The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  (I think that hawks, red-tails and peregrines, kestrels and sharp-shinned hawks and harriers, with their high drifts selected, can hear better this music, and all the sounds between that music; and that wolves and bears following almost constantly the shifting, dissolving, unraveling scent trails of their prey can also smell such orchestral fullness. Where we as our own lately arrived species fit into this orchestra, I'm not sure, unless as I suspect it is in the audience: that we came here last and latest, or were put here last and latest, to observe, and celebrate, and perhaps be the caretakers...)

  This fine-tuned sameness, this tendency, predisposition, even yearning, for one thing to follow the lead of another, like the wheeling of an entire flock of birds that gives itself over surely to no considered forethought but that instead pivots on some invisible point in the sky with not even whisper or rustling of wings, deflecting the flight of a hundred individuals as one being for no apparent reason, like water flowing around a boulder placed midstream ... What is the name for it, the way the deer and elk and antlers, designed for battle, look nonetheless exactly like the limbs and branches of the same forest thicket in which they take refuge? Or for the way you can walk far up a mountain, here in the Yaak, and find a little hand-dug pit where a miner picked at a quartz vein a hundred years ago, and then, traveling only another few yards upslope, but nearly a hundred years in time, you can notice the freshly overturned slabs of rock (perhaps thrust there by the miner himself) where a grizzly has been hunting for ants and digging for Eriogonium bulbs in that mountain soil, and chewing on blossoms of glacier lilies, bright as gold itself, two miners digging in the same place, only a century apart?

  We do not have a name for it, in our language; perhaps we need to make up a name for it, to help draw more attention to it, in order that we might be more respectful of it—this fittedness, this elegance in which we rarely participate, but with which we have been entrusted to notice, and safeguard.

  What would the word be? Would it be different, in different seasons, different weather, different landscapes? Would an adult have a different word for it than a child, and a man a different term than a woman?

  Certainly, the birders of the world are not shy about making up a new language to help fill all the cracks and joints of our own brute and limited existing vocabulary. Gradually, I've come to learn the names of many of the plants of this valley, though infinitely more elusive have been the names of the tiny birds flitting through the high forest, and their calls. The task is not made easier by my red-green colorblindness, but slowly, I'm learning a few, the easiest ones first; and if I live long enough and learn even one or two a year, then at some point in the distant future I'll have a much better grasp of those cheeps and trills and chirps that are always rustling above me, and farther into the thickets, in the summer. (I've tried listening to one of those birding tapes but have had difficulty pretending I'm in the woods—no matter how accurately the calls are recorded, I have trouble making myself believe it's a real bird making that call when there is no other accompanying stimuli of the natural world: no odor of marsh or spruce, no slant of sunlight or dimming of dusk; no breeze, no grass rustle, no sky, no earth, and I have to confess also to becoming frustrated with the pace of the narrative on those tapes. I'm a glacially slow learner, cautious to a fault about accepting or processing almost anything that anyone says, and when the brisk narrators on those birding tapes barge right in over the top of the last bird's call and inform me, "As you can so clearly hear, the call of a blanky-blank nut-dobbler is characterized by its reedy timber..." Well, it's too much too soon for me; the truth is, it seems to me that nearly all of them have some kind of reedy timber, or a throaty buzz, if you listen deeply enough.)

  My durable old Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds pleases me, however, in a way the tapes don't; and I am delighted by the phonetic spelling of the birdcalls, which so far in my limited experience I have found to be unerringly accurate.

  The evening grosbeak "calls incessantly to maintain contact with the flock. In flight, tchew tchew tchew or a shrill p-teer. Also a cleared, downslurred tew." Clearly, this description is the inspired labor of love of an obsessive, for up until this point, surely, there has never been in our language either the word tchew or p-teer. Even tew I find remarkable, although I think the guide might be coauthored, for some of the birdcalls—too many of them, in my frustrated beginner's opinion—are described merely as a "chip" or sometimes "a soft chip," or even, if that second coauthor is feeling particularly descriptive, "a rapid series of chips." (The yellow-rumped warbler, on the other hand, when wintering in the desert Southwest, sometimes utters a sharp chep).

