The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  I want to be clear about this, how intoxicated one is as winter is leaving. Every moment seems both familiar and magical in this reawakening. Like a wave, a wand stirring over the forest, the hoot of that midday owl rouses the geese into full honk, which bestirs then the great marshy vat of the spring peepers—the wave of life returning like a warm tide. You can feel it returning as if it is not many interlocking parts but all one vast animal; and sometimes on my walk out to my cabin I have to stop and stare slack-jawed, with a huge gaping grin, at this sheet or rolling wave, so similar to the curl of a wave of sound—invisible, but so deeply felt, stirring the heart again in its furthest places.

  I stand there like a madman, or a somnolent, not budging but being swept downstream nonetheless, grinning, tumbling downstream, vibrant waves passing all around me.

  A grouse drums farther back in the old forest, and a butterfly, like a bright-colored spark or ingot midday, flutters past, soundless, with its periwinkle-satyr-blue color searing a trace into my winter-dulled and softened brain. Perhaps it is in the wandering and tiny flight of that single insect that the transition from sound to color occurs—the trace of the butterfly's erratic flight like some electronic wiring, hooking the color switch back on in the deepest sleeping recesses of the mind, and in that moment, deeper nerves being touched, shorting across their synapses, awakening joy, not winter's peacefulness or steady-calmness kind of joy, but a brighter, more leaping kind of joy.

  Winter was wonderful, but my God, here comes the other, here comes the next; and now I am fully awake and I can barely stand it. What kind of a pig would ask for forty or fifty more springtimes when even one—just one, this one, is so perfect, so much more wonderful than anyone could ever possibly deserve?

  It is yours. All you have to do is stand at the edge of the woods and look. All you have to do is pause in your steppingstone walk, and linger and look—to wait, in that space between winter and spring. All of it is yours.

  As if to produce firm evidence that the old frozen sleeping world is indeed being turned upside down, one morning a flicker chased a raven across the sky: the newly arrived, white-backed, smaller bird harassing the dark prince of winter. It's a sight you don't see every day. I stood there and watched it hungrily, like a simpleton, my mouth open, until it was gone, and then still I stood there: feeble-minded, and grateful for it, after so long a spell of feeling no-minded.

  I don't mean to dress it, April, all up as being nothing but fine, nothing but ecstasy. April is of course filled with waves of psychological treachery that will break your heart if you let them.

  Sheets of snow roll in from the north, muffling all that emerging sound and blanketing completely the thrilling sights of that bare black earth. Up, down, up, down, go your hopes and desires, your moods and your joys. You begin plotting your next winter's vacation in April. Next year, you tell yourself, you'll be smarter; you won't travel to sunnier climes in January or February. You will wait all the way until April, when the alternating pulses of sun and snow are breaking the backs and spirits of, toying cat-and-mouse with, the handful of valley residents who are reclusive enough, tender and fierce and wounded enough, to live here year-round.

  The excitement of seeds, in April—all the world held in the palm of one's hand, the future of a vast forest, like a vast dream—and the excitement of saplings, apple trees arriving as bare-root stock from the nursery, to be planted far away from the house in a patch of sunlight, so that years hence it will be a long walk to harvest any of the apples, and so that the bears and grouse and deer and other wild creatures of the woods, including the worms, may avail themselves of the feast, and may do so without having to come near, or become accustomed to, the haunts of man.

  I'll build wire enclosures around the saplings so that they'll be protected from the hungry deer for the first several years—ten or more?—until the trees are finally large enough to be free and clear, and on their own.

  April is when I transplant other trees too, wild stock pulled up from the thawing gravelly terrain of roadbeds—logging roads that are closed a few years, saplings that would be driven over by vehicles once the gates are unlocked, as they are almost always unlocked—remaining closed for wildlife security until such point as the timber companies decide what the wildlife needs is not security after all but more logging, and open the roads back up...

