The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  But I want them also to know respect and restraint, discipline and economy. (Knowing that these things are my weakness, and that they are not likely to get it naturally, not through my shared blood, anyway, I suspect at times that I work overly hard at bringing them these lessons.)

  Like any children, they love to pick flowers, and because we live amid such a richness and bounty of botanical profusion, in the springtime we always have new-picked bouquets of wildflowers throughout the house. But there are responsibilities and lessons that go with their rights and privileges; they have to learn (and have learned) not to pull the whole plant up by the roots. They have to learn sensitivity and rarity. Although we have numerous trillium, they don't do well in a vase, so we don't pick them. And even though the magnificent and ornate purple and gold fairy slipper—a member of the orchid family—is abundant in this northern forest, they are much diminished elsewhere in the world, and so out of respect for their worldwide distribution, each girl picks only one per year; but I must tell you, we all enjoy the week or so that that little orchid is showcased in our kitchen, and the tradition of it speaks to April almost as much as any other.

  (Later in the summer, into the full vegetative roar of the season, they will be able to pick to their hearts' content: double fistfuls of sweet-scented royal blue lupine, huge bouquets of fire-red paintbrush, cerise fireweed, pearly everlasting, and that great and common weed, the only weed for which I can find no lasting enmity, the oxeye daisy ... We gather the seed heads of yarrow too, to dry and save for use the next winter, in treating the sore throats of February and March, steeped in a hot tea...

  What to make of such lessons? What hostages all children are to their parents' fears and values! I suspect that rarely there passes an hour of the day that I do not remember this, and think to myself, What can I do to help them know more joy? What can I say or do to help present to them this lesson, or another? And again, such fretting or consciousness derives largely, I suspect, from my own clumsiness in the world, my own misdirection and awkwardness. I want them to know the things I do not know; I want them to know grace, and as constant a peace in the world as is possible.

  Our tradition with the glacier lilies is this: We try to find some for our evening salads, around Easter time. That Sunday, after the eggs have been hidden and found numerous times over, both in the house and out in the woods, we will take a walk up toward the snow line on one of the south-facing slopes, and there, walking along the snow's edge and listening to the sound of dripping water, we'll forage among the glacier lilies, as if partaking the food of the resurrection, and we'll bring home a handful to place in our salads.

  Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. Maybe I'm being too rigid, too much of an eco-freak. But I try to teach them gratitude and respect. I try to remind them that these flowers are the season's first food for the bears—for the fifteen or twenty grizzlies we have left living in this valley—and I counsel them to take only one or two blossoms from each clump or cluster, as a show of respect; as a reminder, a remembrance, that we are visitors to this mountaintop and that our own needs are usually excessive, rarely as primal anymore as those of the other forest-dwellers.

  I can't use that language, of course. I can just tell them to pick one or two from each clump; and to leave far more than they take. To eat some there on the mountaintop and to save some for our evening's dinner of elk steak (sometimes from that same mountain) and garden potatoes.

  It's something we try to do every Easter.

  I believe firmly in the sanctity of the seasons; in the promised regularity of cycles; in the bedrock foundations of loving ritual, celebrating feasts, and thanksgiving. I don't know why I feel these things so strongly—I know only that I do.

  I don't have the words yet to tell or explain these things to them.

  Instead, on our hike out, I show them, when I'm fortunate enough to find them, the big footprints of where the bears have been walking, and playing, and sliding in the snow.

  Mary, the genius gardener, is coming over today to help Elizabeth design a strategy for this year's garden. Mary doesn't plant her crops in rows and columns but in a wilder mosaic, a little of this and a little of that, certain things flush up against other things, a curlicue of patterns that resembles more than anything, I think, the arrangement of lichens on a rock high in the mountains. Mary says that this "wildness" helps make the garden more resistant to pests and disease, and looking at her garden, a visitor can see that she's right; her garden is but a microcosm for the plan of this landscape itself, which comprises forests mixed with similar mosaics of diversity, and possessing, in that diversity and shared dominance, astounding richness and health.

  Just across the state line, over in Idaho, our friend Julie is doing the same thing, planting corn right next to and among her beans, so that the beans will have a natural trellis—the cornstalk—to climb.

  After harvest, then, it can all be turned to fallow.

  I'm staring out at the garden this morning, continuing to be astounded by the notion of color, mesmerized by the irises and daffodils. Why does color even exist? Isn't it just the differential absorption and reflection of light rays falling on different surfaces? To the sun, isn't everything below just a black-and-white palette of various reflectivities and absorptions—and the pattern and arrangement of all those myriad differences as random and aswirl as the sprawl of lichens creeping across one vast boulder? Why color?

  Enough navel-gazing! And yet, upon awakening from winter's grip, it's hard to stop the mind's sluggish, even feeble, stirrings. With appreciation, not petulance, you want to ask Why? to everything; and as when a child asks that question, there are no real and final answers, only an unending succession of the same refrain—one Why? leading only to the next Why?, and then the next.

