The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Perhaps there is some utterly boring and fully explicable scientific reason of selective advantage for this to be so—the geese and ducks existing side by side as matter-of-factly as cattle egrets and cattle—but such a thought generally arises only when considering the mystery as written on paper or in the abstract; for each morning when I walk down to the cabin and first come in sight of the marsh's opening and see the immense and graceful geese sitting serene and gigantic on the open water, and the smaller ducks—tiny in comparison, hunched up next to and amid them—the first and only feeling and impression I get is one of an overwhelming, even holy, calmness. And in those first mornings, I believe my instincts, every time; I believe what the world is telling me—that the geese and ducks are calm, and are made calmer by each other's company and, if I may dare say it, each other's beauty, and the beauty of the morning, and the season—and that no other reason is needed.

  I stop along the wooded path and stare out at them, mesmerized by the returning of life to the marsh after so long an absence; and they stare back at me, through the forest, and quack quietly and mutter—sometimes one of the geese will announce himself or herself with a single frosty-morning bray, but beyond that, nothing but beauty, and reverence among all of us—I can feel this—for the sacred space of the marsh and the beginning of the season of life.

  Everywhere, early in the morning like that, the woods are dense with the humility of living things who have made it through another winter, and who have been vested yet again with the privilege of life.

  As soon as the snow is gone, it returns. With maddening duplicity, it comes and goes. The black earth ovals that have been slowly opening up beneath each tree's canopy, encircling each tree's trunk—sometimes you've been waiting six months to see those ovals—disappear again in a single evening, while you sleep; in an hour's time, or less, being covered again by the silence of falling snow.

  It's a deception, of course—it is generally but a mild, wet snow that blankets the woods, and whether with an inch or a foot, it is temporal. The earth's skin is warming beneath the increased light of the longer days, and the snow will be shed like an overcoat, the river sound of trickling, gurgling, running water singing all throughout the woods as the soil temps rise; within days, the same patches will reappear, as if their previous sudden disappearance beneath the returning snow was but a tasteless magic trick, a joke or a prank. But even in the full knowledge of this, it's hard to take, for a species as visual as we are. It doesn't matter that some deep and logical part of you knows that this is really no setback whatsoever—the visual part of you thinks, Ah, fuck, it looks like January again.

  Occasionally—about once a day—I think for a few fleeting moments about how the earth is getting warmer, and of the changes that will be wrought by the heaviness of our hands and the astounding hunger of our desires. I think of how the stomata of plant cells might have evolved to open and close, with regard to conservation of cell moisture, in a system with median high temperatures of, say, ninety-five degrees.

  But now, in the course of not even one reproductive cycle, the trees are being asked to recalibrate evolutionarily for temperature increases of ten and fifteen percent beyond their accustomed redline max—and I will consider the toll that such stresses will place on all manner of vegetation, year after year, and the cumulative debilitation. The forests growing weaker and weaker, ever less resistant to the necessary cycles of fire and insect epidemics, which will endeavor to purge and cleanse the weak forests.

  Only the oldest, most stable and diverse forests, I fear, will have enough buffer to remain intact and healthy and functioning; all else will crumble, I fear, and will one day be overtaken by weeds and other exotic species, with the resilient cant or balance of ecologic grace tipped finally one inch, or one degree, too far one way or another past the point of its forgiving fulcrum.

  Sometimes I feel like asking the future to forgive me for seeming—and acting—so cavalier, even when I have before me the full evidence of impending massive change and probably even catastrophe.

  There is some animal part far inside me that is made deeply uncomfortable, agitated, by the realization of the present trends, and all the data and variables available to both scientists and laypeople—the world, heavy beneath the weight of our hunger, is tipping over on its side, if not turning upside down—but ever and again, we are almost always primarily a visual species; and mercifully, thankfully, for us, if not the coming generations, we are able to take thin solace in the view of astounding and overwhelming beauty always before us—a green meadow, a child's laugh, the austerity of a glacier, the elegance of a cow moose, or a fawn, or the intricate probing of a red-shafted flicker searching a rotting log for the chattering sawyer beetles within—so that almost always we are able to put away what Wendell Berry has called the grief of foreknowledge and instead concentrate on the matter at hand, which is living.

  About once every two or three days, I'll think about the long list of the departed and the even longer list of the quickly departing. As if unable to help myself, I'll consider, as I give thanks for my many blessings (marveling at the sight of a bull moose, or a wood duck, or the emerald head of a mallard duck; and at the taste of the bounty of my meals: aged elk backstrap, duck and dove, wild mushrooms, wild trout, grouse and pheasant and huckleberry syrup), and the tastes I do not know: wild buffalo, for one, with wild salmon on the iffy shortlist. I'll muse on the astounding difference in taste between the domestic and the wild—the domestic replacing insidiously with its blandness the absence of a thing with a specific taste and ferocity many of us will never know, and which no prose can capture, or any other manner of archive, for the taste of the wild ones is not merely a matter of reproducing them in laboratories or stockyards or game farms but rather is surely also a function of the lifelong relationship between that species and its wild landscape—the latter making the individual animal not just taste a certain way but look a certain way.

