The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  During the deepest of freezes—generally anything colder than ten below—the cabin's uninhabitable, even for a few minutes at a time, and so then I'll arise at two or three o'clock each morning so I can work in the warmth of the house, downstairs, before anybody awakens, finishing by daylight, in time to make the school run, before returning home disoriented and weary to nap for half an hour or so.

  Out of such irregularity, a rhythm eventually develops. It is a rhythm of fatigue, as you're stretched thinner and thinner by the odd hours. This couples with the natural insomnia that plagues many of us in winter and combines with the brilliant full moon to lure you into another world entirely different from the one most of the rest of the country's engaged with. Add to this the fact that you're frequently working on short stories or novels, in which that part of your world, though believed in deeply, is entirely made up, and the results can be very disruptive to your grasp on reality. You become convinced that the bears, who for the most part don't fight January but instead sleep straight through it, have it right; and that the animals that migrate are also wiser than us.

  Like a prisoner, or a puppet, or some brute utterly lacking in imagination, you reel on through January, enraptured by its beauty, but always, it seems, unmindful of the cost: spending energy in January that will then not be present in February.

  Not every day is frigid. There are some, many, when I can and do work out in my cabin, out at the marsh's edge. On the warmest mornings, the mornings when it has snowed the night before and the new snow rests atop the cabin like the warmest quilt in the world, I'll often work for two or three hours before the sheet of snow above me—warmed by the faint heat of my old stove, and the candles, and my own breath—begins to creak and moan—the ice-skin between tin roof and snow becoming slick, viscous, and then suddenly the whole shittaree releasing, with the beautiful curve and arc of a whole rooftop of snow cascading past my window, followed immediately by a sparkling shower of smaller ice crystals in the big slab's wake, crystals shimmering like fairy dust. And then more snow still falls from the highest reaches of the sky, ready and able to begin replacing again, replenishing immediately all that just slid down the roof, and more...

  The only thing that keeps me from exulting fully in this nearly complete burial of the old world is my concern for the deer. (The same deer that, make no mistake about it, I love to hunt and eat.) In this kind of weather, amid so much snow, the deer will ease into the shelter of the last groves of the oldest forests, which, with their closed canopies above, provide much-needed refuge from the deep snows that pile up in the younger forests. As these large groves of old growth become fewer in the world, however, and farther between one another, the deer (and elk and moose) have less sanctuary in times of such acute stress, and they sometimes take shelter in the smaller groves of old growth, where the mountain lions can then target them easily. In this manner, it is as if the deer have wandered into a trap and become more vulnerable than ever: doomed by the thing they are relying on to save them.

  Often, I wish I could let go of my worries for the wild world, letting go in the same manner as the snow sliding from the steep roof of the cabin. I wish I did not have a sense of duty; I wish I were oblivious to the feeling of obligation toward these last wildlands tucked here and there in the national forests, and could instead only glory in them, without almost always feeling the need to argue, and fight, for their continued existence.

  I wish I could simply drink in this landscape like a glutton: gulping it down, simply taking it, without having to return anything.

  I don't know. Maybe I don't wish that after all.

  My sociability, limited though it is, hits full peak in January; at its apogee, I might go and visit a friend, or friends, two or three days in a row, or four times in a week. I love how frail and lonely I get under January's great snowy claw; we all do. My friend Bill is a master telemark skier, and for these past couple of winters he has been giving me lessons in the backcountry of our favorite mountain. We ski up through the forest, and carefully across the avalanche slopes, keeping to the edge of the forest for relative safety, climbing sometimes for two hours, sweating like horses, in order to gain a ten-minute ride down—but what a beautiful climb it is. And though the ten minutes whiz past on our way down, such is the amount of beauty and joy that's compressed into that little wedge of time that it almost doesn't seem to matter how ridiculously short it was.

