In a voice that is lyrical,
probing, wise and vulnerable, David M. Carroll’s
Following the Water finds a place in the exalted
tradition of American nature writing that includes such
classics as Walden, Silent Spring, and Sand
County Almanac. The deep intimacy with the natural
world that Carroll evokes in his literary chronicle
of wandering familiar wetlands of his native New Hampshire
takes on startling poignancy as it becomes evident how
encroaching urban development threatens that world and
the magical bonds to it nurtured by this extraordinary
writer.
David M. Carroll is the author
of The Year of the Turtle, Trout Reflections, Self-Reflection
with Turtles, and Swampwalker's Journal,
which won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal. In 2006
he won a MacArthur "genius" award for his
work as writer, artist, and naturalist. Carroll has
been featured on Today (where he reached down
into swampy water, miraculously pulled up a turtle he
knew, and told her history), in numerous newspapers
and magazines, and in the most popular documentary in
the history of New Hampshire public television. He is
an active lecturer and consultant to conservation institutions
throughout New England. He lives with his wife in Warner,
New Hampshire.
EXCERPT
YEARBREAK At the earliest
openings of the ice in the overwintering niches of
the spotted turtles, as minute glimmers of quickening
water appear in acres of wetlands still locked in
ice and snow, I forsake my winter paths: the worn
floor by the kitchen table and fireplace; the even
more worn threshold of the narrow doorway to the Oriental-carpeted
passage down the back hall, the narrow gallery hung
with paintings and drawings above agreeably overburdened
bookcases, lined along the floor with stacks of more
books and empty frames; the footworn stair treads
up to my studio workrooms, with their slender passageways
among bookcases, drawing and writing tables, and shelves,
all impossibly piled with papers, notebooks, pencils,
pens, and paintbrushes. With the opening up of the
earth and water I go beyond my few, close-to-home
outer trails of the cold season: my way to the woodshed,
as trodden as an ancient deer path, and my modest
snowshoe circlings through the back field and bordering
woods. At thaw I begin to walk a wider way again,
beyond house and gardens, in places every bit as home
to me as those.
Some of my paths are of
my own making, many are borrowed from deer and muskrat;
most are routes that water traces. In some of these
water-and-mud channels my feet drop into hollows exactly
matching my strides: my own footprints of previous
years’ passings. In rare places left alone enough,
generations of black bears walk historic migration
routes in the impressed footprints of their ancestors.
Stepping from a snow-crested
bank, I descend into the icy running of the brook.
There is the daybreak that comes with every rising
of the sun, and there is the yearbreak that comes
with thaw and the unlocking of the ice. As I enter
the newly opened water, I enter the year and, in a
mingling of dream clearly remembered and new dream
just beginning, start to wade again the streaming
of its seasons.
The turbulent whitewater
spates of mid-March have run their course. Floods
may be brought surging back to life by April rains
and the last of the snowmelt from headwater hills,
escaping the banks again and surging through the low
white pine terrace, the alder and meadowsweet thickets,
the red maple swamp. But for now the brook has settled
back within its channel and is not so restless that
I cannot see into it. Insulated by neoprene, I wade
in. For the first time in the year I move within the
variously black, sky-reflecting, and (where shadows
allow my sight to penetrate its masking surface) clear,
clear flowing of the stream.
At another winter’s
ending I have one more setting forth, one more initiation.
Though I am always one year older, the year is ever
new, renascent. I leave the past cold season, a time
passed largely in the theater of my own mind, my inner
wilderness, leaving it behind like a skin I have sloughed,
and enter the wild realm that lies outside of myself
and ultimately outside of all human knowing. But my
new skin bears the same markings as before, and whatever
I encounter within the season extending before me
will be at once familiar and completely new.
As I have somehow known
from my first intuitive setting out, I will recognize
what to follow. The water will set a course and lead
me through the days; the days will take me through
the year. I go forth directed and open to direction.
What guides the feet? the mind? the heart? The heart,
too, is forever seeking.
I once brought a naturalist
friend, one whose quests range as widely over the
planet as mine keep to a circumscribed corner within
it, to some of the places that have been at the heart
of what I have followed in the wild over the past
three decades. I introduced her to a vernal pool,
a marsh, a swamp, a stream, and along the way I found
some turtles to show her. I talked some, of what I
see, what I look for.
“They say that
the Sufi is always looking for his be loved,”
she said. “You are always seeking your beloved.”
My first heading out of
the year always takes me back to the first time I
wandered out, the beginning of my being there. I felt
that I was called, that something called me, and I
set out alone. That was in my eighth year, when spring
was turning to summer. In every year following, that
feeling has come at ice melt, when I go out to see
the stream at its first running clear, see the water
in marshes and swamps at the moment of opening up,
trembling with the restless stirrings of the air at
the time of great transition —water set free,
vibrant and vibrating, shimmering back to the sun,
the heart-melting light of spring’s awakening.
The touch of the ascendant sun on ice at length gives
birth to water, and water gives life to the year.
After winter’s silence, countless dialogues
begin. I set out to see if the water has come back,
always with the hope, mingled with anticipation, of
seeing the first turtle. In the renewal of the year
I can find again that first turtle, take it in with
my eyes, touch it with my fingertips. Could a year
begin for me without this? My life has come to be
measured in first turtles.
