Following the Water

by David M. Carroll

  As I do each time I come here, I survey this clearing in the alder carr from behind an especially thick stand of northern arrow-wood and meadowsweet before moving out into the open. Nothing catches my eye in the pool or its associated channels, where a spotted turtle could appear at any moment. As my eyes drift beyond the water, scanning its adjacent shrub thickets, they are arrested by a startling turtle shape, so large that it is out of scale with any search-image I had in looking over these very familiar surroundings. My instantaneous thought is that I have discovered an old, top-size wood turtle with a smooth-worn carapace. But then I realize that this turtle's shell—high-domed and blue-black in its soft reflective sheen—is too big to be anything other than a Blanding's turtle.

  Now and again I find the young of this species as I track

  Blanding's turtle.

  spotted turtles along this migratory route. Most are under twelve years old; I have never known an adult to travel this way. Even by the cryptic-behavior standards of most turtle species, Blanding's turtles move in mysterious ways, sometimes for miles, traveling overland, even traversing forested upland ridges where one would not expect to see a turtle, shifting among wetlands, with days spent in hiding without moving at all. Frogs scatter as I fight my way through restraining brush and deep-muck shallows. I cannot help but feel anxious upon making such a unique discovery, but I don't have to rush; there is nowhere for this turtle to go. She is terrestrial-basking several yards from any water or mud deep enough that she could elude me. At my first break toward her I see her lift her head slightly and look furtively left and right. Then she freezes. She too is aware that she has no place to go and can only attempt to go unnoticed. Wood turtles that I approach like this on land do not so much as blink an eye as I draw near and will rarely make a move at all unless I touch them. I slow my advance, then pause. I am in the extraordinary position of having an extended period of time in which to take in a sighting of one of these quick-to-disappear turtles. Sightings like this become indelible in my mind, yet in the excitement of the occasion—revelation, really—one can rush the moment and miss too many details.

  The turtle's legs, tail, and long, long neck are withdrawn into the helmetlike fortress of her nine-inch-long shell. Folds of her neck skin, as well as her head from just behind the eyes, protrude from her carapace. She faces the sun. Several small but distinct pits in her shell allow me to recognize her as an individual I have seen before, at least twice, the last time something like six years ago. We meet again. Many occasions are annual; others occur a number of times in a given year; still other meetings are separated by years or even a decade. Some occur once in a lifetime. With the long-lived turtles, my own life span will not allow for many future reunions; that is, if this place in its broadest extent is left to them, they will be here well beyond my time.

  The turtle has oriented herself behind a clump of alder stems in such a way that several shadows of varying width drape over the contours of her shell. This alignment is probably deliberate; she is taking the afternoon's imperceptibly shifting shadows as a means of procrypsis, acquiring a disruptive pattern that helps break up the form of her shell and grant her a measure of concealment. Only when I run my hand lightly over the smooth, irresistible dome of her shell does she withdraw her head. Here, in the feel of this beautiful sun-warmed shell I have an extraordinary connecting with the season and the life that it bears. I leave her to her solarium and turn back to the tussock pool. Regrettably, my intrusion will break her bond with the day, with the April sun. That would have been so even if I had not placed my hand on her shell. When she feels it is safe to move she will return to the pool and hide for a time in one of its deepest, darkest recesses before continuing on a journey I wish I had a way of following.

  I tend to linger where the water lingers; it is the middle of the afternoon and I am still by the tussock sedge pool. I stand on a broad crest formed by shrub mounds and strewn with windflowers, or wood anemones. Named for their trembling on any slight stirring of the air, the flowers are motionless in this still, still afternoon hour. My back is to the sun as I look into the black water of the pool's deepest trench from behind a screen of thickset winterberry stems, interwoven like some medieval fencing, my coign of vantage for looking over the pool. The profuse specklings of white lenticels on the submersed sections of alder and winterberry stems take on an amber cast in the tannic water. They mimic the patterns of a spotted or Blanding's turtle's shell and suggest one where there is none or conceal one who is there. Perhaps an example of ecology influencing development in a species, this kinship of carapace markings with the effect of the dark water and light lenticels characteristic of the woody wetland plants native to the turtles' prime habitats, or with the scattered sparks of sunlight, the forms and tones of seeds of sedges, grasses, and buttonbush, dropped in season and often persisting, hardly seems coincidental. Dark, tannic water, specks of sunlight coming through dense foliage, light tips on the "leaves" of sphagnum moss, seeds, circular pale pores on underwater stems—all these must have played a role in designing the shadowy blue-black, flecked, and spotted shells of these two turtles of kettle holes, fens, marshes, and swamps, the spotted and the Blanding's.

