The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  In my light-starved, bruised-feeling, out-of-shape mind, this one sound carries all the joy and frenetic energy of children playing the xylophone; and I am ready, and am finally willing, most winters, to say that winter is over and that the brown season has begun. I will still have far to go, beyond this point, emotionally and spiritually, for this declaration to become true—after these many years, I have learned not to lean too far forward in anticipation of spring, if at all—but when I begin to hear all that slow, stirring music, and when I see the first shred, the first gram of dirt, I know that reinforcements are on the way, that light will return to the world, and that my usual cheery good moods, if not my soul, might yet be saved for one more year, for the world to use in whatever way it might.

  So the sound waves precede the waves of color. There is yet another sleeper besides ourselves for whom much of winter is a mystery. About these other sleepers, even our learned scientists are mystified; the sleepers are more a mystery than the winter itself. The bears—both black and grizzly—will have been curled up beneath domes of snow. The black bears crawl into a hollow log (one of about ten thousand reasons it's more than okay to have dead trees in the woods; not every dead tree needs to reach the sawmill to achieve its highest purpose) or tuck in tight beneath an overhanging rock, content, it seems, to simply let the snow mound up over their stilled and sleeping bodies, as if they have for that period of time taken it into their hearts to imitate the sleeping mountains themselves, with their curved motionless shapes almost identical now to the silhouettes of the mountains in which they have ceased, for now, to prowl.

  The grizzlies take this metamorphosis even another step further, tunneling with their hugely powerful forelegs and immense claws into the earth itself—traveling back into the spirit world, according to some beliefs, and in this come-and-go manner are an intermediary between the "real" world and the "spirit" world; though it occurs to me also that in such stories perhaps we have it mixed up and it is that buried, dusty, stony earthen world below, and the time and land of sleep, that is the "real" and durable world, while the brighter noise in the world above is the dream, and the land of wraithy spirits and utmost brevity.

  Whichever inversion holds true—sky below, earth above; spirit now or spirit later—I assume that the same thing that awakens and reinvigorates our spirits at winter's end—the bellowing, fluttering, crying, singing, trickling, whispering, shouting, murmuring, cracking, groaning of winter's end—is the same sound that pulls all the bears, like crocus bulbs, back up out of the earth.

  It is one of the fundamental lessons of science that like replicates like, and one of the lessons of history is that history too is predisposed to do the same; that only with considerable effort and consciousness can the repetitions of the past possibly be avoided.

  In this same manner, sound elicits sound. Sometimes, when going out to my cabin at night to work, walking without a flashlight, carrying my notebook and groping my way through this well-known forest with the other hand, I'll break the silence by cracking through the frozen crust of a shallow puddle—a wintry, surprising percussive sound, which will rouse the sleeping geese into a startled honking uproar, a symphony made all the more dramatic by both the suddenness of the sound and the total darkness in all directions.

  So taut-wired is the new-waking world, so attentive to the music or summons of each small sound, that almost anything at all will set off the chorus.

  The next day, napping in my wintry cabin, as I am sometimes wont to do around the noon hour, taking a brief break between fiction and nonfiction (curled up on a folding army cot next to the murmuring faint warmth of the wood stove, and covered with deer and elk hides; but after only twenty or thirty minutes I wake back up, shivering), even as faint a sound as my clearing my throat there in the cabin is enough to set off the whole chain of events again: the geese, floating out in the marsh, honking madly, and the frogs answering them with their trills and croaks immediately, as if some electrical voltage has passed through the water. The world feels huge when something like that happens, when even the tiniest gesture sets off, like falling dominoes, a series of grand gestures, the entire marsh roaring with sound simply because you have inadvertently and lightly cleared your throat...

