The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  It looked as if they were going to keep on coming, right on through the big window, but they set their wings into a glide and landed on the pond's surface and coasted all the way in, right up to the window's edge, clucking and grunting and braying, and the ripples from their splashing cast shimmering disks of bronze and yellow that reflected in wavers across the cabin walls and ceiling, bathing the three of us in that rippling pond light, and Mary Katherine just watched and listened to it, as if it were all the most normal and regular thing in the world.

  I think that when you save someone, you become saved. I think something passes between you and the rescued person, something almost entirely unnoticed, so that it is as if some thin and perhaps artificial barrier that gives each of us a bit of necessary distance from all others, and a place in the world, and a place in time, has been pulled away, as if all along it was nothing more than a curtain of gauze no more substantial than a veil or a dream: as if such distance, believed to exist at the heart of all things, might sometimes really exist only in our imaginations—again, even if only for a few moments at a time.

  Mary Katherine stopped breathing the night she was born. Elizabeth had delivered her, and we were in our hospital room, had spent the first night there; she was still in her first twenty-four hours of life. All of her vital signs had been perfect at birth—seven pounds, nine ounces, nineteen and three-quarters inches, etc., etc.—and remained fine. But only a few hours into having moved to our hospital room (there was only one other baby in the entire neonatal wing, several nurses per baby), she just stopped breathing.

  She didn't care for it at all. Her face scrunched up and turned red as she gasped and sucked and waved her fists, and then she wasn't getting any air at all and began taking on a bluish tint.

  We both knew next to nothing about babies, but we knew immediately what was wrong.

  I grabbed her from Elizabeth, who was in bed, and went running down the hall with Mary Katherine. It felt like football days, the narrow unoccupied hallway a path one needed to travel as quickly as possible, with a dire force in close pursuit, and time the most vanishing, valuable thing.

  In the meantime, Elizabeth had called down to the front desk, and an elderly nurse, a tiny little old woman, came hurrying around the corner, and I closed the distance to her quickly and handed Mary Katherine—who was still fighting—to her.

  Before I even had time to explain anything, the nurse flipped her over so that she was holding Mary Katherine face-down, cradling her little belly in the palm of one hand, and tapped her on the back, then lifted her upright—and just like that, she was breathing the clean, sweet air of life again.

  Back in our room, Elizabeth had gotten disentangled from her bed sheets and was now running down the hall in her robe, barefoot, trailing tubes and towels, as well as blood, and by the time she reached us, she was faint, terrified, and it was hard to believe that, already, everything was all right again. I was already amazed at the astounding miracle of life, and to receive now, scant hours later, a second miracle—salvation—was indescribable. I do remember feeling joyous and terrified both, and wondering how other parents did it: if every hour was to be filled with this intensity of emotion, this aliveness and alertness. I remember consciously wanting to preserve that extreme joy, extreme gratitude, forever, and for the most part, I think I have; I think most parents do. It was like entering a second world, a second kingdom.

  I wondered why I had not heard much about it. Or maybe plenty of people had been talking about it and I had just not been listening.

  They put her in an incubator thing for the rest of the night, with a little wire strapped to her, some kind of sensor taped to her, so that if she stopped breathing again—for longer than ten seconds, I think—a buzzer would go off. The nurse said it wasn't uncommon for newborns to stop breathing, but that usually they started right back up again. She said she thought Mary Katherine must have had some kind of obstruction, milk or phlegm, and had choked briefly on that.

  I hated that she couldn't be with us the rest of her first night in the world, but the nurse assured us she'd be asleep all night anyway and would never even know we weren't there.

  Still, I stood there on the other side of the glass and watched her for most of the night. If she opened her eyes, I wanted her to see there was still someone there; and if the monitor failed, I wanted to be there to back it up.

  I watched her sleep, and breathe; I counted the seconds between inhalations and exhalations. And once, later in the night, she stopped again, in her sleep—I was counting, with increasing concern, eight, nine, ten, as Mary Katherine stirred in her sleep, increasingly uncomfortable, and by eleven I was rushing back to the nurses' station, though by the time we returned, Mary Katherine was breathing easily again.

  The nurse unstrapped the monitor, examined it, recalibrated it, and tested it against the side of the bed; when it had been motionless for ten seconds, it began to beep.

  I can't remember what the nurse said, or how she explained it, though she did allow that sometimes the monitors weren't always perfect.

  Bleary-eyed, I watched Mary Katherine for the rest of the night. She kept breathing, and the monitor never beeped. The nurses were just across the hallway from her—almost within sight of her—but what was one night, and the first night, at that?

  What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility that was in a way like a saving of myself: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was now invisible and she was everything.

  How such knowledge saves a person I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land in which the self dissolved and another was born. And I still feel that way, too, anytime I look at either of my daughters, and I know that other parents feel that same way—I have heard them speak of it, had in fact heard such things being stated even before I became a parent, though in those earlier days, such discussions, such statements, had held no meaning for me and had the quality of sound of a radio playing faintly in another room, with the language of the radio's music identifiable but the individual words, and their message, indistinguishable.

