FOLLOWING THE WATER

That flowing water! My mind wanders across it.
That broad water! My mind wanders across it.
That old age water! That flowing water! My mind
wanders across it.

—"Myth of the Mountaintop Way," Navajo poem

RAIN UPON RAIN at the outset of April, spits of snow, slants of sleet; the season advances with warm rains, then holds in place with snow squalls and cold downpours, drisk, and drizzle. But spring does not turn back. It moves on with Earth's shift to that more favorable inclination toward the sun and increasing increments of light, a planet turning in its circumscribed track in space, its reined revolving within a yearly circling of the star it travels with, constant for a time in the cosmos. Snowmelt from winter's final caches, held in the prolonged cold embrace of hemlock stands and north-facing slopes, joins the runoff of rain. The earth is saturated. Not even the evaporation brought about by April breezes and the heavy uptake by bud-swelling plants can diminish the water. Upland hills that will be leaf-rustlingly dry by the summer solstice are so sodden that they could nearly pass for swamps.

Water is on the move, not only in the ever-flowing cuts and channels of perennial streams and rivers but in flashing silver runs so ephemeral that they rarely come to life outside of this season of abundant rain. It seems these intermittent streams need to be fed hourly. Their sources will be the first to give out as the last of the melting snow is exhausted and the frequent rains of spring drop off. They will lie as waterless traces, their slender cuts among roots and rocks on the forest floor, lined with fallen leaves, implying the glimmering runs that will not return until autumn rains or something on the order of a hurricane's deluge springs them back to life for a late-season race. Everywhere traveling onward, water seeps through the soil and slides over the impermeable underlying bedrock. At this turning point in the year it appears willful and restless, seeking places in which to pool, only to escape and flow on, as though possessed of the same zugunruhe, the migratory restlessness that is so strong in animate life at thaw. Here, inland and earthbound, water appears intent upon finding its way back to the ocean, back to the clouds, the sources from which it came.

I enter the dense emergent thickets of silky dogwood, silky willow, winterberry, and alder, with song sparrows singing and swamp sparrows trilling, and wade to the sun-flooded southern end of the vernal pool to look in on the islandlike masses of wood-frog eggs. In clearest water I see developing tadpoles twitching in the transparent medium from which they will be born. On the verge of hatching, they too pulse with an eagerness to move on, an innate evolutionary impatience arising from the fact that their natal water will not be here forever. One might think, upon looking into the overflowing pool today, that there would never be a time without water here. Yet the drying out always does take place, and in some years it can come with surprising suddenness, dooming the tadpoles who must become frogs before the water is gone.

Nothing is stagnant in April. Even isolated catchments tremble, as though the water in them is anxious to leap back into the air. The pool's surface vibrates, its quivering tension shimmers with sunlight. Unable to contain its vernal bounty, this broad seasonal pond releases a gently murmuring spill at the lowest point in its rim, an overflow that presses on to lower-lying wetlands. In this shallow slide of water I encounter another stream, a living tide that moves against the flow. An upstream migration of mayfly larvae, a solid insect caravan uniformly five or six individuals wide, twists in a long column along the margins of the spillway. This determined procession has a single intent: to reach the pool that is divined to be at the source of this streamlet, the seasonal pond that will last long enough to allow their metamorphosis into adult mayflies, with wings that will lift them from the water for their brief last lives in the air.

Larvae line each side of the outflow, hugging its borders, wriggling, undulating. They are sorted by size, with the smallest at the landward edge, the largest closest to the central stream, some cuts of which, though only an inch or two deep, are channeled into currents too swift for the larvae to swim against. At frequent intervals, both large and small individuals lose their hold in the navigable edgewaters and are swept back the way they came, until they curl against the edge again and find a lodging place from which to take up their arduous journey anew, falling into place in the upstream-inching column with near-military precision. Insects and water travel their respective ways. Time and place are graphically measured in these two tides, one living, the other nonliving. They both appear to be possessed of destinies. Resolute, but so small—one quarter to three quarters of an inch—the dislodged larvae face significant setbacks; but there can be no turning back.