  As I keep watch I sight another vigil-keeper. Waiting, watching, with a patient intensity and keen perception I would do well to emulate, a ribbon snake lies unmoving at my feet. Not having moved for some time myself (perhaps I can be more patient than the snake; I am not here for my daily bread), I have gone unnoticed by the snake I didn't see until just now. Waiting is a critical component of my observation, as it is of those I am most intent on observing. Most of the time, he who moves first is seen first. I have no idea when this silent one appeared. His stealth in approaching the pool has been so accomplished that he could just as well have slipped out from under my feet. His camouflage is remarkable, even by the standards of a world so infinitely, minutely, and resolutely dependent on crypsis. This bronzed, straw yellow, and shadow black ribbon of snake is wound over, under, and among a littering of leaves and twigs, coilings of fern, bleached vines, and strands of grass, all laced with ribbon snake—imitating weavings of sedge. Anytime I see a snake before he detects me and whips into motion, I take it as a reaffirmation of my interpretive eyesight.

  Drifts of clouds that came together to take over the sky with the afternoon's advance have recently broken up and separated out. The sun is very hot. The snake's sun-struck sides expand and contract rapidly; he breathes at a hare's rate. With a barely perceptible flowing, disturbing nothing around him, he vanishes beneath a mat of fern wreckage. The silence of such animals in the upper layers of last year's fallen leaves, blades, and stems, so quickly brought to a rustling crispness, even on the soggy floor of the alder carr, by April's drying breezes, is as amazing as their endless ways of blending into virtual invisibility with their immediate surroundings. After several minutes the snake reappears, trailing his three yellow stripes over snaking alder roots, and slides into the pool. His fixed jet eyes fired with a spark of sunlight, his scarlet, black-tipped tongue flickering, he winds across an open stretch of dark water and weaves himself into the straw skirt of a tussock mound.

  With a long leap and resounding splash a green frog simultaneously departs from the hummock. She had been statue-still while her protruding gold-ringed eyes took in the world around her. The legendary capacity of snakes for swallowing prey considerably larger than their heads notwithstanding, it seemed impossible that the slender snake could swallow such a large frog. But with the appearance of side-winding ripples on the surface of the pool and a slithering at the base of her sedge cushion, the green frog evidently did not care to calculate any of the finer measurings in nature and made her leap. Surely there is a long history of snake movements and their potential consequences encoded in the green frog's internal evolutionary guidebook. How far back in time does that history go, and how many pages does it have, inscribed with instinct?

  Ribbon snake.

  During its flood s
eason this tiny marsh, like any wild wetland, no matter what size, is a natural theater. It bears constant watching. There are intermissions, to be sure, but one act is soon followed by another in the script of the day, the scenes written sur le motif as they are performed. As the snake slips from view in front of me—I cherish such disappearances-before-my-very-eyes—a sudden sparkling of sunlight off broken water causes my head to turn toward a small spillway at the southeastern end of the pool. I have the best seat in the house, but this is a true theater in the round, and I cannot look everywhere at once. A male spotted turtle clambers up the cut through which water escapes and drops into the tussock sedge pool. In water as black as his shell he becomes a moving pattern of rows and scatterings of lemon yellow spots, as though he were a speeded-up film of a constellation sliding through a night sky. He glides among the upreaching winterberry, then tunnels under submarine sedge skirtings, where all his radiant markings vanish. He will travel on against the flow as I resume following it.