  When we finally got her home (because of her breathing stoppage, we stayed in town a couple extra days, just to be safe) and walked into our cabin and saw that sun-gold reflected pond light shimmering across the ceiling, and when the geese came gliding in, gliding almost into our laps, Mary Katherine tensed with excitement, and then laughed. She had smiled the moment she was born, and now, listening to the goose music, she tensed and then laughed. For some reason, some doctors will tell you newborn babies can't laugh; but if a flock of wild geese comes sailing into their life in the first moment they enter their new home, they can.

  This year, by the marsh, spring (or rather, the first opening in the snow, even if it is only a false opening) is a little later in coming. The marsh is still a mottled slab of snow and ice, but with a few standing puddles, and the sliver-green hues of translucence of more and more patches of thinning ice. The heavier, sturdier birds are returning first—the incredibly powerful ducks and geese, birds flying across the top of the forest each night, returning like rising water levels themselves, hurrying to fill the new spaces created by the snow's departure.

  The snow is not yet going away for good: we all know that. But the struggle has begun in earnest, space versus no space—the land rush is on—and as the snow and ice begin to disappear, the ducks and geese are claiming the new water, pothole by pothole, wing splash by wing splash.

  By mid-March, they are pouring in like bats, their unseen wing whistling heard always at dusk, so that it seems to me as if with their enthusiastic return they are helping to nudge along the gear works that are leading us all to the advancing equinox, the return of sufficient light, finally, to balance the dark.

  It's still cold and snowy, but somewhere—if not yet on the marsh—there's yet another slot of open
water just ahead, just opened; and they're anxious, it seems, to be the first, or among the first, to reach it. Perhaps in their power and rush they are not just helping to nudge along the gear works that lead us toward the equinox but are in fact attempting, with their momentum and desire, to speed it along. It's easy to imagine that with their fast, strong flights they are finally pulling back the covers of winter, finally revealing the black bare earth of spring and the coming meadows and marshes that will one day be as brilliantly green as the jeweled feathers on the heads of the mallard drakes that are now reinhabiting them.

  You can't see any of this, at night, or into the future. But it's up there, and out there—close enough to hear, if not quite yet see. Whispered promises, now.

  The gear works will never break. Easier for our own souls and spirits to fracture and drain away, back down into some rift or fissure, than for those massive, subterranean, and celestial gear works to break.

  With the life comes the sound. The marsh is cracking, groaning, speaking to the sun, on the days when the sun returns. The ferocity of life: on the thirteenth of March, I spy the first mosquito. Surely this is no newly hatched wiggle-tail but instead some overwintering veteran, solitary, a good many weeks ahead of the coming invasion of others of his kind. But still, it's an amazing sight, and after so long an absence, almost a welcome one.

  I don't mean to sound too fond. And after all, one of the birds is going to get him, anyway. When they return.

  Pulling Lowry on her sled across the crust of vanishing marsh ice, skirting around the shallow puddles—each day seems to be the last day, and then the last hour, I can do this.

  The trail, the wake, of our fractured ice glints and glitters in the new sun like a path of diamonds, and it seems to me that it is the thunderous, rasping noise of the steel runners themselves, the tympanic rumbling, that will urge the spring along, as much as the whistle of duck wings at night. So much noise: as if these rasps and rumblings, and even her delighted laugh, are what will awaken the sleeping season.

  More sun, not just ribbons and tendrils seen through the dense strata of clouds, but entire hour- and two-hour-long stretches of it, the entire sky a blue umbrella, and now the snow seems to be routed, and once again, it doesn't matter to us that it'll be back: the great thing is the return of that sunlight. We feel like laughing, even giggling or snickering foolishly at our great luck, for in no way can we deserve such raw miracle, such raw luck. Hasn't it previously been our lot to know only sodden gray, so much of it that we'd become convinced, inured, that that was all there'd ever be?

  More patches of open water, and open earth, appear. Ovals of mud begin to appear on the roads, like the great brown-slabbed flesh of some living thing, gigantic and leechlike, perhaps, rising from beneath the sheets and blankets of the snow.

  The exhilarating, joyful sound of puddles splashing beneath our tires as we drive through the slush: a discordant sound, yet as beautiful, in March, as any aria, any birdsong. The blood thinning, in that new light, and quickening again, with joy.

  The lichens, wet from yesterday's steady rain, today are already sun-dried and waving in the breeze, not like sodden hair now but like long hair blowing in the wind. The trees with their branches like outstretched arms, the long lichens like hair, the knots and gnarls like eyes, noses, mouths, remind me again how little difference there is between anything—how one plan, one law or rule or desire, seems to govern it all: every rock and tree, every bone and branch and feather and antler, and the path of all things. With the sun having returned after winter's long gray slog, it seems not to matter at all that I have no clue what that path or rule might be.