Though varying in size, all the larvae appear to be of the same species. They are generally the first living things I see moving in the frigid waters at the initial opening of the ice each year, when the division between ice and water is reduced to its finest point, a pinpoint in temperature, on one side of which is ice, on the other, water. A metamorphosis in the physical universe that has a profound influence on all living things on Earth takes place at this all but immeasurable dividing line. My first sightings of these living, streaming mayfly larvae often occur through windows of thinnest ice. In near-stationary backwaters or gentle drifts, they undulate through the water column. At this seasonal moment they have come to a common direction and advance along a watery labyrinth among the wetland niches that exists only during flood times. Living mats of larvae edge their way along lingering ice or wriggle up films of water so thin that they are no more than a glistening on the saturated earth.

Many of the larvae are intercepted by other seasonal migrants, returning red-winged blackbirds and their companion grackles, who know the times and places of such abundant prey. Robins, attuned to this insect phenomenon, become wading birds for a time and feed on the teeming larvae, which are compelled by the current to run a gauntlet of shallows that barely cover their backs. But they are legion. Enough of them will reach the pool to fill the air above and all around at their moment of metamorphosis, perhaps no more than two weeks away.

I take the water's course and go with the drift, with water barely moving, running little races, or standing still for a time, as it threads over and pools upon the land. At spring flood, water is at its fullest capacity for connecting the varied elements of the wetland mosaic I wade each year. It unites compartments that will later become individual isolated pools or channels and wet meadows whose surface water will inevitably fall away as rainy spring gives way to droughty summer. The unifying water of flood season is the medium that links me with all wetland niches, serving as my entrance into the wetlandscape and my conduit through it, my guide to the places of the plants and animals living within it.

Following the water, I walk glimmering traces into a dense maze of alders, morning alders still silver-beaded with rain that fell in the night. They have yet to leaf out, but their lengthening maroon and gold tassels are one of my measures of the awakening season's progress. Little more than a surface film, the water in this alder carr is so shallow that I cannot truly say I wade it. Twenty-five feet into the alder thickets, the outlet from the great vernal pool joins an intermittent stream at its turning to the south after a long descent from a steep, boulder-studded hill to the east. The stream's life, like that of the seasonal pond, is timed to the abundance of rain and snow. Because it has its origins in a spring and because spring is the season of its most essential running, I call it Spring Brook.

I look down this avenue of water, one of the most familiar faces of April: a surface sheen of white clouds and blue sky, crowded all along its margins by alders and silky dogwood; a length of water alive with wavering lights and black snakings of reflected alder stems; a passage of thirty yards or so through screens of warm gray laced with linear reds, the near alder and dogwood, to where it becomes lost in the maroon-gray maze of farther thickets. I take the day and its water and follow them into the season. Moving eastward, I wade into the morning and begin to track the day in the face of the trajectory of the sun that measures its passing. I cannot help but see the entrance that lies before me as an invitation. It is existence as invitation, as an entrance into an existence opening up before my own. In the blur of the stream, the alders, and the sky, time itself becomes a blur and I go with water that leads back to the past, on to the future ... timeless water.

For twenty-five years I have been coming here to follow this same route of springtime waters. This is hardly a geological time frame, but I marvel at the constancy I witness. The water returns to retrace and reclaim its longtime runnings, slow flood drifts, and poolings. The alders hold their place. Nearing their time of metamorphosis, migratory mayfly larvae move against the stream, down which many wood-frog tadpoles will soon travel. Upstream migrants that in the past few days have begun to return for the season of the vernal pool include green frogs, bullfrogs, and spotted turtles. Individual spotted turtles have been making spring pilgrimages up this watery corridor far longer than I have, some perhaps for a century. Their species has inhabited the channels and pools of this wetland system (fewer and fewer remain that are this extensive and interconnected) since the retreat of the glaciers that carved its topography in the landscape more than a millennium ago. I wonder just how many generations of these turtles have made the journey upstream to the vernal pool at spring's flood-rich awakening, then back downstream at summer's advent and the time of low water. When did that first traveler to follow the retreat of the glaciers—there had to have been a first—head blazed with orange, jet shell adorned with a constellation of bright yellow spots, move up this clear flow so new to the world? I think of such firsts, so incomprehensible. I do not like to think of lasts.

I pass a small chain of alder mounds a little higher than all the others, where every April wood anemones bow and bloom, reflected in the moats of clear water that accompany their flowering time. Like the vernal pools and so many seasonally flooded wetlands, this shrub swamp could appear somewhat tenuous, even transient. One could take an impression of impermanence from an overview of alder and sapling red maple and the comings and goings of its shallow water. And yet year after year the water returns, and the shrub carr persists. It is the water, however slight and seasonal, that shapes and keeps this wetland for its time.

