Water Rhythm
Catherine Reid
In all the years when I did not know what to believe in and therefore preferred to leave all beliefs alone, whenever I came to a place where living water welled up, blessedly cool and sweet and pure ... I felt that after all it must be wrong not to believe in anything. —Sigrid Unset
When water doesn’t flow from a faucet; when the house isn’t connected to city pipes; when every ounce has to be driven in by truck or carried in gallon jugs or we have to go to the source for every pail and sip—the well, the spring, the reservoir, the river—then we remember how we depend on it, how it fattens our cells and lungs, our veins and humors, our meat and fruit and vegetables. We savor it. We dole it out.
We sense again its steady rhythm, the way I felt it in the voice of a friend when she described her home by what she no longer had. “We used to live with a cistern,” she said with some sadness. “We had to live our days around if and when there was water.” She said it as though reciting poetry, as though the experience contained many truths and each could be distilled into that one succinct metaphor. But she and her partner do more than raise sheep and border collies; they also work regular jobs at other places and have to show up on time, whether or not water flowed from the small reservoir. She shrugged and led us toward the barn. “Unfortunately, you can only live like that when everyone works on the land, the way the earlier farm families did. When you can set up a rhythm of washing—clothes, your body—that has everything to do with available water and nothing to do with time of day. You make sure there’s enough for the animals; you make sure everyone gets some to drink. You learn to shower when you can and save dishwater if you have to; you hoard all that rinse water to throw on the garden.” And after many months of trying to fit their lives into that cycle, they admitted they needed a steadier flow and dug a deep well.
I knew what she meant, however; I had lived the rhythm as a kid, though only for those summer weeks that our family spent at my grandfather’s cabin in northern Vermont, where all our drinking water came from a spring across the pond. We took turns paddling over, a chore none of us minded—a quiet approach, a careful entry through tall grass, a way of lowering the pail so that no silt was stirred. And then that bucket of clear, cool water to balance in the center of the canoe, and then carry up the uneven steps of the bank, into the kitchen without slopping or dribbling. It was the drinking and teeth-brushing water, the cooking and tea-making water, the coffee and lemonade and thirsty-in-the-night water. For everything else—for everything that didn’t come near our mouths—we used water from the pond. But the water we dippered we loved for its taste and because we knew where it rose up, secretive and splendid.
It was a rhythm I knew briefly as an adult, too, the two winters I lived without plumbing and made do with rain buckets, with ice or snow I melted in large trays on the woodstove. And it was a rhythm I felt in every cell in my body for those four days I once fasted without food or water. I had taken part in a demonstration, protesting a nuclear power plant being built on the banks of the Connecticut River, just upstream from where I’d grown up. I knew too well what “downriver” and “downwind” meant. I knew too well which railways would carry away radioactive wastes, which roads would turn into evacuation routes for families and school buses and emergency personnel. I believed then and now that there’s no acceptable way of storing materials with century-long half-lives.
I was arrested and chose to fast, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, my body feeling lighter and more brittle by the hour. Then, at 2 a.m. on the fifth morning, they released me, a guard offering me a glass of water before I went out. Afterward, almost rehydrated and on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, everything in that moist night seemed connected by the kindness of her gesture and the water animating all of us—the deer in the headlight, my eyes tearing in the wind, the frogs’ great leaps as they spronged across the road.
Salamander Crossing
Catherine Reid
I once picked up a child from the roadside, a kid I’d never seen before in a town I rarely passed through. I was driving toward Camel’s Hump in northern Vermont for a day of hiking while the leaves were just ideas and the views all big and unimpeded. I had the day off from work, a dear friend was with me. But first there was the crying child on the grass, his bike on its side, pieces of pedal strewn about him. He let me check the knee he held, a nasty scrape, several bubbles of blood, the hill far too steep for rickety wheels, for a scared seven-year old in a small snowsuit, a bulky knapsack on his back.
We drove him back up the hill to his house and then understood why he dared the risky ride. His mother appeared at last, disheveled, in a bathrobe, and kept the screen door closed between us. She looked beaten and suspicious, dark circles under her eyes, an arm bent to protect herself or to swing and connect with him—but not while we stood there, waiting. “He’s a brave kid,” I said. “He almost made it.” I looked behind at the yard and didn’t see a vehicle. “Do you want us to drop him off at school?”
She didn’t. “We’ll manage,” she said.
I took my time retrieving bike parts from the car, arranging them on the lawn, piecing together the story out of the snuffling he’d done earlier. He had missed his bus—it came way before it should have, 6:30 suddenly acting like 7:30, and he’d been warned about waking her, so he took off the fastest way possible.
Suddenly I got it and wanted to shout at the house. “It’s daylight savings time! It’s not his fault!”
But all of us had been thrown off by then.
