Following the Water

by David M. Carroll

  Across the road the woods are gone, replaced in the turning of a single year by fifty half-million-dollar houses, acres and acres of lawn set with forlorn trees left standing in isolation here and there, driveways, and wide avenues named for what once may have been there: Trillium Way, Ferncrest Drive, Birch Lane. Perhaps somewhere in the interior of the development a road has been named for the fox. No contribution to any architectural legacy, the houses seem embarrassed, standing in a twilight zone of suburban landscape, awkwardly, blankly, staring at each other across empty space. It will go worse for the fox when this landscape conversion is mirrored in triplicate on the other side of the peatland. He will be compelled to adapt even further, dodging automobiles as he hunts the narrowest wetland edges and backyards, mostly by night.

  The fox and I are between two houses and not far in from the road. I look up over a mound of highbush blueberry off to one side to see a woman turning the pages of a book as she sits on her deck, which overlooks the wetland. I am extremely ill at ease. The gray fox yawns as he lounges in his open-eyed siesta. It does not appear that the woman will finish her book anytime soon. Not wishing to cause suburban terror, I slink in the direction of the second house, where no one seems to be about. It is so much easier for the fox to run this gauntlet, to slip the network of human eyes and move without being seen.

  The difficult growth in this treacherous fen is too low to conceal all of my movements. I have been sighted. As I go on with my searching, I note the slow passings of a police car, and I understand better than ever why they are called cruisers. When I return to my car at the edge of the road I receive the company I was expecting. The black-and-white police car pulls up behind me and two uniformed officers get out. I am certain that my own uniform of black headband, camouflage T-shirt, and waders did nothing to allay the concerns of a crime-watch neighborhood. I am asked for my driver's license and social security number and then told to explain what I am doing. I state my mission and mention local contact people. After radio checks are made, I am thanked for my cooperation. There is one final question, which I had also anticipated: "What's with the basketball?"

  As I left the wetland, I found a basketball that had escaped down Trillium Way and bounced far enough out onto the quaking sphagnum mat to prohibit its being retrieved and had decided I would take it home to give to some young friends.

  "We thought maybe you had it in case you fell in."

  VARIABLE DANCER

  12 AUGUST. I make out a little pickerel just beneath the surface of the brook, his green-gold barring used to excellent effect in blending with the scant submerged and surface blades of bur-reed that trail from the downstream tail of a sandbar; he is a fish more gold than green, with a thin line of pale bronze drawn from snout to tail, as straight as a pickerel. Slender vertical bars (like the finest underwater reticulations of burnt bronze sunlight glimmering over the sandbar) are spaced along his sides. So many living things live on by keeping close to, disappearing into, something that looks so much like them, at times exactly like them: sunlight and shadow, water and earth, sand, stones, plants living and dead. Pattern is such an integral part of the pattern.

  A pair of ebony jewelwings is nearby, poised on a broad-leaved overhang of fox grape and silky dogwood, she resting her white-tipped dark wings and he his jet black ones above their burnished-metal bodies ... fish and damselflies, jewels set in a sunlit run of the brook at midday.

  My progress along the stream arrested by the little fish that caught my eye, I set up watch here in the heavy cover of overhanging shrubs and vines. But I am not long taken up with fish and damselfly, for I see an orange flash in the water, the thrust of a wood turtle's leg. A small turtle struggles to hide in, or perhaps simply pass through, a weaving of silky dogwood stems directly beneath my watching place. I step down into the stream and pick him up. The pickerel darts away at my first movement, but the damselflies keep their places.