  Over the first two seasons I came here, I never saw a turtle, even though, from my first looking in, I had the strongest feeling that this must be a spotted-turtle place, that these turtles must pass along this intermittent stream in their seasonal migrations to and from the vernal pool and must make some seasonal use of the tussock pool. But I was either too early or too late in my initial searches. And then, the first spring I found them, I saw eleven over three successive days. That was quite a revelation—if revelation can be anticipated, even expected. The turtles are far more transient than the water here and can easily be missed. But over time—I have needed time, and I have had it—I came to know the comings and goings of water and turtles in this place. At a certain hour on a given day, when the face of the season turns in the direction of migration, I sense that the turtles are on the move, and I come here to wait and watch.

  The living and nonliving elements of the planet share a succession of synchronizations that are set within the variations of the passing seasons. They march to a single drummer. But the rhythms of the timing, which are attuned to the vagaries of climate, can vary by weeks from year to year. There is, on balance, in these cyclical variations a degree of constancy that allows me both the dream and the expectancy of appointments kept. They are crossings, intersections, in the arenas of minutes, hours, days ... years. I endeavor to read the seasons, their cycles of water, light, temperature, and time, their at once constant and varying clock.

  Repeated visits to the wetlands I am intimately familiar with, season after season, year after year, and the accumulated observations of all these wadings and walkings, have led to my developing something of a biological clock. Sometimes it is set so precisely to the moment in the season's progress that I can look up from my writing and drawing table to see clouds breaking up on an afternoon at thaw and know that the first wood turtle has left the overwintering stream to ascend a west-facing bank to take his or her first sun of the year. I go to a place on the stream bank and the turtle is there, sometimes one I have seen in that precise place, more often a different turtle responding to the same seasonal moment in the same riparian setting.

  I leave the tussock sedge pool by way of the spillway through which the spotted turtle made his splashing entrance. Some migrants come to this pool via an outlet at its western end after making their way through a series of shallow channels and impoundments maintained by beavers. Some of the dammings and diversions of water that maintain this system are surprisingly small, secured at strategic points by packed branches and mud that elevate the surrounding water levels just enough to meet the beavers' requirements. When I look at one of these minimalist dams I cannot help but wonder at how a plugging of mud and woody debris a few inches high by a foot wide can be part of a scheme engineered to keep a broad impoundment in the permanent stream precisely at the level of the floor of a beaver lodge more than fifty yards away. All of these workings, of water on its own and water redirected by beavers, debris dams, natural levees, plant mounds, or deadfalls, provide passages and places for animals and plants. The interrelationships among water, earth, climate, plants, and animals are as good as endless over the space and time allotted to this mosaic of wild wetlands. Simply by virtue of being left alone, it becomes rarer with every passing day. My being here is inescapably colored by my profound awareness that its continuing to be left alone is by no means guaranteed. It is all but certain that the increasingly over-peopled world will find its way here, as happens in virtually all landscapes great and small on Earth, and will bend it to some human purpose, breaking its bond with time, countermanding its coevolutionary imperative, depleting its biodiversity, and erasing its remarkable natural history.

  Sometimes I follow the water along the beaver channel and backwater wetlands that border the low-gradient, nearly level lowland run of the permanent stream about fifty yards to the west, which I call Alder Brook. It is one of the most difficult passages I make. Today I continue along my spring-flood route, which is not without its own challenges. A markedly uneven substrate that is at times solid, at times deeply mucky, and fencings and tangles of last year's fallen growth and intertwined woody shrubs, laced in places with thorny swamp rose, all make for slow going. As I follow the gently drifting water I thread my way out of the densely thicketed shrub carr and begin a gradual descent into a deepening depression in the topography that supports a fifty-acre mosaic of wet meadow, marsh, shrub swamp, red maple swamp, and widely scattered, deeper, permanently flooded pools. My watery pathway conducts me to a wide, fairly open swale of lake sedge. After bowing so often to the low arches of the alder carr, where the namesake shrubs grow horizontally as much as vertically, I am able to stand up and walk erect for a time.

