The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

She would have been around thirty at the time of this conversation, and still a long way even from forty-two herself. She died several years ago, and as the millennium approached, she was much on my mind. I was filled with a feeling both large and hollow, crossing over that not-insubstantial line by myself—or rather, without her. Of the two of us who began that conversation, only one has continued it; though in my heart, as that date appeared, it was a small solace to know that even nearly four decades ago she took the time to consider it, and I can recall the thoughtful look she gave the subject as she answered my child's questions.

  It's not just for the scientists of the future that I've profiled the passage of a year, here in a northern land still fortunate enough to have four full seasons despite the rising tide of the world's increasing heat, the ever-increasing global exhalations of warmth and carbon. I like to imagine that this record has value, in a scrapbook sort of way, to my family, and to others who will in the future inhabit, and love, the Yaak. Often, particularly as I grow older, I am aware of wanting to share with my children little secrets, little points of interest, about the valley—where the huckleberries are best in a dry year, or late in the summer; where the elk are in November; where the wolves dig their dens; where the grizzly claw marks are on the old cedar—and that the passing on of such knowledge constitutes a transfer of some of the most valuable currency, other than love, possible; that the transfer of that kind of intimate and place-based knowledge, the knowledge of home, is a kind of love, and rarer and more valuable now certainly than silver or gold.

  Some days I worry that there is a sand-through-the-hourglass effect to such observations, and the passing on of that knowledge; that though the knowledge might be passed on to the next generation, and the next, so rapid now are the ecological changes in the West, so severe the dissolution of various biological underpinnings as one piece after another is pulled from the puzzle, the map, of previous integrity, that the future will render such knowledge irrelevant: as if, already, I am describing things that are gone-away, or going-away.

  But one of the key components of love is hope—enduring hope—and to let fear replace hope would be a bitter defeat indeed, a kind of failure in its own stead.

  Already, nearly a full decade has come and gone since I set out on this project, undertaken when Mary Katherine was eight and Lowry, five—after much anticipation, the millennium got here so quickly, and then passed, even more so—and it is with no small degree of wonder and bittersweet reflection that I look back now across the unknowing divide of then and now, to a pre-September 11 time when we thought we were ready for the future, and possessed what already, in near retrospect, appears to have been a phenomenal, if unsustainable, pre-millennial amount of innocence.

  I'm struck also by the prevalence of euphoria in these pages—the exhausting, exhilarating cycles of ever-ascending, as the seasons, and the valley, deliver more beauty, and more bounty, with each passing day. Who was the young man, or younger man, who wrote those pages?

  I like to believe he was the same one who reads these pages now: who had the luxury, there at century's turn, of slowing down for just a moment, and paying attention. That he was an observer to whom innocence was not an impediment, nor wonder and unknowingness a liability. As if each day, no matter what the season or century, we each and every one stand always on the other side of such a divide.

  JANUARY

  WE'RE HAVING FRIENDS OVER for New Year's Eve, as we usually do. Not a lot—just the Janssens, the Dailys, the Linehans. The Janssens' two children, Tyler and Wendy, as well. There's food and music, and, hellions that we are, we're playing Pictionary and Scattergories. We've got apple cider for the children, and beer and wine and margaritas for the adults. There's a lot of food, and it's all incredible. We joke about the sign that was out on the marquee in front of the Ben Franklin store down in Libby: SHOP NOW, THE END IS NEAR. All year long we've been amused by the flurry of activity, nationally—folks buying generators (as if the supply of the gasoline required to run them would not be disrupted) and hundred-pound bags of navy beans, and fifty-gallon barrels for rain catchment. Gold bullion, extra ammo, and that kind of thing. It's so strange to see the rest of the world scrambling to prepare for an attempt, a possible attempt, to live, for an indefinite and frightened period, the way we live day in and day out. I'm not quite sure how to explain the feeling. For a fact, we take both pleasure and pride in feeling set aside from the rest of the world and the confusions of civilization— it's why we're here —and it's slightly disconcerting to feel the world rotating as if to assimilate itself, even temporarily, to our worldview and practices. It makes us feel less an island, less isolated. Less independent, even as we understand, upon any kind of examination at all, that there is no absolute independence, that it is all only relative.

