The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  I kept looking up the driveway, hoping to see Elizabeth come driving down at any moment—perhaps with a second bucket, and a second person; it would make a difference—but she did not appear. My wishes were not enough to summon her, and I imagined that she was still a half-hour distant, crossing the summit only then, and that she would return to nothing but ash and rubble, with a disconsolate husband sitting at the edge of the smoking char, trying to formulate an answer for the question that he knows will be coming: What happened?

  It wasn't exactly as if I was praying, in my desperation. I fucked up—that's all there was to it—and it seemed silly to ask some greater force for mercy and help in a situation that was completely of my own making, and when I had not been particularly diligent heretofore about staying in close communication with that greater force, grateful for all my many blessings, it's true, and for the spirit and mystery of the woods, and life; but praying, well, no, not really. But I have to say, the thought did cross my mind, and it did occur to me to wonder, Oh, if there is a spirit of the woods out there, the forest, that bears any kinship and mercy toward me, how wonderful it would be, what a miracle it would be, to get a little help with this damned wind right now.

  I want to be very careful not to misrepresent what happened next. I want to be extra certain that I am not suggesting my desire for the wind to cease had any bearing on what happened next, which is that the wind, indeed, ceased.

  It lay down like an animal going to sleep, lay down at the last possible second, just before its own impulse carried it up the slight rise and into the house; and in that lying down, that breath of stillness, I was able to begin fighting the fire back. Each bucket I hurled onto the trouble spots now was effective—no other flames rushed left or right around my efforts—and like a pool shark running the table, I was able to begin knocking the fires out, anchoring the corners and front first, and then the flanks, making a stand.

  Darkness moved in from out of the woods—dusk was coming in as if made curious by the spectacle of all the smoke and steam—and with each new bucket tossed onto the perimeter, the fire grew quickly tamer until there was almost nothing of it left at all. I was strolling through the blackened field now like a man watering his garden, sauntering from one fire to the next; and by the time true evening had arrived, the wind still had not returned, and neither would it, that night. The last little embers and candle flames were snuffed out, and the spring peepers were calling as they did every evening from their floating marsh swamp below, and the snipe were performing their eerie wing-whistling aerobatics above; and there was time enough for me to go back into the house and scrub up all the telltale boot prints of ash and mud and charcoal from where I had earlier thundered through the house, searching for a bucket when the fire had first raged out of control.

  And by the time Elizabeth's headlights came sweeping down the driveway accompanied by the crunching of gravel under her tires, I was sitting out on the front porch listening to the night songs and sipping a glass of wine and looking out at the dark patch of field like some successful farmer for whom everything had gone entirely as planned.

  It was too dark for her or the girls to see or notice anything, and even then, the next day, they did not at first notice the great swath of black until I drew it to their attention; and even so, the burn looked planned and calculated, geometric and safe. The girls were chagrined by the blackness of the field—I had to explain to them that it was like painting, that that deep black was but like a primer for the most incandescent sort of green, which would be arriving now in only a couple of weeks—but Elizabeth was completely nonplused by it, assuming that the fire had behaved precisely as I had intended it to, accustomed, even this far into our marriage, to the myths of men, and competency, and lovely predictability.

  I went out each day, for the following week, before the grass greened up, and searched the barren field for Tracy's earrings, but found nothing; and I shall not look for them in that manner again.

  Rain, sun; rain, sun; rain, sun. The tresses of old-man's-beard are sodden, and the entire forest is draped with such dripping, tangled strands, and when the sun comes back out, those tresses begin to steam, and the forest steams too; after a while, this baked-out increase in humidity makes it rain again, warm thundershowers, and it's easy to imagine the plants and trees sucking up the moisture with the straws of their winter-thirsty roots, as my skin and the sleeping chambers of my mind are thirsty also for some true sun, high-angle, long-lasting quality sunlight, and each hour that I have of it, I feel better, that much closer to joy, and then, beyond joy, euphoria.

  The fawns are just before being born. It's the last week of May and it seems that in the swollen bellies of the does you can see the bony knees and elbows of the fawns-to-come, and you wonder why the wait, why don't they come on out right now?

  It's almost painful to watch the distended does leaping over fallen logs and easing their bulky selves through the narrow hallways and brambly tunnels of alder and hawthorn, and yet you know that it's these last few days that count the most, as the fawns continue to grow, even in their mothers' wombs, gaining every bit of advantage they can—and which they need, in spades, once they hit the ground, birthed into a land with perhaps more predators than any valley in the Lower Forty-eight—bobcats, lions, lynx, wolverines, black bears, grizzly bears, wolves, coyotes.

  As the green landscape explodes into emerald life, so too do those leaping nutrients—burgeoning wildly, each day—pass from the forest into the does, and from the does into the fawns. The forest's reckless growth—particularly that last week of May—is evident and palpable, but it is somehow a reassurance to know that the things beneath the surface, the unseen things, such as those fawns within their wombs, are also growing at the same wild and exuberant pace and pattern; that everything, despite running at full roar, is still in perfect step-and-rhythm synchrony. Some think of Handel's shouted Messiah as being a Christmas song, but sometimes when I hear it it makes me think of May—complex, exuberant, shouted May.