  I hold the turtle up to the sunlight for inspection and note at once that half his tail is missing. But I have him in my hands a full minute before I see that his right front leg is gone; not the slightest stump remains. His left front leg is pale white where orange and black scales have been chewed away. But the leg and foot are intact, not a toenail missing. On the orange-scaled bases of his hind legs and right heel, scorings seem to have been made by tiny, needlelike teeth. There are no tooth marks on his shell. Whatever predator it was that took his leg—obviously not something as large as an otter—knew that gnawing on the shell of a turtle, even one this small, would be to no avail. Although they are quite fresh, the wounds, even at the amputated leg, are not bleeding. I suspect that he was attacked on land and has taken to the brook to hide and heal. He is in his seventh growing season. We have met before: he bears tiny notches in his marginal plates I have made to identify him as wood turtle number 105 in this populous colony, which I have been looking in on for twenty years. Somewhere in my notebooks are records of previous encounters, perhaps from the time the turtle was a hatchling. I return him to his cover in the stream. If both of us continue on here, I may come upon him as a three-legged adult thirteen or more years from now, may be able to find this record in my notes, and know to within a few days when he lost his leg.

  My turtle discovery of the day is not a happy one. But I think again of how often something is revealed simply by my coming to these places. This is especially true in the complex of wetland, riparian, and upland habitats of which this brook is a vital component, a diverse and relatively isolated landscape with which I have a deep bond. Such a bonding can never be long enough or intimate enough, the way it is with any love.

  I cross to the exposed crest of the small sandbar, scattering three newly transformed green frogs, all carrying the final traces of their tail stubs. The bar is crowned with rice cutgrass; two little clumps of a sedge are beginning to flower. The little pickerel who was poised here has not returned. My adventure with the wood turtle has driven him from his watery hunting ground for the time being.

  I continue to search the water. But it is something in the air that next catches my eye, a drift of color that is there and then not, in the deep shade around me. It appears again. I strive to follow this seemingly disembodied flicker of violet that is both striking and invisible over the streamside shallows. Can color come to life? Here is a living thing I cannot even catch with my eyes. Then I do catch sight of, and manage to follow to where it comes to rest, a tiny damselfly, a variable dancer. And how variable this dancer is: a wisp of color, lavender dancing in shade along a wooded stream, a tiny shadow moving in the transparent colorlessness of the absence of sunlight over dark, wet sand.

  Because a small fish and a pair of jewelwings caught my attention, I found a wood turtle, and because I stopped to look at a wood turtle I saw a variable dancer. For a time I have been united with all of them, by my sight, my being here, by whatever it is that brings me to such places time and time again. They are connected with one another and with everything else out here by the streaming of the brook and a coevolutionary history that is yet being written. And they are linked by a moment shared in time, a moment that I myself can share and so become connected with a world that could seem so far apart.

  WALK TO THE FLOODPLAIN

  24 AUGUST, AFTERNOON. My one somewhat domestic link with the river comes by way of two seasonal streams that cut through woods on our property and pass along the northern and eastern borders of a level field behind our house. The field is predominantly wild, with bluestem grass, barren strawberry, bristly dewberry, goldenrod, and native shrubs, but we have set gardens in it here and there. The brooks join at the northeast corner, follow the wooded eastern edge of the field, then run down a steep, wooded descent of half a mile or so to a confluence with the river. This watercourse, so near at hand, is one I seldom follow, in part because, within that half-mile run to the river, the conjoined streams have to pass through culverts, first at the base of a high berm erected to accommodate a state highway and then, not fa
r below that, under the northbound lanes of an interstate that was run through the river's narrow floodplain thirty-five years ago.

  Today, as I do every few years, I follow the seasonal stream's bisected cut to the floodplain. By late summer of most years, the brook has gone dry, yet the black silt that lines the level runs along the field is wet, the substrate a never-drying muck. A steep tumble of stones, moist with moss and humidity, drops from the southwest corner of the field's plateau. It is an icy staircase in winter, a rushing waterfall at thaw and after hurricanes or remnants of a tropical storm at summer's end. This silent tracery in the landscape can be brought back to rushing-water life by rainy spells at any season.

  I gingerly descend the abrupt, slippery stairway of stones. A third of the way down to the floor of the great hollow into which it drops, I step onto a level rim about three feet wide that encircles the hollow. The steep berm of the state road cuts through the outlet end of this great bowl, which was shaped in the earth by ice and running water. The rim is evidence of the workings of the glacier, the original land scape designer and engineer of the topography through which I pass.

