The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  The trees are starting to get their blood back; the sap is stirring, and the terminal and axial tips of the larch branches, previously winter brown, are glowing gold. The branches of the aspen are breathing as if pulsing blood red, fire red, and best of all, the slender limbs of the willow and alder are turning bright yellow, a living yellow that is rich enough in the sunlight, yet seeming even richer and more alive in the falling snow or, on some foggy days, in the drizzling, hissing rain. The sight of the yellow and gold branches attaching themselves to the backs of our winter-starved retinas is so welcome that while skiing around the marsh and passing near those willows, resurrected one more time, at least one more time, we come to a full stop and simply stand there, drinking in the color with our eyes, color in a landscape where for more than three months there has been almost none at all.

  It's not over, not by a long shot. Most of us will have spent all our energy loving, and climbing over, the high, long, snowy wall of January. And now here it is February, with nothing left, energy-wise. It's real good, at this point, if you've got someone to love. You're falling, by this point, whether you mean to or not, and whether you even realize it or not. There is an old winter part of you that is melting to slush and falling away, for better or for worse, even as the heated breath of the earth below is tickling the cap of snow that blankets it. Sheets and dribbles of water are beginning to trickle beneath that blanket of snow and ice, and fractures and crevasses are appearing up at the surface—and in your own falling, which again may be good or may be bad, it's nice if you have someone to hold on to.

  And you try to enjoy it for what it is, February, whether it is a joyful one or a darkened one, but make no mistake—be honest—what you're really holding on for is March, and the return of the geese, and dirt and mud, and all the other months beyond.

  February, as much or more than any other, is a time for quiet, steady work, work with very low and attainable goals, or, best of all, work with no goals, work that is simply work.

  The light is softer and prettier, when it appears—which is still rare and infrequent—and, as with the blushing limbs of the softwoods, seems to somehow be alive, which is an odd concept indeed for a thing as abstract as light. And yet it seems as alive as an animal, so strong and beautiful a presence is it; and you know that any day, or perhaps even any hour, any minute, a bird is going to begin singing again, though still you don't dare to hope or dream yet after so long a trudge through the snows and lightlessness of the other months. Still you lay low, if you are wise, or experienced, and you wait patiently, waiting for February to move past and behind you, rather than your endeavoring to push on, floundering, through it.

  And beyond the return of those first slender fibers of color, and the first few patches of living sunlight, there is something even more wonderful.

  There is the first hint, once again, of warmth: faint brushings of warmth, light as the touch of a handkerchief against the back of one's neck, or against an upturned face—faint, but enough, at first, after such an absence; for now, enough.

  Appearing all throughout the woods too are the shapes and textures of old buried things, emerging as if from beneath shrouds—some ragged, as they were before they had the blankets pulled over them, though others sleek in their emergence, with a thinning glaze shining over most of the world, as the days warm the snow to the melting point only to have the nights freeze it back again, until that world's shell is more transparent than glass and seems to magnify the objects that are beginning to reappear beneath that lens of thinning, clearing ice.

  There is something now that looks sharply different about the woods each day, and if it is one of those Februarys when you are feeling good, you can understand and see, in your joy of the approaching spring (even as you milk, with pleasure, the last of winter's goodness and silence and beauty), how the world is being made ready quickly for the return of the birds and all the other sleeping things. And if it is one of those Februarys when you are feeling low, you marvel at the brute tenacity and determination of life and are humbled by the onrushing force of it, even as you, supposedly a superior being, possess no such force and perhaps, even in February, feel defeated—though by what you cannot say.

  More and more sun drifts into the valley, and the snow melts and trickles in the daytime, then contracts again beneath night's bright stars, scrunches back up: but each next day there is a little less of it.

  On a walk, the old blind dog, Homer, passing through a sunlit opening in the woods, one which possesses that clear hard glaze of the previous night's freeze, is delighted to be capering across the taut frozen surface of that ice rather than punching through the snow as she usually does: scampering now as if in once more the freedom of her youth rather than her sixteenth winter. Tail wagging. One more winter behind, or almost behind. Can she see, in her near blindness, the brilliance beneath and above and all around her? Or is she aware only of the spaciousness of it—some vast and delightful emptiness everywhere, near the final end of winter's hard story, and with a little pause in the world now, as the world, this northern world, begins to prepare to receive all its characters, and the jumble and speed and complexity of life, once more?

  Even though the temperatures are warmer, you feel colder, sometimes—as if your resistance has been worn down. Or perhaps it is because of all the moisture that is being released by the melting snowfields, or the return of the winds and the stirring breezes; but in the mornings and again in the evenings, you're chilled, and a fire still feels good in the wood stove, even though the cold bright sun is shining and even though the water is dripping from the eaves.

  Bald eagles soar in pairs high over the open bowl of the marsh, almost out of sight. It's cozy to visualize the column of shimmering updraft, the pillar of it, rising from the reflected perfect circle of the snowy marsh below, the dark woods all around absorbing the sunlight but the snowy marsh reflecting the heat straight back up into the blue sky and the eagles riding, as if on waves, the pulses of that one pillar of marsh updraft, spinning and soaring nearly a mile above the marsh, tracing the perimeters of it with their wingtips.

