The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  But nothing. Each year, nothing.

  We'll find them. There's plenty of time. If not this year, then next, or the next. Sometimes I feel a wonderful urgency, while down on my hands and knees searching, in knowing that the green grass is onrushing, growing higher each day, like tongues of green flame rising higher and higher, diminishing my chances of finding the earrings with each passing day, though most days the green fire doesn't bother me.

  Instead, I put in my hours—the days, then the years. If not this year, then next. The earrings will be found—they cannot have traveled anywhere—when they are meant to be found, and it will be like a little miracle when they are. The important thing in the meantime is to keep showing up, to keep putting in the hours.

  All through the winter, the deer have traveled the same paths over and over, packing the deep snow, their sharp hoofs cutting down to form lanes, and then nearly tunnels, through the soft hills of snow. They keep these trails so packed down that the snow in them gets compressed to some kind of superdense cobalt- or galena-colored substance, more slippery than mercury, denser than lead—and, paradoxically, or so it seems at first, these trails, which once marked where the snow had been worn down to its thinnest margins, is now the last to leave, the last remaining thread of winter: fifteen feet of snow supercompressed to a height of only a few inches so that even in the returning warmth of May, these luminous dense ice trails linger long after all the other, fluffier snow has long since melted; and having no need to use these trails now, which are slippery, the deer avoid them.

  Instead, the deer step carefully across the spongy dark duff—surely they must feel sprightly, unencumbered, at long last—and in this yin-and-yang inversion, old snow to black earth, they shed their winter coats, leaving their hollow hair in tufts and clumps all over the woods, the braided, winding rivers of it running now at cross angles to the old paths of hoof-matted ice.

  The hair glints in the newer, sharper light of springtime, looking like spilled straw, or silver needles—trails of it leading all through the woods—and this shift in the riverine sentences that echo the deer's passages, a shift even more pronounced than the reversal of a tide, are for me, as with the coming of the first trillium, one of the most visual markers of the season, the true and irreconcilable end of winter. Though the mud and forest puddles will dry out, and the winds will soon enough scatter those tufts and concentrated rivers of hair to a more democratic and widespread distribution, in May it is still all clumps and patches, the deer shedding great wads of hair against any rough surface: the bark of a hemlock, the stub of branch on a fallen lodgepole, the branches of a wind-tipped fir tree. Appearing all throughout the forest too are the whitened, ribby spars of winter-killed deer, appearing like so many ships stranded by the white tide's great withdrawal, and in caves and hollows too, beneath the fronds of great cedar trees, entire mattress-nests of deer hair can be found, in places where a mountain lion has fed all winter long: dragging one deer after another to his or her favorite cache and gnawing on it, almost always in the same place, until the bones stack up on one another like a little corral and the disintegrating hides shed their fur. After the end of winter, in such places, the ground may be half a foot deep in white belly hair, belly hair as white as snow—the tide pulling back, retreating horizontally, with new life, springtime, poised now at the leaping edge of vertical green roar...

  May is a wonderful time to see the eagles, both bald and golden, the former returning with the opening of the river ice, and during this period they feast gluttonously on the moraine of an entire winter's worth of road-killed deer. Nearly every morning on the drive to school in early May, Mary Katherine and Lowry and I will pass at least one such eagle banquet, with two or three bald eagles—both the mature adults and the adolescents, which are just as large but don't yet have the white head—accompanied often by a golden eagle or two; and when the eagles see a car or truck approaching, they leap up from their roadside feast and on great wide wings flap wheeling in all directions to their various sentinel perches, eagles swirling in all directions, like children who have been roughhousing while their teacher steps away from the classroom for a moment scrambling back to their seats upon whispered news of the teacher's return.

  Fur from the deer carcasses swirls in the air, glinting like pins and needles, loosened from the eagles' talons, deer hair stirred on the currents of the eagles' departure and by the truck's passage.

  Time and time again I am astounded by the regularity and repetition of form in this valley, and elsewhere in wild nature: basic patterns, sculpted by time and the land, appearing anywhere I look, everywhere I look. The twisted branches back in the forest that look so much like the forked tines and antlers of the deer and elk. The way the glacier-polished hillside boulders look like the muscular, rounded bodies of the animals—deer, bear—that pass among those boulders like living ghosts.

  The way the swirling deer hair is the exact shape and size of the larch and pine needles the deer hair rests on, once it is torn loose from the carcass and comes to rest again on the forest floor.

  As if everything up here, everything, is leaning in the same direction, shaped by the same hands, or the same mind; not always agreeing or in harmony, but attentive always to the same rules of logic, and in the playing out, again and again, of the infinite variations of specificity arising from that one shaping system of logic, an incredible sense of connection and attachment developing: a kind of unconscious community, rarely noticed, if at all, but deeply felt.

  Felt at night when you stand beneath the stars and see the shapes and designs of bears and hunters in the sky; felt deep in the cathedral of an old forest when you stare up at the tops of the swaying giants; felt when you take off your boots and socks and wade across the river, feeling each polished, mossy river stone with your cold bare feet.