  Like the larch needles themselves, or the fawns-in-their-mothers'-bellies, so too are the deer's antlers expanding quickly now, leaping, accelerating toward some pull of light with a force and reckoning that I suspect is at least as powerful as that of the moon upon the tides. And just as each beach possesses a set of lows and highs, neap tide and spring tide, specific to its unique landscape, so too does each valley, and each ridge and mountain range, possess its own unique angle and rhythm of light's return, with each valley's individual variances as subtle yet distinct as would be the musical compositions of a thousand different composers: each feeling the same raw emotion in May, joy, but each composition as different as the composers themselves.

  The sunlight flooding down, bathing the land in longer light, is the music, but each unique landscape is the composer; and in May, after the goose-honking cacophony of the music warming up in the pits, the fuller piece, in all its true complexity, begins to rise above the chaos, and to emerge, each year, with brilliance and elegance.

  In a harsh climate like this one, a northern climate, snugged in tight against Canada as we are, spring usually comes a week to ten days later than it does down in the towns where we do our shopping, Troy or Libby, which are forty miles farther south, and at a slightly lower elevation.

  But this difference between landscapes, this other-ness between nearby but different valleys, is not always measurable in linear miles or vertical feet, is not quantifiable just by run-of-the-mill Cartesian advancement and regression of the sun. Once the sunlight, the spring-light, does make it over that northern stone wall and into the Yaak, crossing that invisible divide explained in part by Bergmann's rule—it comes rushing on, I think, even faster and more forcefully than Bergmann himself could have proposed, because we too are in a low-elevation landscape, anomalously so for the northern Rockies. So it is like there's one weird cant, some angle, some mathematical torque, involved in the equation.

  There's extra force too that's easy to u
nderstand, and you sense it, see it, in the robustness of all the plants and animals in the Yaak. Simply put, they have only about fourteen weeks to put on their growth, whereas the same species forty miles south might have an extra four weeks—two weeks on either end of the growing season—to do the same. In the Yaak, then, that compression of growth could surely be assigned some straight-line mathematical number, some coefficient of growth, or coefficient of spring, that relates directly to the explosiveness of spring upon that landscape—just as some tides on a steep pitch will rise with calamitous speed and acceleration. If springtime in northern Utah comes on with a whump-force of, say, 7.8, and in the Pleasant Valley, near Libby, with an 8.3, then by the time the green wave of life crests the icy summit and rolls down into the northern Yaak, perhaps it carries a sledge power of, say. 9.3.

  And that extra force, that extra power (again, different for every landscape, every valley up here), could be measured in the explosiveness, the recoil from winter, of the larch needles sprouting, and the speed of growth in the antlers of deer, elk, and moose—and can be felt keenly in the blood of all the region's inhabitants, as distinct and unnameably unique to them all, to us all, as the springtime tune of a bird whose name we do not know but whose song is long familiar to us.

  Thank goodness the Yaak is merely called the Yaak, rather than "9.3," or "10.0." The name of the place is all we need to know for those of us who live here to be aware of the nature, of its power, and of course, even if we did not know its name, we could feel it—that 9.3-ishness—simply upon first entering its realm and its spell.

  Because I am not a mathematician, I can fool and play with math. In addition to our valley high-ending the scale of life, due to the compression and brevity of sunlit days, the so short growing season—residing at the very northern end and range of things, in one of the last few wedges before one goes to the glaciers and total snow, and total sleep, of the farther north—I think there is some cant or twist or torque to our already substantial coefficient of force.

  And then upon that cant—call it 15 or 20 degrees plumb of normal, deliciously cockeyed from "normal"—there is yet another torque, so that ours is a strong, strange land upon a strange land upon a strange land, factored thrice away from anywhere else, at least.

  The cant—what makes our 9.3 already unique, even more so, not a straight north-south 9.3, but a uniquely tilted 9.3—comes from a number of other factors, including the scrambled topography, the many J-hooked twists and turns of our ravines and creeks and canyons, so that when spring's forceful green breath and gold light finally do crest the summit and come crashing in, they do so in a crooked, tilted fashion that is once again unique to only our hills, only our mountains.

  No artist, no man or woman, or even any committee of the gods, could have dreamed up such a place. Perhaps one God dreamed and then crafted this one place, or perhaps this valley, kicking and fussing, or sly and secretive, seized and carved its own unique fit in an otherwise seething and occupied world—but for certain, something is going on here, something powerful that should by all rights make scientists fall down in quivering, awestruck supplication; and that should make us take care of this landscape, preserve and revere it and its remaining healthy wildness. This power is felt at least as strongly in May as in any other month, if not more so. And for my purposes, as a poet and a resident, we don't need to know the coefficient, or the angle of cant. Simple reverence will suffice.

  Perhaps only when we are dead and buried in the valley's rich soils will we understand more clearly the shapes and natures of its many forces.

