WRITING APRIL

1 APRIL. The crowns of the royal fern mounds have melted free, but they are islands of pale ocher and sienna (warm in color and in what they collect from the sun), outposts of thaw in the encircling acres of ice and mounds of snow that still prevail throughout the great alder carr.

Winds, strong and chill, stir that familiar, near-at-hand rustling in the dry sedges, as though something with more substance than wind were moving through them. Distant low roar in the upland pines beyond the swamp. Not long ago I heard a few red-winged blackbird calls, distant and windblown, coming from the border of the brook.

***

Woodcocks know the snow's first melting away from the bases of alder mounds, the slightest openings achieved by upwelling groundwater and seeps in the alder carr and aspen thickets; all of life is intimately attuned to the narrowest of margins.

Deer tracks are set in the footprints I left in the lingering snowpack at the edge of the swamp yesterday. I so often take to deer trails; here one has taken to mine, step for step.

Wading among the sallows, a broad swath of just-overhead-high willow shoots at the outer edge of the deeply flooded alder swamp, I see a pair of black ducks leave silver streaks on the dark water as they stealthily, silently glide out of sight. Secure in the same screening blur of emergent shrubs, the ducks, of a species that is ever alert and seems to be always on edge, do not burst into the air in wild-winged flight, their almost invariable reaction upon catching sight of me. Losing myself among the countless fine branches, I enter one of those watery thickets in which everything but the present moment and place is brushed away from me. I can feel myself disappearing. My awareness shifts to the pliant stems immediately surrounding me.

As my focus turns to the just-emerging catkins, their bud scales and leaf buds still pressed tight against lustrous stems, I become seeing eyes and touching hands only. A

Sallows.

song sparrow sings and I become listening ears as well. In the maze of wandlike branches above the floodwater, runoff, and melted snow that have escaped the banks of the brook to inundate this hollow, I read the supple growth of the willows, stem by stem. As they assume the colors of quickening life, they vary within their own species and among the three or so species that grow here. Some stems are green-gold, streaked with a sheen of sunlight. Others are gray-green, a rich umbered purple, or dull ocher-green mottled with a smoky charcoal gray. The tiny leaf scales range from greens to carmine.

The scales of the flower buds respond to the season. Some have almost imperceptibly separated from their branches to show tips of fine white silk. Others have opened almost fully to unveil soft catkins—pewter gray, silver, ivory white. The scales that have sheltered these flower buds through the winter fall away as I brush among their stems. Willow catkins—first flowers of thaw in the shrub swamps and along the borders of brooks, belonging to the wind and water of winter's fitful transition to spring, nascent in a newborn season, open to wild pollinators.

I begin to wade out of the alder carr. My left foot has gone numb. The wind has abated, and red-winged blackbirds have advanced into the alder thickets. Their evensongs ring clearly in my ears. A mourning dove's plaintive calls descend from a high pine on the upland ridge. I hear Canada geese trumpeting but cannot make them out against the low sunlit sky to the west. As I scan for them, I hear that familiar rain of twittering, then see a flock of tree swallows wheeling directly overhead. A great blue heron departed from the marsh beyond the alder lowlands as I entered them, and on my way here I heard a phoebe and a robin. In leaving the shrub carr I cut a wand of beaked hazelnut on which the tassels have lengthened in the time since I walked in. The threadlike, bright magenta tips of the female flowers are showing, familiar signs that the season has come back in a day.

It will be a while before I see the next spotted turtle or the first vernal-pool amphibians. Cold, blustery winds and a dusting of snow in the night. North by northwest winds are blowing a smoke of snow from the high white pines. A cardinal sings, but it is cold, a winter's-edge day in early April sun, the sky a hard, cold blue.

Water-murmur and the distant evening song of a robin. The high crowns of the pussy willow thicket have come into full bloom. The sun has slipped behind the western hills as unrelenting winds bring a snow squall down from the mountain. The snow melts upon touching the stream bank, dissolves as it swirls into the brook.

***

The run of chill, wind-blasted days and nights of hard frost continues. There is no sun. Sharp-toothed winds whistle along the little silver-running brook that divides the gray-trunked, low, level expanse of the red maple swamp, gray trunks accentuated by the muted yet radiant gray-green glowing of lichens in a time of cool, abundant moisture. The maples rock and clatter together on high, where a few first flowers open. Several trees reach up from each stump left after the last cutting in the swamp. Ancient roots, perennial enough to seem eternal, could send up new sprouts following cuttings by man or beaver every year for decades until, left alone for a time, they become trees again and re-claim their forest.

As I approach the grassy vernal pool in the late afternoon, I hear a deafening chorus of wood frogs and peep frogs ringing out. Within this ear-impacting din I can make out the rollicking splash of the wood frogs. The power of the midday sun working on water in mid-April: when I passed by here just four and a half hours ago I heard only a few tentative calls. Now those isolated eruptions that seemed to be questions have been answered. I wade among the wood frogs as they leap and roll through the deeper trench just out from the emergent winterberry thicket, their traditional site for depositing two enormous communal egg masses each spring. The frogs do not perform their customary multitude-in-unison disappearing act; they have become too aroused by their own inner fire—perhaps a strange concept, since they are deemed in human terms "cold-blooded"—and by the heat of the season to pay any heed to my approach or my stationary looming over them. But they do take immediate notice as a bittern wings low over their orgy. This consummate frog predator, who can rise up out of nowhere even when there appears to be no standing cover, puts them down in an instant, abruptly silencing their tumult. The peep frogs shrill on. I imagine the bittern has been feeding well on the incautious male wood frogs. They will soon get their wits about them and resume their silent and secretive ways. For now they are the image and sound of wild abandon at the "at-last" breaking of spring.

Late in the day a robin sings incessantly, and a mourning dove calls repeatedly from the dense pine stand above the alder carr. Only the faintest sunlight shows in the alders, as the sun is about to disappear in the hazy sky, dropping beneath the pines of the low western horizon. It is breathless here, but as so often happens, I hear the wind in the high white pines to the east. Now robins call from roundabout, their distant, lilting song to the sun's setting and rising. Piercing even from across this great alder swamp, the calls of the red-winged blackbirds mingle with those of the robins. Sapling red maples here and there among the alders spike the maroon-gray thickets with sharp red, the color of April's coming to life. This, the time of the red maple flowering, is the best time here and throughout the swamps and river floodplains, along the brooks and streams, wherever water stands or flows. After all these years I try to fill up on this signal moment, but there is no keeping it. It always comes to this: I can only return, again and again, and be here in this too-brief time. The temperature drops quickly, sharply, with the setting of the sun.

I don't think I've ever heard a more massive—if this word can be applied to sound—chorusing of wood frogs and spring peepers. It pulses directly into the skull, one has no need of ears. Standing in the full brunt of it, I feel that I risk hearing impairment. What it does to the mind, the heart, is my kind of maddening ... no, my kind of wildening.

The ringing in my ears fades as I move away, but I walk from chorus to chorus; just as I move out of range of hearing the wood frogs, and as the peep frogs become faint, I pick up the outer fringe of the same heart-gladdening communal crescendo from the vernal pool by the boglike border of the marsh. It is exhilarating to enter into the full sweet fury of this singing and have it fall away as I leave it behind, only to pick up another, ahead in the cranberry—sweet gale meadow that is my destination. To live in a landscape where one could never outwalk the wild callings of spring...