  Felt when you stand at the edge of the marsh and listen to the choral uproar of the frogs, and surrender to their shouting, and allow yourself too, like those pine needles and that deer hair, and like those branches and those elk antlers, to be remade and refashioned into both the shape and the pattern and the rhythm of the land.

  You feel surrounded, and then embraced, by a logic so much more powerful and overarching than anything that man or woman could create or even imagine, that all you can do is marvel and laugh at it, and feel compelled to give, in one form or another, thanks and celebration for it, without even really knowing why...

  In this manner, I feast hungrily each morning in May on the sight of the eagles pulling loose with their beaks and talons the tufts of fur from the winter-killed deer. The trees and bushes then growing up out of that deer-enriched soil to sprout the branches that are the same shape the antlers had been. One story. Many parts, but only one story, and the rhythm of each month carrying us along beneath or within that one chorus.

  It seems to me to be extraordinarily wonderful to see such a sight on the way to school nearly every morning, in the awakening days of May, and I like to consider how such images, in both the singular beauty of each, as well as in the braided rhythm that is created by their regularity, help to comprise the fabric of the girls' childhood, days of wild green regularity so incomparable to and unquestioned by any other experience that such sights seem "normal" to them. Though even in the dailiness of it, the wonder of May, and of all the months here, I try to explain to the girls to not take such things for granted, saying this even as I am fully aware that there is a part of me that most wants them to take such sights for granted; to accept such bounty as their unquestioned due.

  In a way that I haven't yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children growing up who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have some certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasingly rare and valuable as time goes on, and even cherished into adulthood, as well as—and this is a leap of faith, by me—a source of strength and knowledge to
them, somehow.

  I believe that the quality of such an experience, though intangible and immeasurable, will be, and already is, priceless; and I am grateful to this landscape for still being able to provide such daily sights to all young people: to children still so naive that they do not even yet realize such wonders are now rare elsewhere.

  For as long as possible, I want them to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace, and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. Around the next bend. And that the wild world still has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May, and reassembling May.

  Is it too strong a statement to say that I want them to someday know that they were married at birth, even before birth, to this landscape—to serve it and be served by it, shaped and supported—the power of it in them like the charging ice-melt release of the cold mountain rivers in May?

  Perhaps that notion, as much as any, speaks to that idea, that belief I have that in the daily witnessing of the natural wonders a strength and a base form in them, a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other places: unique, and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant to the blood's and heart's call, even now, in the twenty-first century.

  Why am I so comforted by ritual and tradition and the regular unfolding of knowable patterns? Why do I love so much to hunt, search, discover, and gather?

  Every May, after the snow is finally gone but before the world burns green, I go back out again and search for those lost earrings of Tracy's, even knowing somehow that I will probably never find them, that with each passing year, the odds grow longer, as the earrings sink and sift deeper into the forest duff, and into the detritus of each passing year's bent brown grass, the chaff of time. Perhaps the earrings are resting flat on the ground, far beneath such matted hay, covered each year with another annum of silt and dust, or perhaps they are turned on their side, slender as a paper clip, and invisible, unknowable, except to the blindest of lucks or the most certain of destinies.

  Each year, however, as a practice both in hope and in the hunt, under the pretense of searching for the earrings, under the pretense of believing, I set the dry brown sheaves of grass-hair on fire in the vicinity of where Tracy lost her earrings. Part of it is for the purpose of remaining, each year, brazen enough to believe in the possibility of a miracle, and part of it is, again, because I love to search and hunt—but part of it too is because I love to paint the field orange with flame and then black and green, with but a single struck match as a brush.

  Sometimes a major mistake that you make reveals itself to you slowly, unfolding through all the various stages of dubiousness, inching inexorably toward certainty—the faint prickle in the scalp, the fear that one feels fairly confident is paranoia and yet which can't be dismissed and in fact continues growing, until finally the fear, and the mistake, blossoms into reality.

  Other times, the mistake is revealed immediately, arrived at with a kind of Oh, shit! alacrity.

  This grass fire that I set in my front yard this year was of the former variety.

  Seen from a distance, it would have seemed laughable. Why was that man getting so carried away with his task, swabbing the great square field of dried yellow-brown grass with one match after another? And why was he running as if along a strand line as he set them, so that the little fires could join together like falling dominoes, moving quickly, as if with desire, one wave leaping quickly over itself to grow into the next one, rather than setting methodical backfires and letting the desire, the yearning, for the dry grass work against itself in a kind of trap?

  Why wasn't the man taking his time, and stomping out the little fires after a while, before they got too big, instead of just standing back and watching them run? And why, for God's sake, didn't he have buckets of water lined around the perimeter of the area he wanted to burn, and garden hoses at the ready?

  Why hadn't he checked the wind? Why hadn't he waited longer, for the last pregnant purple moments right before, and even in the face of, one of May's many spring thunderstorms? Why did he instead need to be so god-awfully impulsive and impetuous, so reckless and disorganized?

