The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Forgive me, future readers, for my being alive at such a glorious moment. I promise that if I cannot help protect such wild places—though I will try—I will at least try to take full pleasure in the bright-burning, beautiful wick of them...

  The theory of my little plan, my little idea for an enclosure in the shape of a pack of wolves—or rather, an enclosure in the shape of running wolves, keeping the deer out on one side of the fence—would have resulted in a colony of fluttering aspen out in the middle of the meadow some four to five years after I'd staked the wire out; and to someone flying overhead, or to the eye of a raven, the meadow could have been cause for a second look.

  In my theory, the shape of each wolf would have been precise, as sharp-edged as the dream of the artist, with the deer herd's ceaseless gnawings and nibblings all the way up to the edge of the wire trimming perfectly the outline of the thing that was absent; as if the very deprivation of the thing summons first the idea of the thing-not-visible, which then, under some chorophyllous or otherwise miraculous exchange, ignites into the physical, tangible presence of that dreamed thing.

  The wire can be removed—rolled up and placed in the garage, or unscrolled elsewhere.

  Now—in the theory—there is a mature grove of fluttering aspen, their leaves making a specific and ancient kind of music.

  Where there are aspen, there will always be deer.

  Perhaps a wolf, or wolves, over in Canada, will hear that distant music, or take in that sweet and specific scent, and put it into their minds, to muse on.

  Where there are deer, there can be wolves.

  In October the leaves will turn dry and gold, and in the wind they will make a louder rattling, and in their maturing decay, a stronger, and more pleasing, pungent scent; and the adolescent wolves of that spring and summer's pack, seeking to disperse and expand their territory, will remember that first new sound and scent of April and will begin to move in that direction.

  By January, perhaps, when the snow is belly-deep on the struggling deer, and the colony of aspen stands leafless and silent, the whitened trunks almost invisible against the new-fallen snow—the outline of the aspen-shaped wolf pack seeming to disappear, in that manner—the final act of the synthesis, the dream's exchange, will occur, as the first traveling wolves, drifting down from Canada, filter into the aspens, passing among the young-standing trees.

  Moving silently, searching for what has been promised to them, and the thing—the dream—that has summoned them. Eyes as bright as green aspen leaves.

  In the end, I did not have the nerve for the dream, was made uncomfortable by the heavy-handed showmanship, the grand, manipulative, all-knowing arrogance of it. I will roar my opinions in a public meeting to fellow mankind when I feel the wild woods are threatened, but in the face of the forests themselves, and on those windy mountaintops, I am a voiceless, speechless supplicant, a silent novitiate. It was a reluctance not at all unlike that of my unwillingness to transport even a single painted turtle into my beloved marsh.

  I love aspen, I love wolves—I love deer. And I have begun making little enclosures to protect the aspen from the deer—to protect the aspen for the deer, and the grouse, and the other wild creatures that utilize them. (Even as later in the fall, elsewhere in the forest, I will hunt, and kill, and eat those creatures. Playing God, I know. Does God, in a manner of speaking, eat or consume us—our spirits—and in so doing keep alive some essence of God? Who knows?)

  The wolf shape idea was just too disrespectful, too cocky, too knowing and all-sure. It was not appropriately awestruck. The page—art, and storytelling—is the place for such manipulations and hubris, not on the canvas of the landscape itself, which is surely already someone else's creation, of which we are to be the curators and would-be imitators, but not, surely, the Grand Revisers.

  I think that little by little we may be inching closer here to a workable and accurate definition of pagan.

  In the end, of course, my abstention or completion of a dream is of no real consequence to the world—only to the self, and sometimes to a handful of others. Again and again we confuse ourselves as individuals as beings of significance. What I was dreaming, with one roll of hog wire—a mere dream, as vaporous as a single breath of lung smoke in the bright sunlight on a frigid day—nature accomplishes on any given mountain in a single windy evening, with one great stroke of a brush, or in the entire state, the entire intermountain West and Pacific Northwest, in a single season, with a huge winter-kill deer die-off, in which a steadily increasing imbalance (too many deer gorging on an excess of summer browse, but with not enough of the thermal protection they need in winter, the closed canopy of the old-growth forest) finally tips all the way over.