  The bobolink's alarm call is a deep wenk, and the Townsend's warbler—such as the one that summers in the big alder tree just outside my cabin window, and which is accustomed to the sight of me (How long do they live? Is it the same one that returns to this same branch, every year?)—gives a "distinctive weazy weazy weazy weazy twee, or dee dee dee-de de." I don't know about the dee dee dee part, but the weazy weazy part is dead on, and not on my most ambitious day as a writer could I ever have hoped to capture the sound, and the dialect, with that linguistic accuracy, and I am indebted to Author Number One.

  (The olive-sided flycatcher is another easy one, and hence a favorite. Found in the mountains, it is often encountered by me while I'm hiking late in the afternoon, hot and tired, and its inarguable call of Quick! Three beers! was, I feel certain, described also by the first author, rather than the chipping author.)

  There's so much to know, and so many ways of knowing; and again, while I prefer to find things out the slow way—across the years, if necessary, and at close range—by touch, by sight, by scent, by sound, by dreams, if possible, and by the constancy or reassurance of repetition, as with the seasons' cyclings themselves, I also love getting information from the miracle of the printed page.

  I'm forty-two years old—suddenly, looking back, that seems like a lot of years, a lot of seasons, a lot of opportunities—and yet I think there's a pretty fair chance that even if I lived to be five hundred and forty-two, I might never know or discover that based on analyses of the stomachs of olive-sided flycatchers (from the family Tyrannidae —the tyrant flycatchers), it has been revealed that everything Nutallornis borealis eats is winged, that it eats no caterpillars, spiders, or other larvae.

  Perhaps an engineer would see it differently, or perhaps not, but it seems, from a poetic perspective, that such specialization—such fit—speaks at least as much to a notion of gentle cooperation and gracefulness in nature as it does to the old hammer-and-tong model of scrabbling competition. This is not to suggest that nature is anything less than fiercely clamant, with every individual scrambling hourly for tooth-and-claw survival, and for the sustenance and continuance of each individual's genes and genomes, but upon closer examination, it might seem that there are always two worlds, like one overlaid on the other—two worlds at right angles to each other, perhaps—the savage, competitive world, and the gentle, cooperative world, and that it is not just God's, or the gods', desire to fill the world with beauty and order, with a full elegance of fit, so that every niche is miraculously and intricately occupied, but that it is wild nature's gentle and cooperative desire also.

  What else are we to make of the knowledge, for instance, that as the olive-sided flycatcher perches high in the branches of conifers, waiting to catch the wind-stirred vertical tide of winged summer insects, the insects' lacy wings glittering and whirling diaphanous as the day's warming currents carry those insects in plumes up toward the waiting flycatcher (as a stream carries tumbling nymphs and caddis flies to a trout waiting in the eddy behind a boulder), the water pipits hop along on the ground just below those three-beer whistling flycatchers, gleaning from snowmelt puddles and patches of ice the next day's leavings of those insects that perished overnight in the alpine chill—those insects which, having evaded the acrobatic swoops and pursuits of the olive-sided flycatcher, found thems
elves stranded nonetheless, and stippling the ice the next morning in dark flecks and nuggets on the snow?

  There's no need for the flycatchers to hog the ice; there's no need for the pipits to try to compete, up in the stronger, loftier currents of wind. An agreement has been struck—if not between the pipits and the flycatchers, then by someone, or something.

  Is there something wrong with me for finding landscape, more than mankind, such a marvelous invention, such a marvelous palette for whatever force, or forces, created this world, and set it into motion, halved in hemispheres and quartered into seasons, as neat and tidy and efficient and complex and unknowable as a single cell, or a single melting second in time?