  The scent your skin makes, in intense sunlight, as if it is cooking: I haven't smelled it in six months, not since last September, hiking high up on a rocky ledge. The sun going down, back then, giving up its intensity for half a year. Hello, welcome back. At this moment, looking up at the cumulus clouds, the blue sky, the alder branches still bare against that blue sky, but with the birds chittering and chirping and singing and pairing up, and the warm wind pouring now across the thawing marsh, there is only one spider web's strand separating me from euphoria, and in my deepening middle age, forgive me, I'm trying to keep that strand from snapping me and re-leasing me (like some balloon) into that euphoria. Instead, I'm trying to stay slightly lower and centered, so worn out and frightened have I become—so weary—of the subsequent and necessary and correlative down-swoops of spirit that accompany such euphorias, later on, in the natural law-and-order system of cost and recompense.

  I just want to sit here in the mild sun and be happy, peaceful, content. I am no longer always as brave as the small birds around me now, returning to the marsh—birds that are said to, in the springtime, sometimes sing until a vessel in their throat ruptures and bright blood sprays from their mouths.

  I aim for these journals to be nothing but a celebration, portraits of joy—this is what I hope to train my eye to look for—and yet to look too closely at one thing while purposely avoiding the other thing sitting right next to it is myopic at best. There is a part of me, hopefully a larger part, that can look at the pattern of the emerging, fledgling springtime and feel the larger spirit of the world—the joy, and awakening—that runs like fast meltwater just beneath the surface of all things, and in the return of southerly breezes, and be swept along, carried along, by this momentum.

  But I see the fracturing and disintegration too, the greed and injury—the bizarre geometries of clearcuts, up one mountain and down the other—and as the white world vanishes and the remaining forests slowly release their snowpack to the thawing, hungry, muddy soil, the patchwork of clearcuts hang on to their snow stubbornly and become even more noticeable, and unnatural-seeming, in the springtime.

  With no overstory to trap the awakening earth's warmth and respiration, they just sit there, strange little glaciers, hoarding all their water, even though this is the time of year that the soil and vegetation of the surrounding forest most need it, and have evolved to receive it.

  Giant unencumbered snowpacks, the old clearcuts insulate and keep chilled an earth that is otherwise seeking to awaken, and they reflect the sun's solar rays back into space.

  They sit there and wait, accomplishing nothing, while life—wild, rambunctious, hard-earned, and glorious life—races past all around them. (And when they do finally release, burned by the sun, it is in a useless, calamitous collapsing rather than in the slow, sustainable, nutritious trickling away that occurs farther back in the stability of the old forest. They dump their water load all at once, sometimes several weeks later than what the ecosystem historically was used to receiving—and everything, all movements of nature, are skewed and disrupted, sometimes even scoured away by these clearcut-caused releases of artificial peak flow.)

  It does no good to dwell on it, or to allow your one sweet and precious and wild life to be made bitter by such observations, but it's out there, all around you, and you cannot help but see it. Two centuries ago, before the first ax or saw ever dreamed of a place like the Yaak, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew, hack and rack the growing green!"

  Over the years, I've become almost accustomed to the horrific views—not benumbed, by any means, but inured, summoning sufficient residue, I think, to bear up beneath such injurious, daily witnessing—in part, by learning to focus on the wild and soothing beauty of what's still left. But as each new season reveals yet another round of new clearcuts—two hundred or more years of interconnected grace being swept clean—I can't help but wonder what kind of savage and ineffectual people would allow such a thing to be done not just to their own land, or any land, but to the views that flood and fill our senses thereafter in each glimpse of those denuded hills, day after day after day, and ever increasing—such views filling their children's lives too until one day perhaps there is a generation of children that knows nothing else and accepts such a view as due or recompense, with each season's thaw melting new
scours and gullies of erosion, the mountains themselves washing away, trading mystery for scab.

  Some days I feel we're very near that tipping point—wherein one or two more clearcuts tip the balance of wonder versus rage, joy versus despair, too far the other way, so that we know only the latter, and very little, if any, of the former.

  How much is too much?

  I love the way the phone calls and e-mail messages spread slowly north, in March. A friend in Trout Creek, more than a hundred miles to the south, and at a lower elevation, saw the first red-winged blackbird nearly two weeks ago.

  The rumors drift slowly north.

  And here, in my own marsh, two bedraggled but freshly bathed sparrows singing, shaking cold water from their wings and singing, as if completely unaware that up in the mountains, as the earth warms and awakens, the old logging roads are turning into rivers, taking millions of gallons of water straight out of the forest and funneling it, silt-laden, down into the creeks and rivers, and away: the sparrows singing instead as if governed by some mythic, merciful equation in which joy must always somehow exceed, even if only slightly, despair, so that the more there is of the latter, the more there is, or must be, also, of the former.

  The willow branches become even more vibrant orange-gold, washed and birthed by come-and-go rains. Where has all this sparrow-song been, all winter? Sleeping, beneath the snow, so that the arriving sparrows have gotten here just in time to intercept it and claim it, as it emerges—or have they carried it with them, sometimes hidden, all this way?