One of the rarest turtles in North America sits in my left hand, peeing. The spring sun is hot on my shoulders, turtle urine wet in my palm. The toes of my rubber boots have sunk out of sight in a marshy meadow a few miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland. Three hours ago I left my home in mountainous western Maryland, forty-five minutes ago I was doing fifty miles an hour in rush-hour traffic through the city, and now I’m nose to nose with a small creature who first appeared with the dinosaurs in the Triassic Period and has changed very little since.
The turtle in my hand swims for a while in the air, its small flippers rowing uselessly, trying to find some surface to push off from. The orange blotches on its neck identify it as a rare bog turtle. Its shell is a mosaic of scarabs, irregularly shaped, polished scales of obsidian and cedar. When I bring it up close to my right eye and peer between the top and bottom of its shell, I can see not only the obvious orange on its neck, but how that vivid color pales deep inside its shell like the embers of a fire in the far reaches of a cave. I like to think it’s some kind of signal, a message from 150 million years ago.
My herpetologist friend Jim supervises a research project in this meadow, a project designed to study the territory and movements of these three-to-four-inch-long turtles, creatures threatened by habitat loss, wetland invasion by nonnative plants, and illegal collecting for the European exotic-pet trade. During previous visits, Jim has epoxied and duct-taped to several turtles’ shells small transmitters that emit a specific signal. He and his research associates are trying to track them to see how much room and what kind of habitat they require, so that conservation practices can help restore their dwindling populations. The biologists are interested in range, eating habits, and nesting requirements. I’m interested in the turtles’ semiaquatic nature, how they hang between two worlds at once.
Ecologists consider turtles a mostly successful group of animals, meaning they haven’t been wiped out by predators or an inability to adapt to changing environments. They’re reptiles, not amphibians. Amphibians spend part of their life cycle in the water, often with gills, and later, when they develop lungs, move to a more permanent residence on land — a kind of two-part existence. First you’re an adolescent, splashing around in the neighborhood pond, and then your body begins to change, and you grow legs, move onto land, and spend your days sober and dry. The bog turtle, however, is born in bog or swamp or marshy fen and spends its whole life there, burrowing into the mud, hauling itself out to bask on logs, back and forth between wet and dry — as if it can’t make up its mind and spends its whole life trying them both. It’s the ambiguity of their habits that interests me.
No places are more ambiguous than swamps and bogs. Their identities wander from solid to liquid, slosh back and forth over the line between firm and yielding. Irish poet Seamus Heaney called the bog a place that “missed its last definition by millions of years.” How did such a sloppy place get past the Creator? In Genesis I read that on the second day, God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear.” I’m trying to imagine what happened here, whether God meant that decree in some macrocosmic way and didn’t much care about the details of little valleys like this, or whether it’s just been too long, and God, having turned his attention elsewhere, hasn’t noticed how swamps and bogs defy all those grand “let there be this” and “let there be that” proclamations.
The day the bog turtle pees in my hand, Jim and his colleagues are searching for nests. It’s June, nearing the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. The search for turtles without transmitters begins primitively, Jim’s two assistants tottering through the wetland with two long sticks each. Picture a novice skier without skis, trying to get used to walking over uneven ground with a ski pole in each hand. Except these two are punching the ground with their poles, a rhythmic gunk-down, slurp-up, lurching through the spongy earth. They’re waiting for the sound and feel of something solid down there in the mud, something their poles will clunk against — a rock, an old green Coke bottle, a turtle’s back. One of the assistants, Rick, is the size and shape of a football player: massive shoulders, chest like a stone slab. He flounders along, wobbles each time he hauls one foot out of the slop, swings it forward like a mud-draped pillar, lowers it, shifts his weight, sinks in again.
When Rick’s pole hits something solid, he whoops, leans down, and grabs a foot-long turtle by the tail. It’s not the shy bog turtle but a snapper, and it dangles in midair like an upside-down maniac in a straitjacket. Twisting its shelled body, trying to wrench itself free, it does a sudden swing-lunge for the pole Rick clenches in his other hand, snapping its jaws at the wood, neck muscles distended. This is not the turtle we’ve come looking for, and the contrast between its fury and the bog turtle’s shyness reminds me of that optical illusion we used to puzzle over in grade school: If you look at the drawing one way, you see a demure woman’s face, her eyes downcast, feathered hat, something soft draped around her neck. Shift your vision just a bit, and the hag appears, warty chin, nose like the bent prong of a pitchfork. The drawing is both women at once. The bog holds both turtles at once. When you reach down and work your hands into the mud, what you touch is as likely to rip a chunk off your fingertip as pee in your hand.
