Following the Water

by David M. Carroll

  The diminution of this signal flowering, which, as such transitions generally are, has been gradual and had not clearly registered with me before. Some things one does not want to focus on, and in my nature there is a deep reluctance to face change. In critical areas of my own history, change has signaled loss. Two of my favorite words, as I wander the realm of the turtles, have been "same" and "again." I recognize the reality of transition, the necessity of flux. It is easier for me to think of cycles: the beaver dam cycle, the coming and going of glaciers. I sense that my ingrained mistrust of change rests largely on fear. "Things change," I heard as a small boy, grief-stricken from witnessing the annihilation of turtle places I had wandered and had so quickly come to love. This platitude was offered by way of remonstrance at my refusal to accept change and my railing against it—or, at best, proffered as ironic consolation. I have continued to hear that phrase all my life, as though it excused, compensated for, or gave some acceptable rationale for the havoc reaped in the name of "progress." Such mindless mantras, non sequiturs uttered in the guise of wisdom, allow people all too easily to overlook, and to forget, consequences. Love must never learn to live with loss, the destruction of a dream or a reality, the taking away that is so blithely passed off as change.

  Five-thirty ... the afternoon advances. The bittern calls again, uh-WONK uh-tunk, uh-WONK uh-tunk, in a generously repeated series, an evocation of the season that draws me more deeply into it. Over the passage of years the individual singers change, but the song of the bittern, as of the others who declare spring, remains the same. As long as I have been coming here, the place from which the bittern calls, the hidden nesting place possessed of its own roots, has remained the same. As long as the water keeps to its seasonal rounds—as long as it is left alone to keep them—this complex and enduring wetland system, with flux and cycle factored in, will maintain its domain, and a pair of bitterns will find their place to nest within it. Successive generations will remember and return to this watery complex, a pinpoint on the planet, from wintering places as far away as Mexico or Panama.

  Spring is so much a season of remembering, of returning and greeting anew. The water remembers and returns, enlivening the landscape with light, sound, movement, and silent reflections as it retraces ancient courses and refills historic pools. I come back again to places from which I have been distanced by the forbidding cold of winter and its barricades of thick ice and deep snow, and by the indoor aspects of my life. I come as visitor-observer, more different from turtle and sedge than they are from one another, in terms of being of and in this place. But I come with links of continuity and connections that give me a sense of belonging that I need not fully understand. In many ways I feel that I come back from some great distance, some deep time, like a migrant bird or a turtle awakening from a half year's sleep within himself, from a being away that goes back even beyond my boyhood. Each year's wading makes the next year's all the more compelling. All I know is that I must come back. Once I have returned, being here is enough.

  It is quarter past six as I turn among the tussock sedge mounds, wade from the deepening channel that leads to the dense tangles of another shrub swamp, and head to shallower water. I skirt the rustling tussocks and wade into the lasiocarpa meadow. I have named this marshy compartment after the species name for the graceful plant that fills it with sweeps of grasslike growth, Carex lasiocarpa, the woolly-fruited sedge. I am a little above knee-deep in water and waist-deep in the ethereal sedge. Virtually all of the growth around me consists of this plant. With long, trailing blades about one-twelfth of an inch in width, it has a deceptively delicate appearance. Under favorable conditions it establishes monocultures as unforgivingly exclusive to other growth as those of the taller, coarser lake sedge, cattails, and even the woody alders. New shafts reach six to nine inches above the water, lithe, sharp-pointed, spring green. Their reddened bases stand out sharply in the clear water.

  This first emergent thrusting forth forms a watery field of erect spikes that will extend to form a sheening haze of long, arching twists and sprays that bow and sweep with every stirring in the air. When the sedges are at full growth, stronger winds create grassy waves in passing over them, as though the plants themselves were water. Last year's pale, flowing blades fill the water from the surface to the turfy substrate they have built up here. They have been arranged carefully: not a hair out of place, it seems, combed and brushed by the slow, swirling slide of the water.

  And throughout these graceful arrangements of sedge are windings of large cranberry, the one plant that finds its place and even proliferates among them. Fruits from last autumn persist on the pliant lacings, which keep their leaves all year, deepening to dark maroon in winter and greening again in April. In most years the seasonal shallows that now inundate most of the cranberry vines are gone by summer solstice. While the water is here it provides another favored niche for spotted turtles.

  I come again at this time of year to wade in the late light of day, to hear the bittern pumping and listen to the rain of twitterings that falls from tree swallows not long returned, as they wheel in the high open air above this great wetland depression a few final times before dark. Red-winged blackbirds call—always there are red-winged blackbirds calling at this season, wherever I wade. The water is so open and clear now, at its greatest depth and with vegetation just beginning to come forth within it. The water magnifies, not only the strands of sedge, which seem to flow without moving on while the flood drift moves through them, but also the day, the hour, the precise point in the season's passage. This great pooling of collected meltwaters and gathered rains intensifies the light within it, the light upon it, the light reflected from it. Here spring is magnified in clear water lying upon land. Even the calls of distant red-winged blackbirds seem magnified as they carry over the waters of wet meadows, marshes, and swamps.

