Following the Water

by David M. Carroll

  And here I find a turtle who has been doing just that. A young one has evidently been settled here for a while; several red maple leaves, let loose in the still air to spiral down from the high canopy, have landed on his carapace and stayed there, obscuring him all the more. The shadow from the high bank across the stream has crept over him as well. But the air is warmer than the water, and it appears that he will linger on the bank before returning to the stream, which, though only thirty-seven degrees, will be warmer than the air when the temperature falls below freezing in the night.

  I find no other turtles—significantly, no adults—in this place that for so many years has yielded me many of my final sightings of the year. This could well be a reflection of the toll taken by the otter predation of last winter. I have unprecedented and unwelcome tallies among my notes for this season: I have, by way of four shells I found after discovering that first lifeless wood turtle at thaw, documented five fatalities. I know the seasonal movement patterns of at least half a dozen adults whom I would have expected to encounter this season but have not. And in addition to the known dead and those I have failed to come upon, who could well have succumbed to otter attacks, I have recorded upward of thirty turtles who have lost from half a leg to one or two entire legs.

  And yet, in an alder- and meadowsweet-thicketed stream reach a quarter of a mile downstream from the confluence of two brooks, the unusually populous wood-turtle center on which I have focused, I found four intact individuals, perfect to the tips of their tails. Because this site is in active farmland, I rarely go there. But I wanted to compare its wood-turtle status with that of the area of heavy impact. I cannot count this as a definitive survey, but I certainly have to consider that the predation may have been quite localized.

  And perhaps episodic as well, if considered as an outbreak set in at least several decades of minimal predation. (Many of the adult turtles I have recorded were more than twenty years old when I began to observe this colony.) Space and time are clearly factors—I would say critical factors—in the coexistence of wood turtles and otters over millennia, an ongoing dynamic with so many variables and interactions and a complexity that may well be ultimately indecipherable.

  Seeing, which I found so difficult upon my arrival, becomes nearly impossible as I follow a turn in the brook and face into the sun. Except in the shadows of the trees I am absolutely blinded. I see better after the sun drops below a ridge of white pines to the west. Then, as light begins to slip away altogether and I make my way from the brook, I gather pale kindling in the pine grove, smooth fallen branches from which all bark has sloughed. As I leave, as darkness deepens in the riparian landscape, a mood deepens in me of days growing shorter and the year ending. These transitions color me, as they have since my first boyhood wanderings, with a vague melancholy, even as they tinge the leaves of the streamside maples with an exuberant brilliance. I think back to a time long past when other brooks, now lost, ran wild, and I followed. Night comes on with its first small scattering of stars, and I forget what it was I was trying not to remember.

  FALLEN BUCK

  18 OCTOBER. Walking up the autumn brook, I come upon a dead buck, a white-tailed deer lying on the mixed leaf-strewn and open mud of the bank. My eyes have been so intent on the water, and he is so well camouflaged—and so still in death—that as large as he is I nearly step on him before I see him. I have come close at times to living deer and have found several dead ones, in advanced decay or little more than bits of fur and bones; but I have never seen such a vision as this. Handsome in death, fallen somehow in his prime, he lies in a lifelike pose. His fur flows over his body with the grace of water flowing over stones in the nearby brook. His large ears—so large—which in life could

  pick up the slightest whispers of distant sound, do not hear the rushing of the water just beyond his muzzle. He would make a perfect statue of a deer in gentle stride if I were to right him. His hindquarters have been eaten at slightly ... there is some fresh blood and small scatterings of hair. I take this as the work of scavengers and not what brought him down. Even with these signs of inevitable dissolution at his flanks he is so fresh and appears dignified in death.

  As I admire his form and attempt to commit it to memory—the sweep of gray, silvered, light fawn fur over his wonderful rib cage—his sides seem about to heave with breath. His large, wild shape and substance, in which a heart so wildly beat not long ago, still speak of life.

  I circle around him, looking from every angle, and each view describes a perfection of form and function. I see how the antlers he soon would have shed are securely set in his head, their footings reminiscent of a tree's rootedness in the earth. His antlers branch forth with a treelike twisting. Taking the antlers in my hands—I never would have expected to have such a tangible hold on a deer, such a physical bond—I rock them and discover a surprising flexibility. I raise his head and part of his muscular neck, lighter and more supple than I would have thought. It seems his eyes are about to blink, his nostrils twitch and snort. As I shift his head about, I feel as though I could raise him entire, lift him to his feet, and set him to run wild again ... as though I could even run wild with him, leap the brook with a single bound and run like a deer through the woods.

  I gently lower his head and neck and settle them precisely back in the impression they have left in the semifrozen, leaf-lined brook-side turf, the shallow cradling depression where cheek and jaw rested (did the last of his animal warmth help shape it?) and walk on up the stream.

  BROKEN GLASS

  5 NOVEMBER. I see gleamings in the brook as I look into clear, chill water sliding over stones and cobble, gravel and sand, the streambed on which the wood turtles have settled as they begin to wait out another long winter. I find here one of the "books in running brooks" of which Shakespeare wrote, perhaps the one great book for me, one I never tire of trying to read. Now that successions of hard frost, cold rains, and wild late autumn winds have stripped the alders and silky dogwood of all their leaves, the stream is flooded with sunlight, except in runs through flats of white pine and along slopes of hemlock. Far more lit up than in deeply shaded summer, it is mostly a course through leafless miles, its water filled with light even as the sun traces its low, edge-of-winter arc in the sky.

  I could count the cobblestones that are magnified by this crystal streaming: dark stones and light and some that glint or give off a sheen when viewed from the right angle, mica, quartz, and feldspar. Something shines golden in the sand. Even if it were gold it would be but one more mineral among the many here. Raw or minted into coins, gold has no value in the economy of this wild-running stream. Only time can be spent here; it is the currency of the seasons and their workings, and all that one can ever spend here. The gleam of a gold nugget would signal no more value on the bottom of this stream than that of the soft, lustrous light given off by feldspar, the most common mineral on earth.

