The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Writing by candlelight in the cabin one cold dark night, I cough my February cough—as familiar to me by this point as the act of breathing—and a jet of visible frost-air, rime-breath, bursts from my mouth and snuffs out, with startling alacrity, the entire row of candles, the wavering light by which I am working.

  I sit in the darkness for a moment, waiting, and then relight them using the coals from the fire in my wood stove, and go back to work.

  While out backcountry skiing yesterday, practicing my awkward beginner's telemark turns in new powder, I lost my keys on any one of a couple dozen head-over-teacup tumbles—a fact I discovered only upon reaching my truck at the bottom of the mountain. I was due to pick up the girls after school and had allowed only a few minutes of buffer time for this operation—it was a good fifteen miles to the school, still, too far to ski and get there on time (and in February I could not count on another truck passing and giving me a ride to the school; in winter's depth like that, you can sometimes go the better part of the day without seeing another vehicle on the road). But fortunately, in the gravity of the wisdom gotten by my experience and my advancing age, I had guarded myself well against my own distractedness and had wired an extra set under the bumper so that I was able to retrieve those keys and start the truck right up without a hitch. I felt proud, if you can imagine that—losing all my keys in the snow and still I was pleased with myself, pleased with having outwitted even my own crafty self—and I went on up to the school and picked up the girls, right on time.

  I decided however to go back the next day, if it didn't snow, and look for those keys, for a number of reasons. I knew it was a long shot that I'd find them, up on the huge mountain, in all that snow, but so great is my reverence for that mountain that I felt the obligation to play it out, to make at least one search, out of respect, to try to avoid littering the mountain with all that steel; and I wanted to look too because there were a lot of keys on that ring, some of which were the only key I had for this or that padlock, and because also attached to those keys was a wonderful little multipurpose knife Elizabeth had gotten me for Christmas one year. And I wanted to look too because I had a strange and utterly illogical feeling that I might be able to find them, against the odds.

  This mountain has fed my family across the years with its berries and has been the place I go in times of joy, and in times of sorrow too; and it has given my family, over the years, numerous deer and elk. Finding a set of keys deep in the snow in the backcountry is nothing, really, compared to finding an elk, sometimes, in this valley—or rather, having that elk delivered to you via the mountain and via the elk itself—and so I set off the next day up the trail, carrying a shovel in my right hand instead of a ski pole, backtracking my way up the mountain. (I had called down to Libby to inquire about renting a metal detector, but as is often the way of such things, the cost was prohibitive: the heck with the detector, I decided, resolving to rely instead on grace and luck.)

  Only the faintest skiff of snow had fallen in the night; I'd gotten lucky in that regard. And it was easy enough to follow my tracks from the day before; and easy too to find the places where I'd biffed, huge snowy volcanic craters of clumsiness and spasticity.

  It was good exercise, going back up the big mountain for the second day in a row, and at each crash site I dug and dug, excavating an even wider pit. (What would those who came this way later in the week think, encountering such mammoth excavations?) After I had exhausted a ten-foot abyss around each tumbledown marker, listening intently, keenly, for the light and telltale clink of metal shovel blade against steel keys, muffled beneath the snow, I would move on farther up the mountain, retracing the previous day's falls in reverse, reliving my spectacular ignominy in such slow and studied fashion as to approach penitence—noting, as I moved in reverse that way, how the tight twin tracks of my skis had begun to wobble and separate just above each crash site, analyzing coldly, impassively, the slope and angle of terrain and the skier's approach that had led to each of the numerous miscues.

  And even after I failed to find the keys with each new pit I dug, I didn't give up but instead sketched on the back of a scrap envelope the approximate location of each spill so that I might come back again in the spring and search in the absence of snow, and before the vegetation greened up, for the bright metallic sparkle of my key ring glinting in the sun—assuming a squirrel or pack rat had not carried the shining treasure off to its nest, or that a sharp-eyed, curious raven had not found the keys first and carried them off jangling in midair to a distant and secure stick nest even farther into the backcountry; and assuming too that the sliding sheets of ice in the spring would not transport the keys too much farther downslope, or in too erratic a pattern, carrying them hopelessly away from the origin like the distant detritus of some clattering moraine.

  It was all but useless. Still, I had a good feeling about it; and in any event, it was a fine day to be up on the mountain digging holes in the snow. Blue sky, a bright sun, and good exercise.

  Like some mad golfer, I counted the holes as I worked my way upward—dogleg left, hook right, slice left, dogleg right—weaving in my backtracking the same story of the fall line, not in the animal grace of a traverse but in the speed-thrill bombing run of the skier, carving only the most slender of s's—and punctuated too often with those explosive craters—and my map grew more complex, noting this tree and that. I know the mountain so intimately that it would be no problem at all for me to return to those exact spots in the spring or any other season, snow or no-snow. And finally, near the top, after having nearly finished my bizarre cartographic project, I spied a strange-looking bump in the snow that was just about the size of the clump of keys, and though the clump was coated with an inch of snow from the night before, it looked to me as if there might be a sixteenth of an inch of metal key tip sticking up through the snow.

