'Following the Water': a naturalist's love affair with swamps and their creatures

"Following the Water — A Hydromancer's Notebook"

by David M. Carroll

Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, 188 pp., $24

With its limited appeal to lovers of swamps and turtles, it's hard to imagine how David M. Carroll's beautiful new book, his fifth, will find enough buyers to earn its advance, much less turn a profit. Perhaps, like poetry collections printed as priceless gems intended for extremely specialized audiences, Carroll's stunning drawings and circumspect ruminations on his wanderings in ever more threatened New England wetlands are reason enough. What he witnesses will open the eyes of readers of "Following the Water" who care to look, offering rewards utterly unrelated to a publisher's bottom line.

For "Swampwalker's Journal," Carroll won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal, an annual award for distinguished nature writing, in 2001. He won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2006. He's an active lecturer and consultant to conservation institutions in the Northeast. This information comes from the cover biography, but why he dons camouflage clothing and waders, and spends days and nights toting notebook, binoculars and camera into rural backwaters in search of turtles, he never reveals.

But for some unexplained, perhaps inexplicable, reason, for more than 50 years Carroll has set off as soon as creeks flow and snow melts, every year a year older, as are the turtles whose shells he notches in order to identify them. Every year, too, undeveloped, undisturbed territories shrink, forcing native inhabitants to adjust yet again to human encroachment.

"Following the Water" traces six months of Carroll's detailed observations. From April's dance of mayfly larvae to August's hatching turtles to October's "quieting" of the year, he walks slowly and stops often to report on worlds few of us ever see. Sometimes, even he struggles to find his quarry, such as a gray tree frog, whose "crypsis in color, pattern, and motionlessness ... is legendary." In his notebook, Carroll dubs the frog "lichen with eyes," and his sketch perfectly illuminates the description.

This book is emotionally opaque and raises huge issues — overpopulation, waste, conservation — without offering suggestions. Nevertheless, it's well worth the journey with Carroll, whose passion we may not fully understand yet can't help but admire.