Holding Water

In the fourth paragraph of "The Ponds"--chapter 9 of Walden--Thoreau elaborates on the experience of sitting in his boat at midnight fishing under the moon. "It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook."

He does something like that in the paragraph that follows, by attempting to describe the colors of the pond's water:

Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-top it reflects the color of the sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond... . When much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself...

This passage reminded me of the surface of the water when I've been on it in B.C. It would be impossible for me to describe from memory, but I'll try with the help of some photos.


Late one afternoon this summer, Jan and I were paddling back to the government dock in Okeover Arm after exploring Freke Anchorage at the head of the inlet. The sinking sun sillouetted the Gwendolyn Hills to the west. There was hardly a breeze.

The water's surface was smooth as oil but irregular, unbroken but rippling, a mirror of melted quicksilver covered in sharply outlined shifting patches of color. Blue for sky, white for cloud, black for shadow, grey--for who knows what, perhaps the transparency of its own depths. As they emerged and dissolved, the patches nested within one another and took on nameable shapes: a chain of islands, a duck, a seal, flukes. It hit us both at once--this surface, these colors and living embedded shapes: a Tsimshian blanket.