Following the Water

by David M. Carroll

  Water lily.

  A DRINK ALONG THE WAY

  BLAZING SUN on sand, midday August heat. I head for the deep shade of a tall stand of white pines that tower on the crest of a ridge dropping to the wood-turtle stream. In this direction the pines are flanked by low wetland shrub thickets. Opposite, off to the west, extends the broad, level, open plain of an abandoned sandpit, where the earth has been stripped to a bare mineral layer bordered by slopes steep enough to be walls.

  It is ninety degrees, welcome heat that in a time of year free of plaguing mosquitoes and black flies allows me to wear a single thin camouflage T-shirt. For so much of the turtle season, I am obliged to wear layers against the chill and/or biting insects. I come to this shade at noon in the time of the wood turtles' hatching. Over the years I have found them here often enough, by turtle-seeking standards, to believe that the little ones emerging from nests on the sand flat or slopes orient themselves toward the dark shape of the pines and their great communal shadow. So I look here first, before I take up my crisscrossing of the heated open terrain.

  In this place the word arena works both literally and figuratively; arena in Latin means sand or sandy place; in Spanish, the word is used for sand, but also for bullring or stadium, a place for a spectacle. In this theater of sand the rituals and dramas of wood-turtle nesting (from late May into June) and hatching (from mid-August into September) are played out.

  And here today I have another of those encounters that draw me to the arenas of the turtles. After first searching the pine-shaded ground, I cross the sharp demarcation of the shadows' outer extent and step into the blinding sun where, the moment my eyes adjust, I see a hatchling wood turtle, barely over an inch long. He is not many shell lengths short of reaching the shadow of the pines. What long, hot, dusty way has he traveled? I once found a hatchling close to where this one has settled, having seen me before I saw him, on the sand. That earlier hatchling, though perfect in every regard, was dead. Even his gesture was full of life, but he had died in midstep, literally stopped dead in his tracks, on a nest-to-water journey that could go no farther. I could only conclude that he had succumbed to overheating in his effort to reach the shade.

  I pick up today's tiny traveler and move back under the pines. This one does not appear to be under stress, but I feel I should take him out of the sun to document him. And I would be blinded by the glare reflected from my notebook pages were I to record him out in the open. I take my balances and calipers out of my vest to weigh and measure him. Ordinarily I simply set a turtle back in place after I make my notations, as I always try to stay in the role of observer. But it occurs to me to offer this turtle some water.

  The hatchling has been in a chamber in the sand for more than seventy days, encased in a shell until his recent pipping from the egg and subsequent digging out of the nest. There has been no rain in more than two weeks. His only drinking—if it can be called that—has come from hydration provided by the contents of his mineral-coated eggshell and its absorption of moisture from the sand, replenished at intervals by rain during the protracted incubation period. I take my water bottle out of my backpack and use the plastic cover of the casing that holds my calipers as a shallow dish. I set the turtle down and place the egg-tooth-tipped point of his upper jaw in contact with the water. The instant this seemingly magic touch is made, the hatchling extends his neck full length, immerses his head, closes his eyes, and begins to drink. This turtle has never seen, never tasted, water in this form. But he knows it at once, just as his mother knew at once the sandy terrain she needed when she set out on her first nesting expedition when she was about twenty years old.

  The hatchling's throat shows the slow, steady pumping of his drinking. He is oblivious to everything but water, that medium essential for life—the enormous being that picked him up and carried him off, the suite of instincts and senses that has been guiding his survival, directing that first monumental experience with his natal planet, his nest-to-water journey, even any concept he might have of danger. Nothing but this first full drink of water matters now. Minutes go by. His head is still immersed, his eyes closed, neck fully extended, throat rhythmically pumping. I can feel this turtle's elemental thirst. I come to a deeper understanding of need in the natural world and wonder what limits this outwardly untroubled wanderer had been taken to.

  Having decided to time this long, deep draft, I catch up on my notes while keeping an eye on him. Five minutes go by ... ten ... he does not open his eyes, does not come up for air. After twenty-one unchanging minutes of drinking, the hatchling lifts his head from the water and opens his eyes.

  DANCING TREE

  I WALK LONG, late September shadows again today, and again today light breezes are at play in them. I feel the heated sun in open-field places and in sun-slants among the shadows. I see a young girl dancing. It is the wind in a sapling big-toothed aspen, turning golden leaves over to shimmer with sun reflected from their pale undersides. She dances a moment in an open space, with little bluestem grass bronzing all around and gray goldenrod fading to seed on the sand flats where hatchling wood turtles have departed from their nests. She stands still, a sapling again, just for a moment, and then is dancing leaves once more, a young girl dancing on the restless wind, so supple, swaying and bowing in her circumscribed place in this clear field with crickets singing. As I read these signs of another season (I am old enough now that they seem an ancient personal history), the sun and the sand and the wind in the leaves and the dancing girl who cannot stay, a silent voice within me asks, as it has every autumn since I was a small boy, "Where does the season go?" And then asks the season, "May I go with you?"

