Following the Water (5 page)

T
HAT BREATH
of air just now, breathed back to me from the heated stream bank, the scent of sun on earth rising on the slightest stirring of the air ... the mingled scents of moss and leaves, the brook. I remember and am there again, in that place that no longer exists, as a young boy who no longer exists. April's alchemy creates a memory out of mud and water, sunlight and fallen leaves; spring breathes on these and brings something not just to light but to life. At such unbidden moments, and they are fleeting, fragments of memory become so vivid that they live. I cannot see them, I can only feel them, these unconscious rememberings not just of what I was then but of what was all around
me. That light of some deep yesterday, the sunlight on the water, the stream that sparkled by, the frog that looked back at me, and at the same time all the world around. Are these some last earthly existences destined to die with me? How is it they return to me, to take me back? Is there ever a going back to stay? Does all this lie in memory only?

That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.
That broad water! My mind wanders across it.
That old age water! That flowing water! My mind
wanders across it.

—"Myth of the Mountaintop Way," Navajo poem

R
AIN UPON RAIN
at the outset of April, spits of snow, slants of sleet; the season advances with warm rains, then holds in place with snow squalls and cold downpours, drisk, and drizzle. But spring does not turn back. It moves on with Earth's shift to that more favorable inclination toward the sun and increasing increments of light, a planet turning in its circumscribed track in space, its reined revolving within a yearly circling of the star it travels with, constant for a
time in the cosmos. Snowmelt from winter's final caches, held in the prolonged cold embrace of hemlock stands and north-facing slopes, joins the runoff of rain. The earth is saturated. Not even the evaporation brought about by April breezes and the heavy uptake by bud-swelling plants can diminish the water. Upland hills that will be leaf-rustlingly dry by the summer solstice are so sodden that they could nearly pass for swamps.

Water is on the move, not only in the ever-flowing cuts and channels of perennial streams and rivers but in flashing silver runs so ephemeral that they rarely come to life outside of this season of abundant rain. It seems these intermittent streams need to be fed hourly. Their sources will be the first to give out as the last of the melting snow is exhausted and the frequent rains of spring drop off. They will lie as waterless traces, their slender cuts among roots and rocks on the forest floor, lined with fallen leaves, implying the glimmering runs that will not return until autumn rains or something on the order of a hurricane's deluge springs them back to life for a late-season race. Everywhere traveling onward, water seeps through the soil and slides over the impermeable underlying bedrock. At this turning point in the year it appears willful and restless, seeking places in which to pool, only to escape and flow on, as though possessed of the same zugunruhe, the migratory restlessness that is so strong in animate life at thaw. Here, inland and earthbound,
water appears intent upon finding its way back to the ocean, back to the clouds, the sources from which it came.

I enter the dense emergent thickets of silky dogwood, silky willow, winterberry, and alder, with song sparrows singing and swamp sparrows trilling, and wade to the sun-flooded southern end of the vernal pool to look in on the islandlike masses of wood-frog eggs. In clearest water I see developing tadpoles twitching in the transparent medium from which they will be born. On the verge of hatching, they too pulse with an eagerness to move on, an innate evolutionary impatience arising from the fact that their natal water will not be here forever. One might think, upon looking into the overflowing pool today, that there would never be a time without water here. Yet the drying out always does take place, and in some years it can come with surprising suddenness, dooming the tadpoles who must become frogs before the water is gone.

Nothing is stagnant in April. Even isolated catchments tremble, as though the water in them is anxious to leap back into the air. The pool's surface vibrates, its quivering tension shimmers with sunlight. Unable to contain its vernal bounty, this broad seasonal pond releases a gently murmuring spill at the lowest point in its rim, an overflow that presses on to lower-lying wetlands. In this shallow slide of water I encounter another stream, a living tide that moves against the flow. An upstream migration of mayfly larvae,
a solid insect caravan uniformly five or six individuals wide, twists in a long column along the margins of the spillway. This determined procession has a single intent: to reach the pool that is divined to be at the source of this streamlet, the seasonal pond that will last long enough to allow their metamorphosis into adult mayflies, with wings that will lift them from the water for their brief last lives in the air.

Larvae line each side of the outflow, hugging its borders, wriggling, undulating. They are sorted by size, with the smallest at the landward edge, the largest closest to the central stream, some cuts of which, though only an inch or two deep, are channeled into currents too swift for the larvae to swim against. At frequent intervals, both large and small individuals lose their hold in the navigable edgewaters and are swept back the way they came, until they curl against the edge again and find a lodging place from which to take up their arduous journey anew, falling into place in the upstream-inching column with near-military precision. Insects and water travel their respective ways. Time and place are graphically measured in these two tides, one living, the other nonliving. They both appear to be possessed of destinies. Resolute, but so small—one quarter to three quarters of an inch—the dislodged larvae face significant setbacks; but there can be no turning back.

Though varying in size, all the larvae appear to be of the same species. They are generally the first living things I see
moving in the frigid waters at the initial opening of the ice each year, when the division between ice and water is reduced to its finest point, a pinpoint in temperature, on one side of which is ice, on the other, water. A metamorphosis in the physical universe that has a profound influence on all living things on Earth takes place at this all but immeasurable dividing line. My first sightings of these living, streaming mayfly larvae often occur through windows of thinnest ice. In near-stationary backwaters or gentle drifts, they undulate through the water column. At this seasonal moment they have come to a common direction and advance along a watery labyrinth among the wetland niches that exists only during flood times. Living mats of larvae edge their way along lingering ice or wriggle up films of water so thin that they are no more than a glistening on the saturated earth.

