Following the Water (12 page)

Mercifully, the mosquitoes have not yet come out into the open air, though it is cloud-darkened and steamily humid. Rain-scented air, medicine-smelling earth, silence now interspersed with faint bird calls from across the hayfield, stillness broken at moments by slight stirrings of wind, so imperceptible that the slender grasses seem to move on their own. How loud the droning of a bumblebee some distance off among the blackberry flowers. Thunder rolls again. It is to the north and east, moving away; for a time I can walk without rain.

E
DGING MY WAY
along the eastern margins of a peatland that is about a mile and a half long and variously a fifth to a quarter of a mile wide, I try to pass unseen by those traveling the busy roadway that runs along the entire length of the fen. Painfully close, the pavement is generally less than fifteen yards from the wetland border. I can bring myself to be here only by virtue of the extremely dense cover that occupies most of this narrow margin, a barrier of buttonbush, sweet pepperbush, sapling and occasionally mature red maple trees, a near-impenetrable woody structure made all the more formidable by being bound up in stout-thorned common greenbrier.

This cover shields me from a world very different from the peatland, which, with deep reluctance and many misgivings, I have agreed to investigate. I am loath to do suburban turtle work, but some individuals and the local conservation commission have asked me to document the presence and seasonal movements of spotted and Blanding's turtles. Road-killed spotted turtles have been found here—I saw the shell of a three-year-old—and the Blanding's are strongly suspected to inhabit the peatland and its surroundings. These two species are declining primarily because of habitat loss and are considered of special concern throughout their ranges. Proof of their presence might provide a bit of leverage to gain concessions from a suite of developers poised to press upon the entire western side of this remarkable ecosystem, some backing off that might spare a measure of the habitat margins. I have conducted such field investigations before and have seen my evaluations and recommendations all but invariably come to naught in terms of any truly meaningful protection. Pointing this out and elucidating scenarios from my personal history, in which "information/documentation" and "education" have time and again proven not to be the answer, I sought to avoid this engagement. (There will come a time when I can no longer become involved in such campaigns at all.) But once again a conscientious group has sought my perspective, and I have agreed, for the nature of this peat
land intrigues me. There is also the fact that paid turtle work is uncommon and sometimes hard to turn down.

The greater portion of this boglike wetland is untraversable. I thrust my five-foot wading stick down into a pool surrounded by sphagnum laced with sweet gale, a rafting that shakily supports me, without touching anything solid. My course is dictated by a circuitous route in which I can find enough footing to sink no more than waist-deep and by my efforts to keep a concealing screen between me and the road. The growth in this acidic fen, dominated by leatherleaf and sweet gale, is generally no more than waist-high. By wading mucky channels that are not bottomless, I can shorten myself and thereby attempt to avoid detection by passers-by as well as by the turtles I hope to see before they see me. It is decidedly "advantage turtle" here.

My only other ally in achieving stealth is my customary trait of moving slowly and holding still for periods of time. Houses have been built on the upland peninsulas thrusting from the roadway into the wetland, and I feel all the more exposed to human eyes as I explore a backwater cove between two of them.

As I stalk turtles who may or may not be here—so much of the time I search for the invisible, and for much of that time the object of my search may not even be present—a shadowy, silver gray movement catches my eye. I make out a small fox in a welter of shrubs and greenbrier who is intent
upon a grackle which, in quest of his own food, is tossing leaves about in a tiny clearing. With extreme, rather catlike stealth, the gray fox inches forward, employing the upland-border screen, as I do, to pass unseen, but he steals through it with consummate grace and complete silence. The coloring of his pelt is far more concealing than the camouflage shirt I wear. He is one with sunlight and shadow, the grays of the shrubs, fawn and sienna of fallen leaves, a beautiful ghost of a predatory mammal who is alternately there and not there even when moving. I am in a zone of open water and low-growing leatherleaf; the shoreline vegetation must block me from his vision. I freeze the moment I make him out, and he goes statue-still at the same moment. Does he sense me? Or is he reckoning his approach to the preoccupied but doubtless alert grackle? The jet black bird gleams iridescent purple and gunmetal as he goes about his foraging on the floor of the thicket.

