The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  January is the social month. On Tuesdays, after school, the children from the little school (nine students this year, covering grades kindergarten through eight; one teacher; and one teacher's aide position, shared among three different aides) bring their sleds to the big hill outside town, and the adults join them. For a couple of hours, until the dimming blue dusk sinks down from the tops of the trees, we skitter down the hill on big inner tubes and plastic-slickened sleds, shouting and whooping in the forest, trudging back up, then, only to slide down again, leaving, across the course of the afternoon, as dense a skein of tracks as if an immense elk herd had been wintering on that slope, cutting with their hoofs the myriad trails of their daily comings and goings. All in a day, however; and again, what would be survival for them is merely play for us.

  Afterward, with the children soaking wet from their exertions as well as their snow tumbling, we picnic; we stand around a crackling campfire as dusk thickens into true night and sort through all the loose and extra scattered jackets, caps, gloves, and mufflers as we visit. Parents have brought cookies and cakes, crackers and cheese and lunch meats, and, always, hot chocolate.

  We visit about the most mundane and trivial things, and in the ease, the safety, of that mundaneness—against all odds and logic—we grow slowly closer—awkward at first, but then gradually across the winter, into a deeper elegance of fit. What is community? I submit that it is not people of similar intent and goals, or even values, but rather, a far rarer thing, a place and time where against the scattering forces of the world people can stand together in the midst of their differences, sometimes the most intense differences, and still feel an affection for, and a commitment to, one another.

  Am I dreaming? Perhaps. But January is as fine a time for dreaming as any.

  I sense that January is getting overlong, in this narrative, this testimony, this witnessing. I want to close it, for the reader's sake: there is almost an entire year left to experience. But I want it to be understood also, fully, that even though wonderful, it is one long damn month for almost everyone and everything but the wolves and the ravens.

  January is the isolate month, and January is the social month. We go skiing with other adults, our friends, regularly (like almost everyone else in the world, it seems we're too busy in the other months of the year—that even here time hurtles past and neither cunning trapper nor stalwart engineer can figure out a way to slow it here, either—not even here). After dropping the children off at school or having secured a babysitter for the younger ones, we'll set off on an adult ski, starting right behind the school, striking off up a snow-covered logging road in a long safari-like train, brightly clad, cheery, vigorous, living. We move through the dark woods sometimes in silence, other times garrulous, and gawk hungrily skyward whenever the sun appears briefly through the clouds. On one such occasion, a friend of ours, Joanne, is so thrilled to see the sun that without irony she whips out her pocket camera and takes a photo of it, of the sun amid the clouds only, with no foreground or background, and no human characters in it—photographing the rare and elusive sun the same way one might hurry to snap a picture of an elk or a moose crossing the road in front of her.

  I love the pace and rhythm that's involved in skiing through the woods. I love how slowly your thoughts reveal themselves to you, and I love, in the loneliness of January, the blurring of the lines between the animate and the inanimate. On this one ski, for instance, the one I am thinking of, it seemed that everywhere I looked in the forest I saw a snag, a dead tree, that had been carved and sanded and sculpted into the same shapes as the animals that lived in these same woods, that the same winds and rains and snows and fires that sculpt and influence the animals' shape also even the outline of inanimate materials such as stone and deadwood.

  I think there might be more to this idea, this coincidence or observation, than meets the eye—some vast law of physics existing far beyond coincidence, though on a scale so immense as to be beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to grasp and measure and count. In a month like January, one is free to ski along at a leisurely pace, hypnotized by the landscape of snow, and hold such a thought, or any other, comfortably in one's mind for long moments, if not hours, and to savor and contemplate the ultimate solitary essence that resides somehow in the core of each of us.

  One night late in the month—that big moon on the wane, though still huge and swollen in its misshapenness, blue-silver washing out all the stars, filling the forest with its breathless, eerie, metallic light—I step out into the garage to get a piece of venison from the deep freezer, to take inside to begin thawing out for the next evening's meal. It's dark inside the garage, though the world beyond is alit in that blue fire. It's frigid. All sounds have a clarity and density to them not noticed at warmer temperatures, or in the daytime. I hear a scuffling sound out on the ice and look out into the bright moonlight to see a herd of deer standing by the dogs' kennels, nibbling at the tufts of loose hay that are sticking out of the kennels' doors.

  The moon is so bright, I can see the gleam of the deers' eyes. I recognize one of them as the doe who lured in the buck for me on the last day of the season; the same buck whose antlers are drying in the garage, between her and me. The same buck whose backstrap I am taking out of the freezer—am holding now in my hand—for tomorrow's dinner. The muscle that had powered the animal that had chased her.

  Does she carry his progeny within her? Who will outlast whom?

  She, and the others, just stand there looking at me, dark silhouettes in that amazing blue light. It's too cold out for them to run back off into the woods; they're seriously intent on pawing at that hay.

  I could take ten, twelve steps and be out among them. They can't see me, back in the darkness, the blackness: they can only sense and scent me.