  I climbed straight on up to that spot, not daring to take my eyes off it, and daring to hope, daring to believe, all the way up—and sure enough, there they were, on the seventeenth crater—or the third, if you wanted to count your way down from the cornice at the top. The familiar sound they made when I picked them up and dusted the snow from them and dropped them in my pocket was a kind of music extraordinarily sweet, and on the ski back down the hill to my truck, I wondered, and not for the first time, at the silliness with which we fill our days, at the passing of the hours that end up composing a life.

  Nothing sleeps forever. That there are stories, out upon the land as well as in our own hearts—the ceaseless reordering of patterns and events to create stories, whether in the script of pen on paper or by the elegant calligraphy of fires and glaciers, and natural selection, succession, evolution and devolution—proves, I think, that all things will rise again, that there can be no permanent sleep, and that even the stillness of geology, or death, is temporary. In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen writes,

  In the book of Job, the Lord demands, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? Declare, if thou hath understanding! Who laid the cornerstones thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

  "I was there!" —surely that is the answer to God's question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleeting assemblies that we think of as our bodies have been in existence since the beginning.

  I do not think we would have been gifted with the ability to observe stories, much less create them, if this background movement, this narrative momentum, were not one of the underlying forces or currents of the world itself. For what other reason would the world have instilled in us such a proclivity or talent if not for use—even if that use is but to celebrate, observe, replicate, the larger patterns?

  Nothing sleeps forever. The river reawakens first, in February, stretching and cracking and groaning and glowing sapphire green as the ice softens and fills with warming water from below, the ice acting like a magnifying lens through which that returning sun strafes; and
after the rivers begin to break apart and stir and then flow once again, the land begins to awaken—and after the land awakens, then the plants begin to stir, the trees and grasses and forbs, and after the vegetation awakens come last the animals that had been sleeping within that sleeping earth, spilling from their burrows and caves like boulders loosened from the frost's grip on a frozen hillside, warmed by the climbing sun, and tumbling downslope and back out into the world. If that in itself is not the grand pattern of story, the progression and movement of some larger narrative, some larger meaning gotten from the assemblage of the many individual parts and scenes, then what would you call it instead?

  Nothing can sleep forever. No matter how rock-hard the frozen earth was in January, in February the ground begins to soften, right after the rivers open and begin to move again, and right after the first ducks and geese return, looking for those early patches of open water, quacking and honking and braying like donkeys, so that to one who did not understand perhaps the cant of the sun and the incredible power of that increased angle of its incidence, and the increased force of radiation, it might seem that it was the powerful stride of the geese's honking alone that was softening that frozen ground to jelly, to mud—the ground softening finally, and loosening, stretching and bending up into sluggish oceanlike waves, swales and troughs that oscillate like the living thing the earth has become, not just across fields and pastures but up and down the dirt roads, bunching them up into corduroy washboards.

  As the land awakens, coming back to life, these swales and troughs pitch our trucks so that we bob up and down like small boats in the crossing of them. The loads of firewood we carry in the back for added traction on the ice fly up into the air, crossing each swell, before raining back down scattered and repositioned, thumping hard when they land. You can hear such thumping anywhere in the valley, at any time of day, in February—new swales appearing almost anywhere overnight to surprise the habituated and inattentive driver. Those falling-back-to-earth loads of firewood (it's fun to watch in your rearview mirror when such a wave catches you by surprise: you feel the lift and rise, the sudden weightlessness, and glance in the mirror, and sure enough, it's like a magic trick: all your firewood is up in the air behind you, hanging and floating for a second), when they finally land—settling right back down into the bed of your truck, in only slightly rearranged fashion—set up a tympanic clattering that echoes through the woods and drums loudly on those very same warped and frost-heaved roads that first gave rise to the drumming.

  (Later in the year, when the awakening is complete, the softened roads will finish their yawn and will be stretched back out all the way flat again; and again you will understand that almost everything has some sort of life, or the semblance of a life, through story, and that almost everything has some sort of motion, and as such, some sort of narrative...)

  And though the bears, off in the distance and still asleep in the earth as if entombed, are not quite reawakened in February, these bumpings and thunderings must surely be communicating themselves to the bears' dreams, the pitched and jouncy loads of our firewood and our bang-hollering trucks drumming down through the tight skin of icy earth, the bears picking up on those sounds with the sonar of their sleeping bodies, as the enormous whales are said to be able to hear the ocean-stirred vibrations of distant drilling rigs and buzzing motorboats hundreds or thousands of miles distant, or even, perhaps, the oar of a single kayaker as the blade enters the dark water, a distant whisper spoken in a language that is a complete mystery to our own slack-bodied selves.

  To those sleeping underground, perhaps the sounds of the stirring world above enter their dreams in a jumbled state and incorporate themselves into the bear's dreams in such fantastic reassemblage as to create the most amazing dreams and stories imaginable. Perhaps the bears and other earthbound, sleeping creatures dream of a sky filled with floating pieces of firewood, neatly sawn stumps hanging in the air, drifting, waiting to come back down to earth, waiting and waiting...