  Spotted turtle in cranberry vine.

  I wade across this shallow sea of water and sedge to a channel that circles its southern rim. I don't know if it was water that originally cut this channel along the edge of a slight topographical elevation, which effectively divides acres of marsh from acres of shrub swamp, and then animals took to using it as a corridor, or if larger animals first walked this way to skirt the difficult emergent shrub thickets, wearing a trail into the substrate that water then followed and over time shaped to its own purpose. At any rate, I follow a route that water takes and that also serves as a wetland passage for moose and deer, muskrat, mink, star-nosed moles, water shrews, spotted turtles, young snapping and Blanding's turtles, green frogs, and mayfly larvae.

  I would like to see a list, reaching back to the time of the origins of this watercourse, of all the life that has passed through, lingered, or taken root here. Somewhere beneath the built-up muck and vegetation, there must be a record of the day when the last of the ice shelf turned into crystal-clear glacial meltwater running over sand, the day that initiated the return of life to the deglaciated Northeast. At thaw, as the last of the ice shelves drop from mounds of shrubs and royal ferns in clear-running, sand-bottomed channels, I have intimations of that momentous melting in scenes that seem reenactments of it in miniature. Perhaps not long after that glacial retreat—at least in a geologic time frame—members of my own species, early enough arrivals to be called indigenous (though so much later in coming here than the preglacial turtles and ferns), followed this very route on hunting sojourns or seasonal migrations, without the comfort of insulated waders.

  I suspect that it is a combination of treading feet and seasonally drifting water that keeps this channel open, a slender conduit little more than a foot and a half wide over most of its gently snaking length. It divides further as it links networks of other channels and pools throughout the marsh and swamp elements at the eastern and western extremities of the complex. Many of the watery cuts are so narrow that I can barely slip one leg past the other in wading through. As with the intermittent stream, the water finds its varied ways here, flood time af
ter flood time, to reclaim its runnings and pondings and so define the enduring wetlands. For several decades now I have been one of the animal forces that helps keep the channels open, as I repeatedly retrace their labyrinthine networks.

  Even in this leafless early flood season I see a brushy haze of dense thickets and crowding screens of shrubs when I look directly ahead. I could almost forget that I am in a wetland, and nearly half immersed at that.

  The depression within a depression in which this shrub swamp is set combines the deepest—though rarely exceeding thirty inches even at times of highest flooding—and most permanent water with the densest growth to be found in the overall wetland complex. The shrub swamp is also the site of the earliest ice-out and thus it is the citadel of overwintering spotted turtles. I call it the Tangle, although any guest I brought here might observe that any of the sur rounding interspersions of shrub swamp and marsh is every bit as much a tangle.

  I have come here over the seasons of so many years, from March or April's opening of the water until October or November's closing over, that I have developed something of a spotted turtle's familiarity with the labyrinthine landscape. My feet, even through waders and wading shoes, have acquired a very literal feel for its watery pathways and the vagaries of its substrate. I get a few reminders each year, as I rediscover hidden depths of muck with a sudden unexpected sinking. My passage here is perhaps not typical wading, for I must knee my way among unyielding mounds of mingled shrubs, royal ferns, and sedges and shoulder my way through alders. Moving through the Tangle is a total-body experience.

  Though I know this wetland so well, in its purely physical as well as its ecological and metaphysical aspects, neither the familiarity nor the hardships breed contempt. Being here has brought me to a knowledge, both tangible and ineffable, of a world apart, completely distinct, from that of my own kind. How many of us, and how often, think of the fact that we live our time on a planet, within that planet's time? What good is it to be alive on Earth and never come to know at least the place where one lives? We don't even try to know it with our senses, much less with our minds and spirits. How many human feet in the industrialized world know anything more than floors, pavement, lawn, or manicured sandy beach in a lifetime? We live on Earth without walking it. What do we touch with our hands? So many human eyes and ears see only the human-constructed landscape, hear only human sounds. Wild hills and swamps are looked at casually, if at all, viewed as little more than a backdrop for human dramas. So many voices, so many languages beyond human tongues, are never listened to. We are in fact overwhelmingly out of our senses. Our eyes are open for such a brief time, our appearance on Earth between two unfathomable sleeps. Are we to sleepwalk through it?

  I edge my way out of the Tangle's final snarls. In snagging my sweater and catching my hair, the alders, winterberry, and swamp rose seem intent on keeping me here. Late in a long, slow day of wading I settle into a thigh-deep pocket, most of it mud, among the alders. I haven't the energy to immediately struggle out; it is one of those occasions when I am just as happy to be held in one place for a time. I am not far from the water's outermost curling, as it turns in a shallow arc along what might appear to be the upland border. But the wetlands extend beyond the margins of this shimmering slide of visible water. On the far side of the alder carr that has detained me rises a swamp composed not of shrub thickets but of trees, a red maple swamp. The trees are radiant in the last lingering slants of sunlight that play across their forty-foot crowns.