Many of the larvae are intercepted by other seasonal migrants, returning red-winged blackbirds and their companion grackles, who know the times and places of such abundant prey. Robins, attuned to this insect phenomenon, become wading birds for a time and feed on the teeming larvae, which are compelled by the current to run a gauntlet of shallows that barely cover their backs. But they are legion. Enough of them will reach the pool to fill the air above and all around at their moment of metamorphosis, perhaps no more than two weeks away.

I take the water's course and go with the drift, with water
barely moving, running little races, or standing still for a time, as it threads over and pools upon the land. At spring flood, water is at its fullest capacity for connecting the varied elements of the wetland mosaic I wade each year. It unites compartments that will later become individual isolated pools or channels and wet meadows whose surface water will inevitably fall away as rainy spring gives way to droughty summer. The unifying water of flood season is the medium that links me with all wetland niches, serving as my entrance into the wetlandscape and my conduit through it, my guide to the places of the plants and animals living within it.

Following the water, I walk glimmering traces into a dense maze of alders, morning alders still silver-beaded with rain that fell in the night. They have yet to leaf out, but their lengthening maroon and gold tassels are one of my measures of the awakening season's progress. Little more than a surface film, the water in this alder carr is so shallow that I cannot truly say I wade it. Twenty-five feet into the alder thickets, the outlet from the great vernal pool joins an intermittent stream at its turning to the south after a long descent from a steep, boulder-studded hill to the east. The stream's life, like that of the seasonal pond, is timed to the abundance of rain and snow. Because it has its origins in a spring and because spring is the season of its most essential running, I call it Spring Brook.

I look down this avenue of water, one of the most familiar faces of April: a surface sheen of white clouds and blue sky, crowded all along its margins by alders and silky dogwood; a length of water alive with wavering lights and black snakings of reflected alder stems; a passage of thirty yards or so through screens of warm gray laced with linear reds, the near alder and dogwood, to where it becomes lost in the maroon-gray maze of farther thickets. I take the day and its water and follow them into the season. Moving eastward, I wade into the morning and begin to track the day in the face of the trajectory of the sun that measures its passing. I cannot help but see the entrance that lies before me as an invitation. It is existence as invitation, as an entrance into an existence opening up before my own. In the blur of the stream, the alders, and the sky, time itself becomes a blur and I go with water that leads back to the past, on to the future ... timeless water.

For twenty-five years I have been coming here to follow this same route of springtime waters. This is hardly a geological time frame, but I marvel at the constancy I witness. The water returns to retrace and reclaim its longtime runnings, slow flood drifts, and poolings. The alders hold their place. Nearing their time of metamorphosis, migratory mayfly larvae move against the stream, down which many wood-frog tadpoles will soon travel. Upstream migrants that in the past few days have begun to return for the season
of the vernal pool include green frogs, bullfrogs, and spotted turtles. Individual spotted turtles have been making spring pilgrimages up this watery corridor far longer than I have, some perhaps for a century. Their species has inhabited the channels and pools of this wetland system (fewer and fewer remain that are this extensive and interconnected) since the retreat of the glaciers that carved its topography in the landscape more than a millennium ago. I wonder just how many generations of these turtles have made the journey upstream to the vernal pool at spring's flood-rich awakening, then back downstream at summer's advent and the time of low water. When did that first traveler to follow the retreat of the glaciers—there had to have been a first—head blazed with orange, jet shell adorned with a constellation of bright yellow spots, move up this clear flow so new to the world? I think of such firsts, so incomprehensible. I do not like to think of lasts.

I pass a small chain of alder mounds a little higher than all the others, where every April wood anemones bow and bloom, reflected in the moats of clear water that accompany their flowering time. Like the vernal pools and so many seasonally flooded wetlands, this shrub swamp could appear somewhat tenuous, even transient. One could take an impression of impermanence from an overview of alder and sapling red maple and the comings and goings of its shallow water. And yet year after year the water returns, and
the shrub carr persists. It is the water, however slight and seasonal, that shapes and keeps this wetland for its time.

At the confluence of the spill from the vernal pool and Spring Brook I come to the first of two depressions in which the water I follow expands and lingers before its eventual entrance into and dissolution in the broad wetland mosaic, an interspersion of wet meadows, fens, marshes, shrub swamps, and swamps along the stream's course. This marshy pool is only seven strides across, perhaps a foot deep, set on eight inches of gripping muck. This is too deep and wet even for alders and sensitive fern; the pool has been colonized by reed canary grass, its seeds washed down from the vernal pool or transported on the backs of turtles, frogs, and salamanders. Long, intensely green, wavering strands of filamentous algae fill the narrow cut of the central channel, which the seasonal flow evidently keeps free of the entrenching reed grass. The algae form thick mats throughout the grassy zones as well. This pool, too, is alive with mayfly larvae. Here, given a comparative ocean to navigate, they appear aimless in their swimming to and fro; but eventually, individually and collectively, they fall in line at the head of the pool and, intent upon some higher water, the great majority join the formal procession traveling against the current. Some stay here until their time of transformation—or is it later arrivals from downstream sources that I see emerge from this minute pond as winged
adults, joining those who rise at the same hour from the vernal pool?

Over the seasons, certain days and times, not fixed dates on any human calendar, are my own holidays, constants within the season's variables: the Opening of the Water; the Migration of the Mayfly Larvae; the Return of the Red-winged Blackbirds; the Arrival of the Frogs and Salamanders; the Time of Spotted Turtles Migrating; the Dance of the Mayflies; and, tightly cued to this, the Return of the Tree Swallows ... So many, the litany goes on throughout the sequence of the seasons, to times of departures and the Turning of the Red Maple Leaves; the First Thin Ice; First Snowfall; the Long Winter Quiet. These are my holy days, set in the calendar of the seasons. Though regulated by the sun and the moon and the spinning of Earth, they are not limited to any twenty-four-hour period; there is no affixing a number to them. I mark these times as I see them with a common denominator: "Again."