The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  They keep telling me what everyone has been saying since each of the girls was born, and what I have found to be true: about how fast it goes—and I agree, and thank them for their counsel. My friends keep looking at the girls' little baskets of berries and smiling, and saying that same thing again and again, throughout the course of the lazy-dusk conversation—about how fast it goes—and yet I don't know what to do about that truth, that inescapable flight, other than to go out into the patches of light scattered here and there along the edges of the old forest and pick strawberries with them in the evening, just as we're doing. And while I'm very grateful for the advice, any advice, I also wonder often if it, the time of childhood, doesn't pass faster for the parent sometimes by considering, and noticing, the speed of its passage as opposed perhaps to a sleepier, less attentive, less fretful awareness of that passage and its nearly relentless pace.

  Either way, it's going to go fast. I know I'm doing what I can to slow it down. Reading to them in the evenings, cooking with them, taking them on hikes, and swimming in the mountain lakes...

  Any activity I do with them could be done faster and more efficiently, but only recently have I come to understand that the slower and more inefficiently we do these things, the greater is my gain, our gain; the less quickly that galloping stretch of time passes. Taking three hours to fix a single, simple meal is a victory. Coming back from two hours in the woods with only a dozen strawberries left over is a triumph. Chaos and disorderliness can be allies in my goals of spending as much time as possible with them. If I'll only watch and listen, they'll show me—for a while—how to slow time down: instructing me in a way that I could never otherwise learn from the caring counsel of my friends, and their experiences.

  Still, it's good to hear it, even if bittersweet. I know not to argue with them, or deny it. I know, or think I know, the sound of the truth, and it's wonderful to have their support in the matter.

  We say our leisurely goodbyes and part company in the hanging dusk turning quickly now to darkness so that we need to turn our lights on, traveling down the road on our way through the old forest. On the way home, the girls would eat every single one of the last of the berries if I let them—would run right through the last of our supplies in only a minute or two—and so I put the little straw baskets in the cab of the truck, out of reach.

  A couple of days later, after an afternoon spent at the falls, we're walking along a gravel road, again at dusk, and again the girls are finding the tiny wild strawberries. The twenty-seventh ofJuly: hot days, cold nights. It's a couple of miles back to the truck, and the girls alternate between running and walking slowly; and again I try to relax and release, and give myself over to what seems to me to be the irregular, even inscrutable logic of their pace, their seemingly erratic stops and starts. Stretching their freedom, then coming back.

  They run pell-mell for a while down the road, then slow to a saunter. Lowry stops at one point and looks up at the sky for long moments.

  "What are you doing?" I ask.

  "Listening to the leaves," she says. And she's right; just above the louder sound of the rushing creek, the drying leaves of the riverside cottonwoods are rattling slightly, and sounding different, drier: autumnal already.

  She's four! It pleases me deeply, so much so that I don't even say anything other than offering some mild concurrence.

  Farther down the road she stops again, and announces, "It smells good here." It's the creekside bog orchids, intensely fragrant—almost overpoweringly so, like cheap perfume—and both girls walk out into the orchids to smell them better, and Lowry tells us that they "smell better than the shampoo with the silver cap."

  They run for a short distance, with me trailing right behind them, for safety—giving them their freedom, yet guarding them in lion country—and they stop yet again. And when I ask what they're doing this time, Low says quietly, as if from dreamland, "Listening to water."

  They're both just standing there, staring at a glade below, in the dimming light: mesmerized, it seems, by the very fabric of the landscape, the interlocking of all those different species and sizes of trees; and I realize with a wonderful bittersweetness that I really don't have a clue as to what either of them is thinking or feeling, only that they are fully suspended in the business of being children—that they are in a place I want them to be, and yet where I cannot go; though even as I am thinking this, and thinking about how totally oblivious they are, in the moment, to my adult presence, Low turns her gaze from the mountains and tells me she thinks I'm standing too close to the edge of the road and the steep slope leading down to the river.

