by Rick Bass
The question catches me for half a step, maybe longer.
Everywhere, I answer.
Lowry considers this, looks around, then points to a huge cedar. Is that tree him?
Yes.
Where's his ear?
Well—he really doesn't have ears. I can see her considering an earless visage, and so I change tack and fall back on the familiar: Everywhere.
She peruses the woods more closely. A tree has fallen across the trail and been sawed into pieces by the trail crew and shoved to one side.
Is that cut-down tree him?
Yes.
On the drive home, once we get to the gravel drive, I let Low sit in my lap and steer. As she does so this time, I notice that she keeps looking out her window and flashing her pretty smile, and holding it for several seconds. When I ask her what she's doing, she says, Smiling at the trees.
It's very late into the month now. I'm sitting in my cabin, working on an essay in the broad daylight, looking out the window occasionally at the green marsh, and beyond that, at the dark blue of the old forest. The day is shining—no deer are out in the marsh, midday as it is, and the marsh grasses are stirring in the breeze only slightly, moving like the gentle swells of the ocean, far out at sea, as if something immense is passing by, just under the surface, and the climbing heat of the day is lifting the metal roof of my cabin as the metal expands ever so slightly.
The metal is beginning to creak beneath the sun, making a steady ticking sound as if trying to register or quantify the sun's warmth, and so accustomed am I to inhabiting this place—this chair, this desk, this cabin—that I soon find myself lulled, as if by hypnosis, into comfortable rhythm with the ticking roof, so that my heart is beating in slow and steady resonance with it, even pausing or skipping, sometimes, as my heart lingers for half a moment, waiting for that next tick; as if waiting for or seeking permission from something—the sun—for each next beat.
For just a moment, an image comes to me of me stepping outside myself; for just a moment, I can imagine a person, a man, like myself, sitting in that cabin, his heart beating in unison with the midsummer sun—sitting in that dark, cool cabin, beneath that green metal roof, which is swathed in shady green glowing alder light—and in that image, the man is imagining, dreaming, writing, dreaming with his heart lifting, ticking to the pulse of the sun.
With great difficulty—again, as if hypnotized—I pull back from the image and willfully turn my back on the man, and the scene of him at his desk, writing. I must hurry outside and into that rare light and warmth. There are scant hours left.
JULY
JULY ON THIS ISLAND is, I think, the strangest month for a writer. The euphoria of June's wild courtship has settled into you, has integrated youthfully into the powerful rhythms and patterns of the place, as well as the season, high summer—and likewise, the girls are in full vacation frenzy. There are hikes I want to take, explorations into the backcountry, and always, activist tracts and op-eds and letters of comment to address, meetings to attend; and there are outings to take with Elizabeth, both in the city and in the country—a raft trip in Canada, an art exhibit opening in Washington, D.C., a concert in Seattle—and, theoretically, there are stories to write too, hunkered down in the little log cabin at marsh's edge.
But first and foremost, these tender few years that they are young, there are the girls, and their summer needs and desires. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to observe that the girls are their own seasons, perhaps compressed into several years of girlhood rather than into a single year, though again, who can say that they are not also the year into themselves, for no one year is the same with them; they are changing daily and nightly, and unlike the seasons, which rotate annually with precise and reassuring sameness and repetition, affording a careless or inattentive or distracted observer opportunity again and again to examine the marvelous construct of each day and each season, there exists no such return opportunity for the girls, and my parenting of them. I must notice it now or miss it forever.
So they take precedence, particularly in the summer. Still, I cannot afford to abandon my trade completely—there is the so-called living to be made, and there is also that even more restless stirring or gnawing of craft. Always, you want to try something you haven't tried before—to discern some new story, to visit some new territory, to meet some new characters, and to reach a place also where your sentences are drawn tightly, or if not tightly, then elegantly.
All of that takes a strange and unreplicable mixture of happiess and despair and dreaminess and urgency. And summer—particularly July—is an ideal time for the luxury of possessing, and maintaining, all those writerly emotions, keeping them separate for a while, then mixing them together for a while, as if in a recipe—except for the beckoning, lovely call of childhood summer.
So I still wander out to my cabin each morning and stay there until the afternoon. But too many days, especially in July, I don't dive as deep as I could, or should, to get where I really want to go. Even before I settle in and prepare to descend, I'm already thinking about pulling out. And that's all right: I am not complaining. In fact, it's wonderful. If I can just manage to stay close to the dreaming, in July—not quite reaching it but neither letting it slip away—then hopefully, the ability and energy and desire to dream will be accessible and available in August, or September, or even October.
So this summer, particularly July, seems to summon the dream-time, and makes a space and a way for it—but I can only try to keep that dream-garden, that mental place, briefly weeded and watered, and can occasionally cut some herbs from it, for drying; I can't harvest it, or prepare any elaborate meals. I can instead only glance out the window at it from time to time and know that it's a good growing season for such things.