  Perhaps the shapes of those forces—visible to us only now on the outer limits of our understanding, and our vague hypotheses—will become firmer then, in the manner of the shapes of shadows at firelight's edge stepping closer to reveal their truer and fuller forms, their infinite specificity, revealing the shape of black-backed woodpeckers, long-toed salamanders, grizzly bears, woodland caribou. Maybe then.

  For now, however—with us not yet immersed in the soil—it is enough to run unknowing into, and through, the quick green light.

  And beyond our 9.3-ishness, and beyond our 15-degree cant, there is still another mystery at work—a torque, a wiggle, upon the force of those other two combined forces, yielding even more specificity, more uniqueness, and even more strength. Torque—also referred to as "natural force"—is measured in foot-pounds, or Newton meters. Let's just say, for argument's sake, that the torque upon the cant of the force of Yaak is somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five Newton meters. (Perhaps this last coefficient, unlike the others—the brute power of the place, and the ellipsis of that force—is variable, relaxing and then contracting again, like a clenching fist, or a pumping heart, or a striding, upright animal, squeezing tighter on breezy, gusty, swirly days, and releasing, becoming softer, on balmy calm ones. What handheld computer, or what mainframe, could ever chase down these daily, hourly variances? Surely, only the receptive human spirit—in May, or any other month.)

  Anyone who's resided here for any time at all—not even four full seasons, but for even a month's cycle of days—can feel this tightening and loosening of things, out in the woods. Hunters, I suspect, can feel it most intensely—moments when the woods begin to stir, and moments too when all goes slack and still, when the inhabitants of the forest seem not to be thinking anything (there's a distinct sag in the forest's energy) and neither do they seem to even be breathing, but instead resting, almost catatonically, in the manner of a fish that rests for long minutes, motionless, in the seam between currents, or the backwater of an eddy formed behind a boulder.

  As to what might help determine this specific and unique degree of torque within the Yaak, I cannot say. I sense that, more than the physical, formula-like character of the previous two forces, cant and topography, this one is more organic, perhaps even a living entity.

  Some of the factors that might have a hand in the care and feeding of this organism could be the fact that not only do we lie so severely north—so inflamed to the max with Bergmann's rule (and the rule of his associate, Allen, who noted that the farther north one went, the larger the animals became, as a means of retaining more efficiently their valuable body heat during the long winters)—but also that we lie so severely west: more westerly, and in some regards wetter (because we're snugged in low against the wet side of the Continental Divide) than many other valleys deeper into the Pacific Northwest.

  Another aspect of this torque, then, would have to do with the double richness of our incredible sampling of biodiversity. Not only do we possess much of the representative flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest, coexisting in often unique assemblages and relationships with Rocky Mountain species, but many of our species also are represented from a third ecosystem, the far north of Canada's northern Rockies—the massive Purcell range—and are the southernmost extent in the world where those icebound denizens are found: woodland caribou, and snowy owls.

  Even if such numbers do exist, in the end they are no more than metaphors or abstractions for understanding the stories of this place, which sometimes go hurtling past our sleepy eyes, and other times seem to progress at an infinitesimal creep. But if the picture or model of what I'm proposing has any authenticity or integrity to it, then the pattern of it should hold true in the glance of a moment, as well as be expressed across a season, or a year, or a century—just as the principles of the life of a cell should hold true, in logic and pattern, for the principles of an entire organism, and beyond that, a population.

  And I believe that this is the case. I believe that there are certain days when the leaning arc of a single hour's worth of sunlight contains in each moment, all of the physical aspects, and the structural patterns, of the entire canted power of the entire season, and the complete year; and in those perfect and distillate moments, those perfect hours, you can taste and feel and know and sense in a single moment the essence of a place's nature and character, a place's voice. Such recognitions carry in them the e
cho of a time back when such awareness and fluency in the natural world was more common—was in fact perhaps one of our birthrights, as it is that still of the wild animals, for whom a single glance into the woods, or a single wisp of odor, or a single sound detected, might carry to them a better understanding of the identity of that one place than you or I might be able to accomplish or know in a year or even a decade of traipsing methodically and studying those same hills.

  In those kinds of moments, however, in which the patterns of a place are to be glimpsed or known in that single hour, what the nature of that light, that hour's revelation, might be like late in November, with the cant leaning down more precipitously than ever, and the days shortening frightfully—an entire day's worth of sun appearing, rising, and then falling between the hours of two and three p.m.—is the quality of fireworks. That one hour's worth of sun, in November, might rise straight up over the ridge, like a sputtering Roman candle, but then descending too within the same space of that very hour. In May, however, the light contained within that same hour's passage, rather than possessing the quality of a lone, fizzling firework, might be more like the taper of some long and wavering blossom, or the fire on some distant August ridge, growing brighter even into the dusk, and on into the night: a flame, a light, that it seems not even night itself can extinguish.

  In May, such is the richness and length of the newly arriving light that the languorousness and confidence of it, the fullness of it, carry over into our blood, and our spirits, and our own patterns of the heart, and rhythms—just as winter's strangely compressed light (and absence of light) can carry in it a density that can at times be a bit too much to handle, sludging up the blood of those older folks whose blood no longer burns or boils bright enough to keep the sludge at bay.