  I've got about two hundred acres of trees. It's kind of ridiculous to be planting more, but I can't help tinkering; I want to help return diversity to this grove of woods I'm now responsible for. (It was logged hard around 1970, with almost every tree of any marketable size back then—forty years old or older—being taken, so that most of my forest is between thirty and seventy years old, though there are also a few whoppers that were in too distant a location to fell, or that were spared because the chain saw ran out of gas, or the sawyer took a break that day and then was diverted elsewhere; I cherish those big ones, survivors by mercy...)

  Cedar, aspen, and ponderosa or yellow pine are the rarities up here. The ponderosa, or p-pine, prefers hot, dry, south-facing slopes, of which I don't have many, but my marshy swamp of a place is well suited for the cedar and aspen.

  The explosive deer herds have helped keep the cedar and aspen pruned back, however—more than pruned: there's almost an entire lost generation of aspen and cedar, harking back to the clear-cutting days of the early seventies. The clearcuts promoted the conversion of a dark forest of old growth into big fields of early successional forbs, which benefited (for a while) the deer herds, building them up into unsustainably high populations. (Soon enough, the limiting factor became not summer forbs and browse, but winter range—the shady old-growth forests that had been eradicated, leaving this abnormally high deer population shit out of luck.)

  The too-high deer population wandered the valley, chewing down anything and everything—particularly the young aspen and cedar saplings. The deer herd didn't suffer any massive die-off (there weren't enough wolves in the valley to prune them back) until the harsh winter of 1996; and as a result, there's about a twenty-five-to-thirty-year echo, a gap, a missing generation, of aspen and cedar, from the Long Time of the Deer: an indirect echo of all our clear cutting, and the absence of wolves.

  So I'm putting wire cages around cedar and aspen saplings, trying to bring them back into my forest, at least, if not the whole million acres, as if blowing on the kindling-spark of a campfire, trying to resurrect flame.

  For a while I toyed with the idea of doing something funky and artistic: of designing, in an open area next to an existing grove of mature aspen—remnant survivors of the days before clearcuts, and the days before the too-large deer herds—a corral, a wire enclosure, in the shape of a pack of five or six running wolves.

  My theory was that young aspens would safely propagate in this wolfine enclosure, free from the ceaselessly grinding jaws of marauding deer. A dense colony of young aspen shoots would leap up in this enclosure (as they leap up in open fields every year, only to be clipped back by the deer's teeth, every last sucker shoot being clipped back).

  In the safety of the wolf-shaped enclosure, however, the aspen would prosper. All they really needed was a three- or four- or five-year head start, to grow tall enough—in leaps and bounds—to be above the height of the deer's teeth, even when the deer stood on their hind legs and endeavored to stretch out their necks like giraffes; four or five years was all the aspen needed to grow tall enough to be safe.

  Not coincidentally (there is no machine of man, no intricate feat of engineering nearly so marvelous as even the most basic and simple designs and intricacies of wild nature), the deer herds themselves generally require only three or four years to rebound in numbers adequate to prune sufficiently the aspen suckers that have, in the deer herds' absence, made their break for the sky.

  I can't help but be struck how much like a symphony it is. Even when there is no sound issuing forth, there is the rise and fall of measures, sequences of three-four deer time laid over cadences o
f four-five aspen time. Some trees squeak through that gap, by luck or chance or design, and live to grow beyond the teeth of the hungry deer, given half a chance, given any break at all—leaping for the sunlight, dodging and weaving and hoping each day in that one year of critical overlap to evade the relentless hunger of the recovering deer.

  Sixty or eighty years later, the pleasing dry rattle of golden aspen leaves high overhead in a cold October wind beneath incomparable blue sky will be like a tympanic prefatory for the next century, the great score playing itself over and over again with only the subtle variations differentiating one aspen grove from the next—on one hillside in this century, wandering slowly over to the adjacent hillside, in a slightly different pattern, in the next, like a slow-curling wave far out at sea—and with no shore in sight, only curl after curl of gold aspen wandering across the mountains, herded and shaped by the deer: as if the deer, not man, were some kind of god of creation.