  Your mind slows way down, in winter, up here, in January. You find yourself thinking at great length about useless or insignificant little things. Memories from far away and long ago seem to ascend to the surface unbidden, as if in a dream. One such memory I have, while skiing one day—total silence, save for the creak and rasp of my wooden skis, or "boards" as Bill calls them, across the tight skin of the frozen snow—is from my childhood in Texas. I find myself remembering what a big deal it was back then—thirty-five years ago—to put on long underwear. How strange the sensation was, to be wearing one set of clothes beneath another, and how exciting, almost dangerous, for it meant that dire weather was coming—a norther, with raw sleet and ice, and temperatures that might drop into the teens, or even, once every ten years or so, into single digits. Drama. Once or twice a year, we'd need to pull on those long white thermal tops and bottoms, to brace ourselves against nature's rawness.

  How quickly we adapt! Now I cannot imagine not wearing long underwear, in every day of the heart of winter, and a much warmer material than those heavy old white cotton suits. It's almost as if I've been given the opportunity to live two lives. As a boy, pulling on the novelty of that long underwear once or maybe twice a year, I would never have dreamed that one day I'd be wearing it every day, that wearing it would become as common as lacing up shoes or boots.

  Such are the kinds of thoughts you find yourself dwelling on, contentedly, mindlessly, as you ski your way up the mountain through the hypnosis of falling snow, curtains of it everywhere, and the whisper of your blood not like the waves of some gentle ocean but like the sound and rhythm of that steady-falling snow, hushed and quiet and calm and ceaseless.

  I love driving the girls to school each morning; I love traveling the same route through the snowy woods, watching the days grow incrementally longer, and seeing the same stretches of woods each day.

  Anything's possible. We've seen mountain lions bound across the road in front of us, and elk, and coyotes; once, a weasel. Always, deer.

  Always, crossing the river in town and looking upriver, we seek out the snowy mass of Mt. Henry, with the line of its 1994 burn traveling halfway up it, neat as the faint scar from some old surgery.

  The river is almost always frozen by January, and glancing at it as we cross over the bridge, we can see, and are almost momentarily mesmerized by (in the manner that one can be hypnotized by a fire), the strange lunar patterns in the whorls of ice: stress fractures and rifts that have sealed back in over themselves like broken bones knitting themselves together again, the frozen skin that is a blanket for the sleeping river stretching and contracting, cracking, splitting, yawning. The script that remains behind after each night's flexions exists either in long, sweeping arcs stretching in radii across the entire river, as perfectly carved as if transcribed by some giant compass, or as an odd assemblage of perfectly straight lines, like those in a game of ticktacktoe; or as if a pile of spindles has been spilled onto the ice in a game of pick-up sticks.

  In either instance, whether arced curves or straight lines, the impression you get—the impression you cannot shake from your mind—is that each riverine marking in the ice, remnant and residue of the previous day's and night's thermal variation, is not random but exists in this world under the auspices of some mathematical formula, some reason for being: not yet known by us, and as alien as some language never before heard.

  Reading, or rather, looking at, the riverine etchings, one easily imagines that the elegant, unknown formulas are pursued vigorously by mathematicians and physicists in universities far away, that th
ese men and women pursue the formulas like hounds; but it's easy to believe too that they will never gain on or capture the river's crackings, that always, like some animal that's able not only to stay ahead of their pursuit but to cover its tracks each night, the knowledge, or the formula, will always evade them, and instead there will remain only each morning's new glory.

  Looking at the inscrutable elegance of the ice patterns' strange geometry, one is reminded of the children's story in which the spider spins in her web the words "Some Pig."

  Punctuating too the river's flat crust of snow are the stippled tracks of deer, their hoofs sometimes as small as coins, hundreds of coins spilled the evening before. Knowing deer as we do, it's no problem at all to recognize an interpretation for the snowy sentences of their passages. Here is where they crossed the river to get to the browse of the hawthorn bush. Here is where they came down off Hensley Mountain in search of morning sunlight. Here is where a doe with two fawns wandered along shore's edge, nibbling the dried stubble of last autumn's wild roses.