  HAWK-STRIKE

  IT IS SO STILL that a red maple leaf touches down on the brook, alights on the slightest curl of one edge, and balances so. When a slight breath of air does stir, the leaf sets off, a small red sail on black water. It glides among bright shapes of sky scattered among the dark shadows that cover most of the surface in the late afternoon. The water is impenetrable to sight save where slants of sunlight find their way into shallows and impart an amber glow. One of these slants strikes the maple leaf, and for a moment it is a flame upon the water. I stand beneath a bower of wild grape, most of whose broad leaves have been eaten to lace, each one a delicate filigree of veins, a skeletal structure describing a leaf that no longer exists.

  Suddenly the all-encompassing calm is broken by a bolt from above. A large hawk, with wings held close against his body and tail compressed, arrows through scant space from somewhere over my right shoulder, nearly grazing me as he streaks low across the brook on a deadly slant through a screen of shrubs to tangles at the base of a large red maple. There is the startling sound of air impacted by the braking of his wings, followed by a return to silence. For almost a full minute I hear nothing, see nothing. Then there is a rush of wing beats, and I glimpse a dusky shape vanishing in the undergrowth. The hawk—I'm quite certain it was a broadwing—has flown off at a level lower than my shoulders. I am struck by how skillfully this large raptor, a far more familiar sight wheeling, wide-winged, high in a great expanse of sky, maneuvers himself through these dense riparian thickets. He must, of course, come down to earth for the consummation of his hunt. Not long after the hawk's disappearance, a cadence sets up along both sides of the brook, up- and downstream: the rhythmic chuckings of chipmunks. As though beating low tribal drums, they signal one another.

  As I heard no cry or sound of struggle, I presumed that the hawk had missed his target. Now I see a most agitated chipmunk zigzagging about on the rough-barked trunk of the red maple, several feet up from where the hawk struck. He chatters wildly. I could think he has a rather exciting tale to tell.

  BROOK TROUT, WOOD TURTLE

  6 OCTOBER. I am a long time standing in the brook, at its edge, along a banking of royal ferns, my feet deep in a drift of leaves in a deadwater. I begin to wonder how many days are left in the year when I can enter the stream. Low in the water, close to the tops of my w
aders, I scan shallows and depths. As though they existed apart from me, my eyes descend to move in and out of shaded and sunlit pockets, root tangles, submerged lodgings of branches and drifts of sunken leaves. As always, my searching has a focus, a target. But as with my peripheral vision, peripheral thought as sumes a guiding role. Beyond the specific objective, nearly always a turtle or some aspect of turtle, there is a broader searching, whose specific object is something I have never been able to perceive, never had any need to know.

  A brook trout appears. I didn't think my entry into the brook and even my motionless surveillance had been stealthy enough that I would suddenly find myself standing beside one of these elusive fish, so quick to vanish at the slightest movement. He was not there, or at least I did not see him, when I first looked in from my foothold atop the bank where, high above the water, my eyes could penetrate the stream more easily. Dark fish-shape, subtle motion, white fin margins, his shadow on the gravelly bottom ... I don't know which I saw first or if all took shape at once. But all of a sudden I am looking at a trout who is almost exactly the color and tone of the sand-and-gravel bottom in the deeper, scoured, midstream channel. A little more than one stride away from my feet, he holds his place in the flow with a barely discernible undulation of his body and steadying of fins. From directly above, as he would be seen from a kingfisher's perch, he is no more than amber-olive movement in an amber-olive streaming. Trout suspended in, surrounded by, water ever flowing by, as I am suspended in, surrounded by, time ever moving on.

  I turn my head to look at a small green frog who appears and disappears among floating and sunken leaves at the edge of the brook. When I look back, the trout is gone. A green darner, perhaps the year's last dragonfly, rattles over the swirling surface on wings beginning to tatter.

  I pull myself up out of the water onto the bank, move upstream a bit, then step back down into the water just above the holdfast of a great royal fern mound. I set my right foot on the cobbled streambed and my left against the firm banking. Thus anchored, and steadied by one hand on my wading staff, I bend low to the surface and once again let my sight adjust and descend, to unravel the forms in the brook.

  Almost immediately a pattern appears directly below me: fine ochery striations radiating somewhat symmetrically over the umber plates of a wood turtle's shell. This time it is not a defining bit of outline but the markings on the shallow central dome of a carapace, whose margins I cannot see, that reveal the turtle to me. Through a long coevolutionary history, this shell with its shadowy ground cast and unique markings has been designed by its surroundings to be part of, indistinguishable from, them. It is another of those living patterns that has been shaped by its chances of letting its bearer go unseen. I read just enough order to differentiate the pattern from the randomness in which it is set. The turtle's camouflage, deceptively simple, has been orchestrated to fit a far more complicated suite of surroundings and circumstances than those of the trout, for the camouflage must function wet or dry, in terrestrial and aquatic environments.