As I wade against the steady,
at times insistent, flow, I think back to my earliest
experiences with this liquid mineral, now clear, now
silver or amber, gold, black, deep wine red, or tannic
tea, so alive and life-sustaining within its fundamentally
physical, utterly indifferent nature. Water nurtures
beyond the purely physical. As a boy I entered waters
that, if not alive themselves, were so filled with
light and life that my binding with them was as much
metaphysical as physical. These primal immersions
took place in small still-water marshes and swamps
and running brooks too minimal to serve the prodigiously
expanding economic and recreational needs and desires
of mankind. These places of my boyhood continued to
hold something of the heart of wildness in a landscape
being stripped of all original meaning. Not yet subject
to human usurpation and engineering, they were the
soul of the seasons, the lifeblood of ecologies. They
were wild out of all proportion to their scale in
the landscape, and they imparted wildness to my boyhood
heart and mind, my youthful imagination.
But over time so many of
these watery places, even the least of them, were
driven into corners, becoming heavily compromised
relicts marginalized out of their existential meaning,
if not out of existence. These were my baptismal waters.
For all that they gave me —the beauty and the
belonging, the intuitive knowledge of something of
my place in life, becoming something that I simply
could not live without —I think sometimes of
the heartache, the anger and despair, that I would
have been spared, had that entrance into the water
not opened, had I not entered. Their loss is overwhelming.
With every passing year, my following of the water
has increasingly become a matter of finding water
to follow.
Streamside thickets and
occasional taller trees along the stream write their
signatures on the water, an undulating script on an
ever-moving page. Even these shadows have their identities:
the whiplike lines of silky dogwood, broader trailings
of alder stems, bolder strokes of red maple trunks,
and sweeps of white pine crowns. Are these shadows
or transparent reflections? They cut narrow slits
and wider openings in the clear water, which the light
of day would mask. I shift my head, looking in from
as many different angles as possible, trying to catch
sight of a wood turtle, tucked in or perhaps even
shifting about, as sometimes happens as the long overwintering
approaches its conclusion, even when the brook is
only four degrees above freezing. But it is enough
to see the streambed again, its sand, cobble, and
stones, sunken branches and drifts of leaves.
I raise my head and look
upstream. Can I be looking at a wood turtle? The shape
is far enough ahead that I cannot be certain, and
my disbelief that a turtle would be so exposed, up
on an open, muddy mound of stream bank surrounded
by snow and ice, prevents definite recognition. But
as I advance I begin to read it as a turtle, and the
reading is disturbing. The angle, something in the
way that so-familiar sculpted shape is settled, is
sharply out of keeping with any search-image I have.
Wood turtles always place themselves in harmony with
their surroundings, with the configurations of the
earth or stream bottom on which they have settled
or over which they move. This gestalt has struck me
as unfailing. Except when they are compelled to cross
a road or open lawn, wood turtles are never out of
place.
Even from some distance,
as I wade, looking into the turtle’s face, I
know that something is terribly wrong. Where is that
light in the eyes, the light of life and reflected
day that shows before the gold-ringed eyes themselves
can be clearly seen? What are those shadows, dark
pockets on either side of the jet black head? Where
are the legs, black-scaled, with vivid flashes of
red-orange skin color that should be part of the pattern?
Riveted by this troubling vision, I never look away
as my feet find their way over the streambed and I
wade to the turtle. A profound confusion comes over
me, the elation of seeing that first turtle up out
of the water at the end of hibernation mingling with
a reality I do not want to see. The turtle ’s
eyes are closed, her legs are gone.
I pick her up. Her shell
is so familiar, that shadowy umber brown carapace
with yellow-gold striations, like faint flecks of
sunlight. Tiny notches I have made along her marginal
scutes identify her. An adult female, she is one of
the first wood turtles I documented along this brook,
where I have been recording them in notebooks over
the past twenty years. Her head does not move, there
is no sign of life in her tail as I move it from side
to side. A few tiny bubbles appear at her nostrils,
perhaps a last flicker of life. All of her right front
leg is missing and the lower half of her left front.
Her right hind leg has been eaten away from the knee
joint down, and her left hind leg is only a shaft
of bone to where the knee joint was. How did she get
up here? My crowded thoughts and questions settle
out, and I realize that of course she could not have
climbed up onto this mound but was left here by the
otter who discovered her in her winter hold in the
stream and wrestled her onto land to work at her,
force out at least a foot to eat from the fortress
of her shell. There is not one tooth mark on her carapace
or plastron; predators know there is no biting through
the shell of a wood turtle this size.
A sense of foreboding comes
over me, as it did five years ago when, at this same
seasonal moment, I discovered an adult male who had
lost both front legs and then a six-year-old who had
been bitten through and killed. I am familiar with
reports by others who study turtles of heavy losses
on colonies of painted and snapping turtles by otters
preying upon them during their hibernation. I found
no further evidence of such predation that year, but
I wonder what I will find when the wood turtles here
begin their first streamside basking of this new season.
I set the turtle back down.
The temperature will drop well below freezing tonight.
If the least flicker of life does remain within her,
it will be extinguished. A life of decades, likely
more than half a century, has come to an end. Borrowed
stardust is at length returned, and the flame that
burned within passed on. In silence, the water flows
on by. Alder shadows creep across the snow. This is
an aspect of what takes place in the stream, along
its banks and beyond. My human-turtle connection does
not allow me complete objectivity. But my deepest
griefs are human-driven, not by the death of any individual
living thing within the ecology, but that of the ecology
itself.