  "Don't slide down there," she says, taking my hand. "I don't want to lose you." Like something dropped in tall grass.

  We resume our journey. Not too far from where we've parked, we encounter a dead garter snake in the road, tire struck, but intact. They're fascinated, of course, both by their instinctual, archetypal fear of snakes and by the archetype of death; and they examine the snake, the specimen, like little scientists, stirring it gently with a stick—it still looks alive—and Lowry sprinkles a little dust on its head, as if in some pagan ritual.

  We pass on, then, though she's quiet all the way to the truck, and when I ask her what's the matter some fifteen minutes later, she says, "It makes me sad when things die."

  What do I know about girls, or anything? Would not a little boy—a boy such as myself, perhaps, have wound the dead snake around his wrist to wear as a bracelet, an amulet, or tossed it on his sister?

  All I can do, often, is watch, and listen. So often it feels as if I'm treading behind them, observing, listening, and learning other rhythms, rather than being out in front, as if breaking trail for them, the way I had always assumed it would be, being a parent.

  This is supposed to be a book about the months of the year, and about this one singular landscape. But again and again, watching the girls watch the landscape helps me see it more fully, and in new ways, whether down on my hands and knees at ground level, or staring off at the horizon.

  There's still time for me to learn some of what they see and know and feel. It's not too late. I can still learn, or relearn, some if not all of what they seem to know intuitively about, among other things, an engagement with time. When to walk, when to run, when to rest, when to dream. When to be tender—more often than not—and, by extension, when to be all other things, as well.

  I want to believe that my bitterness and cynicism, and my fears for the environment, fade when in their company; that such worries leach away, as if back into the soil of the landscape itself, where they might even be absorbed by the rattling cottonwoods and the scented orchids. It probably is not that way at all, but some days, after a good day spent in the woods with the girls, that is how it feels; and I rarely come away from such days without feeling that I have learned something, even if I'm not sure what it is, and that although time certainly has not ceased or even paused, at least it has not accelerated in that awful way it can do sometimes, slipping out from beneath and away from you, as if you've lost your footing on ice or some other slick surface.

  I guess it's better to be aware of the briskness of its passage than not, after all. It's going to go fast either way. But if you're aware of its brevity, then at least you'll be aware too of the eddies and slow stretches.

  But my friends who stopped and visited the other evening when we were picking berries were right as rain. It's going to go real fast either way. The best I can do is try to keep up.

  More guests, guests pouring into the homes of all Montana family and friends, in the summer, pouring in like water through a breach in the earthen wall of the other nine months, friends and family flooding a year or more's absence, compressing it to the point, vacation, where we can only joke about it among ourselves, the intensity and busyness of summer: entertaining, cooking, taking hikes, doing so at a recreational pace that we would probably never otherwise attain, left unchallenged by summer visitage...

  Elizabeth and I
have it pretty easy: most of our guests are low-key and self-entertaining, particularly useful traits when one batch is leaving on a Sunday morning and another arriving on a Sunday evening.

  Ferocious games of badminton out on the grass-clad rocky drain field, like some crude parody of Victorian England. The shuttlecock fluttering upward while just beyond the stone wall, and in the dark forest, lions and grizzlies wander, their footprints squishing in the mud along the little creek bank. A great gray owl, with its four-foot wingspan, cruises through the yard at dusk, made curious by the shuttlecock perhaps, and alights in a tree at the edge of the woods and watches for a while, its head seeming as large as a man's.

  The girls manage to capture a tiger swallowtail, one that has already been wounded in a previous engagement, and decide to keep it for a pet for a few days. They bring it into the house and put her—they have named her Zoey, so we know she's a female—on the cut flowers in a vase. For the rest of the evening, and much of the next day, she flies around the house, looking so festive and exuberant that it makes some of the adults wonder, Well, why not have a butterfly for a pet, and let it have the run of the house? What's a little occasional yellow dusting against the kitchen window? The tiny little sound of butterfly wings fluttering, at night, just before going to roost.