  More sounds, on the eighteenth and nineteenth of February, this year: the air as aswirl with sound as the buried earth, with the strange raucous chitterings of the pileated woodpeckers calling out as they fly from ailing tree to ailing tree, searching for the ants and beetles that feast on those trees, as the pileateds, with their long anvil bills, feed on those insects, so that—again, another marvelous equation—a forest grove of dead or dying trees, rotting or burned, equals the sight and sound of a great pileated woodpecker, three feet from bright red head to tail and with an even larger wingspan, flying through these forests with wild whoops and wails and laughs. And while it is an equation beyond our ken to completely measure or replicate or even fully understand, it is not one that lies beyond our ability to observe and celebrate, which is, to paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, exactly what I have been doing all day.

  And again, the sameness or similarity of the equation and its patterns expresses itself across the different media; as the shouting, laughing giant woodpecker is in many ways but a miraculous blossoming of the dead-standing spars—little more than a leap of thought, as if the dead-standing spar had all along desired to become such a bright and flightworthy and attractive bird—so too does the sound of the great pileated woodpecker carry within it the same energy and pattern, the vibrancy, of the silent sap that is beginning to stir in the living trees, and of the overwintering insects that are beginning to stir in the dead or compromised ones. It all seems to be attempting to merge, once winter starts to lift.

  Unerringly, it seems, the woodpeckers swoop to the trees that contain the stirring insects. (How do they know? By sight, by sound, by odor, by intuition?) Tentatively at first, they begin to tap at the chosen tree, probing it, until, within the first few trial excavations, the tender and delicious insects are revealed to the uncurling tongue, and further excavation begins now in earnest. A rapid, concussive drumming issues throughout the forest, the pileated hammering out its deep and distinctive rectangle-shaped cavity, chips and slivers of bark flying everywhere—the bird, it seems to me, preferring to test the green bark of still living trees, in February. (Do the woodpeckers mark with anticipation, visually or otherwise, those trees each autumn that are or might possibly be newly diseased?) There could be ten thousand reasons, ten thousand related connections, dependencies, and advantages for such an intricate seasonal preference, some acute and exquisite forest balance—but all I know is that in February one notices with far greater frequency the new-peeled slivers of green glistening bark resting atop the new snow, new wood pale and bright as new-milled lumber, and chips scattered about wildly, looking at first like the residue from where some sawyer passed just hours before with ax or chain saw...

  And in the drumming sound of those excavations, despite the falling snow, one can hear another of the first sounds of spring returning, and in those glistening chips and slivers that the woodpecker has carved from the trunk one can see that the sap is beginning to move, and just like the river, and just like earth, and just like the braids and ribbons of ducks and geese overhead. The butter-colored wood chips are sticky with living resin, and revealed like that, resting upon the open snow, it is as if the blood within the blood, the sap within the sleeping tree, and the sleeping tree within the sleeping forest, are beginning to awaken; and again, whether the woodpecker is drawn to the first few signs and clues of that awakening, or perhaps participates more actively, helping to accelerate that awakening, not just with the booming cannonade of its drumming and its wild and strange calls but with the actual cracking open of those new-stirring trees, I could not say for sure; neither do I need to know.

  Again, I really need only to know that I like to walk across the diminishing snow, in February, usually on snowshoes, and notice, and celebrate, those bright new-peeled ribbons of bark resting fragrant upon the snow; and to know that there are forests where I can do this, that there are forests where I will always be able to do this.

  And another new bird! My God, a ruby-crowned kinglet perc
hing cold upon a bare alder branch outside my cabin, on the twentieth of February, peering in at me through the frosted window and cheeping quietly, while in the spruce thicket behind the kinglet the chickadees are foraging this bright morning, with the sun higher than it has been all year. Even the owls are calling, courting, midmorning, and it doesn't matter that it's eight degrees today: the sun is higher than it's been yet, the light upon the world is fuller and richer than we have yet seen it, and all the birds are more active than they've been all year.

  Watching that kinglet watch me through the thick frost of cabin glass is proof again that spring's coming soon now. The first of February is far too soon to lean forward in your traces, as is even the seventh, or even the fourteenth—but I would estimate, based on my own experience, that if you want to get really reckless about it, you can begin to dream of spring on this date, the twentieth of February. There's still a good three to four weeks of rutted ice and snow cover remaining, but if you're tough enough, you can go ahead and begin dreaming now.

  Three to four weeks is still a long time—especially after so long a trek—and like the deer back in the forest, you'll want to conserve yourself, and your strength—don't sprint for the finish line yet, and, in fact, don't sprint at all—but on or around the twentieth of February, it's all right to begin to dream.

  I was skiing again yesterday, noting the new angles of light upon the forest, and found myself thinking again about the cant of this valley. You would think that for neatness' sake, and symmetry and balance, February light would have the exact qualities of August light, that each would be balanced against the earth evenly, cleaved six months apart from each other, half a year, like the severed halves of a pear, an apple, or some other round and balanced fruit. But again, because of the valley's cant—this one sweet and specific place on earth—it's not that way at all. Neither is April light like October light.