Free Following the Water by David M. Carroll

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