Following the Water by David M. Carroll

in turtle places, the trees I touched were mostly those of swamps. In the same way I came to know the shrubs, more numerous and diverse, which my hands were constantly gripping for a necessary physical steadying, as well as for other groundings. Trees and shrubs were something to take hold of in an insubstantial world, something to provide me rootings and something by which to take root. In time I came to know the names they had been given. I couldn't get enough of learning their names, common and scientific and eventually even in the foreign languages I studied.
    Black bears mark trees, rubbing, biting, and clawing them to designate their territories. I touch trees, my signal trees, most of them sentinels marking points where I enter or depart from a marsh or swamp. I touch them at each coming and going throughout the seasons. When I can reach a shaft of sunlight striking a tree's bark, I place my hand there.
Other trees mark a place along the way in my wetland circuits. At the same time they mark a station in the seasons. Some I touch day after day for weeks on end, others but once in several years. Some I have touched only once in decades; some I will never touch again because they have been taken away or because I cannot bear to go back to where they stand. Storms and lightning have taken some—there is no loss in this.
    I am in the quiet here, the silent now of this slowly moving shadow. Time stays with me awhile. There is always a sense of returning for me in such a place. I come back again to tree bark and shadow, intervals of bird song and silence, the voice of the wind, the streamlet in its silent slipping by ... back to a day in the swamp in boyhood when I had a sense in the present of a day in some deep past. I enter a confusion of time that allows not a better understanding of time, but a deeper relationship with it.
    There are no empty hours in these wild places, no unit of time in which nothing happens. There are durations in which it might appear that nothing has changed. But something is always taking place. For how long now have I observed no more than the shadow of the pine in its incremental shifting as constant, if not as continually observable, as the glimmering water drifting by? There is the invisible passage of time, revealed by the sundial of this white pine. I am so aware of this place, this crossroads of life and the
seasons, as a theater of time. There is as much time coming as passing ... it flows over me as the nearby water flows over a fallen alder stem or as the pine tree's shadow moves over the earth. Do I dream the day or experience it? Watch it go by or go with it?
    I come here during the spotted turtles' migrations, the season of so many returnings, to stand by this sentinel tree and watch the season for a while. When the turtle migrations end, I leave the pine to the rest of the year. Whenever I am here or in any of the places I am this deeply drawn to, I feel a connectedness, a filling in of some profound, vague emptiness. I need to be empty of all distractions. I come to forget and to remember.
    Since early boyhood there have been two foundations: to be there and to return. I feel again that promise kept, kept from the day of the first turtle, those first few hours of being there. I come also to know where to be. The places have changed as landscapes have been ground under, but it is all there waiting in the places that remain. All that opened up to me in that first place, the intuitive revelations and empirical observations, holds on in this place that has been left to the workings of nature—where, for want of a better word, "wildness" lingers on.
    I come to meet the day, and the day comes to me. I am here not to gather information but to receive information; to breathe in and out the pine-scented air, take in the nour
ishing silence, listen to the wind, the birds, the frogs; to watch the water shimmering by and regard the slow turning of the shadow of the pine as it marks the