Following the Water (8 page)

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.