The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  The sun seems almost always to be overhead, beating down. Ten o'clock seems as hot as two o'clock, barely tolerable, and beneath such an unchanging zenith, the already weak human sense of direction becomes further challenged so that only the silhouettes of familiar mountains can guide you to north or south, east or west, rather than the traditional cant and tilt and rise and fall of the sun.

  Except for the force of the life shriveling from the forest, the woods are extraordinarily silent. Sometimes a lone raven will glide past, high overhead—how can they fly in this heat, and them black as obsidian; are their wings as hot with absorbed heat, perhaps, as fire itself?—and you will see its shadow on the ground as it passes in front of that directionless sun. And spinning, looking backwards, trying to see where the bird that cast that shadow is, or was, you can rarely find it, for by the time you have turned and looked up at the sun and then quickly away, trying to figure out which way the bird was traveling, it's already gone, and it is as if someone again has tossed another stick onto the fire of the sun.

  In this, the hottest month—just as with the coldest—there are long days in which nothing happens, or in which nothing seems to happen. A journal no longer even bothers reporting the weather, which is always the same—windless, clear, hot—and there doesn't seem to be any significant or dramatic animal activity. Even the trees and forbs and grasses are dormant in their drying out, beginning to seem as lifeless as if already in the true leached-out heart of winter. The birds are silent in the heat, as are the fledglings on their nests, tiny, fuzzy, bulge-eyed, crooked-limbed scrabbling things that are due somehow, miraculously, in Costa Rica and points farther south in only three or four months.

  This is the key to peace, I think, or at least one of the major keys that will allow one inside one or more of the gates that might surround the kingdom of peace: a learned ability to observe and catalogue, perhaps even if only intuitively and emotionally, as many of the different paces of life, and its changes—order into disorder, and vice versa—as possible; and to become comfortable, even fluent, in the recognition of these cycles: whether the one-day's arc of light across an equinox sky, or a month's tracking of the moon, or a deer or elk herd's annual migration from mountaintop to valley bottom, or the thousand-year cycle of a cedar forest growing old, or even the tectonic creep of continents, the imperceptible slip and thrusts of glaciers.

  To not automatically apply a human-centered or individual-centered scale of time and its perceptions on a subject other than oneself surely allows one entrance through at least one of the many gates of the high walls surrounding that kingdom of peace.

  It's hard enough to learn our own cycles, and even those are not so intimate and always with us, completely in our control; how can we possibly expect to control those of the world, at the fringes and in the margins of which we stand briefly, for our eighty-eight years, or whatever strange and ultimately small number we are allotted?

  I would like to think this is what spirit is like, what dying is like—and what waiting to be born is like too: looking down on the green earth, the gold and red earth, the white earth, the black and brown bare earth, and watching all the changes drift across it, again and again—deserts becoming old forests becoming ice-capped mountains becoming oceans becoming deserts again, the changes drifting across the calmly scrutinized terrain below with the gently inexorable power and assurance of cloud drift, or even the shadows cast by cloud drift.

  From such grander scale, more beauty, not less, would be able to be seen and understood. The brief lives of humans, and humans' histories, would appear like tiny flashbulb poppings of light in the darkness—the synapses of a moment. The blossoming of an individual flower on one hillside on one mountain range, another flash of light.

  What scale should we use when we look at a thing? Different scales for different things, right?

  I'm old fashioned, I know, but I'm convinced that in almost all regards, the slower and longer and more moderate a scale, the better, with regard to our own plans and machinations, and particularly with regard to our relationship with nature. There's certainly nothing new in such a thought—isn't this but a windy attempt to define the words patience or humility, or even forbearance? But for someone as impulsive and scatter-minded as I am, this is a task, even upon so substantial and assured a landscape as this one: a task that still, twenty years later, I seek to learn hungrily, in almost every moment of every season, on every hill and along every creek bend, in every consuming glance, every quick, ravenous memory, each one like the spark of light made by a single match on that dark mountain in the night.

  Even these pages however are but a compression of the events and images I've gathered in my drift across this landscape, and in the seasons' cloud drift across me, anchored or moored here at the marsh: a gathering of the sparks, or the things that have appeared in my mind as sparks.

  And again, in the spaces between those sparks (not spaces in which no sparks were occurring, surely, but merely spaces in which I failed to perceive or observe the background cyclic sparking), there are long spaces of landscape and long spaces of time in which nothing seems to happen: as if such space, such nighttime, is the matrix for those sparks. From a distant enough perspective, then, even amid that vast night, there would be light anywhere you care to look, perhaps; light everywhere, a sky and firmament of light, perhaps, even where we might perceive darkness.

  Or maybe these pages, with their compression of the days forming a filter through which to look at this landscape, are not even so much like match strikes in my mind (though even now, in the remembering of them, that is still how they seem to me: ignitions of yellow light flaring up in an otherwise black and sleeping void in which nothing is perceived). It's not even as if I'm sleeping, but as if I'm simply resting again, waiting to be born, or having already lived.

