Following the Water Read online

  Deer tracks are set in the footprints I left in the lingering snowpack at the edge of the swamp yesterday. I so often take to deer trails; here one has taken to mine, step for step.

  Wading among the sallows, a broad swath of just-overhead-high willow shoots at the outer edge of the deeply flooded alder swamp, I see a pair of black ducks leave silver streaks on the dark water as they stealthily, silently glide out of sight. Secure in the same screening blur of emergent shrubs, the ducks, of a species that is ever alert and seems to be always on edge, do not burst into the air in wild-winged flight, their almost invariable reaction upon catching sight of me. Losing myself among the countless fine branches, I enter one of those watery thickets in which everything but the present moment and place is brushed away from me. I can feel myself disappearing. My awareness shifts to the pliant stems immediately surrounding me.

  As my focus turns to the just-emerging catkins, their bud scales and leaf buds still pressed tight against lustrous stems, I become seeing eyes and touching hands only. A

  Sallows.

  song sparrow sings and I become listening ears as well. In the maze of wandlike branches above the floodwater, runoff, and melted snow that have escaped the banks of the brook to inundate this hollow, I read the supple growth of the willows, stem by stem. As they assume the colors of quickening life, they vary within their own species and among the three or so species that grow here. Some stems are green-gold, streaked with a sheen of sunlight. Others are gray-green, a rich umbered purple, or dull ocher-green mottled with a smoky charcoal gray. The tiny leaf scales range from greens to carmine.

  The scales of the flower buds respond to the season. Some have almost imperceptibly separated from their branches to show tips of fine white silk. Others have opened almost fully to unveil soft catkins—pewter gray, silver, ivory white. The scales that have sheltered these flower buds through the winter fall away as I brush among their stems. Willow catkins—first flowers of thaw in the shrub swamps and along the borders of brooks, belonging to the wind and water of winter's fitful transition to spring, nascent in a newborn season, open to wild pollinators.

  I begin to wade out of the alder carr. My left foot has gone numb. The wind has abated, and red-winged blackbirds have advanced into the alder thickets. Their evensongs ring clearly in my ears. A mourning dove's plaintive calls descend from a high pine on the upland ridge. I hear Canada geese trumpeting but cannot make them out against the low sunlit sky to the west. As I scan for them, I hear that familiar rain of twittering, then see a flock of tree swallows wheeling directly overhead. A great blue heron departed from the marsh beyond the alder lowlands as I entered them, and on my way here I heard a phoebe and a robin. In leaving the shrub carr I cut a wand of beaked hazelnut on which the tassels have lengthened in the time since I walked in. The threadlike, bright magenta tips of the female flowers are showing, familiar signs that the season has come back in a day.

  It will be a while before I see the next spotted turtle or the first vernal-pool amphibians. Cold, blustery winds and a dusting of snow in the night. North by northwest winds are blowing a smoke of snow from the high white pines. A cardinal sings, but it is cold, a winter's-edge day in early April sun, the sky a hard, cold blue.

  Water-murmur and the distant evening song of a robin. The high crowns of the pussy willow thicket have come into full bloom. The sun has slipped behind the western hills as unrelenting winds bring a snow squall down from the mountain. The snow melts upon touching the stream bank, dissolves as it swirls into the brook.

  ***

  The run of chill, wind-blasted days and nights of hard frost continues. There is no sun. Sharp-toothed winds whistle along the little silver-running brook that divides the gray-trunked, low, level expanse of the red maple swamp, gray trunks accentuated by the muted yet radiant gray-green glowing of lichens in a time of cool, abundant moisture. The maples rock and clatter together on high, where a few first flowers open. Several trees reach up from each stump left after the last cutting in the swamp. Ancient roots, perennial enough to seem eternal, could send up new sprouts following cuttings by man or beaver every year for decades until, left alone for a time, they become trees again and re-claim their forest.

