A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

mile or two, and now shut in by a sudden turn of the river in
a small woodland lake. All the phenomena which surround
him are simple and grand, and there is something impressive,
even majestic, in the very motion he causes, which will
naturally be communicated to his own character, and he feels
the slow, irresistible movement under him with pride, as if it
were his own energy.
The news spread like wildfire among us youths, when formerly,
once in a year or two, one of these boats came up the
Concord River, and was seen stealing mysteriously through
the meadows and past the village. It came and departed as
silently as a cloud, without noise or dust, and was witnessed
by few. One summer day this huge traveller might be seen
moored at some meadow’s wharf, and another summer day
it was not there. Where precisely it came from, or who these
men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we
who bathed there, we could never tell. We knew some river’s
bay only, but they took rivers from end to end. They were a
sort of fabulous river-men to us. It was inconceivable by what
sort of mediation any mere landsman could hold communication
with them. Would they heave to, to gratify his wishes?
Henry David Thoreau
163
No, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination,
or the time of their possible return. I have seen them in the
summer when the stream ran low, mowing the weeds in midchannel,
and with hayers’ jests cutting broad swaths in three
feet of water, that they might make a passage for their scow,
while the grass in long windrows was carried down the stream,
undried by the rarest hay-weather. We admired unweariedly
how their vessel would float, like a huge chip, sustaining so
many casks of lime, and thousands of bricks, and such heaps
of iron ore, with wheelbarrows aboard, and that, when we
stepped on it, it did not yield to the pressure of our feet. It
gave us confidence in the prevalence of the law of buoyancy,
and we imagined to what infinite uses it might be put. The
men appeared to lead a kind of life on it, and it was whispered
that they slept aboard. Some affirmed that it carried
sail, and that such winds blew here as filled the sails of vessels
on the ocean; which again others much doubted. They
had been seen to sail across our Fair Haven bay by lucky
fishers who were out, but unfortunately others were not there
to see. We might then say that our river was navigable,—
why not? In after-years I read in print, with no little satisfac-