  Perhaps in these pages, as I remember the hours and the days even as they are vanishing behind me, these observations and notes and memories become for me like the mineralized residue, the concentric rings of salt rime left behind in each vanishing August seep and puddle of moisture, thin shining layers of glittering salt dust being fed on briefly by butterflies before being scrubbed entirely clean again then by the rains that return later in the autumn.

  Even as the world seems to become beaten down by the heat—browning, wilting, entering dormancy, even dying and preparing to burn, or to be tested by the burning—the marsh itself remains, as ever, a thing of beauty, as astounding in its senescence as in its spring and summer vibrancy, or its winter serenity. Neither words nor paint can capture the sepia tone of the marsh grasses as they dry out, for their color, or vanishing-of-color, is somehow more than compensated for by the mysterious rustling and clattering sound that accompanies the grasses and sedges in any rare bit of breeze; and the loss of color, the indescribable nature of it, is somehow also accompanied—compensated—by the increasingly metallic reflectivity of the August sun glinting across those bronzed blades, like ten thousand or ten hundred thousand drawn swords.

  Dragonflies rise from those dying tangles of swords, seemingly as infinite as the grass blades and sedges themselves, and they alone are the only movement out over the great plain of the marsh, swirling in no ordered migration but merely each to his or her whirling and clattering own, stirred by the heat, and filling the air with the sunlit prism-glitter of their lace wings, each dragonfly illuminated in this manner as if lit from within, as if burning, and as if fueled by that beautiful jewel-fire.

  Even from a distance of four or five hundred yards, clear across to the other side of the marsh, your eye can fall on, and watch, the flight of any one individual dragonfly, filled as it is with its own corona, and with the cool, dark blue-green of the old spruce forest standing as backdrop.

  The sight of all those dragonflies is calming, as the marsh always is, and it occurs to me that often it is the two poles of the extreme that becalm us; that we can be led to serenity by austerity, and yet we can also be comforted by extreme b
ounty: the fruit stand with its bushels full of vibrant color and rich odor and supple textures, the full smokehouse with its hanging array of meats, the full woodpile, the immense and diverse green-leafed garden...

  As if we are trying to find a way—a confidence—to live in the more complicated space between these two larger, more visible, more nameable primary poles or places, the black and the white. As if—still so relatively new to the world—we are not yet fully accustomed to the middle ground and its mosaics of subtlety and paradox.

  How can we love a kind of animal such as a deer or an elk and yet love to eat it too—and worse yet, or so it seems, love to hunt it, even to kill it? How can we love the deep wilderness, the places where there will never be roads, and yet love the museums and concert music halls, the fine restaurants?

  These vast distances, these extraordinary poles—these dramas of boom and bust, of rank wilderness solitude and exploration, and of seething humanity, are the easy things to love, the things that clamor for our attention. I suspect that one of our more unobserved challenges as humans—as a species—lies not so much in the noisy explorations of those occasional and highly visible dramas, but in how well we pass through the middle ground, the quiet days: the drift between the rapids, and the lovely distances between flood and forest fire and blizzard.

  This is the last place there will be water. Even when the creeks and rivers themselves are but dry racks of bones, shining cobbled and white beneath the eye of the drought, and beneath the prolonged accumulating weight of climatic change, the peaty depths of the marsh will almost always retain some moisture, deep in its earthen breast of the centuries.

  Yet even the marsh will not be here forever. As it slowly dries, the trees standing at its edges—nurtured by the marsh's center—will fall into the center, sinking and rotting, and feeding the marsh grasses; feeding, in their decomposition, the sun-struck, waterlogged soup that helps support, like a puff of warm breath, all those beautiful clattering dragonflies, and so much more: geese and moose and wolves and deer, warblers and vireos. But eventually, if a drying spell continues for a long enough time, the rate of rot will slow and the tree carcasses will begin forming soil.

  Seedlings will take root in the nurse-log carcasses of the fallen, and will rise, living long enough to provide some shade, which will be the beginning of the end for the marsh. The process is called eutrophication, and is one of the slowest nongeologic organic processes I can think of. It might take thousands of years, until one day—was it really only the blink of an eye?—the marsh will be a buried lens of coal, a lake of brittle carbon beneath ten thousand feet of time.

  We want stability, we want reassurance, we want knowledge. And yet how frail we are, really, how wonderfully we quake and tremble beneath the fullness of emotions (or knowledge), purely felt or deeply known—wavering beneath such weight like windswept grass, or as if in ecstasy. This is part of what it is like to be human, so new to the world, and all in all, I do not think I would trade it for the quiet confidence of the other animals, so much more assured in the world and in the seasons; though I have to say, there are times when I envy them the majesty of that assurance, and that instinctual knowledge: those whose reservoirs are so much deeper and older than our own still developing wells.

  I think that to look down on the larger passage of time—beyond a day, beyond a season or a year or a lifetime, or even the quick shudder of human existence—and to see not only all the geese drifting south in their annual migrations and all the elk winding down single file off the mountain, through the deep snow, but to see simultaneously the larger drifts of geologic and meteorological change, and of speciation, to see even the slight and gradual canting wobble of the planet itself, would be both sublime and terrifying, and too magnificent—for now—to even imagine.