  This tripwire tautness, the spring-world leaning forward with such intensity, attentive suddenly to every possible note of sound, reminds me of how in a previous spring, when the builder was reconstructing and relocating—resurrecting—this old cabin in which I now work marsh-side, each hammer's strike in setting the nails of the window frame, through which I now stare at the frogs' and geese's marsh, would set off a chain reaction in which the frogs began trilling immediately, shrilly, with strident answer-back, and from the frogs' chorus the geese would become engaged, hurling their stentorian rasps into the fray. The lightning-quick immediacy was astounding—as if they had been crouched waiting only for that summons, waiting only to be asked to answer back.

  Is this the speed of prayer? Perhaps this simple phenomenon is indeed the easy mechanics of prayer—a one-two seesaw, built on (and fueled by) some amazing bedrock or peat-filled marsh of grace, hundreds of feet of peat, eons of peat and floating bog. Hit the hammer and the frogs and geese will call back instantly. Ask and you will receive. Dream or imagine, and it will be birthed, if in only the right landscape, and the right time.

  More and more I am daring to imagine myself as an old person, replete with loving friends and family, a lifetime in the earning. A lake at dusk—or this marsh, which is a lake of sound, a lake of green grass and sedge, changing hues slightly every day of the year—and at the end of the day, lantern light, and a fine meal. An early spring like this one. Forty or fifty more springs like this one. Bats swooping out over the water or the stilled waves of the marsh grass, chasing insects just beneath and then behind the falling curtain of dusk.

  When I first moved here, a neighbor, an operator of heavy equipment, helpful in all seasons, offered to dredge the big marsh, to scoop out the millennial funk, the grimy peat, and to smear the new great hollow with enough clay and mud as to allow the new gap, the new vacancy in the earth, to fill with clean, clear water, and around the thin edges of which frogs and minnows might take harbor, and in the depths of which larger fish—edible fish—might dwell.

  A dock could extend some certain distance out into those blue waters, and a red or yellow boat—a small sailboat, or a canoe—might be tethered there.

  Two white swans, perhaps, drifting, and, at the wilder, farther edge, a pair of loons, yodeling midsummer.

  Even if I dared to so alter—reverse, invert, banish, conquer, or eradicate—any landscape, I wouldn't, and couldn't, for the marsh is my lake. I need it in every season, need to witness the slow and powerful hourly changes in sound and scent and texture and tone. I cling to, am buoyed by, the sense its spirit emanates—I am calmed always by even the idea of the marsh—and I explained to my neighbor that although I love lakes and their beauty and solace as well, the dredging operation would have been a lot of work and effort for nothing, for I was already content, more than content, with what I had. I knew that even if I had been so bold as to erase a small ecosystem and the communities dependent on it, I would have been bereft immediately of the certain wildness that only a marsh can provide—that excessive, seething clamor of life—and would have been immensely poorer for it.

  The marsh is my lake of color, lake of scent, lake of heated and noisy breath. There is a certain mountaintop up here where I hope either my body or ashes will repose one day, but surely whatever part there is beyond body—the part of our spirits, perhaps, to which memory attaches, like a residue—will reside, to some degree, around the perimeters of, and within the heart of, this great peaceful arena of marsh, deep within the old forest. It is the place that absorbs my anxiety day after day, as it absorbs the water and sunlight in April and begins, once again, to exhale the warm and beautiful scent of not just moderate or hesitant, tentative life, but exuberant life, barely restrained, if
at all.

  Surely I am becoming a pagan; and not through any formal rejection or dubious reexamination of the mystery of my childhood, Christianity, but more through the evolution of some closer, crafted fit between my spirit and this landscape. So glorious does this engagement feel some days that I must confess, in the beginning I wondered if I was not being tempted somehow by the archetypal devil himself—for surely anything this pleasurable had to be sinful, even lustful, and worst of all, placing oneself, rather than any God, at the center of things.

  I'm not even sure what a pagan is, exactly—perhaps I'm misusing the word—but yesterday, after I had dropped the girls off to play at a friend's house over on the back side of the valley, just across the state line in Idaho, I encountered a painted turtle crossing the gravel road, traveling from one marsh to another, and my spirits soared, both at the life-affirming tenacity of her journey, her crossing, and at this most physical manifestation that indeed the back of winter was broken; for here, exhumed once again by the warm breath of the awakening earth, was one of the most primitive vertebrates still among us.