  And while splitting wood one evening with the girls, loading the wheelbarrow to ferry the wood up to the porch, it comes, winter cracking open like a perfect gem being tapped by just the right blow. The sound of it hurtles past us, the whistle of duck wings near overhead at blue dusk, ducks headed hard and fast for the opening upriver just beyond, flying so hard and fast that it gives one the impression they're late for spring, rather than early—and I stop mid-swing with the maul and look up into the dusk, in the direction of that already-gone-by sound, and cry out to the girls, "Listen!"

  Four little patterns that I notice, every February, as familiar and in their own way as methodical as the turning of the pages of a calendar:

  First, the incredible compressed cobalt-mercury color the snow takes on as the warming days melt it and freeze it, melt it and freeze it, compressing and then supercompressing it, and sculpting the snowy hills with that clutching, body-draping, new tighter fit, the tightening body cast of dense ice contracting tighter and tighter upon the land, and the curves and shapes of flowing water halted midmoment everywhere, each cold starry night, before beginning to soften and loosen and flow again, the snow a little bluer each time, each next day of freezing and thawing— stop, start, stop, start, like some ecological rumba and rhythm, and the promise of the things to come—the accruing strangeness of that mercury color is invigorating...

  Second, the delicate filigree of black lichens, old-man's-beard, Bryoria, embossed within the curves of that so distinctly February snow. The returning breezes, and, some days and nights, true winds (both southerly and northerly, and all the earth warming, beneath that dying death grip of the blue-blackening snow, the ice cap of winter now in fierce rigor mortis) toss the black lichen down onto the snow, where, absorbing more warmth, the lichen-moss sinks slightly into the colder snow, then is further ensealed each night beneath the refreezing. It is a February sig
ht, a mosaic that speaks to the coming end of winter.

  About those winds: the old-timers—both of them (by and large, this is a valley of newcomers, ten-year and twenty-year men and women being the oldsters; seed-drift colonists come and go here, as it's a hard place to make a living, and in many respects it's a new place, and a young place, as if itself only recently emerging from beneath the snow)—claim that the valley is a lot windier now, since the Libby Dam was built in the early seventies, creating the giant reservoir of Lake Koocanusa, bounding the valley on its entire eastern edge and effectively cutting it off from the rest of the world, including the Glacier and Whitefish Ranges, just as the town of Troy as well as Libby along the arc of the Kootenai River cut it off to the south, and the Purcell Trench, a great chasm running along the Idaho border, cuts it off from the rest of the world to the west

  Though it's never been measured or monitored or proven locally, I believe them, that the new lake has created what scientists call "lake effect" and that the spring and autumn wind shiftings, particularly, possess greater turmoil, and that the valley, the forest, is still adapting to this new aerodynamic turmoil...

  In any event, the winds of February and the returning sunny days—sometimes, in February, miraculously, we'll have two, even three days in a row, of sun and blue sky—create a distinct embossing, wherein the tendrils of old-man's-beard are blown onto the new snow, black upon white, landing in what can only be called random drift.

  And the next day, the return of the winter-long-exiled sun heats the black lichen with differential vigor, while that warmth is deflected away from the bed of white snow in which the lichen has landed, so that by comparison the lichens resting in that snow at day's end are as hot as the new-burnt tips of match heads; and those warmer lichens settle down into the snow perfectly, like veins wrapped in flesh, sinking down into the snow like the ancient cliché of the hot knife into butter, the lichen chilling sufficiently to slow its descent only when it has sunk to a depth of being level with the snow rather than resting atop it, sinking that millimeter downward, powered by its own warmth, like a swimmer submerging.

  And then night comes again, and the melting snow freezes taut to a shiny cast, with that filigree of lichen embedded by the cooling clutch of the night; and sealed down in the ice like that, the lichen seems like some elegant signature, or like a valuable thing preserved and embossed for all time in that cast. In December and January, the lichen just kind of blows around and drifts here and there and is buried by new snow upon old snow; but in February, the lichen saws its way down into the snow and ice, trapped there and fitting each tendril into each groove of its heat-seared cast so perfectly that the indelible signature of each lichen cannot be pried out of its embossed slate but will remain there, housed in the ice until the snow has melted completely and the sodden lichen rests on the bare forest floor, where it might wait all spring and then into the summer, growing drier and drier, as if waiting for the drift of some loose July or August spark to catch in its nest and ignite...

  The third thing that speaks to me of the pattern of February is the pawed-up snow at the fringes of the previously serene marsh: vast excavation of snow where the herds of deer and elk have ventured from out of the jungles of alders and willows at marsh's edge to claw at the snow with their hoofs, each dainty hoof and slender leg scraping away the snow to get to the dry grass and reeds below as if operating a miniature backhoe, on a cold morning after a heavy snow.

  After such storms, in which a foot or more might fall, the marsh is where the deer go to find their for-certain feed; the place where they can always count on something being there for them, in those vast bent-over dry-hay swaths of autumn-dead reed-grass, even if relatively low in nutrition, by February.

