The Bottle

By Chelsie Vandaveer

January 28, 2002

Sometimes in the early hours before the sun, I become aware of the birds in the shrubs outside. I am not asleep nor am I awake. The dark holds its own austerity. An incongruity haunts the hour, a thought attempts to span the millennia, and a dark regret sits in a corner staring at the soul. A pristine pond, a faultless place will pass out of existence. An old glass bottle was there.

Out in the saw palmetto prairies are small anomalous wetlands. Most are perfectly circular. Mere inches in topography define habitats, but something else happened in these circles. For some reason, they hold water. Acres of dry sands and saw palmetto surround these spots. Scoop out the sand and pour water ten feet from one of these wetlands. No water will stand.

No one knows how these little places came into existence. A few have proposed theories--sink holes that have filled in or blowouts when these prairies were sand dunes. Did centuries of water wash clay particles down to create a pan underneath? But anomalous wetlands are not very important to people in pursuit of rectangular paper exchange.

This prairie was part of an old cattle ranch. The wetland was not large; a dime more than covered the location on the aerial. I was seeking a place maybe 50 feet in diameter, a quarter of a mile away in saw palmetto up to my waist. The aerial showed a pine near the location I was seeking. I could see the pine in the distance. These places are usually spoiled by cows.

I expected to find a cow path through the palmetto leading to the wetland. A hike through saw palmetto is not pleasant even with a cow path to follow. The petioles of the leaves are covered in teeth. The undersides of the fan-shaped leaves house wasps and brown widow spiders. The horizontal trunks trap the ankles. Sometimes you hear a rattlesnake. But I did not find a cow path and had to push my way.

The little pond was pure; emergent native herbaceous with a center deep enough for a yellow waterlily. The edge habitat showed no human or domestic animal impacts. Deer had visited and a bobcat. Two crows cursed me from the pine. The few wax myrtle and Sabal palms were fussy with little yellow warblers. Leopard frogs and crawdads lived here.

A few steps into the pond, my feet sunk into the centuries of muck. I felt my boot hit something hard and slip past. As I raised my foot I sought the hard object with the toe to bring it to the surface. It was a bottle--Celebrated Clicquot-Club. In a moment of absolute clarity the crows went silent; there were no sounds except the little birds and the wind. How came this bottle to this place?

Perhaps a cowboy chanced upon this spot and found it fitting to drink in the holy aloneness. Or a child caught frogs in solitude until he put away childish things. Maybe a lost soul escaped forced labor and sought sanctuary here. Two disparate people shared this spot. It was a chiaroscuro of time, I in the bright sun of now and the other in the deepening shade of the past.

We dress destruction in scientific words--high altitude, ortho-rectified, infrared aerials, and global positioning systems, and wetland rapid assessment. I quantified the wetland, but the form lacked a box for a number to represent the quality of sunlight and soft wind, no place to rate the sound of warblers or splash of frogs, no number to say only one other and I. Someone in a sterile office would use my numbers and price its destruction. So much pseudo-math computed a price on this place.

A pristine pond, a faultless place will pass out of existence. An old glass bottle was there. I kept the bottle as proof that someone else and I stayed long enough to bear witness to its significance.