Week 13Winter Week 13
It’s almost impossible to think about nature without thinking about time.
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life
The cabin is perched right on a bluff in the woods of the Cumberland Plateau. Built from trees harvested a hundred years earlier on our friends’ family land, it is my favorite place on Earth. Our friends urge Haywood and me to use it whenever they can’t get there on a weekend themselves. Endangered plants and animals live in the shelter of Lost Cove, which opens below the bluff: Morefield’s leather flower and Cumberland rosinweed, the eastern small-footed bat and the Allegheny woodrat. The painted snake-coiled forest snail is so rare it lives only in Franklin County, Tennessee. The cabin is a place of quiet and stillness. A retreat from the world. Every time we visit, we think about how calm our lives would be if we lived in a peaceful place like this all year long.
When we arrive on this weekend in mid-March, we see that the hidden basin in the woods behind the cabin—less a basin than a depression between folds of ancient land, imperceptible in summer and fall—has begun to fill up again. This pool of black water is my favorite thing about my favorite place in the high woods of the Cumberland Plateau. The ephemeral pond is coming back.
The soil on this bluff has been gathering for millennia, but in most places it is so thin you marvel that any tree, much less these many and massive trees, could grow here. But in the low place that is beginning to be a pond, the soil is thick and rich, teeming with invisible life. It has been holding on to leaves for as long as there have been trees in this forest. It has been holding on to everything—leaves but also acorns, fallen branches, a long-dead tree balanced above the water on one long-dead limb.
For much of the year the pond, dried up and completely concealed beneath last fall’s leaves, doesn’t exist. The only sign of it is the place on the forest floor where the leaves remain inexplicably damp. Other leaves dry out and blow about with every thermal that rises from below the bluff, but these leaves stay wet. In fall they grow darker and damper still.
One bright winter day, following a big rain or a heavy, melting snow, you realize the leaves in the half-acre shallow are suddenly giving back the blue sky and the sentinels of bare trees towering above them. From the nearby path it looks as though someone has buried a large mirror in the sleeping woods and carelessly tried to hide it with old leaves.
Then you notice that the mirror is growing.
In winter this pond can’t rightly be called a pond, but the rains keep coming. Fog gathers and condenses. Water drips from every cloud-drenched tree. The pond remains muddy at the margins, clotted with any wafting thing the winds can bring, but the water spreads out and deepens. Human beings have had no hand in making this pond; you can tell because it is not bounded by banks or populated by fish.
Emerging from the layers of windfall, the water is black, as black as volcanic glass, because the soil below it is richer and blacker than any soil I have ever seen. I know this from knowing the pond in dry seasons. I don’t need to prove it to myself again now. I don’t kick the leaves aside to inspect it. I don’t so much as nudge it with my toe. This soil is precious. It must not be disturbed.
In time the pond will engulf the soil, spreading far beyond the margins of the gathering mud. As it spreads, it will become home to a vast number of wetland plants and small creatures that have spent all fall and winter buried in the soil of the ghost pond. Dormant crustacean eggs, the larvae of aquatic insects, sleeping salamanders—all will be brought to waking life again by the rain.
And then an entire array of beautiful creatures will find one another and lay their eggs. This pond that is too transitory to support fish is the perfect nursery for amphibians whose eggs too often become someone else’s food in other ponds and creeks. Spotted salamanders live underground, but soon they will climb to the surface to mate and lay eggs in this pool. When they get here, they may find that the marbled salamanders have arrived first. The mole salamanders will stay in the shallowest spots on the edges of the pond. They can live nowhere else on this mountain.
As the pond fills, the wood frogs and the pickerel frogs will arrive, and the spring peepers. Their mating songs will turn the spring nights into symphonies. The toads, too, will come to lay their eggs. The pond that is not a pond will become an incubator for every salamander larva and tadpole on this bluff.
They must be quick in their waking, though, for the sharp-eyed crows have been waiting for them. Our friends have seen the birds standing in the mud in a great black circle, scooping up toads and tree frogs as soon as they emerge from the water. Nor are crows the only danger: winter-sleeping predators are waking, too. Can you see the garter snake beneath the raised branch of the dead tree at the edge of the water? I can’t. The frogs, intent on finding one another, cannot see it, either. It is not meant to be seen.
In summer they will all be gone. The pond, vanished into the shimmering heat, will be hidden once more beneath brush and leaves.