[Some history – the evolution of the “Digs Notebooks”; much of this account is related in detail in my books, especially SELF-PORTRAIT WITH TURTLES. Below I trace in brief a sequence of three major, and formative, events in my artist, naturalist, writer life: the first turtle (a spotted turtle) at age eight; my first book contract (Year of the Turtle); discovery of the Digs and inception of the Digs notebooks. ]
In August of 1986, at the age of forty four, I finally got my first book contract, this for an idea that had become clearly shaped in my mind when I was in high school, at around age sixteen. I was determined that I would one day write and illustrate a book about turtles. It would be a combination of creative writing and text with a scientific background.
These aspects would be interspersed with drawings and watercolors closely related to the writing. Text and art would be built around my personal observations of turtles in their natural habitats, and the book would star the spotted turtle.
Throughout my twenties and thirties I sent queries to publishers, proposals with sample text and art. I received praise for my work, but… “not right for our list… and versions of that response.
I saw a graph of book categories – fiction; non-fiction; travel; recipes; and on. The only genre with fewer readers, ergo sales, was poetry. The days of publishers looking at book proposals submitted by writers themselves had come to an end. Prospective authors had to have an agent represent them.
A writer friend was going to attend a conference at Skidmore, a feature of which was having aspiring authors meet with agents to learn how to go about looking for one who might want to represent their work.
My generous friend said that she would like to take examples of my writing to the conference, to show to agents. There she met literary agent Meredith Bernstein, who was quite impressed with my samples and asked if she might take them back to New York. By this twist of fate I had acquired an agent, a deeply devoted one.
Meredith had the highest regard for, and unshakable faith in, my writing and art. Her conviction that she could sell my books never wavered.
The long-awaited, long hoped-for, news (I realized that it might never come) finally came to me in a phone call from Meredith. We had an offer for my book about turtles.
Meredith had been showing publishers this proposal, and two others, for seven years before this first contract was realized. Remarkably, it initiated a twenty two year epoch in which I wrote and illustrated my four nature histories and one memoir.
My turtle life has been turtle-paced, and I have been fortunate in having a turtle’s longevity.
The contract set another journey in motion. I had long been dedicated to the proposition that when/if I did receive one for this book I would take up an immersion in the scientific literature about turtles, and educate myself along the path I had left off when I decided, late in my senior year of high school, that I would pursue art rather than biology as the primary trajectory of my life.
I had never abandoned my deep calling as a naturalist, with countless hours of countless days of being there – being with the turtles in habitats as wild and natural as I could find in a world of relentless marginalization and outright eradication of such places.
I had come to know and love their wetland world as much as I did the turtles themselves.
This was a bonding established in one life-changing day, when as an eight year old boy I wandered into a stream and marshland for the first time.
I had just moved from the city I was born in, an urban environment that was entirely a world of people, their constructs and concerns. There never had been any contact with nature for me.
Looking out from the yard of the house in a project that I had moved into three days before, beyond the houses around me, I saw trees. There was a woodland that intrigued me, beckoned me. Late one afternoon I slipped away from my its mother’s watchful eye, went off alone toward the trees, walked along the edge of the woods, crossed a small brook and came to stand by a reedy marsh.
In those first few hours I ever spent in a wild place I began to sense that I had discovered a new, utterly different world, one I was deeply drawn to.
As thoughts and emotions were moving through me, a turtle appeared in a clear space in a marshy backwater. I was electrified by the sight of that stunning turtle, with its black shell scattered with brilliant yellow spots, and head adorned with more spots and blazes of orange. I later learned that it was a spotted turtle.
I went into the water, shoes and all, caught the turtle and held her in my shaking hand. The holding and looking into the eyes of that amazing wild living thing was a moment of profound revelation for me.
With this tangible connection, all that I was seeing and feeling became magnified, and imbedded. I knew where I had to be. A course from which I would never waver was set out before me.
I signed the contract and began to write the book, along with making some preliminary sketches for the illustrations. At the same time I embarked on my quest to fill in the background in science I had been missing.