  Some accident befalls Zoey, however. We're not sure what. Some excess of kindness or attention from the girls is my guess—perhaps they tried to fashion a dress for her, or even a leash, to take her out to their clubhouse—and only the next day Zoey breathes her last: languishing and then expiring, with a sad and disturbing shudder reminiscent of a Hollywood heroine, and the first and easiest lesson is learned well: wild things don't belong in captivity. And I can't help but believe that there are all sorts of other lessons, or at least the foundations for other lessons, laid deeper, as well, in a manner that stopping roadside to examine some grille-stuck moth or butterfly could never have accomplished.

  With a garden hand shovel, we dig a grave on a sunny patch of hill, amid a blossoming of the yarrow on which she liked to feed. The girls have spent the last couple of hours making a little box for her, lining its cardboard walls with scraps of velvet ribbon and pictures from nature magazines, and when it is time to lower her into that spot, we place a few flowers around her, and Mary Katherine officiates solemnly but succinctly, informing us, "She was a good butterfly, and we will miss her."

  There are half a dozen of us standing around the graveside. I quote the epigraph from Jim Harrison's novel Dalva attributed to an old saying—"We loved the earth but could not stay"—and then we fill the hole back in with its three shovelfuls of loose, sun-grayed dirt, and tamp in the headstone, a piece of broken clay tile, upon which the girls have scrawled, in black Magic Marker, "Here lies Zoey She was a good butterfly. May she rest in peace. She filled our days with beauty."

  We stand around a few moments longer, each of us thinking our quiet thoughts, and then wander on back up to the house, to begin preparing the evening's feast.

  They see me out the window, picking those weeds: stooping to pluck up a daisy, to unroot a thistle, to grub a sprout of hawkweed, to assail the gentle dandelions. Sometimes, when they are with me, they stoop to do the same. It's a dilemma. How much do I teach my children to fear the weeds of the world? Do I want their happiness to be even slightly or infinitesimally diminished, or rather, prevented—by an occurrence as common as the pressure of weeds, an occurrence that will be made only more common in the future? Who would wish such a thing upon his or her children?

  And yet, how else to define beauty, and how to define values and standards? It seems easy on paper to parse out an equilibrium of moderation, but less easy out in the real world.

  I want them to know of unrestrained love—not just mine for them, but even for lesser things, such as a meadow of green grass. I want fiercely for them to know of uncompromised things, both large and small. Of the lessons of compromise, I believe there will be plenty of opportunity later, and always, to learn those.

  Can one know compromise and unrestrained joy or love or any other passion both? Like a landscape perhaps that is sometimes one thing and other times another; or like an animal, some certain species, that has two dwellings.

  More wind, rivers of wind further into July—brushing against the end of it—so that not only the tall marsh grass itself is bent flat, shuddering, but even the more slender of the lodgepoles are bent over like taut fishing poles that have hooked their tight lines to some invisible underground force, one they might or might not have been seeking in the first place. Bright orange sparks of hawkweed rest in the trash can in my cabin, as if the fires have already arrived. The wind gusts through my open windows, knocks pictures from the wall, and heat lightning flashes and rolls to the west, but still no rain, nearing four weeks now without rain, only an ever-increasing heat. The faint scent of smoke somewhere, and the slightest haze. Change. I pick the pictures up, hang them back in their places. The heart quickens.

  The next morning, a goldfinch is perched on the alder branch closest to my window. Though it's early, already the dry wind is blowing again. Out along the marsh's edges, Bohemian waxwing chase moths, stalling and swooping, but that one bird, the greenish-yellow goldfinch, sits there next to my window with its head cocked, looking in. Its eye is dark and wet and fixed, and as I stand motionless so as not to frighten it, looking back, it seems certain to me that across that short distance—three, four feet—I can feel deeply the first summonings, already, of migration. As if only this morning, for the first time all summer, has that biological imperative surfaced. As if today, only today, finally today, it is time to begin to begin. As if there is somehow an immeasurable but profound difference between yesterday and today.

