in Thoreau’s Journal:

….skated up the river yesterday, now here, now there….the great arundo in the Sudbury meadows was all level with ice. There was a great bay of ice stretching up the Pantry, and up Larned Brook.

I looked up a broad, glaring bay of ice at the last place which seemed to reach to the base of Nobscot and almost to the horizon. Some dead maple or oak saplings laid side by side made my bridges, by which I got on to the ice along the watery shore, It was a problem to get off, and another to get on, dry shod.