I went to the life sciences library at the University of New Hampshire to track down and print out papers on turtles of the glaciated northeast, with a central focus on spotted turtles, as well as the wetland ecology of my ecoregion.
My winter was entirely dedicated to writing, drawing, and studying the literature. When the thaw came and I began another season with the turtles I added the final critical layer to my endeavor, an intent that was also contingent upon my getting a contract to write the book I had held so long in my thoughts: I carried a notebook in my swamp vest.
Years before I had come to call my central area of observation the “Digs”. I discovered this extraordinary ecosystem in late October of 1971, fifteen years before the opportunity to write THE YEAR OF THE TURTLE arose, and at the same time begin my notebook era.
The pivotal discovery of the remarkable place that was to become the center of my turtle seasons for decades to come, came two years after my settling in New Hampshire. I had moved north, my family in tow, as my earlier turtle haunts in Connecticut and Massachusetts all became lost landscapes, completely overrun if not taken out of existence entirely. All of my moves have been landscape-driven.
As with so many things in my life with turtles, my coming upon this new world bordered on the preternatural. Friends invited me to go cranberry picking. My wife Laurette had gone with them on an earlier occasion, and came home to tell me of a great pond and marsh that I would surely want to see. We did not go to any aquatic realms on this cranberrying expedition, but to an extensive depression, damp and acidic, where there were numerous wild cranberries.
As I knelt on the moist turf I saw sphagnum moss; sundews; running swamp blackberries, and scattered low sedges… a range of plants native to fens and other wetlands in which I had found spotted turtles in my youth. A young of the year toad hopped by me as I picked cranberries. There had to be seasonal waters not far away.
With these signs, as though the hollow itself were speaking to me, I continued to wonder about spotted turtles and began to sense that if there were spotted turtles in this part of New Hampshire, I would find them here.
Beyond the cranberry hollows was abroad area of spare sandy soil.
A slightly sloping rise from the damp hollow rose to a sparsely vegetated upland terrain with little bluestem grass; haircap moss; and lichens. These were also indicator plants to me: This could be where turtles came to nest in late spring.
There was a brook with bordering riparian habitat that ran along the fields of the farmhouse we were renting, in which there was a small colony of wood turtles, and I observed painted and snapping turtles in surrounding ponds and marshes. But I was intent on finding my way back to spotted turtles.
The next year I went back to the cranberry hollows and its surroundings in late May. I immediately found clear evidence that turtle-nesting nesting had begun. There were dug-up nests, with eggshells scattered about by nest predators. There were also trial digs, the exploratory work of the predators, and the turtles themselves as they looked for final nesting sites.
Using my fingers, I began to do some digging of my own here and there, hoping to find an intact nest, without success. But I knew I was on a turtle trail unlike any I had yet experienced.
When I got home Laurette asked me where I had been. A scene flashed across my mind – all that digging. “The Digs”, I replied, without forethought. And from that, in time, my Digs Notebooks of 35 years and ongoing.
My Five Published Books
Trout Reflections
Following the Water
Year of the Turtle
Self-Portrait With Turtles, A Memoir
Swampwalker’s Journal
Hand Bound Books
A Book of a Number of Hours
A Book of Winter Buds
A Book of Winter Branches
Borradores
Landscapes – January 20, 1978 – April 1978
Variations: February 1, 1967 – August 1, 1968
Visions: Drawings and Paintings: 1976 – 1988
Exhibitions
“Seldom Seen” Exhibition at the Davidow Center
“Beyond Words” Exhibition at the Currier Museum
Galleries
“Seldom Seen” Gallery
David’s Wildlife Studies Sketchbook
Virtual Gallery of Art Produced for My Five Books
“Regarding Women Regarding…” Introduction
Sketchbook Gallery: 4/1/1985 – 10/14/1987
Swamp Sketchbook
The Swamp Dialogs
Drawings and Watercolors Produced to Illustrate my Published Books
CODIT – Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees