Groundhog Day 2011

Happy Groundhog Day! It’s America’s quirkiest and least commercial holiday, and therefore one of my favorites. (Buy your Groundhog Day cards and presents yet? I didn’t think so.)

The Christian Science Monitor, where my review of Haiti Noir has just appeared, offers five little-known facts about Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil (pictured here).

Groundhogs are also known as woodchucks (from the Algonquian word wuchak, not because they pitch firewood into ponds). Thoreau was fond of them, and often wrote about them in his Journal.

April 17, 1855. Saw a woodchuck. His deep reddish-brown rear, somewhat grizzled about, looked like a ripe fruit mellowed by winter. C. saw one some time ago. They have several holes under Lee’s Cliff, where they have worn bare and smooth sandy paths under the eaves of the rock, and I suspect that they nibble the early leaves there. (The arabis is half exterminated by some creature.) They, or the partridges or rabbits, there and at Middle Conantum Cliff, make sad havoc with the earliest radical leaves and flowers which I am watching, and in the village I have to contend with the hens, who also love an early salad.

C., in this passage, is Thoreau’s friend and walking companion Ellery Channing. Arabis is a plant also known as rockcress. See my friend Lucy’s page Woodchucks Redux for more on woodchucks and Thoreau.