  Even in July, perhaps the surest and most stable of months—the safest and most reassuring—there is almost always, in every moment, and in every moment between a moment, the steady march forward, or downward, and some aspect of leave-taking, whether seen or unseen, like an underground river that flows just beneath the surface of a fixed slab of sun-warmed rock.

  AUGUST

  FIRST BELLFLOWER BLOOM, first twinflower, first monkshood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. Wild strawberries too, red as fire, and hawkweed, colonies and colonies of it spreading through the forests and meadows, displacing native plants, eaten by nothing, its blossoms brilliant orange, like glowing sparks. Butterflies congregate in huge swarms near any cliff-side seep or spring as water dwindles, with the swarms, the butterfly colonies, becoming larger as the heat expands. To our north woods shade-loving selves, it feels as it does when you stoke a stove too full of dry wood, too much too fast—as if someone is throwing such wood on the sun itself—and though doubtless one of the reasons the butterflies gather in such immense numbers around the drying-out damp patches is to feed on the saturated mineral residue left behind as the puddles and ponds evaporate, they are after the pure water too, I think; and to happen upon such a colony while on a walk through the heated woods (trying to stay in the shade of the trees), the impression one receives at first—just before they all spring into the vortex of flight in a random chaos swirl, disrupting all those thousands of fruit vendors' stands over in India, Morocco, and Hong Kong—is that the butterflies have been gathered at those seeps and springs, hunched over them with fluttering wings in an attempt to fan some faint coolness onto those waters, or even to provide, with the stained-glass church windows of their wings, some glimmering protection, as if even trying, with the filter of their wings, to disguise or camouflage that water from the consuming gaze of the sun.

  Almost every year it is this way, in August—hot and dry, with the guessing game that really began back in the heart of winter, as we watched the snow fall, or not fall, coming right down to the whittled point of now. Will the fires come today, tonight, tomorrow? Later this week, or the middle of next week?

  As the woods become ever more still and hot, as the last ghosts of moisture oven-bake dry from the last twig, and the
last pine needle—as the green and living trees themselves begin to dry out, with some of them dying even while still standing up, their needles browning as if the fire has already passed through—the question that back in January or February might have been an if seems inescapably now a when.

  Weather reports shift by the hour and take on the immediacy of war briefings: wind directions and velocities, temperature, humidity, and storm forecasts. As the heated rock shell of the mountains grows hotter each day, like so many bricks baking in the oven, the convective updraft from those violent heatings takes on the force of coal-fired bellows, or even the exhalations of a lung-heated living thing, sending invisible towering plumes of heat, pistons of unlit fire, straight up, where—thirty and forty thousand feet later—they finally cool, condensing and spreading into apocalyptic-looking mushroom clouds.

  They are not yet done, in their cooling. The fire is still in them. It seeks to return to the rocks from which it was birthed—or if not yet birthed, conceived, in that August heat.

  The weather reports tell us who is getting what and where, all around the state: lightning with rain, or lightning without rain. Worst of all—or rather, most frightening of all, if one is frightened of these things—lightning with no rain, accompanied and driven by high winds.

  It comes slowly, in August, the awareness that the lush bounty of spring and green summer, the rampant growth, has now become like a sort of trap or prison, if one allows oneself to be frightened by such things—the cell walls of every living plant, every grass and forb, twig and branch and limb, leaching paper dry, kindling dry, gunpowder dry—all this botanical exuberance, all that life, surrounding you now, surrounding everything, with its husks—husks everywhere—and even if you love fire and love the pulse of life it brings back to a landscape in its aftermath, you cannot help but be a little frightened, standing before the immensity of such a power, and waiting.