I ease the bog turtle I’m holding back into its muddy tunnel and leave Rick, the snapper still dangling from his grip. I’m off to wander the boundary of this swamp, trying to find its edge. I hike the perimeter with a long stick, jabbing it into the muck every ten feet or so. I can easily get obsessed about something like this: wanting to walk, toe to heel, on the seam between things. Once, I enrolled in a weeklong seminar to learn how the government delineates wetlands. The government’s guide to finding the edge of a swamp is fifty pages long, complete with graphs and soil maps you need a magnifying glass to decipher. But a liquid landscape cannot be nailed down with maps and charts any more than love can be understood as a biochemical reaction of pheromones.
In this wetland, I plunge my stick in, study the soil I’ve disturbed, listen to gurgle-slop, figure that if this hole is wet and that one is dry, then the edge of the swamp is somewhere in between. But it isn’t. There is, in fact, no line at all. What’s between wet and dry land is a broad border, a wavy intermediate zone whose boundaries won’t hold still.
Trying to define the edge of a swamp is like trying to put a neatly folded shadow into a dresser drawer. Our efforts to outline these places arise from a desire for tidiness, a wish that nothing undefined lurk around our own edges. But the truth is, even human boundaries shift. Some mornings, I wake up feeling small and compact. I barrel through those days, teaching, opening mail, and grading papers like a self-propelled lawn mower. Put anything on my desk, and I’ll take care of it immediately. Other days, I feel huge, airy, globular. Someone blows through the bubble wand, and I billow out my front door, roll into the garden, into class. Whatever comes my way, I envelop it — snapdragons, students, the solar eclipse. I can’t grade a thing, but I can see the shadow a poem makes, where it wants to go. On those days, I can live with how the edges of a swamp shift, how its underbelly can sometimes surge in the center and open up into a pond, how the pond can disappear and the woods around the perimeter go soggy overnight. So, depending on the day, I am alternately high geared and languid, driven and lazy. And everything in between.
I spent many an afternoon as a child on the stairway between the living room and the bedrooms in our split-level home. It was a central place in the house, just off the foyer, and I loved to sit there with a blanket over my head — aware of the front door closing, my father’s big shoes on the flagstone entryway, the dog’s paws, my mother’s pointed heels. From this vantage point, as if hunched behind a boulder just off the trail, I could see and hear the foot traffic but pretend I was invisible. Everyone knew not to bother me there, that I was in one of those half-here, half-elsewhere moods I would know much later to be a kind of germination period. Once, my twin sister and I even fashioned our own seedpod by threading an old rope through the four corner grommets of a tarpaulin and flinging the rope’s frayed end over a large limb of a maple in front of the house. We sat cross-legged in the middle of the tarp and pulled on the rope until the four corners rose around us, enclosing us, and the sack began to rise off the ground. We were actually able to hoist ourselves a few feet into the air this way and dangle there, a khaki-green sack of twins, a pod hanging heavy on the vine, its seeds hidden inside, suspended and swaying over the front lawn of a suburban neighborhood.
At that time, my family lived just a half mile or so from a small pond that my twin and I could walk to, cutting through the woods at the back of our neighborhood. The pond must have been on someone’s property, but no one ever bothered us there. We went simply to see what was happening, to poke our sticks in the muddy edge or listen to spring peepers. One spring I spent weeks there imagining my stick was a giant pencil with a pink rubber eraser on the end. I imagined crouching on the bank of the pond and systematically erasing the edge, pushing the stubby end into the reeds and rubbing back and forth, back and forth, until the tall green lines grew smudged and crumbly, speckled with imaginary bits of pink rubber. I’d lean over, take a deep breath, and exhale with the blast of a small bellows, then pretend I could see the flecks of pond edge and pink eraser debris fly into a bright blue sky as the pond, unrestrained, spilled over my shoes. There was something quite magical about all this, the notion that you could change the ground you stood on by erasing some line. Years later, when I first read Loren Eiseley’s work, I happened across this statement: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place.”
The gift of ambiguity is that it stretches us. Makes us less rigid. Nudges us out of either/or thinking. One morning when I was forty-two, I stood in my bedroom, changing from a sweat shirt to a T-shirt, and suddenly I couldn’t remember whether my twin or I was older. Was I Baby Girl A or Baby Girl B? From the moment of our birth, in spite of our parents’ best efforts to differentiate us, we were “the twins,” a unit who shared bedrooms and friends and chores and clothes and good-night rituals, a unit others momentarily dissected by asking which of us was older, as if those thirteen minutes were the only distinction between us. So, on the midlife morning when I stood in my bedroom and felt those thirteen minutes utterly dissolve, the realization swept over me that if I didn’t know which one of us was older, if that distinction disappeared, then I might very well be my sister, not me. Looking in the mirror didn’t help. I recognized the face, knew this body was the writer’s and that other one the designer’s. But I felt somehow it was quite possible that I had momentarily sloshed into her body and she into mine, that this might not be me now sitting on the bathroom floor, the way if you take a stick and dig a channel between puddles in the dirt, the water from each puddle heads toward the other, and there’s nothing to stop the exchange of liquid so that, in just an instant, there’s some new, double-bulged body of water, but no recognizable puddle A or puddle B.