  The great depression in which this wetland complex is cradled will rarely be more flooded than it is today. Here are many waters, all linked to form one great water, with a bewildering array of plant assemblages and an abundance and diversity of animals. Some of the animals are resident, some come here daily (I would be one of these), and others pass through only once or twice a season. My clearly defined wading channel, little more than ankle-deep, becomes mid-shin-deep, then gradually knee-deep and deeper, all the while becoming more diffuse, so that a narrow streaming turns into a broad flood. Its progress is so impeded by persistent vegetation that the slow drift could appear to be a still-water marsh. Here Spring Brook loses its identity and becomes one with all other waters.

  The day spreads out before me just as the water does. Thigh-deep now, I send out gently radiating ripples as I move into the marsh compartment. The water is at once amber-gold and clear, radiant with the fallen blue-joint reed grass that fills it, the persistent remains of last year's rampant growth in this emergent wetland. Above the water the sheen of sun-dried mats and sweeps of sedge and grass is nearly blinding. Already, spring green shafts pierce upward through the deep, densely matted layers of last year's blue-joint.

  I wade on through a sea of sunken dead grass and new grass rising. An American bittern booms in the distance, from the same haunt in a wetland corner that gives rise to his pumping, wild, and rhythmic calls every spring. The return each year of a pair of bitterns to this same breeding place, hidden along the interface of an alder swamp and a thick wet meadow dominated by lake sedge and swamp milkweed, is as perennial as the flood and the rising of the reed grass. Not wishing to disturb these intensely reclusive birds, I stay well away from their nesting niche, content to be accompanied by their calls, one of the most compelling voices of the season. I can hear them from their home base even when I am in the vernal pool, a quarter of a mile away.

  American bittern.

  My tour along the current's lazy drift eases me from the grassy wracks of the blue-joint marsh into the deepening hollow of a tussock sedge marsh. Comparatively firm and uniform peaty turf gives way to mucky, uneven footing. Here the water drifts, lingers, or in riffling spills squeezes through narrow passages among the anchored, enduring sedge mounds.

  In one of those niches t
hat exist within broad colonies of established dominants, a deep-muck deposit that has built up between the blue-joint bed and the realm of the tussock sedge, several clumps of marsh marigold have found a perennial footing. Fully leafed out in rich spring green, they stand out among the bleached ocher and sienna that surround them. Already they are crowned with glossy, golden-yellow buds, highlighted with a few first flowers. These wetland wildflowers were called simply gold by early English poets. In their brightening of the chill early-season waters I wade, they are as good as gold to me. The mari-part of their common name may come from mere, an Anglo-Saxon word for marsh. It would not be out of place to call them marsh-gold.

  In contrast with essentially all of the other growth throughout this wetland, whose persistent stems, leaves, blades, and in some cases seed heads allow some botanizing even in the heart of winter, all traces of the marsh marigolds disappear long before the coming of the frosts that end the growing season. Like the wood anemones, spring ephemerals that flower before the canopy of the alder carr shades them out, these succulent plants must complete their annual cycle of leafing out, flowering, and setting seed before they are overtopped by dense sprays of grass and sedge. Here in this tightly contested, tightly turfed realm, the marsh marigolds have not been able to proliferate into the extensive colonies they typically establish in the deep organic deposits and water regimes of seepage swamps and the muddy borders of woodland brooks. These same few gold-crowned plants arise each spring in this same place and stand as another landmark in my living map of the wetlands. They are signposts of the turning of the season as well. When I come again to their bright green and gold, I know where I stand in place and time.

  Or do I make too great a case for stasis? As I look at them, still thinking of persistence and perennialness, it occurs to me that the plants are smaller this year ... there may be one less. It becomes clear that there are fewer flower buds, and I think back to a far more luxurious flowering crown of years past. I am aware now that these marsh marigolds are dying out, encroached upon by the expanding girth of the tussock mounds. These familiar golden lights of early spring will one day be extinguished by the plant succession that is a feature of all habitats.