At the confluence of the spill from the vernal pool and Spring Brook I come to the first of two depressions in which the water I follow expands and lingers before its eventual entrance into and dissolution in the broad wetland mosaic, an interspersion of wet meadows, fens, marshes, shrub swamps, and swamps along the stream's course. This marshy pool is only seven strides across, perhaps a foot deep, set on eight inches of gripping muck. This is too deep and wet even for alders and sensitive fern; the pool has been colonized by reed canary grass, its seeds washed down from the vernal pool or transported on the backs of turtles, frogs, and salamanders. Long, intensely green, wavering strands of filamentous algae fill the narrow cut of the central channel, which the seasonal flow evidently keeps free of the entrenching reed grass. The algae form thick mats throughout the grassy zones as well. This pool, too, is alive with mayfly larvae. Here, given a comparative ocean to navigate, they appear aimless in their swimming to and fro; but eventually, individually and collectively, they fall in line at the head of the pool and, intent upon some higher water, the great majority join the formal procession traveling against the current. Some stay here until their time of transformation—or is it later arrivals from downstream sources that I see emerge from this minute pond as winged adults, joining those who rise at the same hour from the vernal pool?

Over the seasons, certain days and times, not fixed dates on any human calendar, are my own holidays, constants within the season's variables: the Opening of the Water; the Migration of the Mayfly Larvae; the Return of the Red-winged Blackbirds; the Arrival of the Frogs and Salamanders; the Time of Spotted Turtles Migrating; the Dance of the Mayflies; and, tightly cued to this, the Return of the Tree Swallows ... So many, the litany goes on throughout the sequence of the seasons, to times of departures and the Turning of the Red Maple Leaves; the First Thin Ice; First Snowfall; the Long Winter Quiet. These are my holy days, set in the calendar of the seasons. Though regulated by the sun and the moon and the spinning of Earth, they are not limited to any twenty-four-hour period; there is no affixing a number to them. I mark these times as I see them with a common denominator: "Again."

I move on with the water sliding by. It is only at this time of year, and only along this particular intermittent stream, that I literally follow the water. I must walk east into the sun, which makes it hard to see. And wading with the current stirs up obscuring clouds of mud that billow ahead of me. Although this is no swift current, it exceeds my deliberate pace, which is broken up by many lingering pauses. Almost invariably I plan my routes so that I go west and

Study of reed canary grass.

upcurrent in the morning, east and upcurrent in the afternoon. These routes greatly enhance my chances of seeing before being seen. But during this time of water moving everywhere, and migration, I make this downstream journey day after day. The season and my sense of place compel me to go the way the water flows—a sentiment reinforced by the likelihood that I will, more days than not, intercept a spotted turtle or two traveling toward me.

My eyes are challenged by the bright reflected light of the sun thrown off by the water. Overcast days are worse, even with the sun at my back, for the mirror of sky glare is constant from any angle. I tried wearing polarized sunglasses, but water and light, surface and interior depths, became even more confusing. And the smoky lenses put me at a remove from near and distant landscapes. Somehow even sparrows and warblers singing at my ear seemed farther away. I lost something of the immediacy of my own wading feet and felt as though I were traveling in a bus with tinted windows. I have difficulty with binoculars as well. Although they are necessary at times in order to make a specific turtle identification, my eyes do not take well to them, and I am seldom in a situation that grants long-range sightings anyway. In order to really see, I need unaided eyes.

Over the course of more than fifty years of wading wetlands, my eyes have become specialized, adapted to seeing into the water, penetrating its reflective surface, reading its interior depths and the mazes of vegetation within it, the leaf packs, branch tangles, mud, sand, cobble, and stone beneath. My artist wife, who often paints swamps and marshes, urges me to put more blue into my own watercolors of wetlands. I reply that when I look at water I never really see blue. Perhaps because I am nearly always in the water, not looking at it from above, I see black and white, amber-gold, bronze, and dark tea. Often I see no color at all, only transparency; I see the things within the water as though they were suspended in thin air.