  And my un-remembered litany of the lost is not limited solely to the selfish tastes of the palate, not just the passenger pigeon and heath hen, but the ivory-billed woodpecker and great auk, the Carolina parakeet. Too much of a portion of my life is spent in tense anticipation of what else might soon be lost, with the numbers of so many species down to single- or double-digit populations. We're not only the richest nation but the richest the world has ever known or dreamed of. I often wonder, gazing at the gaudy, glittering shopping avenues of the big cities, if these were not somehow the gilded streets of heaven bespoken in prophecies—we are so blessed, even as we stand side by side with the damned, the evil, the impoverished, and the anguished—and yet we seem unable to keep a Florida panther or black-footed ferret alive in the green world; unable to protect adequately the grizzly bear, the cerulean warbler, the lynx, the wolverine, the golden-cheeked warbler, the bull trout, the woodland caribou, the horned toad, the westslope cutthroat trout, the desert pupfish, the steelhead, the inland redband trout, the spotted owl, the Coeur d'Alene salamander, the leopard frog, the marbled murrelet...

  I could go on for dozens of pages—ripping out dozens of pages, rather, from the real book of life, which consists not of any momentary assemblages of genomes but rather the interaction between those genomic organisms and the landscapes they inhabit, the rocks and ice and forests and shafts of sunlight and shadow in that regard every bit as living, and organic, as the genome-creatures themselves.

  The trouble with noticing loss—was it Leopold who said that "to possess an ecological understanding is to know that we live in a world of wounds"?—is that it can lead to a pattern or habit or trend for such observations: like unfolding upon like, as a sheet of sand or other sediment being deposited over the shape of a sleeping landform can take on the same shape as that of the thing it is burying.

  In noticing the yearly encroachment of non-native weeds, useless to the native inhabitants such as elk that have evolved by placing their bets on sweet grass and specific forbs—ceanothus, wild rose, bearbe
rry, and aspen—the eye becomes trained to notice further unraveling of the puzzle: the orange hawkweed displacing the honey-scented fields of royal lupine, and the march of knapweed burning up the meadows in a manner far worse than the most hellacious wildfire...

  Art and music help, as does poetry and literature—they retrain the eyes in the paths of beauty—as does time spent with children, and good times spent with friends or family. But still, the trained or knowing eye in this day and age cannot help but take notice daily of the diminishment of the crafted or specialized things; and it is difficult, more difficult than it has ever been, I suspect, to sit at a picnic table beneath a bower of alder and listen to the song of a returning Townsend's warbler, and to marvel at the butter-yellow and coal-streak markings of plumage—the astounding, extravagant beauty of such a tiny bird—without wondering, even if only idly or casually, whether such an amazing animal, such a treat for the eyes and the ears, is not somehow scheduled to depart not even over the course of the next century but before the end of one's own days.

  You know not to dwell on such thoughts. You know to lean with the wind rather than into it, to hold your winter-pale arms up to the mild, weak sun when it returns, and to close your eyes and turn your face up to that amazing light. You know to remember how tiny you are, and to remember that your own selfish desires—whether we retain the yellow warblers, or not—are really of no more significance than an individual snowflake, a snowflake in mid-April that will be melting before day's end, anyway...

  But you love them, the warblers, and all else, so fiercely. Your fierceness exceeds your tininess; your passion is in no way commensurate with your overwhelming insignificance in the world.

  Is this the way for all things?

  I keep trying to figure out how to describe the relief and delight I have when everything that has left for winter returns to the valley. It is better than having a party, and watching as the guests, your friends, come streaming in. It is better than going to someone else's party, and stepping inside to visit with your friends. The feeling has more to do with primal resurrection, and birth, and if you have been fortunate to be in attendance at the actual physical birth of something—a loved one, perhaps—well, it approaches the company of that feeling.

  It is not quite as direct as that, but it is in the same neighborhood. Not like the birth of your own children, or even your brother's or sister's, for the blood of the geese and the snipe, and of the bears hauling themselves up out of the earth, is not entirely your blood—it is similar, but it is not quite yours, and neither is yours quite theirs—but rather, it is more like when the young couple down the road a ways has their first child, another addition to the community, and you wander down there at the end of that first week to check in on the new baby—to welcome it, and to be welcomed by it.

  Or maybe it is as if you have forgotten, in spring and summer's absence, how much life there is in the world, and are only now reminded, for the forty-second time in your life. Perhaps it is like being a middle-aged or even old person who's been trundling along all his or her life and who suddenly discovers not many new friends, and great ones, late in life, but who reacquaints himself or herself with a good number of those whose full depths of their friendship he or she had never quite understood or realized; but now, with the melting of the snow, he or she can see and know it more clearly.

  As if the man or woman had been sleeping for a long time beneath some substantial, even tremendous, amount of snow.

  The rock walls along our driveway, and meandering along the edge of the lawn, continue to stir in the night, as well as in the warming light of day, as the jelly-mire soil grows ever warmer, looser, muddier, sloppier. They clack over on one another seemingly apropos of nothing, a sound as if some ghost is piddling with the keys on some crude and gigantic piano; or as if even the rock wall is coming to life, such is life's pull and summons, in April.