  Horrific, sometimes, will be dark ovals, shadowy lozenge shapes in the snow about the size of a deer's body, where the stippled tracks vanish. One imagines that though the deer for the most part are equipped with vast reservoirs of instinct, refined and accumulated across the millennia, so too is there chance and error, mistake and uncertainty in the formulas of their own passages; and it seems that over the course of a winter—the river thawing and freezing, opening and closing, thawing and freezing again—the river must become as filled with the bones and bodies of deer as were the fields of the pilgrims said to be filled with the fertilizer of fish, as taught to them by the natives of Plymouth Rock. One imagines the frozen river as possessing a hundred or more hungry mouths, secret and yawing, anxious for the taste of a deer; or that the river beneath the ice is thirsty and must drink of the deer, whose pale bones come in time to decorate its stony bottom like jewelry, the jewelry of chance or carelessness.

  By mid-January, the deer are already beginning to look tired. They are not yet thin or gaunt, but to a close observer, and one familiar with their daily appearances, the weariness is clearly evident; and though it must have been building, it seems to me that their fatigue has appeared from almost out of nowhere, in the same manner that sometimes, early in the fall, after a hard south wind and heavy overnight rain, the ground is pasted and littered with the red and yellow leaves of the season and the trees' branches bare, whereas only the previous day the trees had retained their brilliant, burning colors and the ground its somber brown. You know intuitively that whatever has arrived on that overnight wind has been a long time in coming, but what it looks like to our sleepy eyes is that all was one day a certain way and then different the next. As if a hundred small things make no difference to the world, really, and are unobservable, but that one hundred and one small things do, and are.

  Sometime in January, that one extra inch of snow arrives, or that one extra unit of something, and though I do not believe it breaks the wild spirit of the deer, things are different that next day, and a certain burning light is gone from their dark, wet eyes. There is a new slowness to their movements, and a pause, a studied gathering of energy before they commit to any one movement. It's particularly noticeable in an animal in which such gathering or hesitancy had not been previously witnessed.

  This is the only thing, the only one, that tempers the rich feeling of bounty, of joy and beauty and peace, that accompanies a heavy January snowfall: the awareness that what to me is simple, exquisite, calming beauty—a blizzard piling up—spells trauma and hardship for another.

  It's going to snow, whether you want it to or not. And it's going to be beautiful, whether you want it to snow hard or not. And there is really just only that one temperance, the concern for the deer, that keeps you, in January, from fully embracing the heaviest snowfalls, and walking out into the forest and looking up at the boughs of the snowy trees and asking for more, please more, even as it seems already that all the snow in the world is falling—still more, please.

  It closes in. You stare at things longer, in January. Seen from the window of my writing cabin, the frozen gray bare limbs of the alder bower are like a screen, a maze, that transfixes the eye, and hence, the brain.

  The picnic table right outside the window, beneath the arc of those bare limbs, is piled high with snow. The same pattern, same variation in shelter provided by the arrangement of those branches, has resulted in a differential of snowfall that's landed on the picnic table's top so that now, several feet into winter, it appears as if there is a person sleeping on top of that table, a young person, warm in a down sleeping bag or beneath all those many blankets, with his or her head tucked down into the bag for warmth. In the loneliness of winter, such a thought is comforting, and I like looking up from my pages in the morning to see that sleeping form, comfortable, resting, just on the other side of the window.

  The simple pleasure of brute tasks, vitally efficient, and utterly requisite in January. As one who can fail to execute almost any specific mechanical assignment, leaping instead too often to the impractical dream-world of the abstract, I possess steadfast envy for those to whom such chores seem to come easily, naturally. Perhaps I take far too much pleasure in completing even the simplest task successfully. I once built a crooked clubhouse for my daughters, and every time I look at it, it astounds and surprises me more than any book I ever wrote, or any job I ever held, any task I ever completed. I am not a skill guy, or a closer, a finisher. I'm an ideas man, a big-picture dreamer; I become so easily distracted by all the intermediate steps that lie between, say, A and D, or A and F, much less A and Z. There was never a grilled cheese sandwich I couldn't burn; I don't know how to use the microwave ovens in hotel rooms.