  I'm staring at the bare garden, the black earth receiving the soft morning light (filtered through fog and mist), and watching it strike the garden, and wondering which is better for a garden, morning light or evening. I'm wondering what purpose morning light plays in a garden—if, though soft and seemingly insignificant, it fulfills a function by awakening the plants' cells gradually, gently, perhaps, to some preliminary realignment of stomata that then prepares them to receive more efficiently, later on, the more rigorous photosynthesis obligations of the day, receiving that seemingly useless dull golden glow of weaker morning light as an athlete might perform seemingly menial stretching or warm-up movements before beginning heavier exercise, or as a philosopher might meditate before addressing some long-standing conundrum.

  Who will ever fully know the real value, if any even exists, of morning light upon a garden?

  Who will ever fully know the real value of anything?

  Enough navel-gazing; too much! The green world is rising, beckoning.

  And yet I cannot leave the residue of this thought; it clings to my morning mind as does a spider web when one hikes through the woods early in the day. If the sun's soft light "awakens" the garden, do the geese's cries, out in the marsh, at first light, likewise summon other things—including, perhaps, the seeds beneath the soil, and the plant cells within the stalks and leaves, goose music like a kind of sunlight (for that is what it sounds like to me, in April, sunlight)—as we too, listening to the geese's return, first stir beneath our blankets?

  I know April is lingering on, but I can't help it, I want to savor every bite and taste of it, every fragment of flavor like the claret of a fine wine, like a communion, like a weeklong drunken wedding party. Sometimes I think that April should be the first month, the portal of the year, leading us first onward into all the other months. The one that starts everything else moving.

  I will never be able to decide which is my favorite month, but I know that each year when April arrives it is as if I have been beaten down by a stranger, or a more persistent foe, and am down on my hands and knees, not yet giving up but knocked down yet again, knocked down this time for what feels like maybe for good—I'm down on my hands and knees, head ringin
g, thinking about, seriously, for the first time, quitting—quitting joy, quitting hope, quitting enthusiasm—but then wait, here comes a sound, a stirring in the branches, and an odor, something carried on a dampening south wind; and here, coming through the forest, is someone, or something, approaching, reaching down to give me a hand up, not because I deserve it, but because this superior force is—in April, anyway—loving, and full of gentleness, with generosity to spare; and thus summoned, and deeply grateful and mystified, I rise to one knee, and then stand.

  The mated geese, out in the increasing emerald vibrancy of the marsh, are so elegant: white masks, black helmets; their long black necks craning up from their nests out in the marsh grass, and again those two colors, black and green, seeming to go together so well. The geese's black necks and the green reef of marsh grass, the blackened char of fire-gutted logs and the brilliant green of the fire's aftermath, the new growth.

  The creature of fire itself, the salamander, possessing the lightning bolt jag of green right down the middle of its damp black-and-maroon back. Will we ever fit the world as well as do the other residents who have been here so much longer? What must it feel like to be so graceful in the world, so connected and alive?

  Up before daylight, and working this morning, the twenty-fourth of April, not down at the marsh cabin, but in the warm house, working in silence before anyone else awakens. It snowed during the night—again, I felt the temperature of the house rise by a degree or two, as that heavy blanket of insulation was laid over the whole of the sleeping household—and in the dimness of morning's first creeping light, it is an unpleasant sight indeed to see that the world is entirely white once more, and yet again; an extremely unwelcome image to see snow atop the baby lettuce, atop the basil.

  The light slides in so slowly, and as it is a slightly warmer breath than that of the night's darkness, the simple breath of it is enough, already, to begin melting the night's snow in patches, here and there. As if—so thin and insubstantial is this latest blanket of snow—the breath of one morning alone will be sufficient to erase it.

  That is certainly my hope, as I watch the steam of rising sun continue to melt more and more of the night's snow. Elizabeth, like me, is ready, really ready, for spring, and because I do not want her to have to witness the rude sight of that snow atop the lettuce, I am balancing in my mind, the rate of the dawn's rapid snowmelt, and the number of minutes remaining before she awakens; hoping against hope that the two numbers might balance out so that she will not have to witness this psychologically discouraging sight of even its brief return. How does the old joke go, about how when Mama's not happy, nobody's happy?

  There's no way all that snow's going to vanish in the next ten or fifteen minutes. But still, I keep watching it, and listening to that springtime sound of running water, and watching the steam rise, and listening to the morning sound of the varied thrush.

  Not for another two or three hours will all the new snow be gone again—not until the sun crests the tops of the trees will it burn off and the grass and new garden will glisten with life and new growth again. But still, so fatigued are our spirits by winter, and such is our eagerness for spring, that any little additional amount of snow that manages to vanish between now and the time Elizabeth awakens will be only to the good for not just Elizabeth but all of us. We're really, really stretched tight on this, worn down to a nub from the gauntlet of cloudy, snowy days. As lovely as snow can be, we've had enough.

  What is life? April is surely when the pulse of it returns with the first truly noticeable leap; the month when the blanket is finally pulled back from the sleeping, or the sleepy, world.

