April 5 – From the blinding white snow of the hayfield I look down on the wetland mosaic I call The Great Alder Carr. On my third straight day of coming here I see the first glimmerings of open water. There comes that moment in the hour of the day at thaw when the first openings in the ice appear, and everything changes. I descend the slope, enter the alders, make my way across the snow-covered ice shelf – it gives way in places – and, wearing my neoprene waders, step down into a narrow channel that has melted clear.
Steadied by my wading-staff and hand-holds on alder stems, I thread my way through a labyrinth of innumerable small mounds built up by alders, stunted red maple, tussock sedge, and royal fern. Nearly an hour into my wading I meet with the moment I have so often visualized in the deepest heart of winter. I make out the luster of the April sun on the dome of a turtle’s carapace.
The sighting is in itself enough…certain that this is the first day with any breaks in the ice cover, I can record the precise date of first emergence from hibernation here for the thirty-third consecutive year. (It gives me pause to think that this represents almost a third of a century.)
Identifying this turtle would be of great value. Every record adds to years of documenting individual spotted, wood, and Blanding’s turtles in the broader ecosystem. Every turtle is a history.
A special lifelong kind of tension increases as I draw closer to the turtle. He detects me. The turtle’s head appears, legs extend. I make a lunge, thrusting my left hand forward. It closes on a chill carapace. He has not been in the sun for long; there is, to my advantage, still some winter in him. In all of this, the feel of that form and everything around me, there is an intimate familiarity, reaching back to swamps and marshes taken out of existence long ago. I am familiar with landscapes of loss – they are lost loves.
Finding a shrub mound substantial enough to support me, I manage to get up out of the water to give my feet some respite from the icy water and document the turtle. There are no notches or distinctive markings, no anomaly to identify him. It seems that I have never seen him before. As I study his pat¬terns I think back again to that initial intersection of instants with a turtle. What was it I read in those first constellations on that night-sky arc of the spotted turtle’s shell? I was so young, eight years old…. I knew I had discovered a key, a passkey from an entirely human world, all that I had ever known, and that opened a path into an utterly new universe. I was compelled to follow it, with turtle as guide.
The turtle in my hand has warmed. He comes forth from his shell, reaching out with his legs, resisting my grip. At once I notice his right hind foot: he has a spur-like protuberance on his heel that I recognize immediately. I remember making drawings of this diagnostic feature in past notebooks, but I have not seen him in years.
Findings engender remembrance…my thoughts go back to another turtle from this one’s time, a female with markings so striking I was inspired to do a drawing of her shell. That first recording of spot patterns initiated my keeping notebook records of individual turtles. Over a period of 18 years, she became one I saw with uncommon frequency. I seemed fated to come upon her, in all habitats of her species’ seasonal rounds: vernal pools, backwater fens, migration streams, marshes and shrub swamps, and nesting grounds.
During a mild spell in December, I sighted her through a window of ice, which led to discovering her precise hiber-naculum for that winter. One summer, I found her completing a nest at dawn. There always seemed something uncanny about encounters – the day that I found her nesting was June 10, the 50th anniversary of the day that I found my first turtle.
Her markings were so distinctive I never gave her a number. I gave her a name, something I did with no more than a handful of turtles: “Ariadne.” This name came to me out of nowhere, a beautiful name for a beautiful turtle. Throughout the seasons I wrote in my notebooks, “Looking for Ariadne.”
Years later, when I was writing an account of her nesting at daybreak, I suddenly questioned myself. “Who was Ariadne?” I investigated the name and yes, preternatural: “Ariadne, goddess of paths, mazes, and labyrinths; it was she who gave Theseus a clew of thread that enabled him to escape from the labyrinth of the minotaur.” I again thought back to that first turtle, and the origins of the ways that have led me through the labyrinth of my life. I have not seen Ariadne in more than 15 years. I am still looking for Ariadne.