  Perhaps it is for this reason, among others, that it fills me with such joy, on a cold night when the stars burn so fiercely that they seem to moan and whistle, to take armloads of dry, clean hay and stuff it into the dogs' kennels so that they will be warm and clean through the night, warmer than you or I beneath our blankets.

  For the night to be so frigid yet the dogs so dry and warm, without any fire or electricity—and for my arms to smell of the sweet scent of clean hay as I go back into the house, and to be able to go to sleep knowing that all is well, that the task has been completed, tucking in tight and successful—well, each night, this pleases me inordinately. It's almost as if I've warmed myself against the great cold, out there with the stars burning bright. I can lie down in my own bed afterward and be pleased by it—the act of putting new dry hay in the dogs' kennels—for five, sometimes ten minutes, while the stars glitter.

  Just as warming to the chilled soul in January can be the dutiful act of removing snow from the roof of your house and any outbuildings—generator shed, woodshed, barn—lest the winter weight of all that wet snow, compressing steadily into glacial blue ice, might one day or night as if for entirely mysterious reasons suddenly fracture or crumble that structure as surely and completely as would a meteorite.

  For days, even weeks, you watch the snow building up on your roof, watching it in somewhat the reverse manner of a sailor who stands at the bow of a ship watching for shore that never appears. This shore, this landfall, however, is imminent from the first day, draws closer with each hour, each beautiful storm, and finally one day if you have waited too long, you will be startled by the ice-breaking crack of the first timber groaning from deep within the eaves, or the creaking twist—a sound like a big branch snapping from some staunch and upright support.

  These sounds at first aren't the sound of the real thing, timber breaking—it's only the music of the twisting, mounting stress, like the cracking noise your knees or back or elbows make occasionally when stiff—but the sounds do not cease or abate, through the night or into the next day, and soon enough—it can be put off no longer—you are hauling out the long extending ladder, and the snow shovel, and homemade roof rake (a stick of wood nailed crossways to the end of a long, limber pole,
which will act as a cross between a long broom and a bulldozer blade), with which you can push large piles of snow over the edge of the roof without having to get too near that edge.

  For safety, and because I have two young daughters, I fasten a rope to the chimney, or double-belay off the frame of a window jamb, though there are souls up here hardier as well as more foolish than I who do not use ropes for this annual activity but instead wade through the drifts of their roofs, on a sixty-degree pitch and steeper, like mountaineers up to their knees in snow; and there are souls up here, hardier and more foolish, who every year slip, in their gathering fatigue, and tumble down that slope and over the edge, falling ten, twenty, sometimes thirty feet or farther. Sometimes they are unhurt, though other times they break legs and arms, ribs and collarbones; and at that point their snow does not get shoveled and they, now one-armed, or one-legged, must depend on the vagaries of the weather—a warming spell, to trickle the snow off drip by drip, and a long stretch of days without new snow—or the kindness of a neighbor to perform for them that back-bending labor, as well as all of winter's many other labors, for at least a few months. And so I use a rope, like a sissy; like a middle-aged man who is trying to relearn daily the return of his limitations, after having been almost entirely free of them for what seems like only a very short while.

  There is a wonderful, purgelike mindlessness to the rhythm of shoveling snow off the roof—pitching it wantonly out over the edge, into the great beyond—listening to the three seconds' silence, and then the soft, sifting thump of it landing far below; a feeling of gain, of accumulation, even as the reverse is true, with each patch you clear, methodical and rhythmic, up there on the mountain peak of your home, defending your home, protecting it against the future. It is very much a feeling like that involved with the laying-in of a season's worth of firewood, or more—a feeling of bounty, when what you are doing is ridding yourself of a thing rather than gaining a thing.