  It's so cold. They're shivering. It's so cold that the dogs aren't even coming out of their kennel to bark at them but are instead remaining inside, shivering also.

  After a few moments, the deer lower their heads and go back to eating.

  I should comment briefly on the strangeness of the phenomenon that occurs in this tight-knit little valley, deep into every winter, every January: a preponderance of extrasensory perceptions among and between all of us. I don't want you to think we're all whacked out and cuckoo, believing overmuch in that kind of thing, but neither can I deny that it exists, late into January. I'm confident that someday far into the future (or perhaps not so far), scientists will have found an easy and credible explanation for it; but in the meantime, we dream it, we live it, it's present.

  It comes in waves and spells: rises, surges, crests, then fades away, as if summoned in egress or regress by the moon's tides.

  During the last week of January, I am involved in three startling incidents, one right after the other.

  All occur in the out-of-doors.

  The first one happens while driving home from duck hunting with Tim. It's a sunny afternoon, and I'm tired and weary from paddling, and feeling good because I've got a couple of ducks, mallards, in the back of the truck, and I'm thinking how good they'll taste.

  In my fatigue, the unbidden thought occurs to me that I'd very much like to see a flock of wild turkeys crossing the road. I don't know where the thought comes from: the nearest turkeys are over on the Idaho line, more than twenty-five miles away. I've never seen, or heard of, turkeys over by the dam, where I am now. But I have not driven more than a mile than I look up and see, indeed, a flock of wild turkeys pass through a stand of open ponderosa pine.

  The second incident occurs the next day. My friend Bill and I are driving up into the mountains to go backcountry skiing. We're just riding along, shooting the shit—way up in the high country, past where any game should be found, at this snowy time of year—and I have the thought—actually, it's almost like a craving—that I'd like to see a lynx or a bobcat.

  We round the corner, and a young bobcat is standing in the middle of the road, standing where I have never seen one before. T
he bobcat stares at us for a moment—is it my imagination, or does it seem to be hesitating, as if to be sure we see it?—and then bounds off the road.

  Every day is a gift.

  The third incident occurs later that night. I dream, again completely unbidden, that I am writing a letter to a friend of ours, discussing how much she and I love the short stories of Alice Munro.

  The next day, in the mail—it's as eerie as if I have written the letter, or read it in its entirety, before its inception—there is a letter from this friend, detailing why and how very much she loves the short stories of Alice Munro.

  ***

  Some people get depressed up here, in the long, lightless winter. I've talked to some of these folks, and they say that it's the strangest thing: that when it, the depression, hits, they're still fully capable of recognizing beauty, but that such recognition almost makes the depression even worse, for they can no longer take pleasure in the recognition. As if there is a disconnect, some error in internal wiring, separating beauty from joy, or, worse yet—or so they say—connecting beauty to sadness.

  The scientists say it's all really only about sunlight: a function of the shortening and then lengthening days. As if we are but machines in that regard, or solar cells, fueled by the sun.

  Can you imagine what it must be like for those folks, year in and year out—entering each year the dark tunnel of winter, knowing that it is going to knock them down, pick them up, knock them down, pick them up—stretching and pulling then compressing and darkening them, making them a little wearier, a little more brittle, every year?

  What I think it must be like for these people is as it is when you are walking along a river and encounter a submerged piece of driftwood, so water-soaked that it no longer floats. The years and miles drifted have hollowed out intricate seams of weakness, have scoured out all the knots and replaced those pores with river sediment, clay and gravel, jamming and packing it in between the pores and then polishing it further, as the club—half wood, half stone, now—tumbles farther downstream.

  You can no longer call it a branch or a stone; it is something in between, something altered, and beautiful and unique, even daring, for that alteration: between two places, two worlds. I would think that a person who had survived winter's almost inevitable depression of spirit—the violent euphorias balanced by the dark, even black, troughs—might hold such a piece of wood in his or her hand and feel a brute, physical kind of connection to the beautiful pattern of it: that once soft wood made all the tougher by the enduring, and by the filling in of erratic loss with a grit of gravel that is both of the world's making, and the branch's.

  I would imagine further too that the hiker might run his or her hand over that time-polished object and in the sameness of it all not quite be able to tell anymore which is stone and which is wood.

  I imagine that this walker would place the stick back down into the icy river, buoyed, if even briefly, by the stick's beauty, and walk on.

  Because it's still January—the latest, last, deepest part of January—that person might be on skis rather than on foot. It might, with luck, be the first sunny day in weeks, brilliant and frigid, the sky cracked open with blue and sunlight, the world breathing in full color again rather than black-and-white. Pushing on into that bright clear winter light that has been missing for so long, the skier might marvel at his or her returned happiness—the happiness coming back upon and within as suddenly as a float, an air-filled ball, released from far beneath the surface and rising quickly, and unencumbered, finally, to the surface, the return of happiness (or—who knows—one day, perhaps, even joy) coming back like a migration of something in his or her blood, some rare and wild and elemental herd or flock of a living, traveling thing that is always in the blood, shimmering, hopeful, even yearning, but which travels in some seasons far away, only to return, always, with force; and the skier might, in the onrushing return of this mysterious migration of happiness (or even joy), marvel at how utterly strange it is that we are here, marveling not even at the why of our existence, but at the mere fact that we are.