  What it feels like, in a subtle way, is that the world is joining up with us, when we do not want the world to join up with us; it's why we left the world.

  Around ten o'clock, the lights go out, just as everyone has been predicting they would when the new century turns over and all those computers freak out. Power grids collapsing, satellites falling from the sky, bank accounts spinning to zero point zero. There's no punch line, no alarm or surprise for even the briefest and most delicious of moments—we all understand that because we're off the grid, there's no way this power outage can have anything to do with any computer in the world. Or can it? Are even the generators wired somehow to acknowledge this computerized doomsday meltdown? But still, the darkness is sudden and absolute, and, laughing, we light the candles and pass out the flashlights that are always a staple in any of the homes up here. The main propane generator is down, and we've been using the backup gasoline generator, and it's run out of gas, is all; I walk out into the silence of hard-falling snow, away from the party and my friends, and visit with my mother above for a while before refilling the generator and starting it back up. She's been gone nine years and still it doesn't seem right; still I see things almost every day that I think how much she would enjoy or be amused by. Sometimes it even seems that I will see her again.

  When I go back inside, my friends are visiting with great animation. There's just something about candles, and though I announce that the power's back on, there's no rush to turn the lights back on, and indeed, we realize that we prefer the candles.

  It's snowing like a son of a bitch. We haven't had much snow yet down in the valley, just rain (though up in the mountains, for the last couple of months, it's been snowing steadily). Today however it's been coming down all day: almost a foot and a half so far, and it's still coming down harder than ever. There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards—the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty. It's quite possible our guests won't be able to get out of the driveway when it comes time to leave, but so what? That's what the holidays, and the end of the century, are for.

  It seems like something from a fairy tale—such a soft, heavy, calming snow, one of the heaviest and most beautiful snowfalls I've ever seen. And how wonderful it seems, if this evening is somehow near the end of the old world as we knew it, that that end should come not in fire or chaos but with silent, beautiful burial. We're all becalmed. We all feel joy. All the year's despairs—and there have been many; who among us does not carry them in great quantity, days?—feel swept clean, or even better than that, not merely hidden or absolved but transformed, covered with beauty, converted to beauty. As if all failure or disappointment or hunger or absence has been redeemed.

  I go back out to check on the generator and then stand in the falling snow for a long time. I haven't felt this happy in a good long while—and best of all, I'm happy for no reason.

  I go back inside, with an inch or more of snow on my shoulders from just the brief time spent outside. We continue to browse on the bounty of food, to drink and joke and visit. All of our discussions are of the future: our hopes, our certainty of joy. We
play board games, games of skill and chance, all night, and on toward the gray morning.

  The children wander into the forest with sparklers in the last hour before light. It's still snowing hard. We set off a single firework, a large one, hissing and sputtering and smoking upward into the illuminated sky of falling snow, sparks and traces of light streaming and clattering in incandescent blossoms. Our friends embrace us and then drive home, their trucks all but buried beneath the mounds of snow, and even after they are gone, we do not feel alone, can feel them lingering, and we clean the dishes and wander up the steps in the morning light, to rest for a while. The century has ended, the century has begun.

  It keeps snowing; it just keeps pouring down, not like any meteorological phenomenon but as if some dense and infinite reservoir above has been opened with a knife and the snow is pouring out through that rip as fast as it can, falling like feathers—snowflakes falling so hard and steady that it seems they are stacking up on each other even as they are falling. No such collisions occur, however—each snowflake shifts and slides, does whatever it takes in that falling curtain of snow to keep from merging with the others. Standing out in such snow, you can watch any of those ten thousand flakes, and any one of them will reveal to you how isolated and independent it is; but it's no matter, you need only to take one blink and refocus on the whole to see what a vain and ridiculous myth that is; one blink, and a slight step backwards, will reveal the truth to you, that it is all but one wall of sameness, in the end, and that the much-vaunted structural differences of any two crystalline flakes are of no real importance, in the end; it all becomes compressed and molded into sameness once the flake has fallen to earth.