  In February, after one of the big storms, the deer can wander out into the marsh and not have to worry about picking and choosing through the snow to find this or that preferred food item, all vanished beneath the new snow now like the needle in the haystack, and instead can merely lower their heads and like poor dumb brute animals paw steadily, mindlessly, and almost ceaselessly at the new snow overlying the marsh, no matter how deep, and they know they'll be rewarded with something.

  In a few days, some of the snow back in the woods will melt again, and new trails will be cut by the herd's wandering passages, leading to one food source after another, and the Bryoria will continue to fall from the trees, blown by the wind; but in that first day or two following the big wet snowstorms of February, the deer and elk come out into the amphitheater of the marsh, the place where they know they can always find something, and with that strange backhoe digging motion begin scraping away the snow, excavating their way down to the dead and colorless stalks of autumn, and nibble away: chewing that dry grass as much for the heat generated by the digestion, the fermentation, as for whatever leached-out nutrients might linger in the cell walls of those stalks. It is a sobering sight to see them doing this, one that always only increases the respect we have for the deer.

  Sometimes after such a big storm, we don't see them out there pawing at the snow but instead will see, while out on our skis, only where they have been; and the disparity between the perfect smoothness of the untouched snow and the shredded terraces and canyons they have cut frantically, desperately, with their sharp hoofs—eight or ten deer working long and hard in a concentrated area, pawing and pawing, like salmon pushing upstream through the rapids—reveals to even our soft and comfortable lives a sharper and fuller and fairly horrifying glimpse into, if not understanding of, the true nature of hunger: the ceaseless, nearly volcanic forcefulness of it.

  Those new-cut canyons and terraces look exactly like the landforms of the desert Southwest, where violent rivers crossing magnificent spans of time have carved similar features not over the course of a single day or evening but across millions of years; and in either instance, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the signature of hunger; and we ski on past.

  The fourth thing, every bit as delicious as the first three: the way the ground, the wonderful bare ground (I'm speaking now of the extreme end of February, and that only in a dry year, such as this one), first opens up around the trunks of the largest trees, umbrellas and ellipses of bare earth, first amid the snow, where each tree's branches (particularly the spruce) have trapped the day's heat and held it there for a little while, into each night, thinning that ice further and further until it is there that the earth first reappears, around the bases of those trees.

  The darkened trunks of the trees likewise absorb, with differential vigor, the heat of the sun, mild though it is, while the snow everywhere else reflects and diffuses it back into the atmosphere; and again, on into the night, the absorbed heat in those blackened tree trunks radiates slowly back out across the snow, warmest on the west side, which is the part of the tree trunk that received the last and most intense heat of the day. The bare earth appears here first, in that west-canted ellipse that makes it appear as if someone or something has been buried at the base of that tree, at the base of every tree, feet pointing west, the soil appearing so recently excavated that no snow has yet fallen on the gravesite.

  It is, of course, no death that is being marked, but birth, first birth; and in late February, when the earth first begins to show itself again, the hungry eye of the winterer lingers on these open patches first, and marvels at the random, intricate beauty of last autumn's cache of twigs and leaves and pine needles revealed once more: a miracle of delicious specificity after so long a sameness of white.

  You watch those grave-shaped patches of earth grow from hamster-size plots into something larger, day by day and night by night, more and more earth appearing in that same west-southwest cant, like a sundial of the waking dead—the patches of earth shrugging off more and more snow until now the earthy openings at the base of each tree are nearly suitable for something the size of the family dog, and then larger, able almost to fit a human beneath them. (On some mild days, with the return of the sun, you're able
to recline on some drying gentle slope of earth, upon such a plot, and stare out at the snowy marsh and listen to the south wind and the barking of ravens—no other birds yet, but soon, very soon.) Still, even when there is enough earth available to house a full-grown human body, even when there is enough earth available to house such a creature, such a specimen, as yourself, it's not over yet.

  It is still fully winter—a glance at the tracks of deer, which are leaving blood in their prints from where they occasionally punch through the weakening ice, cutting their hocks, will provide as graphic an example as any that it is not over yet—and it's important not to disembark yet, in your overeagerness, from the slow-unfolding wave of winter, important not to be lured too far out into the open, yet, important not to rush or be rushed. It's important to honor the shortest month with caution, and to ride it all the way in to shore, rather than getting overanxious and leaping off early and swimming in choppy, awkward strokes, ill timed with the slow and powerful unfurling of the wave that is still behind you now.

  Seeing the smudge of the distant trees of landfall, while invigorating, is still not the same thing as seeing the sandy beaches of the actual shore itself. You still have to wait a little while longer.

  Sometime in February, the great four-week cough sets in—a maddening and seemingly ceaseless cycle of hack and phlegm, the accrued effect of too much wood smoke, too much fog and dampness, and almost no sun for three months now. For all of winter's wonder, you have to question, at this point, whether humans, or at least your race of humans, were meant to live year-round in such a dim and lightless land. What of the geese, the hummingbirds, and the monarch butterflies, all that flee thousands of miles south at the first vanishing of the sun? What of the swans, which also leave, and the bears, which descend into sleep? What of the snipe and the mallard ducks, the warblers, vireos, and kinglets?