  But those aspen will also still retain the indomitable refrain from the last score: the echo of color and leaf-rattle again a kind of music that sings of how those sixty- to eighty-year-old towering aspen eluded, if not outwitted, brute fate and hunger—a music, an echo, that speaks to once-upon-a-time hard times, and spindly saplings, and knock-kneed, starving deer wandering the snowy, barren woods, and ferocious, ravening lions stalking silent and big-footed those starving, wandering deer, and overhead no brilliant blue sky amid gold leaf-flutter but instead the purple and gunmetal flat slatiness of January, February, with huge coal black ravens winging through the dense firs and spruce and calling out like sentinels the occasional details of the slow, slow dramatic progression ongoing below...

  Consider again, please, the notion of sight, odor, taste, and touch as a kind of music: as all lesser complements to this astounding movement of April. It is like nothing if not a symphony out there, certain notes falling in order that others may rise. In the life cycle of the lodgepole pine—a species not much longer-lived than our own—the trees tend to outgrow their shallow root system in their quick race for the sun somewhere between the age of eighty and one hundred twenty years, entire stands of lodgepole being susceptible to insects at that point and blowing over during some fierce windstorm, after which the lodgepole will then rot, re-enriching the soil, or burn, likewise enriching the soil (and in the heat of the fire, the lodgepole cones scattered about the forest floor are mechanically activated to release, in their destruction, the seeds for their renewal; lodgepole cones have evolved to require intense heat to release their tight-gripped seeds).

  It is often the supportive nature of the entire forest, and in particular, the other surrounding lodgepoles, that helps keep the individual lodgepole aloft, more than any tenacious root system. More than a hundred feet tall, skinny and limber, in high winds, they sway and bend into nearly U-shaped arcs, these tremendously tall trees bending like nothing more than tall grass in the wind, bending but rarely snapping, each unable to withstand the force of the storm by itself, but resistant and successful as a group, blocking and diffusing the fierce winds, just barely.

  Once a lodgepole or two tip over, however, that group dynamic is quickly lost. Sometimes a fast-growing spruce or cedar will leap into the new vacancy and grow tall enough, quickly enough, to help plug sufficiently the gap of that sudden aerodynamic flaw or failing, but more commonly the entire aging stand will begin to fall apart once the initial tunnel of wind and light has found its way into the aging lodgepole forest; and in the next storm, five or six or ten or twelve more lodgepoles might lose their hold on the thin soil, and in the storm after that, twenty or forty, and in the storm beyond that one—the stand falling like dominoes now—seventy or a hundred, or the whole shittaree, the end of one story concurrent now with the beginning of another...

  Waste, waste, the timber man thinks at night as the windstorm howls and the lodgepoles snap and topple, filling the forest the next sunlit day with the sweet scent of their broken boughs.

  But the grid-worked ladder-sticking of those fallen long pines provides, overnight and magically, like dice thrown by God's hand, or, who can say, some other master plan designed and executed, a sudden system of fences, corrals, and walls that will protect the next wave of emerging aspen and cedar that find root within the center of that tangled maw of spilled logs, a chaos, or seeming chaos, too dense and gnarly for even the hungriest deer to travel into, to reach the aspen's and cedar's tender shoots. And in that manner, the collapse of the old lodgepole forest, and the setting of boundaries in its collapse, provide, in that abstinence, the very thing the deer herds need to survive—the protective canopy of mature cedar in winter, when the weakened deer need shelter from the deep snow and bitter cold, and the green leaves of aspen, when the summer's fawns are first learning to be yearlings, and hungry for the world.

  By the time the grid of blowdown has crumbled to ferny rot, as happens soon up here in this Pacific Northwest jungle, the aspen and cedar have ascended to a height well beyond the reach of the deer's teeth...