  It is not a busy road at all, but I stopped anyway and picked the turtle up. Her extraordinarily long front claws, so mindful of a grizzly's, confirmed that she was a female—the longer claws are useful in excavating a nest in which to lay the eggs—and I put her in a cardboard box to show the girls when I returned to get them.

  I continued on my way, down across the giant Kootenai River and into Bonners Ferry, to run errands, and then drove back to our friend's, where all the children examined the turtle with appropriate and gratifying fascination. They learned the words carapace and scute and plastron, as well as a bit of the natural history of the painted turtle, but what I suspect lodged deepest in their memory was the mesmerizing hieroglyphics, or cartography, of red and orange swirls on the underside of the shell; and the image that probably went deepest into my girls' consciousness or subconscious, into the matrix of memory and formative identity—or so I hope—was the three of us stopping on the return trip home to release the turtle on the other, safe side of the road, pointed down toward the larger marsh, the direction she had been headed, despite there being still no traffic. Standing watch over her then, as she slithered her way through last autumn's dead grass, and the newly emerging green-up, toward the cattails and chilly dark waters that would receive her, and the future of her kind.

  The specific tone of sky at dusk, the call of snipe circling overhead, and the shapes of these specific mountains— these mountains —imprint themselves, this one April, as deeply in the minds of my young daughters, along with this leisurely, almost nonchalant yet considered act, as the chemistry of each river is said to imprint itself upon the bodies of young salmon. These are the sights and scents and tastes and sounds and textures, the logic and the reason, that I hope will help form the matrix of their childhood, and their individual characters.

  I'm grateful to that one turtle for the opportunity to help show them consideration. I'm grateful to the color of that sky at dusk, and to the unique and specific shape of Haystack Mountain to the north, and to the scent of the pine and fir forests early in the spring for helping form that calming matrix, as sense-filled and tangible as a bough of fir branches spread beneath one's sleeping bag on a camping trip far back into the mountains, the mythic mountains of childhood.

  We stood there and watched her clamber on down into the dark waters. We don't have turtles in our marsh. Our marsh is one of several in a chain of wetlands that is perched at the edge of an up-thrown fault block that parallels the valley's main river. The closest turtles are but a quarter of a mile away, down in one of the huge wetlands created by the river's high waters each spring; but there are no turtles in any of the marshes on that shelf up above the valley—the shelf on which our marsh, and several others, is perched.

  Does that lower wetland not have enough turtles to encourage dispersal and migration—is that the only reason no turtles have ever traveled that four hundred yards up the mountain? (Do aquatic turtles ever wander uphill, or would this be a selective disadvantage? Wouldn't they always find more water downhill?)

  Or is it that hundred-foot rise in elevation that's the limiting factor? Our springtime, up here on the shelf instead of down along the bright south-running river, arrives about a week later than on the valley floor, and our winter temperatures can typically run three to seven degrees colder on any given night. Is that the reason these marshes have no turtles while similar marshes, only four hundred yards away, downstream, have turtles?

  Wouldn't you think, however, that a coyote might fetch one up here, carrying it in his jaws for a while before tiring of it and then setting it down somewhere in our dark woods? Or that an osprey, or eagle, having seized one for dinner, might accidentally drop it here, like the planting of some wild and fortuitous random seed?

  For now—for whatever reason, or reasons—we are a hundred feet too high, it seems, for turtles, an elevation of thirty-three hundred feet, rather than the valley floor of thirty-two hundred. Maybe the warming earth will allow this marsh to receive them, however, in my lifetime. Or it might take a hundred years, or two hundred, beyond that, but no matter; I dare not tinker with so ancient and established a species, trying to coax it into a place it might never have been before. Perhaps this kind of reverence, respect and reverence, more than anything else, defines pagan; I don't know. Whatever it is, I know that I feel it strongly.