I stayed in this curious state, spilling between the two of us, for about an hour that morning. Nothing miraculous occurred. I didn’t emerge knowing my sister’s darkest secrets or able at last to pull off an elegant redesign of my living room, as she could have. What I did feel was how completely fluid my notion of self can be; how totally illusory the lines are with which we define ourselves. I felt a quiet mixture of relief and sadness about all this: Relief at the momentary dropping of the iron definition by which we determine who we are. Sadness at how hard we labor to “know ourselves” — selves that, it seems, are no more fixed than this boggy ground I’m sinking into.
Here’s what I love about the in-between: its inherent ambiguity, how it invites a swaying of the imagination, a languid hammock swing between two definitions, two identities. The mind, like the body, swings sideways, rises over one bed of possibilities, pauses at the peak, considers, sweeps down and over to the other side. I am one twin, then the other. This swamp is land first, and then water; this creature a waddler, and now a swimmer. We are shape-shifters, all of us, liquid mosaics of mutable and transient urges, and we give ourselves headaches when we pretend otherwise, when we stiffen into permanent and separate identities unsullied by the drifting slop, the very real ambiguities of ourselves and the world.
A television crew arrives after lunch to film Jim’s work with bog turtles. This meadow research site is controversial because it lies near a proposed bypass, and the state highway administration has been working with conservation biologists to protect the turtles’ habitat. The camera rolls as Jim pulls on his hip waders again, fastens his headphones, and dials up a certain turtle’s frequency. He listens for a moment, then sloshes off through the wetland. The reporter, in white sneakers, and the cameraman follow. Behind them, clouds thicken in the west.
A hundred feet or so into the wetland, Jim stops and turns the receiver a little to the left, then to the right, the way astronomers turn their radio telescopes, scanning the cosmos, searching for intelligent messages from outer space. Jim is searching for the origin of a blip-blip that’s buried in the mud. Suddenly he stops, kneels, and plunges his arm elbow deep into a soft place between tussocks. Moments later he pulls up an old bog turtle — twenty-five years old, he guesses — a collage of epoxy and duct tape and shell, all of it slathered in mud. It tries swimming in the air, flippers rowing uselessly. The camera zooms in close as the reporter, her sneakers sinking into brown puddles, points to the turtle’s back, the orange blotches, and asks a dozen questions. I’m touched by her efforts, as if helping people understand who this turtle is, his age, his blaze of orange, will help them understand the need to preserve this wetland. The reporter bends down and peers under the carapace. The turtle in Jim’s hand churns his useless legs and recoils his head until Jim finally bends down, wriggles his arm back into the muck, and buries the turtle again.
Isn’t this what we all want sometimes — to burrow into the mud and still have someone nearby who can tune in to our frequency; who can find us no matter how deeply we’ve dug ourselves in?
The present is always ambiguous. We never know whether we’re headed in a good direction or straight into disaster. The most we can do is look back occasionally and see where we’ve been, the patterns to which we’re prone. One of the standard methods for mapping a bog turtle’s meandering patterns is what’s known as the “thread-trailing method.” The researcher attaches a spool of thread to the turtle’s shell so that, as the turtle moves through mud and sedges, the spool unwinds, leaving a trail of thread behind. The researcher can come back days later and follow the thread to hidden nesting sites. It reminds me of Theseus in the Labyrinth, trailing the thread Ariadne had secretly given him. It was his only hope of finding his way out, she’d told him. Theseus could just as easily have been in a huge swamp, a maze of channels and troughs where the only way to get out is to remember which turns and twists you took going in. And in this place, the monster who awaits you could be as ambiguous as the landscape.
It was the Minotaur, of course, that Theseus was trying to kill, a human with a horned head, the offspring of a Greek king’s wife who fell in love with a bull. It’s a wonder there’s not more of the shenanigans of interspecies breeding in the swamp. This place seems as if it could be conducive to animal-plant procreation, an appropriate setting for the bog turtle to lie down with the bur reed, the dragonfly to mate with the duckweed. Here, whole new beings might evolve — salamanders with the skin of rose petals, toothed lilies, turtles who reproduce by releasing seedpods into the wind. The closest things I’ve seen so far in any swamp are the meat-eating plants. Sundews, pitcher plants, and other carnivorous plants aren’t limited to wetlands, but these part-land, part-water places are home to a number of animal-like flora. Botanists would say, reasonably, that the plants have simply adapted to the sparse nutrition available. But I like to think, too, that there’s a camaraderie here, a tolerance for hybrids and mongrels, a kinship among the patrons of this all-night, half-sunken bar for cross-dressers.