  Everywhere you look, in April, you see music, and movement; and after such a long white stillness, even infinitesimal movement is noticeable, and praiseworthy confirmation of life's astounding grand design.

  In the midst of such seemingly languorous, extravagant leisureliness—the glory of spring unfolding, leaf by leaf, with each day edging slowly but steadily back toward a return to the world of color—I must nonetheless confess to a certain edginess, that in the midst of such leisure, there is no leisure; that in the midst of such eternal grace, there is now, both suddenly and cumulatively, a jarring dissonance.

  There are days in this narrative when I have to work to keep my head down and believe in, and marvel at, the timelessness of this dream that is my life, and work to block out the creeping suspicion, if not the knowledge, that these days, these seasons, and all days, all seasons, are now changing so rapidly as to render obsolete even the most mundane observations of natural history even before the ink is dry upon the page.

  Out of this awareness I'm trying hard to focus on the nonhuman flora and fauna of this relatively unpeopled valley, seeking to chronicle, for the most part, the nonhuman parts of this natural world. Certainly there are fascinating tales to tell—personal histories in the cracks and crevices of this landscape every bit as symphonic and dramatic as the rise and fall by the seasons. But the majority of the handful of residents here (there are perhaps 150 of us living year-round in the half-million acres that compose the upper part of the valley) have not been here for very long; as a resident of twenty years, it's surprising to suddenly realize, one day, that I've been here longer than most in the valley. Almost everyone here, with the exception of three or four families, came here from somewhere else, and even the most ancient of residents have not been here more than the short sum of the days of their lives, and neither their families here for yet a full century, so that again in that regard we are all newcomers, still awkward in this land and seeking our fit, our accommodations and graces within it, whereas the intricately fitted connections of one-day-to-the-next and the sophisticated, sinuous, elegant negotiations that the other resident flora and fauna have struck with the variables of temperature, nutrients, light, moisture, and each other are a music that frankly I find more interesting, over the long run. Their lessons of patience, endurance, resiliency, and tolerance comfort me by observation, if not practice.

  It is the landscape, at a single point in time, that I wish to "capture" in this narrative, to celebrate, in so doing, the order and meaning that exist in the turn of every elegant gear and cog.

  Yet again, despite my desire for leisure in such observations, it is too easy now to witness how quickly things are changing, from an ecological perspective. Often I realize that I want to lay down on paper, at the very least, for the future, what it is like at this splendid point in time, tucked away back in one of the last corners of wild green health, up on the Canadian line, hiding out still beneath the echo of the last century, before it all quite p
ossibly begins to fall apart—this blessing, this bounty, to which I and others are so undeservedly privy.

  The old-timers here say that even twenty and thirty years ago it was even more wonderful. Some of them damn the Republicans, who have prevented for thirty-plus years and counting, any of it, not even one tree, from ever being protected. They say you should have seen it then. They say...

  Every morning when I awaken, particularly in the first beginnings of spring, when birdsong starts to fill the day, it is all so new and wonderful to me, even after twenty years, that I sometimes have trouble envisioning anything that could possibly be more idyllic than the present moment, despite my foreknowledge of both its evanescence and imperilment, and the cautions of all old-timers everywhere who croon their same refrain about the good old days.

  Perhaps these observations too, then, are, in addition to a celebration, a way of trying to reassure myself that this patient, resilient, enduring system of fitted green grace will be able to survive almost anything we can throw at it, ranging from mild inattentiveness to blatant disrespect, all the way to indefatigable governmental fear and mean-spiritedness.

  Only time, of course, will tell, as it always does, as it always has.

  It has spoken to the buffalo, the condor, the red wolf, and the jaguar, in this country. It has admonished the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the prairie chicken, the woodland caribou, and the desert pupfish. It is speaking harshly to the lynx and the wolverine, is summoning with death-rattling whispers the sturgeon and the bull trout, the grizzly and the golden-cheeked warbler, the cave salamander and the desert tortoise, the black-footed ferret and the ocelot...