Following the Water (6 page)

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.