Following the Water (9 page)

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.

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 durations 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.

I come to meet the day, and the day comes to me. I am here not to gather information but to receive information; to breathe in and out the pine-scented air, take in the nour
ishing silence, listen to the wind, the birds, the frogs; to watch the water shimmering by and regard the slow turning of the shadow of the pine as it marks the moving day. There is recording and there is experiencing. On some occasions I make notes, but today I transcribe nothing. There is that which cannot be transcribed, cannot be set down or held in any way. I can bear witness, but I cannot truly catch the April light, the wind, the water, or in any real way capture the turtle who passes by, take hold of the frog chorus ... the immersion is intangible, the experience ineffable. It is like making love. I can only wait for it to circle back and go again to meet it. It is making love.

I stand in one of those places where I can see the world devoid of human presence, my own species gone entirely. In sunlight and by moonlight the shadow of the pine would continue for its time to wheel in its slow seasonal circles. The wind would be the same, the water streaming by. The ever-indifferent seasons would follow their course. The profoundly heavy burden of the global human footprint would be absorbed. The deep disruption of what was here before
Homo sapiens
and of what might have been without our species' appearance would be forgotten in the ongoing. The sun, the moon, and the stars would notice nothing. No god would grieve. There would be a return to an ancient silence.

A snake's head rises from dead leaves and dried sedge: slender head, slender neck, jet eye set with sunlight. His
black-tipped scarlet tongue flickers; the rest of him is as still as a stick. Then there is a rhythmic swaying from side to side, his head fixed on a neck held stiff, and then a slow bobbing of the head as the swaying continues, followed by a fluid pouring of life taut in snakeskin, a magic movement with no outward sign of how it is achieved, as though water had become reptile and could flow independently of gravity. A garter snake trails himself among twistings of running swamp blackberry to a frozen-rope spell, his anterior fourth upright, head leveled horizontally.

A catbird's call and a brief, solitary piping from a peep frog is followed by the almost whispered trill of a gray treefrog. The wind that talks in trees speaks pine in my ear. The mingled twittering of warblers and emphatic calls of a yellowthroat come closer, almost to my very shoulder, as my stillness endures. The snake has not moved in seven minutes. The intentness of his gleaming eye—no tongue flicking now—seems pure listening. The wind whispers at times in dry leaves, but I hear it mainly in the high trees, soughing in the pine, swishing in red maple canopies just flowering, not yet leafed out. The snake curls in a graceful arc and slips out of sight beneath fallen leaves and branches.

Above the fawn of fallen leaves, journal pages from last year's seasons scattered about, pressed down by months of snow for the spring sun to open and read, dull green begins to replace the wine reds and deep maroons of winter in the
perennial leaves of the running swamp blackberry vines. My left hand reaches out and holds a gray birch sapling, slowly rotating on its agreeable chalky warmth and slender, satisfyingly geometric roundness.

Studies of a yellowthroat.

To move with a day as a shadow passes over the earth, to breathe at the pace of its passing ... I give my shadow
to the pine's; at intervals cloud shadows take both of ours away. In the pine shadow's outer arc, shade dances away at times and the sun's warmth splashes upon me. Against the trunk I am in the cool heart of the shadow. As the afternoon lengthens, the pine tree's shady silhouette comes to fit almost exactly over the tussock sedge pool, all but its easternmost end. A strong wind has come up and fairly roars in the treetops, gently rocking the winterberry from time to time. The day begins to slip away. I think, at times, of loves other than landscapes.

F
OLLOWING WHAT
appears to be an endless caravan of mayfly larvae swimming against the flow, a teeming migration departing from a scroll pond in the floodplain, I track my way up the little brook they are ascending. The streamlet has cut a narrow draw, down to stones, in a steep, forested slope that rises from the floodplain. Like most of the feeds to this serpentine coastal-plain river, this little brook appears to be seasonal. Two curiosities lead me on: where does the water come from, and where are these mayflies-to-be going? It is always intriguing to see where such a streaming issues from the earth, where it appears from subterranean runs to sparkle in the shifting lights of
the forest and run silver and black in its shadows, enlivening the landscape with movement and, in spills here and there along its rocky descent, with murmurings and music. I am also drawn by the possibility, which rarely proves to be the case, that this slender springtime run emanates from a wetland large enough to support spotted or Blanding's turtles in the upland woods.