  Bounty. I can do both, in July: can wander out to the cabin in the cool morning and sit there for a few hours, writing or not writing but instead simply watching the sunlight walk across the marsh, and with the deer slipping back into the forest as the sunlight warms the green grassy sea of the marsh, and with the insects and, simultaneously, the birds, beginning to stir and rise like smoke, as the marsh temperature begins to warm—and not long after that, the wind, too, begins to move—and yet I can still have the second part of the day to hang out with the girls. The four of us can go down to the river, or out to the swing set, or on a hike or a bike ride. Or if Elizabeth wants some time alone, the three of us can go. The panic of summer's rushing-past quality has faded, and if anything, there is sometimes a midsummer lull, almost a weariness, that sets in, for there will have been a tendency in the previous month to fill the long days of light with as many fun things as possible, so that the revelers now want, and need, to take a breath, and rest.

  I sit in my cool, dark cabin at the edge of the marsh, staring out at all the green light, and feel sometimes like a hunter in a blind, just waiting.

  Some days nothing comes; but in all of the many thousands of hours I've been seated in this chair, at the edge of one of the most productive ecosystems in the world, it seems there is little I haven't seen, at one time or another, across the years. Black bears wandering through the marsh, bull moose walking past the window, golden eagles striking Canada geese, ruffed grouse drumming on my picnic table beneath the shade of the big alder, a mountain lion running through the woods with a dappled deer fawn in its jaws, a herd of elk passing single file through the deep snow, and on, and on: all seen through either of these two main windows, each like a periscope into the wilder, fuller world that I hold at bay the first half of each day so that I can submerge vertically into the dreamland of writing, but a wilder, fuller world that I can then reenter in the second half of each day and can wander horizontally and laterally.

  It is a strange dynamic, to sit and wait and look at such a beautiful image, and to be eager to get back out into it—to taste and feel and smell it, to hike across it, and camp in it, and explore—and yet, for the first half of each day, to be merely sitting there at its edge, looking up from time to time and watching it and trying to resubmerge into a place of dreams, not entirely like the landscape or terrain or moods of the night before's sleep...

  July, more than any month, is rich enough, and long enough, to accommodate this duality. In every way, it is a bridge between two worlds, and two seasons, and two rhythms or paces: and again, this quality of surging bounty, surging excess, is even more exaggerated here at the marsh's rich edge.

  Day after day I sit in this same chair, often ignoring my work and instead literally just watching the grass grow. I listen to the grass grow, and watch the shade deepen as the leaves and needles of all the trees around me continue to grow, spreading wider and wider, making more and more shade for my little cabin, even as the bowl of green light that is the marsh, the basin, grows ever warmer and brighter.

  The winds that pick up in July are like nothing but the breath of a large animal moving or laboring: bellows of noisy, heated wind building in strength all through the course of each day, bending branches and limbs and needles, causing them to grow stronger, I think, forcing them to hold on if they are to survive.

  As the short growing seasons and shady old-forest conditions up here help create a tighter-grained wood, with its growth rings closer together than in other places—a higher-quality, stronger wood—so too perhaps are even our leaves, our needles, stronger, denser, different: for how can the story of an organism be different from the story of its cells, and vice versa?

  The new leaves dip and dance and flutter in these ferocious July winds, but they hold on. The branches shake in July, but filled with sap, they are limber and do not snap. The alder leaves, particularly, shading my eastern window, blow wildly, out on the little point, and shudder a crazy, flashing, dancing green light across the inside of my cabin—across my face and arms—and that flashing lulls me, almost hypnotizes me. Unlike the leaves, I'm able to relax, and let go, and sink a little deeper, releasing myself from the branch of the day and any damning awareness of time, and for a little while, as that green July dancing light bathes me, I sink down into a place where I can rework both time and space, or at least where it feels as if that's the case.