  Still, we watch, soothed and lulled, and unable, for long moments, to turn away. It's more mesmerizing than fire. You feel that you can stare at it forever. You feel it binding you with its stillness, pulling you down and into that sleeping sameness, and yet you are not afraid.

  It snows without pausing for ten days. A week into the blizzard, my friends Tom and Tim and I travel down to the big river that bounds the valley to the south, to drift in Tim's boat, to hunt ducks and geese one last time before the season ends.

  I'll never be able to explain the hunter's paradox. It's one of the most wonderful feelings of the season, to shoot and take with skill a bird from flight—to have your dog plunge into the icy, mist-steaming river and retrieve that beautiful bird, and to take it home and pluck it and clean it and prepare it for dinner—and yet even that really matters not at all, compared to the truly important thing of being out on the open river with your friends, deep into the new heart of winter, winter still only beginning, and the forest and the mountains shrouded with the stunning brilliance of all that snow; to be drifting around each new bend, early on a cold morning, watching and waiting for the explosion of wings—mallards, usually, or goldeneyes, or, once or twice a season, Canada honkers.

  To be drifting, visiting with your friends in low voices, with the dogs shivering both from the cold and the anticipation, and the bald eagles lined up like soldiers in the giant cottonwoods up and down either side of the river, and the great blue herons gliding through the fog with prehistoric grunts and croaks as they leave their morning rookery, the dawn sky aswarm with fifteen, twenty giant birds at a time, coming and going in all directions.

  The bird—the duck, or the goose—doesn't matter, any more than one of those snowflakes matters. All that's important is being out on the river with friends, and strengthened by that, in the heart of winter, at the end of one year, and the beginning of another one.

  The scent of old Tom's little cigar. The sight of him and that winter cigar as familiar as his old-fashioned straw rucksack. The way Tim, a fishing guide, rows so expertly, so effortlessly. The sunlight on the snowy hills above Rainy Creek. The sharklike dorsal fin of a trout swirling in the steamy river, just ahead of our bow. The cold iron of the guns in our hands, and the anticipation, and the silences.

  This year I'm rowing when we spot, in the fog ahead, and on the far side of the river, the high arched necks of a sentinel goose, and then beyond that goose, the huddled shapes of half a dozen more, resting off the point of a gravel island that is shrubbed over with young cottonwoods and willows.

  All year long, Tim guides for a living. He rarely, if ever, gets to hunt or fish for himself. But now the season's over; this is his time, his one hunt. He's the world's nicest man. He would never put himself before anyone. But as his friend, I'm able to insist that for once he consider himself, and his dog; that he take pleasure in hunting, and for his own sake, rather than forever leading others to the hunt.

  Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this, but it's like this is his big chance finally. The guiding season is over; this is the busman's holiday. In some sense, this is what he's been waiting for, and working toward, all season long—though he would never tell you that, or even admit it to himself; truly, he loves to guide.

  But now we've got seven geese stationed downstream of the point, and they don't know we're coming. It's Tim's one chance.

  We drop Tom off at the head of the little island so that he'll be able to get a passing shot at any birds that might fly upstream. Then Tim and I ease downstream, with me laboring to row as quietly as possible—each stroke a prayer, water trickling quietly off the blades of the oars, and the half-submerged cottonwoods sliding past, the current carrying us down toward that point where the geese are tucked away, unsuspecting, on the back side. I very much want Tim to get a bird—to take something, after a season. Two seasons—summer and fall—of nothing but giving, and because I'm a poor and inexperienced paddler, I'm taking extra care to be quiet, and am concentrating extra hard on making the right strokes and aiming the boat properly.