One time when we were both looking into the grassy vernal pool in early spring, my wife remarked on the brilliant, intense blues on the water, made all the more blue by its framing of straw gold reed canary grass. At that point I suddenly saw the color, reflected bits of sky scattered about the pool. As I squinted to keep my focus on the surface I saw blue everywhere: a dazzling Byzantine mosaic of cobalt, lapis lazuli, cerulean, and ultramarine. After a while, though, I had to make a visual adjustment in order to see into the water again.

On another occasion, when I took my wife on a wade into the bewildering blendings of water and growth, reflections and penetrations of light, overhanging and submerged tangles and sprays of grass, sedge, and shrub, she found it virtually impossible to make out a pair of spotted turtles in courtship who were oblivious to us as they moved about at our feet.

"One rarely gets such a good look at them," I whispered.

She said, "I would never find turtles."

In an atmosphere of warmth and light that is still new to the season, a remembered dream I get to relive one more time, I continue along Spring Brook. A soft sheen of sunlight, warm in color, warm to the feel, reflects from dry leaves strewn over wet earth and from the smooth or speckled bark of endless stems and branches. It is not sharply focused and blinding, like light off snow or water, but an ambient, mesmerizing glow. Here and there along the brook's low banks are vibrant accents of yellow-green where sphagnum moss fills wet hollows and creeps over sodden logs and hummocks. A striking emerald green moss cushions the footing of each red maple sapling. Silky dogwood branches streak the warm gray haze of other leafless shrubs with crimson and maroon. The floor of the alder carr is a sun-bleached blur of fawn, ocher, sienna, light purple-grays, and gray-greens. It is wonderfully exhausting to try to encompass these lights and colors, to search them, and all the while try to read the alternately transparent and sky-reflecting water that threads among them. Lodging myself among some sturdier alders that incline over the stream, I rest, waiting and watching.

The midday hour becomes silence and stillness. I slow all the more into the day. I hear an animal chewing. With a gradual turning of my head I scan for the source of the only sound near me. Not more than half a dozen strides away, a snowshoe hare nips the tips of an evergreen sedge's glossy blades. Whiskers twitching, he works his lower jaw vigorously. Other than that he, too, is motionless. His fur, though still marked with patches of winter white, has almost entirely gone over to the earth tones of his summer coat. He is well suited to pass unnoticed in his surroundings. Without making a sound in the dry leaves, he hop-walks a few more yards and settles down to nibble the points of another long sedge. Behind me I hear another animal scratching himself, almost certainly another hare. I twist a bit to track this sound and make him out, hunkered down on the tawny-leaved floor of the alder carr, immobile, his eyes half closed. He looks for all the world to be daydreaming, a luxury one would think his hunted, scampering kind could rarely afford. It seems that spring holds even these quick-footed ones in its spell. On the verge of an explosive full awakening, the season drowses. I feel only half awake myself.

The hare's somnolent repose belies his alertness. His nose wriggles continually, his sides reveal his rapid breathing. His erect long ears never stop turning, scanning the four directions, listening to the world. No doubt these hares have been well aware of me and have tracked my passage down the brook. I wonder at what distance their ever-listening ears first detected my approach. I think my repeated passings here have made me a nonthreatening part of their world. They know my scents and sounds, my form; they are used to me, and as long as I keep to my familiar rounds at my customary unmenacing pace, they will be at ease having lunch and taking naps all but within my shadow. Neither one moves as I extricate myself from my leaning place in the alders and resume my walk.

The fertile fronds of the sensitive fern, suggestive of the buttoned tail ends of rattlesnakes, set loose clouds of spores as I brush through them in crossing a backwater pool, dusting the water with a rust-red coating. The ferns have not yet raised new foliage, but their fertile fronds stand throughout the intermittent stream's course, clearly delineating its route among the alders. Sensitive indeed, this fern is burned by the lightest touch of frost in autumn and is late to unfurl its new green croziers, lest it be caught by the late frosts of a northern spring. By late May I will wade a thigh-deep swath of this wetland fern, making the dwindling water beneath it all the harder to search.

In scanning a pool-like run of the brook, below a sparkling braid that plays over a narrows formed by buttressing roots of red maples gnarling out from both banks, I see the tranquil surface come to life. There are swirls and ripples, and then the surface becomes still once more. Another disturbance riffles the sheen of reflected sky. These are surely the movements of a spotted turtle. As clear and shallow as the water is here, the distance and angle make it impossible for me to see into it. A dark head, its face radiant orange, appears and disappears. I see a dark shape moving, bearing brilliant yellow spots. And now another, suddenly overtaking and heading off the first. I have come upon a pair of spotted turtles, travelers who are combining a spring migration with a courtship chase. They have no doubt been feeding along the way as well, at least until the male caught sight of the female and became oblivious to everything else.

The object of his attention appears interested only in feeding and proceeding upstream even as the male makes clear his own intent of intercepting her. These conflicting purposes slow the process considerably, but the journey continues. I once saw a merry band of four spotted turtles, two of each sex, on such a springtime migration-cum-courtship chase, and although it was a somewhat unruly procession, it seemed as if it should be accompanied by stately Renaissance dance music. This day's couple travels to the faint rippling murmur of the stream-braid and a nearly incessant sequence of songs coming up from redstarts, yellowthroats, and yellow warblers in the brook-side thickets. Whether or not they take time for a coupling, these turtles will be in the vernal pool before sunset.

I continue downstream along the nearly level run of this seasonal brook to the second ponding, which I call the tussock sedge pool, for the cushionlike mounds of the sedges that emerge from its deepest trough. This ten-by-thirty-yard depression serves as a way station for me; it is one of my signal watching places at the time of spring migrations and is a halfway house for the spotted turtles as well. Although their ground or, I should say, water time here is generally brief, the pool is an important hiding, foraging, and sometimes mating place for them. For a couple of weeks out of the entire season I find the turtles here, sometimes four or six in a day. I rarely see them here outside of this narrow window.

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 season 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 that 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.

The diminution of this signal flowering, which, as such transitions generally are, has been gradual and had not clearly registered with me before. Some things one does not want to focus on, and in my nature there is a deep reluctance to face change. In critical areas of my own history, change has signaled loss. Two of my favorite words, as I wander the realm of the turtles, have been "same" and "again." I recognize the reality of transition, the necessity of flux. It is easier for me to think of cycles: the beaver dam cycle, the coming and going of glaciers. I sense that my ingrained mistrust of change rests largely on fear. "Things change," I heard as a small boy, grief-stricken from witnessing the annihilation of turtle places I had wandered and had so quickly come to love. This platitude was offered by way of remonstrance at my refusal to accept change and my railing against it—or, at best, proffered as ironic consolation. I have continued to hear that phrase all my life, as though it excused, compensated for, or gave some acceptable rationale for the havoc reaped in the name of "progress." Such mindless mantras, non sequiturs uttered in the guise of wisdom, allow people all too easily to overlook, and to forget, consequences. Love must never learn to live with loss, the destruction of a dream or a reality, the taking away that is so blithely passed off as change.

Five-thirty ... the afternoon advances. The bittern calls again, uh-WONK uh-tunk, uh-WONK uh-tunk, in a generously repeated series, an evocation of the season that draws me more deeply into it. Over the passage of years the individual singers change, but the song of the bittern, as of the others who declare spring, remains the same. As long as I have been coming here, the place from which the bittern calls, the hidden nesting place possessed of its own roots, has remained the same. As long as the water keeps to its seasonal rounds—as long as it is left alone to keep them—this complex and enduring wetland system, with flux and cycle factored in, will maintain its domain, and a pair of bitterns will find their place to nest within it. Successive generations will remember and return to this watery complex, a pinpoint on the planet, from wintering places as far away as Mexico or Panama.

Spring is so much a season of remembering, of returning and greeting anew. The water remembers and returns, enlivening the landscape with light, sound, movement, and silent reflections as it retraces ancient courses and refills historic pools. I come back again to places from which I have been distanced by the forbidding cold of winter and its barricades of thick ice and deep snow, and by the indoor aspects of my life. I come as visitor-observer, more different from turtle and sedge than they are from one another, in terms of being of and in this place. But I come with links of continuity and connections that give me a sense of belonging that I need not fully understand. In many ways I feel that I come back from some great distance, some deep time, like a migrant bird or a turtle awakening from a half year's sleep within himself, from a being away that goes back even beyond my boyhood. Each year's wading makes the next year's all the more compelling. All I know is that I must come back. Once I have returned, being here is enough.

It is quarter past six as I turn among the tussock sedge mounds, wade from the deepening channel that leads to the dense tangles of another shrub swamp, and head to shallower water. I skirt the rustling tussocks and wade into the lasiocarpa meadow. I have named this marshy compartment after the species name for the graceful plant that fills it with sweeps of grasslike growth, Carex lasiocarpa, the woolly-fruited sedge. I am a little above knee-deep in water and waist-deep in the ethereal sedge. Virtually all of the growth around me consists of this plant. With long, trailing blades about one-twelfth of an inch in width, it has a deceptively delicate appearance. Under favorable conditions it establishes monocultures as unforgivingly exclusive to other growth as those of the taller, coarser lake sedge, cattails, and even the woody alders. New shafts reach six to nine inches above the water, lithe, sharp-pointed, spring green. Their reddened bases stand out sharply in the clear water.

This first emergent thrusting forth forms a watery field of erect spikes that will extend to form a sheening haze of long, arching twists and sprays that bow and sweep with every stirring in the air. When the sedges are at full growth, stronger winds create grassy waves in passing over them, as though the plants themselves were water. Last year's pale, flowing blades fill the water from the surface to the turfy substrate they have built up here. They have been arranged carefully: not a hair out of place, it seems, combed and brushed by the slow, swirling slide of the water.

And throughout these graceful arrangements of sedge are windings of large cranberry, the one plant that finds its place and even proliferates among them. Fruits from last autumn persist on the pliant lacings, which keep their leaves all year, deepening to dark maroon in winter and greening again in April. In most years the seasonal shallows that now inundate most of the cranberry vines are gone by summer solstice. While the water is here it provides another favored niche for spotted turtles.

I come again at this time of year to wade in the late light of day, to hear the bittern pumping and listen to the rain of twitterings that falls from tree swallows not long returned, as they wheel in the high open air above this great wetland depression a few final times before dark. Red-winged blackbirds call—always there are red-winged blackbirds calling at this season, wherever I wade. The water is so open and clear now, at its greatest depth and with vegetation just beginning to come forth within it. The water magnifies, not only the strands of sedge, which seem to flow without moving on while the flood drift moves through them, but also the day, the hour, the precise point in the season's passage. This great pooling of collected meltwaters and gathered rains intensifies the light within it, the light upon it, the light reflected from it. Here spring is magnified in clear water lying upon land. Even the calls of distant red-winged blackbirds seem magnified as they carry over the waters of wet meadows, marshes, and swamps.

Spotted turtle in cranberry vine.

I wade across this shallow sea of water and sedge to a channel that circles its southern rim. I don't know if it was water that originally cut this channel along the edge of a slight topographical elevation, which effectively divides acres of marsh from acres of shrub swamp, and then animals took to using it as a corridor, or if larger animals first walked this way to skirt the difficult emergent shrub thickets, wearing a trail into the substrate that water then followed and over time shaped to its own purpose. At any rate, I follow a route that water takes and that also serves as a wetland passage for moose and deer, muskrat, mink, star-nosed moles, water shrews, spotted turtles, young snapping and Blanding's turtles, green frogs, and mayfly larvae.

I would like to see a list, reaching back to the time of the origins of this watercourse, of all the life that has passed through, lingered, or taken root here. Somewhere beneath the built-up muck and vegetation, there must be a record of the day when the last of the ice shelf turned into crystal-clear glacial meltwater running over sand, the day that initiated the return of life to the deglaciated Northeast. At thaw, as the last of the ice shelves drop from mounds of shrubs and royal ferns in clear-running, sand-bottomed channels, I have intimations of that momentous melting in scenes that seem reenactments of it in miniature. Perhaps not long after that glacial retreat—at least in a geologic time frame—members of my own species, early enough arrivals to be called indigenous (though so much later in coming here than the preglacial turtles and ferns), followed this very route on hunting sojourns or seasonal migrations, without the comfort of insulated waders.

I suspect that it is a combination of treading feet and seasonally drifting water that keeps this channel open, a slender conduit little more than a foot and a half wide over most of its gently snaking length. It divides further as it links networks of other channels and pools throughout the marsh and swamp elements at the eastern and western extremities of the complex. Many of the watery cuts are so narrow that I can barely slip one leg past the other in wading through. As with the intermittent stream, the water finds its varied ways here, flood time after flood time, to reclaim its runnings and pondings and so define the enduring wetlands. For several decades now I have been one of the animal forces that helps keep the channels open, as I repeatedly retrace their labyrinthine networks.

