The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  (Increasingly, I think that one experiences the lightless winters up here as one might a series of concussions, in which, although each individual blow is not too bad, a kind of cumulative effect begins to exert itself—a toll with a price and a cost not apparent sometimes for many years. And when we are young and our blood is joyous and tumultuous, May-like in its own unique and powerful uproar, we do not hear or heed or otherwise notice the arc or cant of those patterns of light and rhythm and mood; but when we are older, and more settled into and accustomed to the world, our moods and rhythms will more closely track those of the sun's and the season's arc across the skies.)

  In May, when the sun returns—and not just any old sun, but the delicious, exciting, lengthening sun—then there is for me a feeling of gratitude toward the very earth itself, as you might feel gratitude to some Samaritan who helped you back to your feet after you'd just been knocked down.

  And herein, in May, is perhaps one of the definitions of grace in the world: You don't even have to reach out a hand for help. You can crouch or even lie there whipped and beaten finally by the density of winter's lightless weight, disheartened or even defeated into a stupor by the great mass and length of darkness, and yet without your even lifting a hand, the world will find you out in May, will find and reach each and every citizen—both the human and the nonhuman animals, and each and every plant—and will pick you back up and deliver the long slant of that green light into your heart, will pick you up and breathe a warm breath back into your soul, no matter how cold and stiff and dormant it might have become in the winter, and in the absence of green, and the absence of chaos.

  You cannot escape this long shaft of light, in May—no more than the warming black soil and flame-tapered green buds of aspen and cottonwood can escape it.

  Nothing can hold the light back when it is unleashed into May. We all receive it—the animate as well as the inanimate—as if being lifted onto, and riding, a great green surging wave.

  You may not understand or know any new patterns, staring at the cant and cycle, the rise and fall of light, in any of those one-hour windows in May—but you will remember, enthusiastically if you have forgotten it in the long lightless winter, that up here, you are still connected to and fully a part of all those cycles that appear and play themselves out, effervescing, within that one hour of light, for you can feel the same shapes and twists and movements of light going on in your own blood.

  A part of you is riding along with each hour of the new light; a part of you is feeling the big river-surge toward its high-water marks; a part of you is feeling those deer's antlers leap from their skulls, restless in the extra-long having-waited. The earth itself seems to shake under your feet, quivering like an animal tensed. It might be what it's like to be a king or queen, except that you rule no one other than yourself, but when a part of you is to be found connected to every other thing in the landscape, riding that green wave, it is quite enough to be a sovereign ruler of yourself; it is an honor.

  There is a roaring in your ears, and a joy in your blood, as you ride on that building wave of light.

  It's different, here. The wave has its own shape and characteristics. I'm foolish, I know, to even propose that math can capture it. Let the snipe calls capture it, and the density and frequency of the spring peepers, and the black Bryoria back in the old forests. Let the scent of spruce sap mixing with ice-snapped fir boughs capture it, and our ten thousand other living things, our ten thousand other living measurements. Our only chore, our only task, is to ride that green wave when the light comes back, flooding around our ankles, and now up to our waists, lifting us.

  The weaving continues, accelerating according to that secret cant—all the spilled sprawl and disorder from the beginning of the month lining up now into firming braids of strength, like many creeks and brooks conjoining at the base of the mountains to hurtle us toward June, as if June's warm breath is already looking back at us and blowing its breezes back across green living May, the wild green garden.

  Staring out my window one rainy morning, mesmerized by nothing, and thinking nothing, simply entranced by the world, I notice that pulses of green are emanating from various places in the marsh. Stripes and bands of the lengthening marsh grass are illuminated as if slashes of sunlight are falling across them, but there is no sunlight coming down through that steady rain. And gradually, and with some astonishment, I come to understand that the glow, the green light, is coming up in waves from out of the marsh, up from out of the earth itself—subtle variations in soil or peat-richness, perhaps, imbuing one stretch of marsh with extraordinary nutrition, so that the shifting, wavering beams of green light I'm witnessing, rising and moving across the marsh like some immense yet dimly visible creature walking, are nothing less than the sight of life being created, the marsh grass sucking in the rain and warmth and blossoming, leaping, into life. Gray-coated deer, their fur drenched and matted from the steady rain, are emerging from the curtain of the alders on the far side of the marsh and passing now through those waves of pulsing green light.

  The deer are wading knee-deep in the marsh, veering from one green place to the next, chewing almost savagely at those living, glowing places of green life—the marsh grass surely so vibrant and alive to the deer, this one day, and so rich in protein, that it is as if the deer might as well be grazing on living fish, or frogs—and now the rain is roaring against the tin roof of my writing cabin, and is beating the deer's already flattened fur tighter against their bony haunches and ribs and shoulders, winter's signature still written sharp upon them, even the swollen-bellied pregnant does.

  But they don't seem to care at all, seem in fact to be luxuriating in the rain and the warmth and the richness—and across the far distance of the marsh, they seem to be swimming in the marsh, the grass up to their chests already, so that they might well be swimming in the green light itself, riding its waves...