  A spark of green arrests my eye. No emerald, a splinter from a shattered bottle catches a slant of sunlight. How has broken glass come to lie in a streambed this far from human habitations? The last earthly lights to mark that we were here on this planet, which we have illuminated to the point of fairly glowing in the dark of endless space, may be those cast by broken glass: brilliant sunsparks, bits of moon gleam, faint flickers of starlight, all reflections of the one original light.

  BOUNDARY MARKER

  AS I TURN toward the brook I am stunned by a sign. It is not the kind of sign that I am ever on the lookout for, ever trying to read on the earth, in the water, among the plants. This is a human designation, a small rectangular boundary marker nailed to a tree and bearing the initials of a land trust. I knew this was coming, but I had no way to prepare myself for it. And I knew it would go hard for me, but I am surprised by the depth of my reaction, physical and mental, to this symbol. It is almost enough to turn me back, send me home. What will be regarded by nearly everyone as a conservation victory, a cause for celebration, I can see only as loss and sorrow.
I had tried to steer this change in another direction, beyond conservation to preservation.

  This landscape, an extensive mosaic of contiguous wetland, riparian, and upland elements, all embracing a lingering wildness and extraordinary biodiversity, possesses an ecological integrity that, in the face of the global loss and marginalization of habitats, becomes rarer by the hour. It seemed for a time that it could go differently here, that this place could be exempted even from the intrusion of "passive" recreation, which takes its own toll on wildness and brings pressures to bear on the functioning of a natural ecosystem. But I did see all the familiar signs pointing to this outcome. And now I see that this has become a marked place.

  It is all but universally believed that if development rights are bought up and motorized vehicles excluded, if human presence is limited to foot traffic, dogs on leashes, mountain bikes, kayaks, and the like, a parcel of land is saved and its wildlife habitat protected. But in nearly every case, as will be true here, funding sources and the terms of easements mandate a level of access and recreational use that lays the foundation not for true habitat protection but for a playground for people, a human theme park.

  A constant refrain of my advocacy for moving beyond stewardship and conservation to preservation is that I do support setting aside places where people can go, from relatively natural areas to city parks. One frequently hears that there are not enough places for people to go. But where do we not go? We are too many and we tread too heavily. (Perhaps the planet is to blame for being too small.) What tiny percentage of Earth is irrevocably dedicated to providing wildlife sanctuary, to preserving the biodiversity on which, as more people are gradually coming to realize, the health of the planet and, ultimately, of the human condition utterly depends? We cannot seem to allow room for ecosystems to play out their destinies free from human intervention. A room of its own is biodiversity's only requirement.

  There is talk of a "nature-deficit disorder," the deleterious physical and emotional consequences of people's alienation from nature. The cure for this, as I have seen it addressed in various forums, tends to be simply getting out of the house and away from electronic pastimes. To this end, state parks are opened free of charge and present games such as "nature hunts" for children, and families are encouraged to provide their young with trampolines in winter and water pistols in summer. The distinction between "outside"—open spaces and multi-use conservation lands—and true preserves that provide sanctuary for ecologies becomes blurred and is ultimately lost. In this confusion the "natural" that remains in the landscape literally loses more and more ground and, with that, its meaning. It is nature that suffers from nature-deficit disorder.

  A relationship, if not an outright union, with nature has always been and always will be fundamental to the human spirit. But this connection, which has become so profoundly frayed in the modern world, must not be made at nature's expense. Earth cannot be expected to—and in fact simply cannot—bear the weight of a human population approaching seven billion and growing at the rate of some ninety million a year.

  I walk past the metal marker and cross the brook. I had a premonition the last time I was out here when I saw a young wood turtle at the edge of a stream bank, in what was likely his final basking of the year, that I might be saying goodbye for more than a winter. I have seen this scenario play out before and have been compelled to move to more remote landscapes. But the world of the turtle species I have known runs out of farther landscapes. I see the clear possibility of my personal history with this wetlandscape—a long and intimate one—coming to an end.

  As always, at the close of another season, I look to the thaw beyond the coming winter. I try again to reconcile myself to the fact that the fate of such places is up to the workings of deeper time, nature's own processes. The turtles, and all that they have come to represent for me, will have to endure. Spring will come again, and I will have to find a way to be there. My goodbye has always been until thaw.

  As I cross the brook, I see spans of thin ice here and there on still edgewaters against the bank. This inevitable annual event somehow catches me by surprise every time. It is an undeniable signal of the year's passing. The waters of the fen at the north end of this wetland complex and the marsh beyond it are still open, but featherings of ice have begun to spread over the sphagnum shallows. It is so silent here today. Is it because there are no more insects to sing? The occasional stirrings of a bitingly chill wind are none the warmer for having passed over the glacial pond set in the heart of this wetland expanse. The wind makes no sound in its passing and seems to render the silence all the more striking. In every sense of the word the year is quieting.

  I wade into the great alder carr beyond the fen. There is a glazing of ice in the shallows, perfectly clear windows that I am sorry to shatter in my wading. For a time I shatter the silence as well, with sharp, crystalline sounds; then I wade to open water again and the day continues breathlessly still. The low sun is a white disk in a smoked-glass sky: altostratus translucidus clouds. Ice, poised to march out over the open water in the night, rings the royal fern and alder mounds. I do not know if there will be one more mild spell; it is possible this will be the first and final closing over. The turtles may not move for half a year. If they stir at all, it will be beneath the ice. A couple of calls come from crows over distant pines, and then the profound silence returns.