Likewise, in my cabin, the pen just doesn't want to move across the paper, even though it seems that it should. I'm thinking about the chance all that extra daylight gives me to do chores—piling brush, stacking rock, changing the oil in the generator, cleaning the trucks, or any of ten thousand other non-writerly things—and I find myself working slower and slower, if at all, staring out the window at the green marsh for long minutes at a time. Fifteen, twenty, even thirty minutes will pass without my thinking a single worthwhile thought.
Instead, I'll just watch the color green, and listen to the birds, and the wind, pitching and swooping and rushing around, the wind as active in July as I'd like my mind to be—racing, wondering, exploring—and finally I'll lower my eyes back to the page and scratch out a paragraph or two, telling myself that tomorrow will be the day I'll really get into the good stuff, tomorrow, tomorrow. Having finished my thermos of coffee, I'll close my notebook and wander on back up to the house—where has the morning gone? It always seems as if I've done nothing but sit there and feast on the color green, or green and gold, as if on a meal, and nothing else, as if I have only taken, and have given nothing. And when I walk into the cool house, with its high downstairs ceilings, the girls will hear me enter and will begin calling out the plans for the day, incorporating me into whatever play of the moment is transpiring, whether it's Barbies, or watering their garden, or playing in the wading pool, or dressing the cat up, or swinging on the swing set, or packing for a picnic, or a trip to this or that lake, or this or that waterfall: incorporating me, in that fashion, into their day, their days, as July itself incorporates us all into the middle of the braid of summer. And in July, things feel calmer, less rushed, as if, for once, you truly can say, if you want to, Tomorrow, tomorrow ...
Every month has its flavor, as would any certain spice—tarragon, marjoram, fennel, cumin. I am not sure what the taste of July is, but I think it is something sweet, like a dessert that you might eat slowly, after the full and complex and dramatic onrushing meal ofJune, and before the next-days of August. I think that July is also like one of the very best fieldstones we find occasionally for use in the rock walls we like to build (rock walls that serve no purpose but instead travel only as if
of their own accord off into woods, tracing some line of contour that is pleasing to the eye). The long, flat, thin rocks are my favorites—"Sweet!" I'll cry while driving down the road when I see such a specimen, talus-slid and winter-tumbled to road's edge, and the girls will groan, knowing it means I'm going to stop and try to grunt-wrestle it into the back of the battered old truck. It is these rocks, so level and balanced and sturdy and durable, so fixed, and perfect for linking one run of joints to the next, that remind me of July—or rather, vice versa—with the dense, unchanging slab ofJuly laid as a bridge between June and August, seeming somehow twice as long as either of those other two months, as befits our orthodox concepts of the classical, elegant shape of beginning, middle, and end. The animal- or muscle-shaped lens, with the middle twice as long as either the beginning or the end.
My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July.
The girls love to go on picnics, even to the point that they'll hike for an hour or more to a favorite spot—a little tumbling waterfall or a certain lake. (Both girls, when each was younger, for many years, pronounced the word pig-net; they loved them before they knew the name for them.) They love to pack their straw hampers with chips and apples and grapes and bread, and they love to cook hamburgers over the fire. When we go to the lake, I'll carry the canoe, portaging it ridiculously far into the woods, along with life vests and such, and we'll take turns, two or three at a time, when paddling around out on one of those round lakes; and for the life of me, I can't tell if I'm helping to teach them leisure or industriousness. We walk a long way, sometimes, with the girls carrying their baskets, and yet once to our spot, wherever it is, we'll lounge in the green grass or on some huge and perfectly tilted slab of rock. We'll wade in the clean creek, or swim, with our life vests on, in the clean lake.
Perhaps I am confusing the word leisure with luxury.
Is privilege the right word for this life—and for being able to show the girls such places, such things? We're conditioned to believe this, I think, and while I bear great gratitude to the world for all of its beauty and richness and bounty, I also sometimes grow angry with myself, and even defensive, when I find myself falling too much into that trap of thinking in those terms. The girls—and Elizabeth and I—are lucky to know such a vital landscape, with its pieces still intact; we're even fortunate, and yes, it's true, we're even privileged.
And yet there's a part of me too that knows, even if dimly and far beneath the surface, that such natural treasures were once everyone's birthright, that landscape was inseparable from being, and that one no more had to ponder the issues of clean air, clean water, and the presence of grizzly bears and bald eagles and old forests than one did one's own name, or identity. There was gratitude and wonder, even awe, and yes, a feeling of privilege, I'm sure, even before these things became rare. But somewhere across the generations, I think our vision of landscape has been worn down in this culture, so that gradually we have ceded an understanding that our public lands and parks are owned by us to a vision instead in which they are a commodity, so rare have they become, and that they are to be managed by industry, even as we understand that industry will not be kind to them.
I don't know. I'm angry and joyful both. It's an incredible privilege—I guess that's the right word, after all. But still, I want to argue that it's more luck or good fortune than privilege. Privilege seems to possess a faint air of special entitlement—entitlement beyond the norm, available only to the elite, and that, of course, is precisely how the industrial elite would like it.