  As I approach the grassy vernal pool in the late afternoon, I hear a deafening chorus of wood frogs and peep frogs ringing out. Within this ear-impacting din I can make out the rollicking splash of the wood frogs. The power of the midday sun working on water in mid-April: when I passed by here just four and a half hours ago I heard only a few tentative calls. Now those isolated eruptions that seemed to be questions have been answered. I wade among the wood frogs as they leap and roll through the deeper trench just out from the emergent winterberry thicket, their traditional site for depositing two enormous communal egg masses each spring. The frogs do not perform their customary multitude-in-unison disappearing act; they have become too aroused by their own inner fire—perhaps a strange concept, since they are deemed in human terms "cold-blooded"—and by the heat of the season to pay any heed to my approach or my stationary looming over them. But they do take immediate notice as a bittern wings low over their orgy. This consummate frog predator, who can rise up out of nowhere even when there appears to be no standing cover, puts them down in an instant, abruptly silencing their tumult. The peep frogs shrill on. I imagine the bittern has been feeding well on the incautious male wood frogs. They will soon get their wits about them and resume their silent and secretive ways. For now they are the image and sound of wild abandon at the "at-last" breaking of spring.

  Late in the day a robin sings incessantly, and a mourning dove calls repeatedly from the dense pine stand above the alder carr. Only the faintest sunlight shows in the alders, as the sun is about to disappear in the hazy sky, dropping beneath the pines of the low western horizon. It is breathless here, but as so often happens, I hear the wind in the high white pines to the east. Now robins call from roundabout, their distant, lilting song to the sun's setting and rising. Piercing even from across this great alder swamp, the calls of the red-winged blackbirds mingle with those of the robins. Sapling red maples here and there among the alders spike the maroon-gray thickets with sharp red, the color of April's coming to life. This, the time of the red maple flowering, is the best time here and throughout the swamps and river floodplains, along the brooks and streams, wherever water stands or flows. After all these years I try to fill up on this signal moment, but there is no keeping it. It always comes to this: I can only return, again and again, and be here in this too-brief time. The temperature drops quickly, sharply, with the setting of the sun.

  I don't think I've ever heard a more massive—if this word can be applied to sound—chorusing of wood frogs and spring peepers. It pulses directly into the skull, one has no need of ears. Standing in the full brunt of it, I feel that I risk hearing impairment. What it does to the mind, the heart, is my kind of maddening ... no, my kind of wildening.

  The ringing in my ears fades as I move away, but I walk from chorus to chorus; just as I move out of range of hearing the wood frogs, and as the peep frogs become faint, I pick up the outer fringe of the same heart-gladdening communal crescendo from the vernal pool by the boglike border of the marsh. It is exhilarating to enter into the full sweet fury of this singing and have it fall away as I leave it behind, only to pick up another, ahead in the cranberry—sweet gale meadow that is my destination. To live in a landscape where one could never outwalk the wild callings of spring...

  A BREATH AT THAW

  IN THE WOODS and over the great plain of the hayfield there are still two to four feet of snow—another year in which I have to snowshoe to the first open water other than that which has been set free in brooks and rivers. In the shrub-swamp compartment of the great alder carr, the slow, steady drift of floodwater from the distant stream and the heat-collecting melange of rampant vegetation combine to erode the ice. The first open water and the first turtles—spotted turtles—appear at the same time, often on the same d
ay, in this small, sedge-crowded first foothold of thaw in a vast landscape still lying beneath a mantle of winter white.

  My year within the year, the year of the turtle, begins here. The ice is less than a day off the water. Knowing that I am so near that moment, I step down from ice and snow and wade into the season. I always hold the thought, anticipation-cum-hope, that I will see a turtle in the very act of emerging from hibernation and will recognize it as such. I have come close and perhaps even witnessed it in essence. Certainly I have envisioned it, that astonishing appearance from a half year's darkness, the awakening from that deepest of vertebrate sleeps, the coming forth from mud and intertwined roots and rhizomes of shrubs and sapling red maples anchored on atolls of royal fern mounds into clear, cold water filled with light, and then the critical ascent to open air and the warmth of the sun.