  The contours of the hollow suggest how it came to be. At the breakup of the last ice sheet, during the era that configured the landscape of the glaciated Northeast—a landscape richly laced with waterways—a huge block of ice lodged here, one of the chunks left behind by the eroding glacier. For a time the torrents of meltwater that cut the stream channels here divided around the persistent ice, depositing deep alluvial sand and forming the rampart on which I stand. Over greater time the ice block itself was scoured away and disintegrated entirely, leaving this hollow in the earth, the negative space of its former self.

  Today, in this silent space left so long ago, I can envision that block of ice with water racing around it, the erosion and deposition that created the hollow and its broader surroundings. Perhaps the ice let go all at once, crushing and shifting stones, or perhaps gradual melting and insistent erosion over time created the ravine that descends to the floodplain, itself shaped by the dynamics of the river's flood pulse. There is a reckoning of time on which a millennium is a minute. Ten thousand years ago can seem like yesterday in a place like this—a place of earth and water, time and the seasons.

  The layers of white pine needles lining the descent are even slipperier than the wet stones. With the assistance of handholds on smaller trees, I make my way down the wall left by the ice block. I come to the floor of the depression, where over more recent time mucky organic sediments, the stuff of swamps, have been building up. If I were to block the entrance to the culvert and use the berm as a dam, I could turn the hollow into an impoundment almost twenty feet deep and fifty yards in diameter. Because of the workings of water over the year, trees cannot grow here. It is a realm of moss and fern and, in central spaces more open to the sky, marsh marigolds and marsh blue violets, which bloom before the leafing out of the deciduous trees that line the slope. This is another of those places, or spaces, in which I like to stand and be still for a time. It is no great precipice I have come down, but I am not fond of, nor well suited to, the ascents and descents required to get here. And then there is the roadway. But the world goes by up there ... goes on by. It does not stop to look in, much less enter. Even the noise of the world passes overhead, or at least enough of it that in this hidden hollow on the edge of everything I try to avoid I can yet find the stillness and silence in a remnant of the natural landscape I am constantly searching for. This place is emblematic of what the black bear and moose, even the turtles and frogs, have been left with. But it is the human erosion of the landscape, a far different work from that of the glaciers, that drives all of them, great and small, into narrower and narrower corners of the world.

  I think of how often I am in an arena of life, for every place in nature is a theater. What dramas have played out upon this little stage, what scenes of long duration or fleeting moments? Time is ever passing by, yet here it seems also to stay. Minutes, hours, can hold their breath in this stillness. Seasons hold in place even as they move through the year. How much water in how many forms has rushed or slowly drifted through here, lingered here? And the living tide as well, of plants and animals, all the kingdoms of life.

  Water routes, from oceans to slips of seasonal water like this, have served over deep time as life's migration corridors. Despite the highways, even the largest animals of the day—bear, moose, white-tailed deer, coyote—continue to move along this cut. Their seasonal movements are not optional; they have no choice but to run every gauntlet, from backyard to superhighway, that unceasing human engineering and manipulation of the planet put in their paths. I know the larger mammals almost entirely by their footprints, for they maintain their ancient secrecy, hiding from man even in the unconscionably marginalized contemporary landscape. Night, even though illuminated by artificial light that can be seen from outer space, continues to be an ally in the clandestine shiftings of these animals. The same function is served by floodplains, other wetlands, and wilder streamsides, where any remaining cover tends to be the thickest.

  I find evidence of the animals' passing through. One morning, in a small plot I had turned over in my back-field garden the previous evening, I found a record of those I rarely see, the tracks of a bear, moose, deer, and coyote. I doubt that they had formed a parade, traveling almost in each other's footsteps, but between dark and dawn all had walked over the same small space along their common way. Their tracks were all but superimposed upon each other; I could frame them in a single photograph. Smaller animals following the travel corridor of the ravine are killed on the state road, and they and the largest, bear and moose, are sometimes found as roadkill on the highway.