The fox makes an additional increment of advance. With a burst of his wings the grackle takes flight and vanishes at once. A large bird for such confining quarters, he has his own ways of navigating branch mazes and weavings of thorny vines. The fox, who has been in something of a crouch, stands erect, on tiptoes even, his large ears also erect, and stares at the place from which his prey has disappeared. He opens his jaws wide and runs his tongue over his shiny black lips, as though tasting the bird he was unable to get
hold of. Then he moves off a bit and settles himself in a small hollow at the base of a wild apple tree that has somehow found a footing in this narrow jungle. He curls up and wraps his tail around himself.

My back has become painful, though I have straightened it a bit at times and shifted my weight from one foot to the other when it seemed the fox wouldn't notice. There are only tiny windows in the mazes between us. He looks directly at me for a moment ... his face appears and disappears with slight turnings of his head. For seconds at a time, we seem to look right at each other. I look straight into his almost dreamlike eyes, see clearly his fine features, beautiful coloring, narrow muzzle, and sharp, black-tipped nose. Once again I feel that my own pale face must be conspicuous, out of place even. But he does not appear to make it out.

Across the road the woods are gone, replaced in the turning of a single year by fifty half-million-dollar houses, acres and acres of lawn set with forlorn trees left standing in isolation here and there, driveways, and wide avenues named for what once may have been there: Trillium Way, Ferncrest Drive, Birch Lane. Perhaps somewhere in the interior of the development a road has been named for the fox. No contribution to any architectural legacy, the houses seem embarrassed, standing in a twilight zone of suburban landscape, awkwardly, blankly, staring at each other across
empty space. It will go worse for the fox when this landscape conversion is mirrored in triplicate on the other side of the peatland. He will be compelled to adapt even further, dodging automobiles as he hunts the narrowest wetland edges and backyards, mostly by night.

The fox and I are between two houses and not far in from the road. I look up over a mound of highbush blueberry off to one side to see a woman turning the pages of a book as she sits on her deck, which overlooks the wetland. I am extremely ill at ease. The gray fox yawns as he lounges in his open-eyed siesta. It does not appear that the woman will finish her book anytime soon. Not wishing to cause suburban terror, I slink in the direction of the second house, where no one seems to be about. It is so much easier for the fox to run this gauntlet, to slip the network of human eyes and move without being seen.

The difficult growth in this treacherous fen is too low to conceal all of my movements. I have been sighted. As I go on with my searching, I note the slow passings of a police car, and I understand better than ever why they are called cruisers. When I return to my car at the edge of the road I receive the company I was expecting. The black-and-white police car pulls up behind me and two uniformed officers get out. I am certain that my own uniform of black headband, camouflage T-shirt, and waders did nothing to allay the concerns of a crime-watch neighborhood. I am asked
for my driver's license and social security number and then told to explain what I am doing. I state my mission and mention local contact people. After radio checks are made, I am thanked for my cooperation. There is one final question, which I had also anticipated: "What's with the basketball?"

As I left the wetland, I found a basketball that had escaped down Trillium Way and bounced far enough out onto the quaking sphagnum mat to prohibit its being retrieved and had decided I would take it home to give to some young friends.

"We thought maybe you had it in case you fell in."

12
AUGUST.
I make out a little pickerel just beneath the surface of the brook, his green-gold barring used to excellent effect in blending with the scant submerged and surface blades of bur-reed that trail from the downstream tail of a sandbar; he is a fish more gold than green, with a thin line of pale bronze drawn from snout to tail, as straight as a pickerel. Slender vertical bars (like the finest underwater reticulations of burnt bronze sunlight glimmering over the sandbar) are spaced along his sides. So many living things live on by keeping close to, disappearing into, something that looks so much like them, at times exactly like them: sunlight and shadow, water and earth, sand, stones, plants living and dead. Pattern is such an integral part of the pattern.

A pair of ebony jewelwings is nearby, poised on a broad-leaved overhang of fox grape and silky dogwood, she resting her white-tipped dark wings and he his jet black ones above their burnished-metal bodies ... fish and damselflies, jewels set in a sunlit run of the brook at midday.