  A flock of common grackles settles noisily into the high red maple canopy, each one a jet black bird silhouette distinct in the smoky blur of upper branches and the crowning glow of red-sienna twig tips, bright red buds, and flowers. Swamp sparrows continue their flitting and calling in the alder and royal fern mounds darkening around me. Water glides by in a silent sheet, brightening as the alders go black. Bound for lower ground, it swirls away from the upland ascents, its surface a constant quivering of tiny braids and voiceless riffles—alive and ever moving at the springing of the year. Here I will turn away from the water, which moves on among the alders, a broad silver slide finding its way to the permanent stream.

  In its final run this lowland drift is channeled into a network of deeper cuts through belts of alder on wetland plateaus, sharply defined races banked by unyielding root and turf. Here the constricted runnings become forceful enough to keep their courses clear of sediments, cutting down to underlying sand. As the great depression slopes downward to its lowest point, the bed of Alder Brook, water quickens in these sluiceways and takes on the voice of a babbling brook, as though eager to get on with the race to the greater stream.

  As daylight diminishes, the peep-frog chorus intensifies in the backwaters of a fen a quarter mile away. With raucous clamor and a rushing wind of wing beats a flurry of grackles lifts off from the topmost canopy of the red maple swamp. In the quieting that follows, I hear again the drift of evensong from their red-winged cousins on the far side of the wetland mosaic. The season, like the water glimmering all around, extends before me.

  A DAY IN THE SHADOW OF A PINE

  Junto a las aguas quietas

  Sueño y pienso que vivo.

  [By quiet waters

  I dream and think that I live.]

  —Luis Cernuda

  19 APRIL. I touch the morning sun where it touches the furrowed and plated bark of the pine. Sunlight finds its way through the tree's dense crown to warm the trunk and enhance its resinous scent. Sun warms the color as well, shifting small illuminations, washes of gold over lavender-gray here and there in the prevailing cool, deeper violet cast of white pine bark in shadow. How many suns are there in the day? Sunrise, morning sun, the sun at its zenith, afternoon sun, sunset, and all those intermediate points. There is a sun for every season and all gradations of them. This pine has not yet attained half its potential girth and height, but still the sun of nearly a century's seasons has played over its bluish green crown, marking the turnings of all those days.

  Touching trees has always grounded me. Before I knew their names I knew them by their feel, by the colors and textures of their leaves and bark, the ground on which they stood. As I spent nearly all my time in turtle places, the trees I touched were mostly those of swamps. In the same way I came to know the shrubs, more numerous and diverse, which my hands were constantly gripping for a necessary physical steadying, as well as for other groundings. Trees and shrubs were something to take hold of in an insubstantial world, something to provide me rootings and something by which to take root. In time I came to know the names they had been given. I couldn't get enough of learning their names, common and scientific and eventually even in the foreign languages I studied.

  Black bears mark trees, rubbing, biting, and clawing them to designate their territories. I touch trees, my signal trees, most of them sentinels marking points where I enter or depart from a marsh or swamp. I touch them at each coming and going throughout the seasons. When I can reach a shaft of sunlight striking a tree's bark, I place my hand there. Other trees mark a place along the way in my wetland circuits. At the same time they mark a station in the seasons. Some I touch day after day for weeks on end, others but once in several years. Some I have touched only once in decades; some I will never touch again because they have been taken away or because I cannot bear to go back to where they stand. Storms and lightning have taken some—there is no loss in this.

  I am in the quiet here, the silent now of this slowly moving shadow. Time stays with me awhile. There is always a sense of returning for me in such a place. I come back again to tree bark and shadow, intervals of bird song and silence, the voice of the wind, the streamlet in its silent slipping by ... back to a day in the swamp in boyhood when I had a sense in the present of a day in some deep past. I enter a confusion of time that allows not a better understanding of time, but a deeper relationship with it.

  There are no empty hours in these wild places, no unit of time in which nothing happens. There are duratio
ns in which it might appear that nothing has changed. But something is always taking place. For how long now have I observed no more than the shadow of the pine in its incremental shifting as constant, if not as continually observable, as the glimmering water drifting by? There is the invisible passage of time, revealed by the sundial of this white pine. I am so aware of this place, this crossroads of life and the seasons, as a theater of time. There is as much time coming as passing ... it flows over me as the nearby water flows over a fallen alder stem or as the pine tree's shadow moves over the earth. Do I dream the day or experience it? Watch it go by or go with it?

  I come here during the spotted turtles' migrations, the season of so many returnings, to stand by this sentinel tree and watch the season for a while. When the turtle migrations end, I leave the pine to the rest of the year. Whenever I am here or in any of the places I am this deeply drawn to, I feel a connectedness, a filling in of some profound, vague emptiness. I need to be empty of all distractions. I come to forget and to remember.

  Since early boyhood there have been two foundations: to be there and to return. I feel again that promise kept, kept from the day of the first turtle, those first few hours of being there. I come also to know where to be. The places have changed as landscapes have been ground under, but it is all there waiting in the places that remain. All that opened up to me in that first place, the intuitive revelations and empirical observations, holds on in this place that has been left to the workings of nature—where, for want of a better word, "wildness" lingers on.