  After that near-interminable abiding, it all begins so quickly with the turtles. What are the dreams, if any, between the closing of the eyes in one year and their opening in another? What is this sleep of stillness that can last for half a year, the state of being of all living things, from turtles to alders, that do not migrate or are not active in winter but stay in place and wait? The transformation that at times seems as if it will never happen can take place in surprisingly short order: ice and snow are changed into water, and winter is converted to spring. April completes the work that March began, and the year and the turtles within it are on the move.

  Is it possible to truly understand what triggers this, what precise timing arises from an interaction between life and nonliving elements: turtle, mud and water, temperature, time itself? I have long felt that somehow, even in deepest hibernation, turtles always know where the sun is and where their corner of the spinning Earth is in relation to it. What else is involved? How has life, among its countless ideas, or solutions, come to this yet one more remarkable, and in the end unfathomable, expression of itself?

  I stand at that great division of the northern year, grateful that the critical place is still here and that I can come here to meet the moment one more time. For many years I have stood at thaw, in water or on shrub and fern mounds, watching for long unmoving spells, thinking I might see that initial movement, the instant of appearance, waiting ... giving something a chance to happen before my eyes.

  Could this be it? I do not witness the emergence from the substrate beneath the water, but something catches my peripheral vision, and my head turns involuntarily to see a spotted turtle where a moment before there was none. It must be possible to witness that fraction of time I seek, but the instant is set in so much possible time and space, even on the narrowest edge of thaw in a relatively constricted opening in a shrub swamp.

  There is a directness in the slow movements of the turtle across the mucky bottom of one of the channels to the base of a mound formed by royal fern and alder and his subsequent ascent of its slope. There is no cautious pause to look around from just beneath the surface before raising his head above the water nor vigilant scanning after doing so before beginning his climb out of it. The turtle proceeds to haul himself halfway out of the water, extends his neck full length, thrusts back his head, and opens his mouth. His throat bellows out—I am amazed at the extent of it.

  After the long, deep elemental breath—I have to think it is his first in nearly six months—I expect the turtle to crawl up onto the mound to bask. But after the turtle lowers his head, he pauses for only several seconds before quickly rotating to his left, slipping from the mound, and beginning to swim away. Once again I am surprised by the turtle's alacrity, by what appears to be a virtually immediate recovery, restoration. Can one breath, no matter how deep—and I have to think that that first breath is taken at times when the tips of the nostrils are just above the surface—take away the effects of an unbreathing winter, a time spent essentially insensate, encased within his shell, withdrawn into his own bones with no external needs while his heart marked the time until thaw at some eight beats per minute? For a moment I think of all the living breaths that have been taken in the world.

  I capture the turtle, hold him just long enough to identify him for my notes and also simply to touch him—a naturalist's documentation and my personal experience. Ultimately I cannot justify even the briefest intervention but take him in hand. I cannot fully touch the season until I touch a turtle.

  RETURN TO THE WOOD-TURTLE STREAM

  HEAVY RAINS, mixed at times with sleet: a cold, dark mid-April spell and the return of floodwaters have kept me from the brook for more than a week. But April's familiar vacillations between winter and spring are not alone responsible for my absence. I have taken them as an excuse for not returning, as in my uneasiness my mood has matched that of the weather and kept me from taking advantage of the few breaks for walking the stream banks in search of turtles. The mingled elation and dread that move through me at the season's outset are a mix as turbulent as the brook at thaw. Irresistible attraction collides with a deeply deterring apprehension, and in this dynamic I become paralyzed. It can no longer be for me as it was in those first few years in boyhood, in which I could not see what was coming and never stopped to think that swamps and streams might not be forever.