  The glutton, Gulo gulo. I wanted to see the field paint itself from yellow-brown to leaping orange to smoking coal black aftermath, and I wanted to see it immediately.

  Even as I stood back from time to time and watched the athletic beauty of the fires skipping and stuttering across the field, then roaring across the field—even as I felt those first pricklings of doubt—I was still bending down with that box of matches and lighting new ones. It was just so incredibly beautiful. I remember thinking, It'll all turn out all right, won't it? It always does, right?

  For my own edification, I want to see if I can explain clearly how the change occurred; how it came over me slowly but steadily, like a great tide, this conversion or metamorphosis from calm confidence, even joy, at watching the flames leap and run (watching them with the same pleasure that a farmer might gaze at a field of growing corn), to a subtle and then increasingly a not-so-subtle feeling of uneasiness, then concern, and then flat, out-and-out worry.

  The mind and the body are such a strange set of wirings. Even as I was hurrying across the field, still lighting matches, still goading the fire on, that other wave, the opposite wave, was coming in from the other direction, merging with the gleeful or joyful waters; and yet even in the moment when those two emotions were equally balanced in me, the joy fading and the worry rising, I continued to race about the field, still touching match to dry grass, a prisoner or puppet of my own momentum.

  How unlike the wild animals we are, in this regard; how loose and relaxed, how unwary, how unable or at least unwilling to change direction quickly, to dart and dip and reverse, to whirl or sprint or flee or leap, but preferring instead to almost always continue on, as if trudging, in the same habits, same directions.

  Finally, through some awkward titration, I became aware of the imbalance of the situation and ceased lighting matches, and instead began trying—belatedly—to control and corral the fire, moving out in front of the quick-running flames and stepping on them with my hiking boots, trying to snuff them out.

  It wasn't working. There were too many of the fires and they had grown too tall, too exuberant, and were moving too fast. In the time it took to snuff out one boot-size lick of flame, two others would race past me, one on either side; and then when I lifted my boot to go chase after those other two forward-leaping flame licks, the one I was just stomping out would gust back to life.

  Soon I was standing ankle-deep in yellow flame, like some heretic; the cuffs of my overalls caught fire, and with a bolt of adrenaline, I slapped them out and danced away from the heat. As if sensing my retreat, the flames surged and skittered forward a good ten feet, rushing on up the hill toward the house.

  I remembered idly that the nature lover Thoreau once accidentally set fire to the forest, burning nearly ten thousand acres, and wondered if there is not something strange in all of us, some critical paradox that helps keep us poised and balanced, upright in the world, working at times against even our own hopes and convictions.

  Already, I was longing for the luxury of prickling doubt I had harbored scant moments earlier, and was instead in full-fledged panic, running back and forth from one corner of the fire to the next and panting, barely able to catch my breath in the thick gray smoke. Waxy green juniper bushes were exploding into biblical plumes with crackling whooshes each time a flame reached them, and the juniper threatened to send the fire from the yard on into the forest, and into the tops of the trees, with a great fire that would then swing this way and that, swallowing the house.

  The junipers burned with far too much energy and enthusiasm; more boot stomps and slaps of my sweatshirt-like-a-blanket were in no way able to subdue them, and I whirled and ran into the house to grab a five
-gallon plastic bucket before beginning to fill it at an outside faucet.

  It was a helpless feeling to be urging the bucket to fill faster, even as I sat there watching and listening to more junipers as they plumed into flame.

  Finally the bucket was filled, and I dashed down the hill and doused what I gauged to be the most strategically dangerous burning bush—the one that was scant seconds away from transferring its fire to the next, and the next, and the next (the flames were sawing and shifting their way quickly toward an old barn, in which old lumber was stored, lumber so dry it might as well have been dynamite; the fire was only three or four feet from that structure)—and then I raced back up the hill and crouched again by the faucets, panting, waiting for the bucket to fill once more. After it did, I hurled myself back down the hill, stumbling and sloshing, jittery-legged and fatigued already from the heat and smoke, to the next bush, and splashed the five gallons of water onto it like a slurry bomber unloading its cargo from far above; instantly that bush was extinguished, but little matter, for in its place, along the other perimeters, two or three new ones lit up to replace each one that went out.

  It was a losing battle, and worst of all, the fire's heat was creating a breath, a wind, that was helping drive it up the hill toward the house; and seeing this, there was no way to not believe that the fire was desiring the house.

  I was just about beaten down, already. I like to believe that I'm a hard worker and, when need be, a ceaseless worker, but there must have been some combination of the smoke and the panic—surely not age, not yet—that got me so whipped. I kept trudging up the hill, gasping and filling the bucket as quickly as I could, but the fire had gotten the better of me, and really, I was just going through the motions. It seemed like it was all over; there wouldn't be time to call the VFD, and neither could I tear myself away from the scene, abandoning the flames to make that call.