  I climb up the virtually perpendicular wall of the berm, cross the first road, and go down into the steep, rocky ravine that will lead me (with a cautious crossing of the interstate) to the floodplain. As I pick my way among the stones, I see a fan of broad, blue-gray feathers. Startling pieces of a scattered puzzle quickly come together as I make out the remains of a freshly killed great blue heron. The remnants are almost indistinguishable among the muted tones of leaves fallen long ago and the blues and grays of shadow and stone: a shoulder and part of a wing here, a spray of wing feathers there, a leg, the long, curving neck, dismembered parts lying within a few feet of one another. I cannot imagine how this great-winged bird of the open sky, long-legged wader of broad expanses of open-ceilinged wetlands, came to a violent end in a dry streambed beneath a dense canopy of trees. There are no fish or frogs to hunt here; this is no place for a four-foot-tall heron to land. Or was he struck in high flight and brought to earth here? It is as though a piece of the sky has fallen. I can't think of any habitat suited to a heron in this vicinity ... or was he heading for the river? It is strange how seldom one finds the larger animals dead, save for the endless carnage of road-kill. They are secret even in meeting death. From what I make of the remains, this was a heron in his prime. I often wonder how a heron, or a deer or bear, having survived the vulnerable first or second year, does come to an end. Unable to solve the puzzle I am looking at—feathers, bits of bone, dried blood—I regard it as a graphic testament to the great blue heron's final flight.

  I find his head and bill. The skull, which is slightly chewed, more likely the work of a scavenger than of what brought him down, is little more than a knob at the base of a long blade, an ornament serving as the handle of a sword. The bill itself has a narrow split in the middle that runs its full length. A narrow line of brilliant yellow borders this crack, which suggests the force of whatever bite or strike brought this bird to ruin—or was it caused by a fall from the sky? Except for the skull of a large snapping turtle (it looks much like the head of a sea turtle), I am not a collector of skulls. But I pick up this once-living sword to give to a friend who studies and photographs birds, and walk on.

  Young-of-the-year water snake.

  As I enter the floodplain, I follow deer trails through shoulder-high se
nsitive fern that seems, like so much that grows in such habitats, out of scale. Or I should say that the vegetation dwarfs me; I am the one out of scale here. I come upon several broad, matted—crushed, even—open areas around some of the towering, many-trunked stands of silver maple. These trampled clearings look far too large to be places where deer, or even moose, have bedded down. They seem unquiet in the great green silence here. Are they arenas in which some vital contest took place? At this season it would probably have been the contest of predator and prey rather than a jousting for mates; but there are no bits of fur or bone, no traces of blood. And yet the tale of some great struggle appears to have been written in the monumental space and silence of this floodplain. For me it would take some effort and a club, at least, to make such an impression in the junglelike vegetation here, even though none of it is woody, except for the silver maples.

  Painted turtle among lily pads.

  I stand so often where much has taken place and will yet take place, events I have little knowledge of. And what is going on even at the moment I stand here, which I have no way of knowing? From the high tree canopy to the dank, alluvial earth, the growth is rank and interwoven; all plants become one plant in the high-summer floodplain. There is space at the edge of the river. I look up at blue vervain, with its cobalt spires set against the milky blue of the August sky. A ruby-throated hummingbird alternately darts and holds still in the humid air, piercing the crimson throats of the cardinal flowers, vibrantly red against the endless green.

  Bullfrog.

  The river cuts deeply, darkly, around a right-angle turn here. Submersed plants I cannot identify undulate slowly, rhythmically, in great masses of long strands draped in algae. There are small fish here, dark shapes for a moment, then no more than tails disappearing, forms dissolving in greater darkness. The shallow water of summer (it is almost impossible to remember the spring floods), so slow moving as to be virtually still along this amber-gold, nearly level lowland reach, becomes restless at the deep-bend meander. Quickened by gravity and the extreme turn of its bed, much of the river's current swirls out of sight beneath an undercut bank. It seems to hold secrets here, some private work it is up to, this river that knows so much of the workings of earth and water, life and seasons, over deep time.