  An awakening. Not every day such an awakening, or in every moment—but always, hopefully, again and again, and again and again.

  FEBRUARY

  SOME YEARS FEBRUARY is the hardest month, and the longest, while other years the traveler clears it with ease, hurdles it with barely a hitch in stride; but always, the traveler respects February, and the cold, dark, somber snowy corridor of its passage, and accepts without shirking the end-of-winter weight of its accrued darkness.

  Some years, a traveler in this landscape, this life, will have paid his or her northcountry dues in December or January—will already have passed through the blood's helpless Sludge-O-Rama of tired and lightless winterheart. Call it the blues, call it depression, call it seasonal affective disorder: whatever name you give it, it's a real thing, and cumulative through the years, like the effects of too many concussions, each long dark winter a biological hammer blow to the pituitary or some other important gland, irrespective of how much one loves backcountry skiing, or beautiful snowy skies at dusk, or snowshoeing, or sledding, or any of the other infinite wonders of winter. Or if each February is not like the cumulative effects of one concussion after another, then they are like a sustained diet that has for too long been lacking in a certain vitamin or mineral.

  There's a part of any northern resident that wants to believe, in the early years, that being affected by this winter heaviness indicates a character flaw, that if you succumb to February or are even slowed by it, this signifies a character weakness, a flaw or soft spot in one's force of will.

  But it's not that way. It—the February effect—is far larger than our puny abilities to either accept or resist. At least as much as any other, this most compact of months is a force of nature, and it packs a wallop. I've had it, the heaviness, come upon me without warning, lasting several weeks—like a rude guest—arriving when only days earlier I'd been on top of the world, and I've had it come creeping in slowly, preceded days or even weeks by sinuous and then later erratic rumblings and palpitations.

  The heaviness just comes when it comes, and it comes as best as I can tell whether you're a strong person or a weak one, a happy one or a sad one. After you've lived up in this wonderful landscape long enough, it comes almost every year—sometimes in October or November or December or January, other years not until March, but most years—as best as I can tell—in February.

  This happens to be a good year for me, on that count, and a good February. Who can say why? The older I get, the more I believe those downturns, those sluggish periods, have nothing to do with character, or uncontrollable external or internal circumstances, but are instead governed by some hand-from-above, or some wave-from-below, and that we are only but storm-tossed bits of twigs and leaf, or tiny insect striders, riding those huge swelling waves of mood. And yet even in a good year, and a good February, in which that lead-hearted torpor does not return, even then there are days in February when I can feel those swells trying to build far below, or when I can hear the faint rattling clack of the puppeteer working his or her strings and crossbars, which, for one reason or another, this year at any rate, are simply and mercifully unattached to the marionette of myself. Still, in February, I sense those distant swells below, and venture forth into the world cautiously, not cockily. I advance in the manner of some ground-hugging upland bird, a grouse or quail, that pauses and then freezes anytime the shadow of a hawk passes overhead.

  This year, the hawk is passing on. But still, out of habit, I move carefully in February, and I do not take my happiness for granted. Neither am I convinced, despite my love for this place, that human beings are designed for or capable of dwelling here all year long, year after year.

  Or perhaps I've simply got too much invested personally in the issue: the rises and plummets of my own heart. What's a little sluggishness, a little malaise—or even a lot of it—in the long run, in the arc of a life, really? Just because a tre
e is consumed by a forest fire, or falls over and rots, or is eaten slowly by beetles and woodpeckers, it would be silly, wouldn't it, to hypothesize that that tree didn't belong in this landscape?

  Still, there's something about February, even a good February, that tries and tests and threatens to darken the soul, and brings a bit of hesitation to even the boldest of hearts.

  February is when the ice comes, and with it, the slippery falls. January has been dry powdery snow; but February, with its warmer, damper breath, its short and lightless days, and its scudding clouds—a fantastic beauty of clouds, a full twenty-eight days of the fantastic beauty of clouds—brings the sore-throat cough and cold and dampened feet. And each day, under the warming breath of February, the top layer of snow thaws and melts, and each night, as the sun scuttles away like a coward, a traitor, and those February puddles freeze back into a glaze of ice, so that the forest is coated with a translucent crust, a shell of ice, and the roads glint, it becomes necessary to drive slower and walk slower, and to keep one's center of gravity hunkered down lower, this month, whether one hears those puppet strings above or feels those swells and surges below, or not.

  There are days too in February, short dark February, and cloudy white February, when despite your knowing better, you never get out of the house. The morning begins, you putter around lazily with paperwork, you eat lunch, you work an hour or two more, you go to pick up the children at school, you come home and feed the dogs and make a phone call, and suddenly dusk has eaten the day and you tell yourself, Tomorrow ...