  The wall is serpentine with the contours of the slope that leads down to the marsh. Grouse scurry alongside it, safe from the aerial strikes of predators, and chipmunks love to scamper its length like acrobats. The wild roses love it, both for the slight extra bit of heat it reflects as well as for the trellis it provides to cling on; but what loves the rock wall most, perhaps, are the long-toed salamanders that live in the cracks and crevices beneath it.

  Maroon-colored and delicate, with fluorescent green lightning stripes running the length of their spine, they crave the dampness that pools and lingers beneath the rock wall, and they hibernate beneath the vast sleeping weight of it; and they are safe too beneath those massive stones, from the pursuits of predators.

  Sometimes as the rock wall snakes along, following the shape of the land, tracking one single contour, it seems to take on the flexible shape of a salamander, and as the long-toed salamanders emerge from hibernation in April, the rock wall too begins to stretch and yawn. Sometimes I like to imagine that those sporadic piano-key clinkings, as the wall shifts and settles and trembles in places, is the sound of the salamanders themselves awakening, and on the move. As if it is all connected, tighter than a tick, and that you cannot summon one thing, in a blessed place like this, without summoning all.

  The glacier lilies, or, as the guidebooks call them, deer fawn's lilies, are among the first color to return that does not crawl or creep or fly; though in a sense too they do that, their bright yellow blossoms flourishing in the unique and specific temporal environment left behind by the daily-diminishing snow line.

  As the signature of spring in the high country, the classic black and white script of bare black earth and melting snow, rides ever higher up the mountain until the last of the snow finally disappears, in these low mountains, the cheerful little lilies (each blossom about the size of a wine bottle cork) follow that elegant black and white boundary, drinking thirstily from the steady drip-melt of the vanishing snow and warmed by the solar radiation accepted gratefully by the well-rested new-black earth; and warmed too by the brilliant reflective heat of the snow shield, always just a few to several yards upslope of that day's newest patch of glacier lilies.

  As the snow shrinks to a dwindling skullcap over the mountain, the lilies seem to be hurrying and hazing it along, nipping at its heels—nursing the glacier, is what it seems like; and in this manner, the brightest, freshest lilies are always the newest ones closest to the drip line, while below them lie scattered, in successional waves of decreasing intensity, the sun-faded yellowing tatters of yesterday's lilies: yesterday's news, vibrant youth reduced to worn-out prayer-flag-looking remnants in only a week's time, with generation after generation of glacier lilies leapfrogging up the mountain right on the heels of the departing snow, chasing it like a kind of brilliant yellow fire, chasing it up and over that highest ridge, pursuing the last of the snow like silent hounds...

  It is the same country in which the bears first come out of hibernation, as those sheets of snow pull back like so many blankets being tucked back; and the glacier lilies are edible—they are nutritional and delicious, sweet and crisp, although, truth be told, more than a handful can give you a bit of a stomachache.

  The bears, particularly the grizzly bears, which have been sleeping beneath these mini-glaciers, suspended like astronauts in the frozen earth, or like seeds themselves, will prowl these warm sun fields just beneath the snow line, grazing on the delicious lilies, and though insects are the plant's primary pollinators, sometimes the yellow pollen will get caught in the fur and on the snouts of the great golden bears as they go grubbing and pushing through the lily fields, pollinating other lilies in this manner. In that crude fashion, they are farmers of a kind, nurturing and expanding one of the crops that first greet them on resurrection each year; and the lilies follow the snow, and the snow pulls back to reveal the bears, and the bears follow the lilies, and the script of life begins moving with enthusiasm and reckless style once again, a script and a story far more exuberant than any that has been seen so far this year.

  And on those same glistening ice
shields, growing smaller each day, the grizzly mothers with their cubs slide down the slopes on their backs, riding the ice to the bottom for nothing but the joy of it—cartwheeling into the fields of yellow glacier lilies resting at the bottom of the vanishing glacier, and then climbing right back up to the top—sliding and playing for hours at a time, in the old world, safely distanced from the new and changing world that lies below, along the river bottoms, and in the valley of man, with nothing but joy and new wakefulness running through their blood. And though there are none of us who can tell by a certain murmuring or coursing of our own blood when it is exactly that the bears climb back up out of the earth—out of the spirit world, the natives say, and back into the world of man—I like to think that the other creatures of the forest can feel it, that they can sense it as easily as we might hear and feel the warming south winds moving through the tops of the pines.

  I like to think too that that joy is as transferable, as felt and connected among all the inhabitants of the forest, as are the south thawing winds of April upon the land, and upon and among us.

  Like any parent, I try to teach the girls moderation, economy, prudence, and forbearance. I want them to know the euphoria of unfettered joy, and the leaps of childhood, and I believe deeply in the ritual and repetition of simple physical models—like a catechism—as a means of helping train them into these patterns and ways of seeing the world. (Each evening before I go back out to work, I let them leap off the porch headlong into my arms—a six-flight leap—and each time I catch them; and midair, their faces are always, always purely radiant ... I do not want their hearts to be a stranger to the wild flights of joy...)