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Nature Seeker

Jan. 31. Eponymous erratics, patterned ice & pitch pine progeny - To Thoreau Farm & Two-Boulder Hill

Updated: Jan 15

Jan. 31, 1860. 2 P. M. To Bedford Level.

Thermometer 45. Fair but all overcast. Sun's place quite visible. Wind southwest.

Went to what we called Two-Boulder Hill, behind the house where I was born. There the wind suddenly changed round 90 to northwest, and it became quite cold (had fallen to 24 or 24 [sic] at 5.30). Called a field on the east slope Crockery Field, there were so many bits in it. Saw a pitch pine on a rock about four feet high, but two limbs flat on the ground. This spread much and had more than a hundred cones of different ages on it. Such are always the most fertile.

Can look a great way northeast along the Bedford Swamp. Saw a large hawk, probably hen-hawk.


The ice that has been rotting and thawing from time to time on the meadows the water run out from below has many curious marks on it. There are many ingrained waving lines more or less parallel. Often they make circular figures, or oval, and are concentric, as if they marked the edge of a great bubble or the like.

I notice the ice on a ditched brook so far worn by the current as to be mackerelled in color, white and dark, all along the middle, making a figure two or three rods long which reminds me forcibly of the flat skin of a boa-constrictor, marked just like it.

H.D.T.


Two glacial erratic boulders mark the entrance to the open field atop Thoreau’s aptly named Two-Boulder Hill.

Jan. 31, 2021.

It’s 8 degrees, but without any wind and under a full bright sun, making my morning walk surprisingly comfortable. I leave from the Thoreau Farm, hosting the house in which Thoreau was born, which was moved just down the road from its original location in 1880. The pure white edifice of the old farmhouse is fittingly adorned by the shadow cast by a majestic oak in front of it, as if signaling the building’s connection with its former famous naturalist inhabitant.

I travel along the edge of the adjacent Gaining Grounds farm fields past flittering juncos playing within a massive tangled row of invasive oriental bittersweet, having completely overtaken the underlying trees. Emerging on the end of the Hanscom air strip, I turn left up to Crockery Field, full of long grass, with dry stems of Torrey’s rush along a stone wall. Several house finches fly over. I further ascend to the 190-foot high summit of Two-Boulder Hill, hosting a clear field of snow, and look to the northeast, but see no view of the Bedford wetlands, now hidden behind trees. Planes from the runway fly intermittently toward me and overhead.

Exploring the southwestern perimeter of the field, I find a side trail leading to the woods with two large boulders marking the path’s entrance to the open hilltop. How can these glacial erratics not be the boulders for which this hill is named!? Given their closer proximity to the original, more-westward location of the Thoreau farmhouse, in my mind’s eye I image Thoreau ascending this modest hill in 1860 between these boulders and reminiscing on the name he and his family coined for it during the family's nature explorations before during Thoreau's childhood. (The house was out of family ownership after the family moved back to Concord from Boston when Thoreau was 9.)

To the north of the field, I descend into a small hollow with a frozen pool to study the textured ice, gleaming in the sun. Like Thoreau did, I see myriad waving lines in a linear, somewhat parallel pattern, complimented by a less pronounced mixture of oval shapes. I wander further northeast into the wooded wetlands with a lovely stand of white birch trees, and find a long ditch toward the northeast. Again, what fortune! This could easily be the exact same ditch Thoreau examined. Tracing the ditch for many yards, I even find areas of black and white mackereled ice within. While not as long, stark and impressive as what Thoreau describes, with some amount of imagination I see what could be analogized to a black-headed anaconda running down the middle.

As for pitch pines, I find many - first multiple large trees in a forested evergreen grove on the north edge of Two-Boulder Hill, and second a large tree decorated with hanging cones on my return journey on the east side of Crockery Field. It’s delightful and not too fanciful to think that these very trees may have descended from the seed of one of the hundreds of cones on the small pitch pine that Thoreau found here 161 years ago.

(So apropos: check out this Thoreau Farm blog entry in which the author recommends sauntering and journaling like Thoreau during the pandemic - a post which I only recently discovered and delight in, as the advice rings in harmony with my own Thoreau quest. And here's another fun earlier blog entry about journaling on Two-Boulder hill.)



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