  The brook trout has been designed by broken surface water, striations of sunlight in clear and tannic streams, and the gold and glitter of sand and gravel; the wood turtle, by all of these as well as by alder leaves and pine needles, wet or dry; shadows and flecks of sunlight in water or on land; dark, moist riparian earth; tangles of grass, goldenrod, and brambles; and screens of flood-drifted branches. With unfathomable complexity over time too deep to truly comprehend, species have been and are continuing to be shaped by each other and their environments and by the terms of existence brought to bear by the nonliving forces that govern their contemporary Earth. The continuity of this shaping and reshaping extends beyond the extinction of forms, body plans, and ways of being, as though all of life were one single determined mind, and each species that comes and goes were a different idea, directed toward persistence in a realm of constant change.

  I reach into the brook, soaking the sleeve I cannot roll up far enough and immersing the lower right half of my vest. My face nearly in the water, I can see nothing. Shoulder-deep, I feel for the turtle with my numbing hand. Even in this cold water my fingers know the differences between roots and stones and turtle shells. I find the edge of the carapace and pull the turtle to the surface. His sculpted, stream-wet shell is, though earth-toned and subtle overall, rich with color: mahogany and lighter browns flecked with pale gold. The washes of brilliant red-orange on his neck and legs rival the spectral colors on the fins and sides of the brook trout. His wet black head glistens, and the gold ring of his wild eye gleams as it regards me. I quickly note the marks that identify this long-familiar, lord-of-the-waterway male and let him slip back into the stream. As he vanishes in patterns of swirling water and streambed colors, I wonder at those gold-ringed eyes of turtle and trout. What interpretations have they made of the world they share but have inhabited so differently since glaciers traced rivers and streams in a vast planet and filled them with the silver of ever-flowing water?

  WADING ALDER BROOK

  Water gives life to ten thousand things and does not strive.

  It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao.

  —Lao Tzu

  WADING ALDER BROOK, I search a steep, west-facing bank, just upstream from Willow Dam. The high, nearly perpendicular slope rises twenty feet or so above the brook. At its downstream base beavers built this dam but abandoned it long ago. A tenacious line of black willows, alder, and silky dogwood colonized it, winding a massive network into the mud-plastered woody structure, reinforcing and eventually replacing the dam with a turfy embankment that is breached by spring's unruly spates, whose silver cascades bring life to a cutoff stream section. But in low-water autumn this natural levee deflects a steady slide of water through alder lowlands.

  In scanning the mesmerizing play of light and shadow upon the brook and all along its banks, I feel as though I have a glimpse into the soul of the season. Set against the bank's slope, my own silhouette is alive with wavering lights, golden shimmerings in a slow-moving black shadow-shape. These rippling threads are sunlight tossed from a wind-ruffled quiet backwater just off the channel's more enlivened run, where water striders serenely glide. I see that the flickering reflections can come to light only in shadow. On the radiant slope of the sun-struck stream bank, they are invisible, lights dissolved in lights. Strewn with fallen leaves bleached of their autumn brilliance, the high banking has become a glowing ocher wall, a tabula rasa for watery writing.

  Within every shadow, from that of the slenderest wisp of dried sedge to those of the infinitely branched debris of former floods and broader stems of standing alder and the one I cast myself (the largest among these), there is a ceaseless wavering of amber-gold webbings of light cast by flowing and windblown water. I move, and the lights move with me, glimmering wherever my shadow goes. I cannot catch them in my hand, but I can shift them about by playing the shadow of my hand over the stream bank and place them

  where I will. It is as though the brook's reflections pass through me, pass through fallen trees and tumbled ferns. Sunlight and shadows, wind and water: at this late afternoon hour in deepening autumn the world becomes translucent, immaterial.

  OXBOW MEANDER

  Often on impulse, I walk out by myself:

  Magnificent scenes, I alone know;

  Walk to the source of the stream

  And sit down to watch clouds rise.

  —Wang Wei

  THE SUN is so low at this hour that it is all but impossible to look to the west, and I trail a long shadow as I make my way to the oxbow meander. Wood turtles at times take the last low sun of the year along its west-facing bank before entering the stream for their long overwintering. As I descend to the brook I see that a large red maple in the floodplain swamp has gone down, a casualty of yesterday's windstorm. This enormous windthrow obliges the deer to take another route among the ferns. And so it obliges me, as I borrow their new trail, a replacement of the former well-worn path that led me qu
ietly and fairly easily to a ford in the stream. The tree's great tipped-up roothold has left a crater that seems destined to become flooded next spring, forming a vernal pool that may well be appropriated by wood frogs and spotted salamanders for their breeding.

  The last warm days of autumn draw me to this place at the fading light of late afternoon in the evening of the year as does the breaking forth of spring, with its dazzling new light in the morning of the year. As fall moves on toward winter and the leaves begin to thin, the low shafts of light that are allowed to touch the stream and its banks become a deeply evocative testimonial to the turning of the year. Everything they touch is graced by a near-miracle radiance in the immediate landscape. The water is low and completely still, as it generally is at this time of year. The brook rests. The wild surges of March around the oxbow bend have been forgotten. Or remembered only, I see, in the swirls of grass and sedge and drifts of flood wrack, interwoven strewings of branches, stems, leaves, and vines that perfectly trace the course and mark the height of the flood that swept through the shrub thickets of the higher bank. In this artful-seeming arrangement of the wreckage of spring spates, as if the brook had left them here for the purpose, the wood turtles do their final sun worshipping of the year.