  The fresh-cut daffodils sitting in the vase on the table before me have continued to drink water, even after being cut. They drank a cup of water yesterday, and a cup the day before: thirsty, even into death. Maybe that is what April is most like, those daffodils, and that thirst—only it is an inversion of that force, so that it is a thirst into life rather than death.

  The older I get, the more I love April, snow and all.

  Wood ducks squealing at dusk. The geese, seeming as big as airplanes, circling the marsh twice before coming in for the splash-landing; coming down as if in slow motion. Once they drop beneath the canopy level of the dark old forest that forms the ring, the amphitheater of the forest, their calls echo wilder, more loudly—amplified in that closed arena, even though it is only just the two of them, these greathearted creatures sounding, once they are down below the treetops, as if there are dozens of them. Always, upon hearing that miraculous and sudden amplification, the dramatic moment when after all that circling they choose and commit to this marsh— this one—and set their wings and feet and drop in from the treetops so that the marsh captures and magnifies seemingly tenfold their sound, as well as the wild joy of its tone, always, the heart lifts and swells, is summoned: wonderfully confused, in a strange way—are we a wild species, or are we a tame species?—and always, exhilarated.

  This too is what April is like: lifting you, dashing you, lifting you, dropping you. Stretching the awakening heart to amplitudes one would not normally reach on one's own.

  Spring's so close that it could be nudged in with a feather. I'm waiting now only for the trill of the first red-winged blackbird, and the return of the felted nubs of the deer's antlers.

  Again, the snow is pulled back farther. A hike with Lowry to a nearby grove reveals a carpet of deer bones, the mass boneyard of a mountain lion's winter cache: a dozen whitened legs strewn atop one another, beneath the boughs of a big cedar. Old stories from the winter gone by being revealed, even as the onrush of new ones comes muscling in, honking in, flapping in, surging.

  I tell Lowry the usual nature rap—the oldest story of all. The bones will dissolve, and the cedar will absorb their nutrients. The deer will be lifted into the sky. The cedar will grow even taller and thicker, even shadier. Deer will wait out heavy snowstorms beneath the protective spread of its boughs. The old deer legs will be caught up within the sweet grain of the wood, between the growth rings of one year and the next—the deer traveling vertically now, in the xylem and phloem, as they once picked their way gingerly and horizontally through the old forest in winter, pausing sometimes to paw at the snow with shiny black hoofs and nibble at an exposed frond of cedar seedling.

  I often wonder what will constitute the moral fabric of a child raised in such a setting as this time and place, this wild green valley. I am aware of the excessive blessings, aware of the shortcomings. But what does it mean, if anything, to a child who can take for granted the most wondrous sights—and for whom bulldozers, strip malls, cell phones, and the like, are not the steady background?

  I'm not saying these other things are good or bad. I'm just saying that I wonder daily what it will mean to the girls, as adults, to have had one certain fabric—the senses and images and lessons—form the matrix, the background, of their lives, instead of another.

  I'll go ahead and say it right out loud: I like to imagine that when they are grown and I am old, they will say "Thank you."

  What's wonderful and frightening now is, I suppose, what's wonderful and frightening about any childhood, and any parentage: it is all accepted as normal and taken gloriously for granted. And that, I think, is the great blessing of childhood. We can find the track of a grizzly and they do not have to lament that there are but perhaps fifteen of them left in the whole valley. We can find an exquisite salamander beneath one of the frost-heaved rocks in the rock wall and they do not have to consider that the entire species may become absent from the earth within the span of their lifetimes, as so many of the species that frequented my childhood in Texas have vanished entirely, in only half a lifetime.

  None of that. Only the slow, sweet normalcy, the constancy, of the days; and from that, the braid of the seasons, as stable as a parent's love.

  It's a nice thing to be so welcoming of spring, for there's certainly no force on earth that could slow its arrival. This morning the south wind
is swirling, gusting, rowdy, the sky breath sending huffs of smoke back down the chimney of my wood stove and back into my cabin, with sudden drops of air pressure all around the cabin as the wind reverses, twirls, counterspins, dances: exhalations, bursts, as if some great animal is running across the sky, breathing hard.

  Another first: this morning, as I am writing by candlelight, the season's first moth shows itself, drawn by the flame. I'm too busy staring with delight at this tangible proof of winter's end to think far enough ahead to snuff the candle; instead, I watch with a thing very close to gratitude as the moth dances around and around the candle's breath, but then it tips a wing in too close and crashes into the pooling wax, and sizzles quick and sputtering malodorous pyrotechnics.

  From now on—now that the moths have reawakened, or are hatching—I'll be on alert. I'll catch them with my hands, one at a time, and toss them outside, into the cool breath of the marsh, where they came from, and where they belong.

  They can pool outside at my windows of light, and bat muffled wingbeats against the glass; as if I am in the cocoon, warm and dry, while outside, the living world of the marsh at night seethes.

  The laughing, drawn-out trill of the sora rails. The geese, the frogs, the ducks; the gulping, hollow-gourd sound of the bittern. The wind huffing and chuffing, the owls, and the sound of running water. The symphony, no longer just warming up in the pit but beginning, finally, to play.