We left, we climbed the mountain, it felt surreal, the beauty, the clarity, the curious sleepiness in my limbs, as though I could float over long stretches of rock, miscalculate distances, stay out too late to get off the summit before dark. As though I could injure myself if I weren’t careful. I was an hour out of time in my body, and even more aware of it because of a small boy who had to take the rap for a law that insisted we all advance our clocks.
It jars me every spring, this odd way we jerk ourselves out of the rhythm that surrounds us, just when the hours of sunlight seem long enough to approximate our days. Just when it’s easy to sense the exact moment the sun rises, the exact place on the horizon where it sets. And then daylight savings comes around and we have to learn the grand design all over again.
For the first week or so afterward, I feel tugged two ways at once, though it’s most noticeable at night. During the day, there’s work and school and appointments, and no choice but to pay attention to the tickings, the digital flashings. But after dark, the windows open at last, spring comes like a train, an express schedule, and it’s lusty and oblivious, not caring if we’re groggy or clear or wholly in our bodies. It’s coming—throbbing and chaotic and barely contained, the spiraling woodcock, the quacking wood frog, the ruffed grouse on his log, slamming air—like a line of can-can dancers, exacting and sexual and violent.
Most of this movement is easy to see—fisting skunk cabbage, swollen streams, green spikes shooting up from ready bulbs. It took me longer to learn about that other groundswell, the damp bodies that slip and blat their way through the woods, across roads, past new construction sites, old stone walls, driven, unstoppable, the frogs and toads and salamanders heading for a vernal pool and a night of thrashing and coupling.
I first saw the heave when driving home one foggy night in late March—a large salamander stumping across the road, its body lit and distorted by the headlights, by the glint off all that dripping water. Just beyond it was another and then another and another, all of them so disproportionate and sudden that I was sure they were prehistoric, older than the horsetails that grew by the brook’s edge. I had to stop the car. I had to wonder how much wine I’d had with dinner. Then I had to get a closer look—salamanders, four and five inches long, with yellow spots dotting their chunky black bodies. They were too driven to be deterred by the car’s lights, by my height. They moved faster when I approached but they didn’t change their course. The rain fell harder; it was cold; I wanted to get home, but there were all these salamanders in the road.
In the land all around me were a million others—marbled and Jefferson’s and blue-spotted salamanders; spring peepers and gray treefrogs, green frogs and pickerel frogs, American and Fowler’s toads, several thousand wood frogs in one pool alone. Maybe even a spadefoot toad, though it’s the rarest, its cycle the fastest. It does the whole thing in one night—emerging from a burrow and heading for a pool, crying out and finding a ready mate, and then releasing the eggs (if it’s female) and fertilizing them (if it’s male), all while still dark. Within hours, the eggs morph into embryos; within days they hatch; within two to three weeks, small toadlets stretch their legs and hop through the woods, equipped with all they need to dig their own dark chambers.
One month, total, from conception to first apartment.
Others take longer, traveling in parades, processions, single-file journeyings, as predictable as the moon’s wax and wane, as the shift of constellations across the black sky. A warm, wet night at the end of March or early April and they’re off, pulled through the night to the pool they first knew, that large puddle in the woods that teems with life for a few short months—tadpoles, fingernail clams, fairy shrimp; turtles and raccoons arriving to eat them, snakes and owls and wading birds, grabbing large insects, fat pollywogs, adult frogs—and then the pool’s gone, dried- up, leaf-littered.
Where the path of these spring migrants cross busy roads, there’s carnage, there’s decimation, thousands of thin skins flattened by morning. Some towns have responded by closing those roads for the few late night hours when amphibians are on the move. Others have constructed tunnels to funnel salamanders safely under. In a few places, volunteer brigades provide the escort service, citizens in boots and raincoats, schlepping amphibians across busy byways.
A breeze blows out of the south in a night still chilly with the melting of ice, and the telephones start ringing, the network of calls like the croaking of frogs, connecting strangers with flashlights in this urgent, wet ritual. We’re sleepy; we’re slickered; we’re in a moment out-of-time as we abet hastening salamanders to that place, so easy to imagine, where desire and relief meet at last.
Catherine Reid writes and teaches in western Massachusetts. Her most recent book is Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). She also introduced and co-edited two anthologies—Every Woman I’ve Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on Their Mothers (Cleis Press) and His Hands, His Tools, His Sex, His Dress: Lesbian Writers on Their Fathers (Alice Street/Haworth Press). A winner of creative nonfiction awards from New Millennium Writings and Alligator Juniper, she also has had work in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review, Sun Dog, and Americas Review. She studied creative writing at Florida State University with the late Jerry Stern and was twice a recipient of a Kingsbury Writing Fellowship. Several of the excerpts appearing here are from River Rights, an exploration of the competing forces in a dynamic watershed.