Despite our lack of rain the bog is full of water. Beavers have been hard at work. Wanting to see what's doing, the hound and I emerge from the cool woods, he securely leashed. On this morning in June, deer are still giving birth and hiding their teeny fawns in the reeds to sleep. We stumbled upon one in a season past. The fawns have no smell and are relatively safe here.* But not safe from exploring and exceedingly curious hounds, so the leash it is.

We’re right on the cusp of a long and cool spring and the hot days of summer. Everything is dusty with pine pollen, including the water — not photogenic, but definitely genic. Slowly, the hound and I wade the perimeter, he alternately sniffing and drinking, hoping to get to the source of that lovely beaver smell. I holding the new camera aloft, hoping  a beaver does not emerge just now.

One after another, I cross the beaver supply channels running from pond to shore with great caution, they are deeper by almost a foot and definitely want to swamp my boots. Step in there and it’d be Agatha on her ass in the water, and camera, too. Every channel is strewn with detritus from beavers pulling branches for their works -- or dinner: leaves, sticks, broken off reeds. Some float high on the surface, others are submerged, half decayed. Tiny fish and other creatures dart between them.

It’s a good moment for noting that things do not get any better than this. Summer’s here but it’s cool yet, green frogs are thumping their hoarse mandolins strings kazoo style, once in a while you hear a bull frog advertising a good place for females with his Model T horn, red-winged blackbirds flit back and forth, tiny blue dragonflies (juvenile blue dashers) defy my attempts to get them to sit for a portrait.

But what really gets me here is the detritus in and on the water. Rich, yellow, almost greasy pine pollen is everywhere, ready to build life. It carries more amino acids than are even needed for making DNA, plus energy food: enzymes, vitamins, minerals, unsaturated fatty acids, and a whole lot of other good stuff. There are dead insects, pieces of alder branch and bark, tiny bits of leaf, teeny blossoms from who-knows-what, young maple leaves blown in from the shore, bits of algae. The water is murky even before the hounds gets a chance to dash through, simply with the amount of stuff that’s floating and hanging around, blowing through the air showing up in rays of sun. A dance of chance to compete with Romeo and Juliet for emotion and drama.
[More below the photo gallery]

Photos:  The photos may be ordered as "Your Pick" greeting cards and 8 x 10 framed prints. 
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Floating Garbage 2 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Floating Garbage 5 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

On the Value of Floating Garbage 4 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Floating Garbage 6 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Floating Garbage 3 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Floating Garbage 7 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Floating Garbage 8 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

On the Value of Floating Garbage 1 (5 x 7 card and 8 x 10 framed print)

Detritus is at the center of everything, some think. A vernal pool, for instance, is characterized by having detritus as its main source of food (energy). That is, detritus from plants and animals not living in it. A vernal pool does not have plants or fish that die and decompose in the water. Stuff falls in and floats in on the wind. The whole place is full of tiny chompers and cutters, creatures specialized in breaking down the leaves, twigs, pollen, dead insects, dead animals, what have you that fall into it. Kind of like a giant digestive trap. They in turn as they die become part of the energy that get digested by even tinier creatures that eat dead things, and of course they themselves are also eaten by larger creatures.

I learned that recently when the Carpenter and I took a hike with a real-life ecologist to learn more about wet places, courtesy of the Hilltown Land Trust. We had an interesting conversation about the definition of external detritus (doesn’t grow in the wet place) versus the food chain in a marsh like this one, where everything and everybody is part of the feast, as plants grow with the nutrients at the very base of it.

For instance, we wondered whether, if a beech tree whose roots are below the vernal pool drops its leaves into the water, it is in fact a member of the vernal pool system, even though we don't see that in the same way I can see that the reeds here in the bog will die and become part of the muck I am sloshing through (with ample and very stinky evidence of the rotting that is part of all this). The pool sort of ends at water’s end, as it were.

The biologist told me that when ecology started, it was assumed that each system was defined by creatures at the top of the chain, the predators we see in the pages of National Geographic and in scary movies. “Now we know,” he said, “that it’s all about like the tiny ones in the water I just showed you in the petrie dish.” Donning hip waders, he’d ventured into a vernal pool to get us some stuff to look at, including the tiniest and cutest tadpoles, giving me a serious case of wader-envy in the process.

For me, it was one of those moments when you see more clearly. We create our world in the image of our own mind, and when we change that mind about ourselves, we create new scientific understanding as well and vice versa. When scientists assumed that we were at the center of everything, they saw those who are most like us in size and activities, likely meat-eating mammals, as the center of an ecosystem.

But slowly an understanding emerged that the systems are not dependent on those at the top, and many, including many scientists, began to see humans as an interdependent piece of nature, as a predator that should not overplay its hand for fear of ending up without and starving.

Much of the current political distrust of science seems to stem exactly from that moment when religion, which puts humans central in creation, became at odds with biology, in which the balance in natural systems became a central tenet.

Science isn’t infallible. You have to believe in its system, the scientific method of empiricism: you have to prove your theories in practice, and you can only prove them until they are disproven. Denying that leaves you open to charges of disingenuousness.

What sets science apart from religion is that it is aware of its own fallibility. Or in any case it should be. Most scientists I have met have a general sense of the superiority of their way of seeing things and a specific sense of their own superiority in the food chain of knowledge. But probed more seriously, they will always tell you that it holds only until the next thing comes around.

Which is not the case with popular representation of the state of scientific inquiry, which only talks of proof and truth. But we historians know that, for instance, the world of biology was greatly upset by the idea that the mammalian (including human) embryo was not, as had been assumed since Aristotle, male in creation, becoming female only by failing to remain male -- but rather more the other way around. It took some serious doing and some generations to change that assumption. That scientists, too, can be blind to the obvious or fall in love with their own beliefs, and how that fits into the scientific method as a source of “truth” about the world, is a conversation we need to have.

But I digress. Detritus -- garbage as the the source of it all -- it's all in a name or an assumption of value. We, and in this case that's all of us, you and me, need to stop seeing the world in our own image, creating the larger picture out of of what we can see and comprehend with our senses pleasingly — as we are busily cleaning up all the detritus around the edges of nature — replacing it with useless detritus not so distinguishable by the chompers and cutters. But remarkably barren of amino acids and the other building blocks of nature.

All this of course takes as much time to flit through my head as it takes me to untangle the hound’s leash from around an alder bush, recently decimated by Mrs or Mr. Beaver. We step back into the cool woods, skirt the now-abandoned nest the young ducks came running out of but a few weeks ago, the eggs leftovers still of great interest to the hound.

Soon, he’s deeply involved in checking out a squirrel running up a tree and I let him off so we can bushwhack home. It's an emotional experience, wading a bog.

* I learned that from Mary Holland’s wonderful blog, Naturally Curious. Another resource is Smithsonian.com which has this fab video of a dragonfly growing wings.