  By August, the weeds, their own kind of fire, have been mostly pulled. Left untended, they are like a kind of double fire, or eternal dead fire, rather than the rhythmic, living pulse of true fire. They displace the native plants and grasses and give nothing in return—nothing eats them, and often the August-brittle clot of them, explosive with seed heads, acts as a kind of fuse, making a thick mat of extremely flammable fine fuel buildup that can carry a fire quickly in places where it would not otherwise creep or travel. The weeds are the sign of an injured landscape, a harbinger of loss, and a great compromise: of trading the specific for the general, the acutely crafted for the abstract. Fecund plenitude for sterile paucity.

  Grant me the serenity to differentiate between the things I can and cannot change, goes one famous prayer; and the encroachment of weeds lies somewhere in the nebulous middle, sometimes on one side of the line and other times on the other. I don't know if I can keep the weeds out of the land I perceive myself to be most responsible for—the relative postage stamp of land that I own, which is to say, live on, and pay taxes on—but I can try, and each year as I fight that battle, pulling the weeds—knapweed, hawkweed, thistle, St. John's wort, and dandelions—I do not so much delude myself into thinking I can hold back the tide, the drift, of their own movements, but instead look at that annual work, the dozens of hours spent on hands and knees in ultra-close proximity to the ground, grubbing and pulling, as a kind of sacrament, or insignificant tithing, or even a modest kind of prayer.

  There are those who will say that change is inevitable, and that weeds are nature too, but I am not sure I would agree. For me, there is already plenty of change just in the normal cycles of the seasons, and in the infinite and specific time-crafted cycles within each day of those seasons. It's my observation that the weeds fragment and isolate and disconnect those other, more supple and interconnected changes, and that it can be said then that not only are the weeds enemies of life beyond themselves (they prepare the land for nothing other than more of themselves) but enemies of change as well.

  Even a glacier, with its frozen cap of hundreds of feet of blue ice, would be more loving and life-giving than the weeds, as the glacier growled slowly over the stony world below, grinding and carving out great buried hanging valleys and magnificent cirques and rivers and mountain ranges, all to be revealed tens of thousands of years later, once the glacier retreated, like the lifting of a sheet; like the unveiling of a work of art a hundred thousand years or more in the making.

  Eventually, however, the weeds are vanquished. Perhaps, like some foolish machine, you have traded the hours of your life for the lives of weeds—or rather, the lives of weeds in the one small patch of ground for which you've decided to assume responsibility. One morning or afternoon, they are finally all gone, you've got them all pulled, and, as if your prayers have been answered—all those hours spent on bended knees—you are rewarded once again with the beauty of what was once a simple and even unquestioned thing, the sight of a field of grass, for as far as you can see, unblemished by either weed or toxin, and a forest likewise with its full complement of native ground cover, a place still quintessentially native, quintessentially local, quintessentially unique—as unique and fitted as if it were handmade by someone long ago, for the occasion of a gift.

  Maybe I'm just easily entertained, but I can sit and stare at a forest or field free of weeds for the longest time, and be filled with a pleasure and a calmness, beholding that beauty, so deep that surely it transcends any conscious thoughts of phrases like biological integrity or native diversity. Instead, there's a spiritual component to the depth—like staring at a painting by a master, transfixed for long moments on end.

  I feel the same emotions, the strange combination of joy and peace and calm and assurance, when I stare at a rock wall crafted by ancient yeomen to fit the contours of the land—the rocks, the sweat of the yeomen, and the stones fitted so tight as to seem, even from a slight distance, seamless—and too, it is not unlike the same feeling of joy, peace, relief, and wonder one gets while watching a herd of elk or deer moving through the forest, or a flock of geese passing overhead. Everything is still working. All the gears in the fine watch are still fitted
and functioning. And you—tiny you, within all those gears—are therefore likewise.

  It seems to me there are two vital ways of looking at the world, beliefs that have contributed to the various wars and religions throughout our history—all the various isms and experiments in commerce, all the centuries of yearnings and muddled strivings.

  Mankind, as typified by the individual, is either but a tiny cog within a magnificent, majestic, unknowable larger whole or is the very reason for the world's existence, the fulcrum for all other turnings of fate and the seasons, and divinely empowered, made as we are in the image—the exclusive image, mind you—of God.

  For my own part, and like a glutton, I believe both. My own life seems like that of a yellow upturned leaf that has landed on a stream, a river, and has been carried along on the larger current. Sometimes the bright leaf is in the center of the river, riding elegantly and with such verve that it seems to be the center of all else around it, and imbued with meaning and direction, even fate; other times, as with a drawing back of scale or perspective, it is just one yellow leaf on one small river in one small valley in one small mountain range, on one vast continent moving very quickly through the even vaster mass of time—mountains and glaciers of time, wildfires of time, oceans and deserts and prairies of time.

  What I mean to be saying is that it is not the labor of my hands pulling all those weeds, pulling them like prayer or beseeching, that causes the berries to arise, in August, after the weeds are gone. But there is a story-making part in us, an eye for flow or narrative, and an attempt to discern order and pattern and rhythm and perhaps even meaning, which lures us again and again into wanting to believe in such connections.