  How the simple sight of this severe marsh heals my sadness, and hones my euphoria! It's fine to observe and learn from as many of the infinite patterns and rhythms and cycles as possible, almost all of which are visible out this one small window, beside which I sit butt-anchored for several hours each day—but more than that, it's the great and calm and simple sight of the marsh's beauty, and of the forest's beyond, which soothes my heart the most: the witnessing, more than the understanding.

  It's true that any understanding I'm able to glean from the comings and goings of the marsh serves also to deepen and enrich my love for the place, but as far as the great calm hand that touches my heart each time I look out at the marsh, I do not need to know or understand the workings of the bones and muscles and internal organs of this one small landscape, but instead need only to sit quietly beside it and watch, and listen, and smell, and sometimes touch.

  The phrase vast amphitheater is often a cliché when used in writing about landscape, but it's true nonetheless: in May, that's what this marsh is, as the chaos of disorder continues to swell into shimmering order. Around and around the sounds go, out in the perfect circle of the marsh, rising and falling at all their different scales and notes and levels, and stirring tired hearts back up into joy, and joyful hearts up into euphoria. The tag-team baton-relay music of sora rails: one rail calling to the next, who calls to the next, who calls to the next. The near silent winging of a raven, high above, followed by a shouted cawing that fairly alarms the listener, even though the listener knows the raven is up there. The earnest but still joyful workmanlike trill of blackbirds. The flutes of Townsend's warblers and wood thrushes, and the wet-tennis-shoe-squeaking-on-linoleum cries of the spring peepers. And in the midst of it all, the dull hum of sun-glinting, armored dragonflies, and the silent music of moths, rising by the thousands from the tall grass of the marsh, like marionettes worked jerkily by the strings of the sun's warmth.

  Sometimes I wonder if this journal might stand in the near future as some naive treatise of nearly overwhelming innocence, as do the older texts from the last century ap
pear to us now; and whether or not this journal might possess a tone someday like that of the sweetly halcyon chronicles of the ancient travelers who encountered the landscapes and cultures of this country for the first white man's time. There is a part of me that wants to believe fiercely that all these wonders will still be present in the world, even as another part of me knows they will not.

  June is coming again, with its ellipses of sun, its ellipses of force. The bear grass, with its wild abundance of every seven years, will be returning. It's looking like an unusually good year out on the marsh for the large crane flies, and for beetles, and white moths. A good year—here on the marsh, anyway, if not so many other places in the world—for yellow-cheeked warblers.

  People who know about the deeply specific things of the world—yellow-cheeked warblers, and grizzly bears—say that those things, and hundreds of others of fine-tuned species like them, are not long for this world. I'm committed to becoming more involved and relentless of an activist than ever, which I think is nothing less than the obligation of each of us, in the face of such a terror, and such a theft—such a waste. And yet I'm increasingly aware too as I get older of another obligation I have to the future, in the face of such terror—a world without warblers, or wolverines!—which is to inhabit the present fully, forcefully, joyfully, as would those coming inhabitants of the world themselves, given the opportunity: inhabiting it with a spirit of greenness, a spirit of leaping and reckless, flamboyant life.

  I squint my eyes almost to closing, staring out at the sunlit marsh. The ancient buzzing, clattering dragonflies could be pterodactyls far in the distance, doing battle. Already these pages, and this place and time, are but an echo, as are any of our lives when measured against the mountains or against anything other than the abstraction of a calendar.

  Still, the marsh grass waves in the wind like a woman's wild hair—no less beautiful than it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand. As it may still be a thousand hence, or for as long as there is sun and rain and snow, and heat and cold, and the color green, and the movement of wind, bathing these things.

  I sit hypnotized before my one bright window again, listening to the laughlike trilling of a lone sora rail, and to the faint and distant sound in that wind of last winter's dead alder branches clacking together like bones.

  Which matters most, the serenader, or the serenaded?

  The grass out in front of the house is a richer and deeper green now than even I, with the paintbrushes of the matches, could have imagined. "Remember how terrible it looked just a couple of weeks ago?" I tell the girls. "Remember how it was nothing but char and scorch?"

  They nod, impressed but not overly amazed, and again I have to marvel at, and be grateful for, a life so filled with miracles, visible miracles, which, while such miracles are not quite taken for granted, are not viewed as anything too far beyond the extraordinary, or beyond one's due.

  I take off one afternoon to run up on one of the mountains above my home to look for the false morels that sometimes grow in the burned forests up there. It's one of the mountains that feed my family, one of the mountains on which we are fortunate enough some years to take a deer or an elk, and this one day, strolling through the maze of standing fire-gutted black spars, and also among the living trees that survived the fire, I'm fortunate enough to find a patch of morels, which will be delicious when cooked in the same skillet as the elk itself, which also came from this mountain: the decomposing rock, the soil itself, bringing to springing life both the elk and the morel, as well as me, so that if we are not mountains ourselves, moving and gifted briefly with life, we are always a part of those mountains, the arms and legs of those mountains, wandering here and there though returning always to the base of these mountains, which feed our bodies and our imaginations...

