By Lyn Garling

Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, Wells, Maine
Early Spring 1997


How is it I find myself here, on the chilly coast of Maine, far from my Pennsylvania country home? And particularly, on this marshy mile-long nature trail in the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge? It is not by accident.

The highway heading north from Boston is a crush of drivers pushing ahead at dizzying speeds through the snow and sleet . Visibility is almost nil as I navigate through a tunnel of mist. Large semis spew splats of salt spray onto my windshield and carry the collective product to the collective consumer in far-flung places. Everything is grey, dirty, wet, faceless, nameless, devoid of soul. Is this the sum total of modern man's accomplishment, supply and demand? Malls, outlet stores on all sides loom large in the shadowy periphery. I pull off the Interstate onto Highway One. More stores. I am looking for something else, something not for sale. A refuge.

I land here like a an oil-soaked grebe washed up on shore. Stepping out, I shiver and take a deep breath of the stillness. The white pine and hemlock trees around me breathe back, gently, dormant, dreaming. Cool, moist, fresh air caresses my face. Granular wet snow lays limply and hummocky over the forest floor. I see Rachel Carson's name on the trailhead and I think, "Yes".

Starting down the path in quiet solitude, I am immediately surrounded by the optimistic conversation of chickadees. I savor the punctuation of my footfalls in the snowy crust. My eyes begin to clear and focus. I slow down. Coming to the first bit of marsh, I see layer upon layer of hues, textures and detail; a quiet unfolding of mystery.

Patches of snow and ice cling to the water's surface, forming floating white islands around naked tree snags. Branches reach upward as if frozen in some earlier agony. Drawing close, nothing is as it appears at first glance; a flat expanse of uniformly glazed mud obscures teeming life below the surface. (Though small brown burps of sulfur secretly give it away!) A stick, holding still in the water appears to be moving downstream as the wind blows one way, the current flows another. Surface waters chop cheerfully inland with the breeze, talkative, tossing glints of light here and there, while the submerged grasses undulate secretly, silently away, toward the sea. A yearning.

Then come sounds. At the bend, the inlet is filled with a distant low growling. My pulse quickens - the ocean! In this chilly misty world, I cannot smell it or see it, yet the presence is huge. In the vastness of the marsh, the honking of geese bounces and skims across the water surface, amplified. A feeling of multitudes. From the woods, crow caws startle, echo and then create a deeper silence, so suddenly I can hear the music of the brown grass stems rustling against one another. Melting snowdroplets trickle between the slats of a bridge, making a melody in fugues, ripples and shadow in the pond below. At the water's edge are bubbles frozen in the ice as if the ripples' sound is held there and when the bubbles escape the thaw, they will let forth a tiny tinkling sound. A liberation.

In front of my nose are forests of tiny lichens inhabiting their own expanse of barklands. Once again I ponder the perfection of symbiosis between algae and fungus. What is this beautifully textured creature living flatly in the interstices between moist thin air and solid bark? Unobtrusively miraculous, nature's most precise air filters, lichens can tell a detailed story about pollution. A story we choose to ignore. At my feet, I see the skeletonized brown leaves on the forest floor and think of all the small lives, quietly doing their jobs, unappreciated, while we rush around our fabricated world, oblivious. A remembering.

Meanwhile, water is everywhere! It is falling from the sky, coming down in river-droves, seeping out of the mud-luscious hillsides in tiny trickles, skittering under, between, below and around every obstacle until, inevitably, it finds its way back home. In turn, the ocean rushes breathlessly up to meet her kind. And me, essentially a bag of animate water, I come to the edge of the shore as if I too were called. A returning.

Water of life, recycled ad infinitum. Did you ever wonder, where each of the quadrillions of molecules of water in your body may have been in their lives? Liquid, gas and solid? Now evanescent in salt spray crashing over the cliffs? Now vibrating within the cells of a she-whale singing from the thick deep blackness? Now flighty in a thunderhead looming over expansive prairieland, light as air, floating with the ozone and caressing lightning bolts? Now iceberg; stoic, inscrutable, fixed in the crystalline matrix of eerie blue crevasses? Endless continuity within endless transformation.

Layer upon layer reveals itself to me and I feel my eyes and mind going deeper, expanding from the narrow confines of everyday life and yet, this IS everyday life! It is going on around and within us at all times.

I think again of Rachel Carson. I conjure her up to be walking along with me quietly, attentive to the larger song through the tiniest manifestation, wordlessly pointing out this bird or that, gazing out at the horizon to see the gyrations of terns silhouetted black against the grey sky, kneeling to see up close the fruiting bodies of the mosses. But what about these? At first I pass them by as just bits of debris, but look! They bounce about on the snow like tiny animate eyelashes gone astray. Looking closely, you can see their chubby antenna and fuzzy blue-grey bodies. It is a small outburst of the humble springtail, their new vernal world a microcosm about 10 feet round. Dense congregations lounge along the dark wooden edging of the trail - maybe to gather heat? I feel a surge of joy and hopefulness at this unexpected discovery of renewed life. Spring of the springtails! Rachel would love it! I feel a sudden camaraderie and pain of loss simultaneously. And yet, I know she is here, in countless ways.

I have come to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge on a pilgrimage and found what I was searching for: a refuge providing place and context for yearning, remembering, returning, continuity, transformation, and liberation. We live in a world caught up in the things of Man, I no less than the next person. We feed greedily from the generous life-springs of nature, without heeding our responsibilities, without giving thanks. I came to remember who I am and where I come from. I came to remember what is important and why. And I came to find the kind of serenity and strength that derives from the knowledge that, fundamentally, we do belong to the eternal cycles of nature, of life and death, and always will.