Feb. 8, 1858. P.M. To Walden and Goose Pond.
I walked about Goose Pond, looking for the large blueberry bushes. I see many which have thirty rings of annual growth. These grow quite on the edge, where they have escaped being cut with the wood, and have all the appearance of age, gray and covered with lichens, commonly crooked, zigzag, and intertwisted with their neighbors, so that when you have cut one off it is hard to extract it, and bending over nearly to the ice, with lusty young shoots running up straight by their sides. I cut one, which measured eight and a half inches in circumference at the butt, and I counted pretty accurately forty-two rings. From another I cut a straight and sound club, four feet long and six and a half inches in circumference at the small end. It is a heavy and close-grained wood.
-H.D.T.
Feb. 8, 2021.
Just before noon, the sun shines brilliantly from a spotless blue sky, providing a feeling of radiant warmth even though it is only 23 degrees. About five inches of newly fallen snow from yesterday afternoon and evening has amazingly refreshened the landscape - yet even so, drifts of snow, which continue to fall from the trees as I walk, leave a variety of oblong, oval and even polygonal craters. I get first tracks to Goose Pond today and I am excited.
On snowshoes, I descend down to the larger peninsula on the southwest side of the pond. The strong sun creates bold vertical striped shadows from trunks and less defined lateral bushy shadows from branches. On the peninsula, my thoughts are interrupted by the laughing call of a pileated woodpecker, which persists for some time. I tromp toward the sound and find the bird in the high trees along the steep bank.
It is on the northern shore of the upper lobe of the pond where I find them, a vast stand of high bush blueberry shrubs perhaps 70 feet wide right along the frozen water's edge. Their crooked, interconnecting branches form a tangled mass ornately decorated by the white snow. One set of branches arches toward the water in a shape reminiscent of a white-capped ocean wave crashing on the shore. This tranquil setting, with white branches against a blue sky, on the edge of a soft, snow-covered pond with a faint animal trail across, is storybook perfect.
I examine the trunk of one of the trees, which has a wider base that splits off into four large stems. I measure the base to be 22 inches and one of the stems to be 9 inches in circumference. Based on a comparison to Thoreau’s bush, measuring eight and a half inches at around at 42 years, these present-day trees must be very old. If by crude calculation a ratio of circumference to age remains true, the shrub would be 108 years old based on Thoreau’s data. Is that even possible? Apparently, it is. In June 2020, two high blueberry bushes, which were originally planted 137 years ago in 1883, were rediscovered in Boston’s Arnold Arboretum.
Today brings another uncanny discovery on Thoreau’s trail that lifts my heart. Could this grove of shrubs, receiving more sun on the north side of the pond and thriving in these acidic soils, actually be descendants of the plants that Thoreau observed 163 years ago today? Perhaps so.
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