  Up in the bow, as we draw nearer, Tim is beginning to allow himself the pleasure of anticipation; he crouches lower and lower, grows more serious, and I can see him entering that zone that hunters enter in the last moment before the final engagement with, and taking of, their quarry. The place that defines them as hunters. That place inside them intersecting with the place of their quarry. A ritual, a ceremony, an act more ancient than the hammering of steel against stone; as ancient as lifting one's hand to one's mouth with food.

  What we'd planned to do was drift right on down to the point, snug to the shore; and upon passing the point, Tim would rise and fire at the geese, which would have leapt into flight at the first glimpse of us. But just before that point is reached, we change our strategy. There's a little slot leading in to the island, and it occurs to us that we can pull the boat in there, get out on foot and skulk to the other side, and flush the birds in that manner. Tim points to the slot, whispers to me, and I change course and start in toward that slip, just as he shakes his head to say, No, never mind.

  But I'm not proficient enough with the boat to change course so quickly or easily; I'm still struggling to maneuver it into the slot, and it turns out I'm not even successful with that; instead, I row us up over the stump of a beaver-chewed cottonwood, scraping our hull and stranding us high-centered atop that gnawed stump; and at the sound of our misfortune, the great birds honk loudly and leap into flight on the other side of the island. From a distance, we can just see glimpses of them passing upriver, flying low across the water and bellowing their dismay.

  I signal to Tim to charge on through the young cottonwoods—perhaps not all of the geese have left yet—and he splashes through the water, waist deep, gains the island. His dog Lily is leaping along beside him—they're making a huge ruckus—and he crashes through the young whips of cottonwoods, but it's like a bad dream: he can't close the distance in time, they're gone, I've let him down, and a few seconds later, we hear Tom begin to shoot, upriver: pow pow, reload, pow pow.

  Now a swarm of goldeneyes comes wheeling past us, flying ninety to nothing, and Tim turns on those birds, fires twice, misses, reloads. In the boat, still stranded atop that stump, I pick up my gun, load, and get a shot at one of the trailing ducks, but miss
. Tim fires twice more as a new batch wings past, misses twice, and upriver, Tom fires again, once, then twice, and then all the birds are gone; and when we wander, embarrassed by our poor shooting, up to where we've left Tom at the top of the island—dead-eye Tom, who never misses—we find that he's embarrassed also: not a bird has fallen, not a single feather cut.

  There's nothing to do but laugh. We stand there in the falling snow and laugh, even as I've got that hollow feeling of having fucked up. I almost got Tim in on the birds. He doesn't care that it didn't work out, but I do. I really wanted him to get a bird. It's the end of the season, and that was his one good chance.

  They stand there in the snow, laughing, and then we wade back out to the boat and continue on down the river, watching for more birds, though we see none. It's snowing so hard now that we can't see either shore, and the sky is the same color as the river; all is a swirl of falling snow, so that it seems as if we're falling sideways, falling from the sky, being blown through the sky, and it is the river, or time, that is standing still.

  A patch of sunlight, an opening, appears in the storm. Ducks are flying through it—a flock of goldeneyes. Tom, the good shot, stands up and fires, and hits one. Lily leaps into the current, swims out, and retrieves it. Then we reenter the curtain of snow: snow falling so wet and hard and fast that it's an inch high on the barrels of our guns. We're just rowing blindly. Tim and I won't get a duck that day, but it doesn't matter. Maybe next year.

  Work—writing—is hard, in January. The words come no more or less easily, but the physical act of hunkering next to the dull-glowing fire in the pissant wood stove out in the drafty log cabin where I work, candles fluttering in the cold, hands and feet chilled so much that often I prop my feet up right by the flames, and have to stop and tuck one bare hand or another under my armpit, or hold it perilously close to the flame, midsentence, before being able to continue on with the sentences, is just plain hard.