  There is a certain recipe for preparing an elk, when one is fortunate enough to take not just an elk in autumn, but later, in May, morels. You lay the slice of elk meat in the heated iron skillet, with some melted butter and a little salt and pepper, and slice in those morels, sauteing them with the elk meat; and after only a short while, you shut the flame off and let the elk's muscle, warmed in that skillet as if back into life, continue cooking on its own.

  Because there's no fat in the meat, the elk-meat muscle conducts heat quickly, as copper wire conducts the galvanic twitchings and shudderings and pulsings of electricity; and the flavor of the morels is absorbed into that warming meat, as the elk in life once browsed on the same terrain, the same soil, upon which those morels were growing, yesterday. And in that manner, once again the meat is suffused with the flavor of the mountain, so that you are eating the mountain, eating the mountain straight from the black skillet, so delicious is it; and timing this last wave of skillet heat, knowing when to turn the flame off and simply let the heat of the meat cook itself, is like catching a wave, a surge, and riding it on in to shore; and the deliciousness of such a meal is no less a miracle than a blackened field turning to green life almost overnight.

  The elk roaming through our chests and arms, the elk galloping in our legs, the mountain sleeping in our hearts, present always, whether we are waking or sleeping: rhythms within rhythms within rhythms, which we will never know but can always honor.

  The thought occurs to me again how strange and perhaps hopeless this chronicle is, destined to disappear like melting snow, with regard to its calendrical observations, beneath the rude and quick-charging climatic alterations that a warming earth is fast bringing: the tilting of the lovely cant, the wobbling of that fine-tuned cant. That these days will never again have compare; that not only is time rushing past, but so too is the four-seasoned, temperate nature of this place. As if it is all finally, after so many centuries, becoming only as if but a dream.

  But my God, what beauty.

  JUNE

  IF I MAY BEGIN with one of the most ancient of clichés, it's been a long winter, you will hopefully forgive me. I live on a million-acre island in northern Montana. A cold, wide, deep mountain river bounds me to the south, as do Idaho's castles of mountains to the west and Canada's clearcuts to the north. I am bounded on the east by a vast lake, like a moat. My valley is an island, and within the cold and snowy year, here in Canada's shadow, June is its own island within the island. It's not quite as if you've been sleeping in all the previous months—neither after June passes so quickly, like a flame, will you immediately close down your year and begin preparing for hibernation—but it is not until June arrives that you realize, without having understood it earlier, that this is what some relatively huge part of the winter-ravaged husk of your body and soul has been waiting for: the long reach of days, the barefootedness, and the extravagance of warmth in the north country. Every cell in your body drinks in, absorbs, that new long light, clamors for it, as if you are sipping champagne from some tall fluted glass.

  Each year it is as if you have never felt warmth before.

  There have been cycles going on all along, an infinitude of cycles—sheets and braids and overlays and intertwinings of cycles: rise and fall, birth and death, motion and stasis—but in June, so illuminated and heightened are the dramas of these cycles that they are visible even to our often benumbed senses.

  They are more than noticeable. In June, they are dominant.

  Beyond the new warmth, and the tongues of gold light, tongues of green flame, the thing that most announces itself in the drama of these heightened cycles is the deer. At first they too are as luxuriant as any of us; like us, they too pass through the new light with seeming wonderment. Hugely pregnant, the does wander through the standing water in the marsh, pausing to browse the newly emergent subaquatic vegetation that might carry four hundred times as much calcium as do the dry-land plants.

  So rich is their diet at this time of year—the first ofJune—that the deer will be shitting a stream of clearish fluid into the marsh even as they are feeding on that new growth there, so that you realize it is as if the slack-water marsh has been given a current by the
sun's energy and is flowing now like a stream, passing straight through the deer as if through an empty vessel, though at least that calcium is transferred to the deer, calcium deposited as if scorched into the deer, while all else rushes past. Calcium is the one thing the deer most need at this one time of year, this one week—and it is not the marsh that is moving like a current, but rather, the deer moving through the marsh that is the current.

  I think that deer are to this valley as salmon are to the Northwest: they have their own lives and passages, but they are also immensely, dramatically, a key part of the larger picture, the larger pulse, of this place. Just as the salmon gather nutrients from far out at sea, packing those nutrients into the slabs of their flesh in the form of rich, dense protein and then ferrying that protein inland, upriver during the spawn, where the bears and eagles and ravens and lions and every other carnivore capture and eat that protein and then carry it in their bodies farther inland, up into the mountains, depositing in that manner, in their spoor, deep-sea salmon atop an inland mountaintop—so too are this valley's white-tailed deer the bearers of dense protein, slabs of nutrients moving muscularly from one improbable place to the next, in ribbons of grace: from a marsh plant drunk on sunlight, to a deep cedar forest, to a lion's belly, to a sunny ridge in the mountains—a passage, a narrative, for which there is never any end, only new beginnings, always all over again, for as long as there is sunlight in June, and deer.