  If this kind of attentiveness to and gratitude for the creation is excessive or unseemly in our species, or, worst of all, ungodly, then I apologize for having been snookered by the dark forces; but know that I will go to damnation for having been an ignorant or mistaken man rather than an evil one.

  Some of my neighbors—friends—frown on the zeal, the restless tenor, of my environmentalism. They counsel me that with eternity at stake in the unending afterlife, there is little point or economy in getting so fretted up about clearcuts when our mortal time here is so temporal and the earth is but a proving ground for the far greater and lasting struggle of our souls, our eternal salvation.

  And sometimes—when I'm really tired of the struggle—I want to believe them.

  But someone—their god, my god, somebody's god—puts the spark and light of peace and joy and worship and awe in my heart when I stand in a cathedral of ancient cedars, or when I am far back in the distant mountains, so close to the sky and a scale of time greater than my own brief stay, and that spark tells me that for me, activism is a form of prayer, a way of paying back some small fraction of the blessing that the wilderness is to me, a way of celebrating and protecting that creation, and a way of giving thanks.

  I meant to be writing about April, and somehow I've gotten all religious. I don't mean to suggest that I have any answers. In fact, I'm not even sure I could tell you what the questions are with regard to religion and those kinds of matters.

  Maybe I'm being snookered. Maybe I'm not a godly man, for loving the woods so much. But in my defense, if any is needed, it's the only time I feel close to a god, or God. If I made a wrong turn somewhere, well, have pity on me. But there is nothing in this world that could ever convince me that God is to be set against the wild forest and the wilderness. That would be like trying to convince me that God is set also against another of God's creations, humankind itself.

  I see no percentage in believing such a dire hypothesis, or any reason for its existence; and it is not the truth in my heart.

  The next morning, driving Mary Katherine and Lowry to the two-room log cabin school they attend—one teacher and one aide for but nine students total, ranging from kindergarten through the eighth grade—the school set back in the woods, apple trees ringing the soccer field, deer standing out on the school lawn—we see the usual sights, more deer moving through the foggy forest, back and forth across the gravel road, but also a gaggle of ravens, two bald eagles—one mature, one immature—and a coyote: all within the thirteen-minute drive to school.

  This is the
daily braid that I want to become part of the tapestry of my daughters' childhood.

  I love how the woods open up again, in April, coming back to life. I love how much there is to see and marvel at.

  More sounds:

  The wild geese.

  The chuckling of the spring peepers.

  The beep-beep-beep of feeding chickadees.

  The sigh of south winds bathing all the bare branches, and the enduring limbs of the evergreens. The wind in April, making its quartering turns to come back up from the south and warming the snow and the soil with its return, might be the best sound of all in April, the sound that mixes with your dreams at night and gives you further authority to desire and dream and hope for all things.

  Stir, bears, stir. Even with your eyes shut, asleep, see the world resurrecting. This world, the next April twelfth. The first mosquitoes, diaphanous in the fierce sunlight, emerging from the ice-rimmed ponds and puddles: Tourists, beware, go back. There is nothing to see here, only mud and insects and large biting mammals, and an unfriendly human population, astounding unemployment, chronic depression, and poverty, even among the rich, and rain and snow and sleet and wind. This is a place of the spirit, no place for the flesh, and a place of the imagination, but no place for a real life. Believe in this place, and pray for it, but turn back, do not come here...

  Owls booming, hooting and hollering at high noon, as if even our full light is shadowy compared to the rest of the world. And back in their dark forests, perhaps it is; what does it matter, daylight or nighttime? The sounds, the awakenings, must come first, before the color, joy, and exuberance. It is the fifth season, in April, the one no one talks about. Very few places in the country—particularly in these greenhouse days—are blessed with four distinct seasons, and yet we, in our bounty, have five. The brown season, the sounds-returning-to-the-woods season; we do not pass from winter straight into spring any more than a child or even an adolescent enters straight into adulthood.