Cross-dressing flora too inhibited to put on an animal mask can flounce around here, as well. A larch tree, for example, looks like a conifer but behaves like a deciduous. Beautifully needled, the larches at Cranesville and Finzel Swamps turn a delicate gold in autumn: sixty-foot-high sculptures of yellowed lace that by December are as bare as nearby maples, the moss at their base littered with inch-long sprinkles.
And if the ambiguity of species cross-dressing is honored in a swamp, it’s no wonder the jack-in-the-pulpit’s gender switching is at home here, too. It’s a trick that might be worth learning: In late summer, you do a quick self-examination of the reserves you’ve been able to store up for next spring, an assessment you make by checking the size of your underground bulb, known as a corm. A large corm indicates you have enough reserves to come out next spring as a female with two leaves and a flower. But if your corm is small, you just kick back, wait all winter, and come out in the spring as a male with a single leaf. Botanists call it “sequential hermaphroditism,” a kind of sexual flip-flopping that lets you gauge your resources before you choose the gender role you want to play during the next season. How sensible.
And how unlikely. We’re a culture that values a dependable, separate self. We not only try to color inside the lines; we’re the ones who produce the coloring books and draw the thick black lines in the first place. Something about us insists that who we are and how we interact with each other be as straight-lined, demarcated, and geometrical as our buildings, parking lots, and highways.
By late afternoon, the television crew has packed up its equipment, and I have climbed out of the turtle’s muddy, sedgy home and sat down to pull off my boots. Jim has located another bog turtle. As he lifts it gently out of the mud, I think that perhaps the ultimate mystery is not that there are no clear, impenetrable boundaries in the universe, but that we can live as if there are. Why the whole apparition holds up, I don’t know. I lie back on the hillside, rest my head against what I know are zillions of whirring grass molecules, more space than solid. My skull, though, doesn’t fall backward into a galaxy of green stars. A sheer layer of cloud veils the sun, turning the sky a pale yellow behind a drizzle of rain. When, across the valley, the sun flashes through for a second, suddenly everything is shimmer and dew, like some kind of backlit, pointillist painting into which someone is blowing moisture. Even the long-dead trees in the middle of the swamp glisten and flicker. The alders, the sedges, the hummocks, the hillside beyond — everything wavers, minuscule movements made visible by millions of sprinkles of lights. And for an instant I think, This is how everything really is — quivering, all the time. What appears solid is actually a rush of molecules whirring in tree trunks, in bark; nothing is still or impenetrable, not even us. I lie by the water, which expands as the sky falls into it, and the whole vision, utterly silent and delicate, vanishes into the inky pool.
We make so much fuss these days about establishing appropriate boundaries, holding our boundaries, and the risks of dissolving boundaries, whether it’s with lovers, colleagues, students, or friends. Self-help books are full of advice about setting limits, resisting manipulation, saying no. And rightly so. There’s much damage incurred from the brutish tramping into someone else’s space. If bogs were human, therapists would make a fortune treating their boundary issues. Psychologists’ waiting rooms would be jammed with jack-in-the-pulpits, sundews, larches — all the swamp creatures who haven’t sorted out their eating disorders and gender problems. But the waiting rooms are empty, and, left to their own devices, the plants seem to have it all worked out anyway. Plants go on eating animals; the larch drops its needles; the jack-in-the-pulpit switches its sex; the borders relax, shift, absorb others. When, by some act of grace, the lines we think are there dissolve, something else appears, something timeless and rich, an intermediate zone, languid and latent, the lushness of something about to be and in no particular hurry to make it happen. The boundary between physical and spiritual melts, and we see that one is always infused with the other. And, as in love, there’s much that’s both real and mysterious in the tender and conscious dissolution of identities, much richness in this place betwixt and between, in this realm of ambiguity.
In Jim’s hand, the bog turtle retracts its orange neck, disappears inside its carapace. Some primitive fire still glows in the recesses of its shell, millions of years old, reminding me of a world without form, a void, before God separated light from darkness, land from water, me from my twin, where you can live on both sides at once, and you know, lifting one foot and then another, stepping in and out of the bog, that the bog is your body, too; that the lines severing one thing from another are chiseled in air; that you can bend down and blow the debris of erased edges into a sky that will blur and shimmer with light.
“Erased Edges” is reprinted from Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, by Barbara Hurd. © 2001 by Barbara Hurd. It appears here by permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org. It first appeared in Orion.