  Each spring I see, in addition to landscapes lost entirely, the increasingly tight encirclement of and encroachment upon this and so many other turtle places. Concomitantly, in "protected" places not eradicated outright by development, comes the inevitable entering and overrunning by the human world. I have long witnessed the invasion that takes the heart from the landscape, and it has taken much of the heart from me. Increasingly in my later years of following the water, following the turtles, I have had to turn away. Sometimes I stay away for an extended time, and there are places to which I cannot return at all.

  But where wildness lingers and turtles hold within it, that original searching, that early unquestioned need to be there, draws me back. For me, the most compelling occasions over the course of the seasons are the first appearance of the spotted turtles as they emerge from hibernation; the wood turtles' first coming up onto stream banks after that same long sleep; turtle-nesting time; and the nest-emergence and nest-to-water journeys of the hatchling wood turtles. These seasons within the season have beckoned me powerfully enough to overcome my ever-deepening reluctance. But even these holds erode. I never would have believed that I could deny their calling, but more frequently with each passing year I am drawn forth only to be driven back. As I come to this wooded brook today, my agitation is intensified by the unshakable image of the dead, legless turtle on the wintry stream bank in late March: image as portent.

  The extent and force of the last flood surge, which reached its height several days ago, is manifest in the record it has left in snags, collections of interwoven branches, leaves, pine needles, strands of sedge, grass, and vine, looking like windrows throughout the lowlands. The debris caught in ironwood and alders tells me that I would have been chest-deep in water then. Some flood wrack has built up so high I cannot step over it but must circle around, as I approach the brook, which has once again settled within its banks and quieted considerably.

  I wade in clear water flowing over scoured sand, a stream alive with amber webbings of April sunlight, then on down a swift-running riffle over cobble to climb a bank lined by alders, silky dogwood, and northern arrow-wood, flanked in turn by extensive thickets of meadowsweet. As I crouch and rise, continually shift my point of view, look ahead and then turn to look back the way I came, I see a wood turtle not far upstream who is visible only from a very specific angle. She basks in a classic edge-of-the-stream setting that is emblematic of the season for me, and although I have many photographs of just such a scenario, I take another series as I approach her.

  I pick her up. Everything seems perfect, the feel of that sun-warmed shell, the familiar weight and density that is so surprising in a turtle that has gone nearly half a year without eating. Only when I turn her over in my hands do I see that she has lost the lower half of her right fro
nt leg. The amputation was surely the work of an otter, probably during her overwintering. A turtle I have documented in past notebooks, she had lived here for twelve years without incident, not so much as a tail nip, until this wound. It will heal. I am well aware that these turtles are remarkably resistant to bleeding to death or getting infections, even from multiple amputations, and that in many cases a wood turtle can sustain this degree of limb loss and go on for many years. But my sense of foreboding only deepens.

  I turn upstream and soon find another turtle, this one on a sandbar building up on the inside turn of a deep-bend meander in the brook. An older male, he is settled at the base of a lodging of beaver-trimmed branches I had left last fall as a supply of wading staffs for this season. I am surprised that the flood did not carry them away. Even before picking him up I know that he too has fallen victim to a predatory otter. There is nothing left of his left front leg, and only the merest stub of his right front leg remains. He has shoved himself here with his hind feet. Immediately I think of the imminent mating season: if he lives on—and it is possible that even in this terribly compromised condition he will survive—I do not see how he could successfully do battle with another male during the often fierce combats they stage at breeding time or how he could manage to pursue and mount a female. But he is an adult male wood turtle and will go on trying to do what he has done before, everything he exists to do.

  Does he even know that those powerful forelegs are no longer there? Perhaps not, or perhaps he has some awareness that all is not the same. After recording him I set him down. He shuffles back into his basking hollow and doesn't move again. In the past, after being disturbed he would have scrambled into the brook and surged off through the water with strong strokes of all four legs.