  Roughly eighty percent of the deer herd vanishes. "Pruned back" is too delicate a term. It is rank starvation, overkill, decimation, carnage; and of those deer that do not starve but manage somehow to struggle through the long winter, many die anyway, in an especially cruel twist, when, after having endured the magnificently brutal winter, they founder on spring's first green-up: eating too much green vegetation too quickly after having lost the digestive bacteria and enzymes in their stomachs during the winter of starvation, and then gorging on the extraordinarily warm and sudden appearance of green spring.

  Their whitened bones, pecked at by hawks and eagles and ravens, with scraps of mummified hide still drawn taut across them, lie scattered in the forest everywhere, like latticed fences knocked askew by some unruly and unreasonable wind. Violets and lady's slipper orchids grow up between the elegantly curved tangle of ribs, safely distanced from the reach of the rabbits, which will find easier plants to nibble elsewhere.

  After sixty or more years of oppression, every aspen colony in a five-state region—tens of thousands of square miles, or a forest the size of all of France—is given a second chance at life, another breath.

  The young aspen shoots and suckers that have been clipped back year after year, failing relentlessly, are now—as if a wand of grace has been waved over them—free to leap toward the sky unhindered, or at least with a two- to three-year head start, before the deer herds begin to rebuild; and the aspen are free to grow not into the man-dreamed shape of a wolf, or wolves, but into whatever shape is negotiated between the wandering underground nation of their roots and the sunlight and the seasons and the shape and substance of the landscape itself.

  When you look at a mountainside of blazing yellow aspen in the autumn, even when it does not appear to be in the outlined shape of a wolf, it is in the shape of a wolf.

  How April awakens in us, again and again, the busy hands and hearts of our industrious essence. Spring-cleaning is both metaphor and reality, and though in this valley it is still too early to begin the outdoor garden, the hard-core earth-turners among us are starting their seedlings indoors, in egg-carton dollops of earth perched on windowsills; and those first tiny tendrils, ribbons of green, are nurtured like the true miracles they are while we wait for the soil to warm. Elizabeth is the gardener in our family; my crop tends more to the wild, and in April, as soon as the snow is gone and the black bare earth has reappeared, I will be out in the woods, planting the hawthorn and cedar saplings, and I am not even one fraction of one speck of pigment in the huge brush that sweeps across this landscape in each and every season, but it pleases me to be planting a seed or a sapling here and there, in this swash of light or that one—giving a nudge to the things I love and believe in, here and there. It pleases me too to dream of the future: of my daughters being old women and walking among what will then be an old forest of big trees, and placing their hands on the trunk of a big aspen, or a middle-size cedar, and remembering, or knowing, that in a long-ago April, at dusk in the drizzling rain, I moved through the woods digging and planting, deeply pleased with the rank smell of life returning to the forest.

  It pleases me too to think of the pileated woodpeckers, martens, and great gray owls of the future, who will neither know of nor care for me, benefiting from the
existence of those certain types of trees, in a few certain places around the marsh; and if that is the size of our paintbrush, or the amount of paint we have with which to work—the sunlight on one day in one season on the fur of a single marten perched on the limb of an eighty-year-old cedar tree, far out into the future, at the edge of the one and only marsh; the marten on that one specific day looking out across the valley to the unchanging curve of Lost Horse Mountain—well, it is an honor to possess even that amount of paint, or even that tiny of a brush, or a dream, and it is with pleasure that I use it.

  What fuels a man's or a woman's dreams? Does a paucity of bounty and heartsong summon the dissatisfied dreamer, seeking to make things better, or is it the excess of these things, the unchecked extravagance, that nurtures further the dreams of betterment, if not immensity?