Even in this leafless early flood season I see a brushy haze of dense thickets and crowding screens of shrubs when I look directly ahead. I could almost forget that I am in a wetland, and nearly half immersed at that.

The depression within a depression in which this shrub swamp is set combines the deepest—though rarely exceeding thirty inches even at times of highest flooding—and most permanent water with the densest growth to be found in the overall wetland complex. The shrub swamp is also the site of the earliest ice-out and thus it is the citadel of overwintering spotted turtles. I call it the Tangle, although any guest I brought here might observe that any of the sur rounding interspersions of shrub swamp and marsh is every bit as much a tangle.

I have come here over the seasons of so many years, from March or April's opening of the water until October or November's closing over, that I have developed something of a spotted turtle's familiarity with the labyrinthine landscape. My feet, even through waders and wading shoes, have acquired a very literal feel for its watery pathways and the vagaries of its substrate. I get a few reminders each year, as I rediscover hidden depths of muck with a sudden unexpected sinking. My passage here is perhaps not typical wading, for I must knee my way among unyielding mounds of mingled shrubs, royal ferns, and sedges and shoulder my way through alders. Moving through the Tangle is a total-body experience.

Though I know this wetland so well, in its purely physical as well as its ecological and metaphysical aspects, neither the familiarity nor the hardships breed contempt. Being here has brought me to a knowledge, both tangible and ineffable, of a world apart, completely distinct, from that of my own kind. How many of us, and how often, think of the fact that we live our time on a planet, within that planet's time? What good is it to be alive on Earth and never come to know at least the place where one lives? We don't even try to know it with our senses, much less with our minds and spirits. How many human feet in the industrialized world know anything more than floors, pavement, lawn, or manicured sandy beach in a lifetime? We live on Earth without walking it. What do we touch with our hands? So many human eyes and ears see only the human-constructed landscape, hear only human sounds. Wild hills and swamps are looked at casually, if at all, viewed as little more than a backdrop for human dramas. So many voices, so many languages beyond human tongues, are never listened to. We are in fact overwhelmingly out of our senses. Our eyes are open for such a brief time, our appearance on Earth between two unfathomable sleeps. Are we to sleepwalk through it?

I edge my way out of the Tangle's final snarls. In snagging my sweater and catching my hair, the alders, winterberry, and swamp rose seem intent on keeping me here. Late in a long, slow day of wading I settle into a thigh-deep pocket, most of it mud, among the alders. I haven't the energy to immediately struggle out; it is one of those occasions when I am just as happy to be held in one place for a time. I am not far from the water's outermost curling, as it turns in a shallow arc along what might appear to be the upland border. But the wetlands extend beyond the margins of this shimmering slide of visible water. On the far side of the alder carr that has detained me rises a swamp composed not of shrub thickets but of trees, a red maple swamp. The trees are radiant in the last lingering slants of sunlight that play across their forty-foot crowns.

A flock of common grackles settles noisily into the high red maple canopy, each one a jet black bird silhouette distinct in the smoky blur of upper branches and the crowning glow of red-sienna twig tips, bright red buds, and flowers. Swamp sparrows continue their flitting and calling in the alder and royal fern mounds darkening around me. Water glides by in a silent sheet, brightening as the alders go black. Bound for lower ground, it swirls away from the upland ascents, its surface a constant quivering of tiny braids and voiceless riffles—alive and ever moving at the springing of the year. Here I will turn away from the water, which moves on among the alders, a broad silver slide finding its way to the permanent stream.

In its final run this lowland drift is channeled into a network of deeper cuts through belts of alder on wetland plateaus, sharply defined races banked by unyielding root and turf. Here the constricted runnings become forceful enough to keep their courses clear of sediments, cutting down to underlying sand. As the great depression slopes downward to its lowest point, the bed of Alder Brook, water quickens in these sluiceways and takes on the voice of a babbling brook, as though eager to get on with the race to the greater stream.

As daylight diminishes, the peep-frog chorus intensifies in the backwaters of a fen a quarter mile away. With raucous clamor and a rushing wind of wing beats a flurry of grackles lifts off from the topmost canopy of the red maple swamp. In the quieting that follows, I hear again the drift of evensong from their red-winged cousins on the far side of the wetland mosaic. The season, like the water glimmering all around, extends before me.