There's not an hour of my life that passes up here, I don't think, without my being aware, sometimes acutely, of my good luck, my good fortune. But still, I balk at that word privilege, for once such a world belonged to all of us, or at least the option or possibility of such a world before it was taken from us, before we failed to protect sufficient quantities of it from our own appetites, for the future.
I do believe that clean air, clean water, and wild mountains and old forests are our birthrights; that a wild and healthy landscape is, or should be, a constitutional right, a freedom, to be protected and celebrated. And as with any right, there is an attendant responsibility.
I want the foundation of it—this luck—to be set within the foundations, like stone, of who they are. And July will still be July, if not for another ten thousand years, then for a while longer anyway, with or without the perceived rights and responsibilities of one species, human beings, and with or without those emotions of awe and gratitude, as well as fear and anger and love. I will try hard only to paint with the green and gold brush of the month—to celebrate, not lament, and to not question tomorrow—but the reader needs to know of this confusion. (As, I suspect, the girls are already aware, to some extent, even if as a current running just beneath the surface—a hidden creek, trickling beneath a talus pile of jumbled lichen-clad boulders.)
There are times when I forget my fear for the future of this landscape, and when I exist only in the green moment. And maybe that's what this narrative is about: trying to isolate those moments from the periods of nearly daunting fear, and even outrage.
They do still exist, those utterly green moments. And I find them more often within the girls' company than not.
By July, the garden is up, even in such a northern landscape as this one. The girls have their own little fenced-in patch, and they wander it in the evenings, snapping peas off the bush and dropping about every third one into the pan for dinner while eating the first two, and then, on the walk back up the hill, they'll browse on those that managed to get into the pan in the first place, so that we'll be lucky if even three for four make it to the dinner table.
Am I being too soft on them? Should I be sterner and insist on a firmer demarcation between the harvest and the consumption? Am I serving them poorly to take pleasure in this lax and vaguely feral method of seeing that they eat a balanced diet?
Somehow, it seems a part ofJuly.
The days are getting shorter, though we will have not yet really noticed it. If anything—as we become more and more accustomed to, and comfortable with, the rhythms of summer—it will even seem to us that they are still lengthening.
A bath, brush your teeth, and then story time, alternating between Mary Katherine's room and Lowry's. Old Teller, Savage Sam, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Treasure Island.
Day after day there is a sameness, a suspension, that comes in July.
I was wrong about saying those rock walls we're building—rock walls leading nowhere, neither containing nor restricting anything—serve no purpose. And likewise, I think the July summer days have purpose, even if in untraditional or unquantifiable ways. Even if their purpose is to have no purpose.
Beauty, and rest, alone.
The irony is that it's not entirely restful, for Elizabeth and me. Mentally, its reinvigorating, but physically, under a northern summer's heightened and ambitious pace, it can become exhausting. Cook late, after getting in from the lake, clean dishes, get the girls to bed, read for a few minutes—suddenly it's midnight. Up early, then, with the world growing light again so soon (the girls sleep on, until nine, sometimes ten o'clock in the morning), and do it all over again.
The course of the invisible rock walls of childhood continues to extend itself, on through the seasons—and the seasons in the landscape itself act as the mason at least as much as do our hopes and dreams.
What is the name for this unspoken, elegant fittedness, possessing not the invisible joints of the stone wall or any noticeable mesh of cog to gear but instead an utter seamlessness? In July, as the fields and meadows begin to bloom with the white blossoms of yarrow, and clusters of pearly everlasting, and even oxeye daisies, the deer fawns, similarly spotted, lie in these fields, camouflaged within the season, calibrated almost to the day, even to the hour.
To cant our entire world, our weather and our seasons, by ten
or fifteen degrees, as if striving to tip the world over on its side, leveraging it with some huge pry bar—how will that listing, that destruction, affect all the invisible angles and hard-gotten, beautiful negotiations of the world?
This astounding unity that we live in and amid, this community of order and elegance so blatant, so powerful and just beneath our nose that often we do not even see it—will we notice it only as it begins to fall apart, the running joints finally beginning to present themselves, widening and wobbling?
And again, there must be some word for it: the fittedness, and this overarching sameness of pattern and even desire. In July, the orange checkerspot butterflies whirl around the orange poppy coal-bright blazes of orange hawkweed, while the yellow sulfurs, also like sparks, dance and skitter across the fields from one butter yellow dandelion to the next, or from the similarly yellow blossoms of one heartleaf arnica to the next. The blue sulfurs, of course, pass from one bellflower to the next—watching them stir, you think at first the bellflower blossom itself has suddenly unfolded and taken flight, and it all seems like a kind of inaudible music, their movements and fitted order like the score and composition for some beautiful sheet music that in life we cannot hear, can instead only see; though sometimes I wonder, were any observer to watch and listen long enough, and deeply enough, if some faint and distant orchestral stirring might somehow be heard, like the preliminary warming-up noises underlying preparations for some even vaster symphony playing always, and always just beyond our notice, no matter how careful the listener, or the observer.