  At what point does one release a dream—at what point, if any, should one release a dream—and savor, perhaps, more fully the undeserved sweetness of the moment? I am fascinated by the accounts of Thomas Jefferson, who, even as an old man in his eighties, labored lovingly in his gardens at Monticello, seeking (and sometimes, briefly, succeeding) to control with astonishing ferocity (and the help of numerous slaves) the immediate landscape around him—the arrangement of his flower gardens, and the yield of his vegetable gardens, and the geometry of terrace and hedge—but who could not control the growth of trees. He could not make the willows arch and weep across the flagstone walkway down to the family cemetery (the slope was too dry and rocky), and late in life he lamented, "If I had but one wish remaining to me it would be to live long enough to be able to one day see the gigantic girth of those tiny saplings I planted as an old man."

  Neither could he grow the vintner's fine grapes from France in that tight red clay, or find permanent or even subsurface water anywhere atop the mountain where he had built, or control the comings and goings of the wild or even semiwild animals within that realm.

  He is said to have owned a pet elk, with which he hoped to impress upon his European visitors the symbol of America as a wild and unfulfilled nation. It was Mr. Jefferson's hope—his longing—that this magnificent bull would remain wraithlike, frequenting that gloomy, dusky band of property just beyond the manicured lawn's edge and the rank woods' beginning, just beneath the crest or knob of the hill, so that in the evenings, the European guests who might be taking an afternoon stroll with Mr. Jefferson, smoking a pipe or cigar and sipping brandy, might have the privilege of glimpsing, from the corner of their eyes, that blue dusky shape of the immense stag, lingering in that quintessentially American no man's land between sophisticated, urbane domesticity and the unfettered dark wilderness.

  That was the hope, the plan. Upon this dream too, however, Mr. Jefferson was unable to instill perfect order. The elk seemed on most occasions loath to occupy that strange and perfect place between the two lands, in that suspended blue-tinted pipe-fog dream-space, and was instead forever galloping wildly off, farther down into the forest, full of wild musk and terror, or was venturing farther up onto the green and manicured lawns, as if lulled by the rampant civilization all around—the orchestra music wafting through the open window, the scented roses by the fountain—grazing his way placidly across the lawn, all the way through the apple orchard, as tame, suddenly, as a child's pet; wandering all the way up to the pulpy, cidery scent of fresh-chewed apples and bedding down for the night there on the flagstone porch, so that the lesson always failed and the European visitors were never quite sure of the message, whether America was a dark and wildly impenetrable, gloaming place, or a sister state, manicured and controllable, even biddable...

  Never, it seemed, could Mr. Jefferson—with the actions of that one elk, in each evening's dimming blue light—capture the ethos of his country.

  Now, of course, there is little but croquet lawns and opera music. Or rather, strip malls and highways. Those few rank elk remaining—not the betamed ones but the wild runners, the ones who prefer, time and again, to bail off over the edge and into the darkness, the wildness, beyond, out of sight in a second, two seconds—those wild ones, and the dwindling wild stock they represent, find themselves confined to ever-smaller and smaller gardens of diminishing wilderness.

  Wilderness: the last places, the very last shreds of places, where we have not yet put roads, or dams, or mines, or clearcuts. The tiniest, farthest corners of places now, not so much like any wild essence that remains in us—for surely each generation, for better or worse, has been getting successively tamer and softer—but rather like the shadows thrown by the essence of that wildness that was once in us but that now exists in us as more of an echo or a vacancy than the thing itself.

  Wilderness. I live in full sight of it, but still a pace or two from it, at the very edge of it, in some green land that, while not in the heart of the wilderness, is nowhere near the heart of any town or village either. Perhaps this is why I identify so closely with Mr. Jefferson's elk: that great antlered creature of the blue gloaming. I think for many of us—for far too many than will ever have the privilege of knowing—there is a deep and instinctual affinity for this place at the edge of things: the edge of the wilderness, and the edge of Montana, the edge of Idaho; the edge of the United States, and the edge of Canada. The edge of the northern Rockies, and the edge of the Pacific Northwest. It is this balance, this high point between two places, that causes us in part to so revere the turn of solstice and equinox.

