Water

I am convinced the universe speaks each night through the amphibians, their voices so extraterrestrial:  gray tree frogs like planets hit with tuning forks; the whirring toads a lunar wind (were there one); the peepers, each, a lost world.  One insect and one fowl are dummies too for this ventriloquist:  katydids rattle out the cosmic background radiation; and loons call their distance from some center—one, two, three AU’s. 

My husband and I know upon waking, before we even move, the day will be humid. A gray tree frog has trilled incessantly all morning from a perch level with our second-story bedroom.  I have seen them around before:  suctioned to the window, in the mailbox, in the watering can.  Today, the humid air has swelled his voice to bull-frog-sized.  He happily bellows out the weather report:  high relative humidity for the next twenty-four hours.

We are governed by water.  In much of the world, women and children walk great distances daily—six miles during the dry seasons in rural Africa—to procure enough water for their families, an estimated five gallons a day per person for drinking, cooking and basic hygiene.  Some women carry, on their heads, up to 100 pounds of water at a time.

I cannot really know, though, how water rules.  Wisconsin receives year-round rain and snow, cradles water in 15,000 lakes and 2,444 trout streams, bears water around 86 % of its border, floats on water, even—bring the 1.2 million billion gallons of water in the aquifers beneath it to the surface and the state would be submerged one hundred feet deep.  So when I hike to water as I do today, it is not an act of survival—at least not the physical kind.  I carry my quarter gallon—mostly for the dog—from home to the pond, and come back with the bottle empty, my skin and clothes sweaty, much lighter, in weight and spirit, than when I set out.

When I arrive at the pond, I see the forest has greened in the night’s rain; the pond wears its shore like a grass skirt, stitched by dragonflies that loop and pull.  Plants are 85-90 % water.  I look from the shore to the pond and back again.  How can they be this close in composition?  What is the difference between a blade of grass and the pond?

“All ponds,” says my Audubon Nature Encyclopedia, “have the charm of secrecy.” Two sandhill cranes take off, bellowing a Pleistocene cry.  Red-winged blackbirds balance on cattail heads, puffing out their ketchup-and-mustard epaulettes.  A green frog banjoes.  An arc away, sedges rise through the skeletons of two bucks. 

Bring a kitchen strainer to the pond, says Audubon, and you can find unusual and fascinating pets for your “nature room”.  Today, on a defunct muskrat lodge turtles bask in rows, like a sheet of shiny floor tile, one that could move right out from under you—and it does when my dog runs by, as if a small, silent explosion in the middle had sent each turtle flying.  Once, I encountered a tiny painted turtle somersaulting in the shallows.  I leaned down to pluck it out between thumb and forefinger and just then I realized what it really was: a very large predacious diving beetle, which, with its two sharp pincers, likely would have given me a painful bite.  I shudder to think how I might have held it, like a wrong choice in love, clear in hindsight.

The heat presses sweat out of me while vapor from the humid air condenses on my skin.  We are closest to a pond when we are young.  Babies, at birth, are 78% water. By one year of age, that amount drops to about 65%.   By adulthood, we average out at 60%, less for women than men.  All too quickly, we become more human.  But today I feel rather watery.  The whole scene makes me pleasantly dizzy.  I think of a book I read, written by a neuroanatomist who had survived a stroke.   During the stroke, the author felt fluid rather than solid.  She could not discern her body from the wall she used to maintain her balance—where she ended and the next thing began became no longer evident.  It was as if, she wrote, the world became a solvent and everything in it a solute.  That is how I feel now:  both totally present and not quite there at all.  And I'm quite glad about it.

Desire

I've traded my desire.

I used to crave the tannin-red or mud-brown water of a creek, and a flat rock where I could lay in the sun with a book. I first remember discovering this rejuvenating combination of sun, stone, water, and words about fifteen years ago in a gorge of hemlocks I had trekked to along Maryland's Gunpowder River. Certainly I had united with those first three elements--sun, stone, and water--many times before but on this day I had in my hand a heavy tome: three novels by Thomas Hardy bound as one, and I was deep into Tess of the D'urbervilles. I selected a giant cube of a rock, one of many that made the water there run deep and narrow. The rock was a perfect mattress and pillow, a reservoir of heat; my raised and open book, a parasol. I listened to the water and read as Tess took all of life's hardest blows: poverty, rape, death, lost love. I laughed when Tess and Angel, escaping town after Tess commits murder, happened upon Stone Henge: it just seemed so contrived. But there I lay on my own stone monument. And I would be lying if I said I wasn't taken up in her downward spiral, like the branches disappearing in the whirlpool below me. I would be lying if I said I wasn't shouting yes! and no! to her at all those points when life seemed to offer choices. Perhaps she couldn't hear me, I thought, over the sound of the water.

But now I crave a small, still pool and the bridge above it, a tiny kettle lake that wasn't filled for the first six years I hiked this segment of Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail but now is, thanks to a cyclically rising water table. The pool is just down from the parking area--a square of mown grass in a hayfield--but I hike to it from the other end of the trail so it feels like I'm three miles in. I lay on my stomach on the warm boards, which heat more quickly than stone but cool more quickly too. My chin on my hands, my elbows and hair dangle over the bridge's edge. I stare into the algae green water, at water boatman and whirligigs and all the mosquito larvae that will make this pastime unbearable in a month except on extremely windy days, when the metamorphosed adults will not be able to alight on me. Last week, as I stared, what looked like a large and purple beetle unwound itself from a mass of algae and underwater grasses, but it was actually a salamander's head; he came to the surface, took a breath, then took cover again, repeating this process every ten minutes. I read here too, but mostly nonfiction now: memoir after memoir after memoir, each life told in retrospect, so there is nothing to say in this silent place, no advice to give, though like the hooves of the deer that leave their deep prints all along the shore, I am totally absorbed.

So it's sun and wood and water and words now, and it's just as good.