  Early in the morning, and then on through the middle of the morning, all the birds will be singing from around the marsh's perimeter, and chirping and trilling and chipping from back in the forest. The Townsend's warbler, a vivid yellow-breasted, yellow-hooded, black-masked male, is my sentinel, year after year, July after July, perched on the same branch, surveying this one marsh and singing that same song, day after day and year after year— weazy weazy weazy weazy twee —a sound that for me announces and unlocks the middle of summer, the heart of summer, as surely as if a key has unlocked a door that has then swung open to reveal a vast and unexplored chamber, a great room; for even as every July is always the same, so too is there always something newly seen or discovered or experienced in each one, always. And even as the other birds begin to fall silent under the oppression of rising heat, the Townsend's warbler, way out there on the point, just keeps on singing, as if he cannot help it, as if he cannot stop—and in that rising heat, the winds continue to increase accordingly, proportionately, bending the marsh grass flat, as if sweeping across the fur of an animal, ruffling it this way and that, with swirls of ever-changing text scrolling across the tops of the tall green marsh grass so that it appears as if a giant hand is scribing quickly, then erasing almost immediately, some hidden text out on the living canvas or tablet of the marsh—

  And these sounds, the lone Townsend's warbler and the rushing of the wind, also allow me to sink deeper, to ignore time and to turn my back on my beloved physical world, and to travel down once again into the other land of pretend and make-believe and what if...

  Sometimes, in July, I don't make it all the way down into that netherworld of story and imagination and instead, like a fish in a blue lake, descend only halfway, just beneath the reach of the sun, and hang there suspended, in that perfect interface between darkness and light, so that someone looking down from above would not even notice that fish, which would seem to be part of the depths itself.

  On those days, it will seem to me that I could will myself just a little lower, and I would be there, in story-land—but so beautiful and engaging is that upper world, particularly in July, that I just don't want to let go. And so I'll hang there, finning, in the interface between the two, able to ease down a little deeper if need be, but able also to begin rising slowly back to the surface if need be: if opportunity arises.

  Anything can lift me back into the green world, in July. The sandal-flopping sound of the girls hurrying down the path to my cabin, wanting me to come out and play. The barking of my dogs. The snort of a doe out in the marsh, or the cawing of the ravens.

  Other sounds, though, send me deeper, down where I need to be—or rather, where I need to be if I am to get any writing done. The heat itself, its steady increase buffered by the cool and shade of my cabin but rising nonetheless, is like a blanket being laid over me, urging me downward; and beyond my cabin, as the day progresses, the heat is such tha
t the birds fall silent, even the Townsend's warbler, for a while.

  Though as with my own sleepy, suspended ambiguity—the landscape and me in synchrony, in this rhythm or pace—the darkness tries to rise back into the overpowering light, and the cool shade tries to ease back out into the heat: for as the day's winds stir across the tall marsh grass, gusting and combing the tall grass in those indecipherable directions, the wind lifts from the roots of the grass the scented, secret coolness that has been lingering there, beneath all the light above. The wind searches out, finds, and lifts up the last of those cool green shadows and scents from deep within the marsh grass and swirls them across the marsh and through my open windows, even as I gaze out at a paradoxical vision of dazzling heat and brilliance; and in the going away, the giving up, for that day anyway, of the marsh's last coolness—the dying of the last of that day's coolness, not to be resurrected until dark—I'm able to descend that last remaining short distance into the lull of writing-land, and pretend-land. And in that new silence, the absence of birdsong, there is now only the rush and roar of that summer wind, a wind so strong it seems to be generated from the bowl of the marsh itself, this strange prairie landscape deep in the dark north woods—and that steady, roaring sound allows me to sink still deeper.

  And again, for all its roaring, the wind itself pauses, as if wanting to be two things, to do two things: to make its lovely rushing, roaring, sweeping sound, and yet to also admire and observe silence. Often through the course of a July day, the winds will stop for a while—as if the weight of the heat that has spawned them finally oppresses them too for a bit—and in that lull, and despite the heat, the Townsend's warbler will begin to sing again, as if calling out to the heat, or as if frantic to fill the space of that lovely midday silence. As if he cannot help himself.