  And I feel like we have more than a world's-full supply of cities, towns, and villages, and far too few cores of deep or true wilderness: the places in the Lower Forty-eight where you can still disappear to the world, even as in your heart you are finding things. The quiet places, reachable only through physical hardship, or perhaps not at all. For the most part, the glorious haunts of the young.

  We have plenty of country left in which to be old, too damn much of it already, paved and wired and cable-ready.

  We—the old, and the becoming-old—have already taken too much of it, have eaten far more than our fair share.

  The Canada geese are the first ones back, preceding by a few to several days the arrival of the ducks. It's about as spiritual a moment as the year possesses, when we hear that first solitary and joyous honking, the first incoming, the first returnee—it is as rare as anything else in and of the year. There can, after all, be but one and only one first wild goose call of each year—and it usually comes at dusk.

  Even though we will have been waiting and watching and listening, it always catches us by surprise. I think that the goose (I do not know if it is the same one, year after year) flies first above the tops of the trees, flying silently, flying north toward the river—and whether it is an old familiar traveler, which cries out his or her joy upon first sighting the marsh, or a newcomer, which, intent perhaps on the more northerly and open river, or Canada beyond, happens accidentally upon the marsh, a clearing, a perfect circle, appearing suddenly below him or her in this otherwise dense forest, the goose cries out his or her joy and surprise both at that sudden revelation.

  Either way, that first wild call comes from a dusk bird appearing silently and seemingly from out of nowhere, the stentorian bray unleashing itself right over the roof of the house, or the front porch, with no earlier, more distant pronouncements; and by the time we run outside, or to the windows, the goose is circling, seeming to us, after so long an absence, as large as a small plane, banking and wheeling. And perhaps that is when spring begins, when the first goose first splashes down into the thawing marsh, landing so perfectly into the place that lies between the end of winter and the beginning of spring that there are only channels of open water in the marsh; the bulk of it is still milky-colored, aerated chunks of sunlit ice, a frigid soup of discolored ice and glistening open water.

  Standing on the front porch, we can hear it all: the splash the goose's outstretched blackened feet make upon landing; the sloshing of the waves from that heavy arrival, lapping over the marsh ice— wake up, marsh —and best of all, in t
he failing light of a dead and dying winter, a winter that is sinking back down into the earth to sleep for another six months or so, the calmer, contented, muted clucks and mutterings of that first-arriving goose, in the vanishing blue light, as he or she returns home yet again; and I believe, parochial bias aside, we are justified in using any animal's northerly range as the definition of home, at least as much as its southerly range.

  The Gulf Coast rice fields or even farther south might be where the great creature winters, or vacations; but it is in the north country, and on marshes and bogs such as these, where the animal goes about the serious work of raising its young.

  For several days, the goose will paddle the open channels like an ice breaker, laying claim not just to the opening marsh but to the new season itself. Other geese will be drawn in to that bowl of light. The marsh is caught in a delicate balance between frost and thaw. Nights are frigid—the marsh freezes back up with a skim of ice that glints in the moonlight—but each day's sunlight opens it back up, as does the leisurely wandering goose, paddling back and forth, singing.

  Other geese arrive, drawn by the first one, and the marsh opens a little more. It is the stretch of the season doing it, far more than the ice-breaking channels made by the swimming geese; but several days later, when the faster, smaller ducks come hurrying in, that is the impression one gets, that the geese have, like snowplows, opened the lanes up sufficiently for those smaller ducks—mallards, mostly, though also goldeneyes and wood ducks—and it is an impression that is heightened by the way the newly arriving ducks often seem to seek out the larger geese and hang out in their company. Whether they do this for protection or companionship, or merely coincidental shared preference for similar microhabitats, I cannot say, though in all my years of marsh watching I have never once seen a single goose or mated pair of geese display even the faintest degree of aggression toward any duck, or ducks, that floated among them.