkill, black choke-berry, wild holly, Viburnum nudum, mountain-ash, meadow-sweet, rhodora, red cherry, canoe birch, water andro- meda, fetid currant.
The prevailing and characteristic smaller plants, excepting grasses, cryptogamic, etc .: Potentilla tridentata, Solidago thyrsoidea [goldenrod], bunchberry, cow-wheat, Aster acumi- natus, Arenaria Grænlandica, mountain cranberry, Juncus trifidus, Clintonìa borealis, Epilobium palustre, Aralia hispida.
Of Cyperacec the most common and noticeable now were
151
TO MONADNOCK
Eriophorum gracile and vaginatum, a few sedges, and perhaps the Eleocharis tenuis.
The grass of the mountain now was the Aira flexuosa, large and abundant, now somewhat dry and withered, on all shelves and along the seams, quite to the top; a pinkish tawny now. Most would not have noticed or detected any other. The other kinds named were not common. You would say it was a true mountain grass. The only grass that a careless observer would notice. There was nothing like a sod on the mountain- top. The tufts of J. trifidus, perhaps, came the nearest to it.
The black spruce is the prevailing tree, commonly six or eight feet high; but very few, and those only in the most shel- tered places, as hollows and swamps, are of regular outline, on account of the strong and cold winds with which they have to contend. Fifteen feet high would be unusually large. They cannot grow here without some kind of lee to start with. They commonly consist of numerous flat branches close above one another for the first foot or two, spreading close over the surface and filling and concealing the hollows between the rocks; but exactly at a level with the top of the rock which shelters them they cease to have any limbs on the north side, but all their limbs now are included within a quadrant between southeast and southwest, while the stem, which is always perfectly per- pendicular, is bare and smooth on the north side; yet it is led onward at the top by a tuft of tender branches a foot in length and spreading every way as usual, but the northern part of these successively die and disappear. They thus remind you often of masts of vessels with sails set on one side, and some- times one of these almost bare masts is seen to have been broken short off at ten feet from the ground, such is the violence of the wind there. I saw a spruce, healthy and straight, full sixteen feet without a limb or the trace of a limb on the north side.
152
THOREAU AND CHANNING, 1860
When building my camp, in order to get rafters six feet long and an inch and a half in diameter at the small end, I was obliged to cut down spruce at least five inches in diameter at one foot from the ground. So stout and tapering do they grow. They spread so close to the rocks that the lower branches are often half worn away for a foot in length by their rubbing on the rocks in the wind, and I sometimes mistook the creaking of such a limb for the note of a bird, for it is just such a note as you would expect to hear there. The two spruce which formed the sides of my second camp had their lower branches behind the rock so thick and close, and, on the outsides of the quadrant, so directly above one another perpendicularly, that they made two upright side walls, as it were, very convenient to interlace and make weather-tight.
I selected a spruce growing on the highest part of the plateau east of the summit, on its north slope, about as high as any tree of its size, to cut and count its rings. It was five feet five inches high. As usual, all its limbs except some of the leading twigs extended toward the south. One of the lowermost limbs, so close to the ground that I thought its green extremity was a distinct tree, was ten feet long. There were ten similar limbs (though not so long) almost directly above one another, within two feet of the ground, the largest two inches thick at the butt. I cut off this tree at one foot from the ground. It was there five inches in diameter and had forty-four rings, but four inches of its growth was on the south side the centre and only one inch on the north side. I cut it off again nineteen inches higher and there, there were thirty-five rings.
Our fuel was the dead spruce-apparently that which escaped the fire some forty years ago !!- which lies spread over the rocks in considerable quantity still, especially at the northeast spur. It makes very good dry fuel, and some of it is quite fat
153
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.