My progress along the stream arrested by the little fish that caught my eye, I set up watch here in the heavy cover of overhanging shrubs and vines. But I am not long taken up with fish and damselfly, for I see an orange flash in the water, the thrust of a wood turtle's leg. A small turtle struggles to hide in, or perhaps simply pass through, a weaving of silky dogwood stems directly beneath my watching place. I step down into the stream and pick him up. The pickerel darts away at my first movement, but the damselflies keep their places.

I hold the turtle up to the sunlight for inspection and note at once that half his tail is missing. But I have him in my hands a full minute before I see that his right front leg is gone; not the slightest stump remains. His left front leg is pale white where orange and black scales have been chewed away. But the leg and foot are intact, not a toenail missing. On the orange-scaled bases of his hind legs and right heel, scorings seem to have been made by tiny, needlelike teeth. There are no tooth marks on his shell. Whatever predator it was that took his leg—obviously not something as large as an otter—knew that gnawing on the shell of a turtle,
even one this small, would be to no avail. Although they are quite fresh, the wounds, even at the amputated leg, are not bleeding. I suspect that he was attacked on land and has taken to the brook to hide and heal. He is in his seventh growing season. We have met before: he bears tiny notches in his marginal plates I have made to identify him as wood turtle number 105 in this populous colony, which I have been looking in on for twenty years. Somewhere in my notebooks are records of previous encounters, perhaps from the time the turtle was a hatchling. I return him to his cover in the stream. If both of us continue on here, I may come upon him as a three-legged adult thirteen or more years from now, may be able to find this record in my notes, and know to within a few days when he lost his leg.

My turtle discovery of the day is not a happy one. But I think again of how often something is revealed simply by my coming to these places. This is especially true in the complex of wetland, riparian, and upland habitats of which this brook is a vital component, a diverse and relatively isolated landscape with which I have a deep bond. Such a bonding can never be long enough or intimate enough, the way it is with any love.

I cross to the exposed crest of the small sandbar, scattering three newly transformed green frogs, all carrying the final traces of their tail stubs. The bar is crowned with rice cutgrass; two little clumps of a sedge are beginning to
flower. The little pickerel who was poised here has not returned. My adventure with the wood turtle has driven him from his watery hunting ground for the time being.

I continue to search the water. But it is something in the air that next catches my eye, a drift of color that is there and then not, in the deep shade around me. It appears again. I strive to follow this seemingly disembodied flicker of violet that is both striking and invisible over the streamside shallows. Can color come to life? Here is a living thing I cannot even catch with my eyes. Then I do catch sight of, and manage to follow to where it comes to rest, a tiny damselfly, a variable dancer. And how variable this dancer is: a wisp of color, lavender dancing in shade along a wooded stream, a tiny shadow moving in the transparent colorlessness of the absence of sunlight over dark, wet sand.

Because a small fish and a pair of jewelwings caught my attention, I found a wood turtle, and because I stopped to look at a wood turtle I saw a variable dancer. For a time I have been united with all of them, by my sight, my being here, by whatever it is that brings me to such places time and time again. They are connected with one another and with everything else out here by the streaming of the brook and a coevolutionary history that is yet being written. And they are linked by a moment shared in time, a moment that I myself can share and so become connected with a world that could seem so far apart.

24
AUGUST, AFTERNOON.
My one somewhat domestic link with the river comes by way of two seasonal streams that cut through woods on our property and pass along the northern and eastern borders of a level field behind our house. The field is predominantly wild, with bluestem grass, barren strawberry, bristly dewberry, goldenrod, and native shrubs, but we have set gardens in it here and there. The brooks join at the northeast corner, follow the wooded eastern edge of the field, then run down a steep, wooded descent of half a mile or so to a confluence with the river. This watercourse, so near at hand, is one I seldom follow, in part because, within that half-mile run to the river, the conjoined streams have to pass through culverts, first at the base of a high berm erected to accommodate a state highway and then, not far below that, under the northbound lanes of an interstate that was run through the river's narrow floodplain thirty-five years ago.