Following the Water by David M. Carroll Page B

reappears, trailing his three yellow stripes over snaking alder roots, and slides into the pool. His fixed jet eyes fired with a spark of sunlight, his scarlet, black-tipped tongue flickering, he winds across an open stretch of dark water and weaves himself into the straw skirt of a tussock mound.
    With a long leap and resounding splash a green frog simultaneously departs from the hummock. She had been statue-still while her protruding gold-ringed eyes took in the world around her. The legendary capacity of snakes for swallowing prey considerably larger than their heads notwithstanding, it seemed impossible that the slender snake could swallow such a large frog. But with the appearance of side-winding ripples on the surface of the pool and a slithering at the base of her sedge cushion, the green frog
evidently did not care to calculate any of the finer measurings in nature and made her leap. Surely there is a long history of snake movements and their potential consequences encoded in the green frog's internal evolutionary guidebook. How far back in time does that history go, and how many pages does it have, inscribed with instinct?

    Ribbon snake.
    During its flood season this tiny marsh, like any wild wetland, no matter what size, is a natural theater. It bears constant watching. There are intermissions, to be sure, but one act is soon followed by another in the script of the day, the scenes written sur le motif as they are performed. As the snake slips from view in front of me—I cherish such disappearances-before-my-very-eyes—a sudden sparkling
of sunlight off broken water causes my head to turn toward a small spillway at the southeastern end of the pool. I have the best seat in the house, but this is a true theater in the round, and I cannot look everywhere at once. A male spotted turtle clambers up the cut through which water escapes and drops into the tussock sedge pool. In water as black as his shell he becomes a moving pattern of rows and scatterings of lemon yellow spots, as though he were a speeded-up film of a constellation sliding through a night sky. He glides among the upreaching winterberry, then tunnels under submarine sedge skirtings, where all his radiant markings vanish. He will travel on against the flow as I resume following it.
    Over the first two seasons I came here, I never saw a turtle, even though, from my first looking in, I had the strongest feeling that this must be a spotted-turtle place, that these turtles must pass along this intermittent stream in their seasonal migrations to and from the vernal pool and must make some seasonal use of the tussock pool. But I was either too early or too late in my initial searches. And then, the first spring I found them, I saw eleven over three successive days. That was quite a revelation—if revelation can be anticipated, even expected. The turtles are far more transient than the water here and can easily be missed. But over time—I have needed time, and I have had it—I came to know the comings and goings of water and turtles in this
place. At a certain hour on a given day, when the face of the season turns in the direction of migration, I sense that the turtles are on the move, and I come here to wait and watch.
    The living and nonliving elements of the planet share a succession of synchronizations that are set within the variations of the passing seasons. They march to a single drummer. But the rhythms of the timing, which are attuned to the vagaries of climate, can vary by weeks from year to year. There is, on balance, in these cyclical variations a degree of constancy that allows me both the dream and the expectancy of appointments kept. They are crossings, intersections, in the arenas of minutes, hours, days ... years. I endeavor to read the seasons, their cycles of water, light, temperature, and time, their at once constant and varying clock.
    Repeated visits to the wetlands I am intimately familiar with, season after season,