The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Looking down on our distant valley and the mountains beyond, and feeling the release of peace spreading through us, it's easy to understand that perhaps this is how it is for the bear too, as he or she wanders these same hills, fitting these hills, and comforted too, doubtless, by both the sweetness and abundance of the berries, the rich purple sugar fuel that will carry him or her, like an underground cosmonaut, tumbling safely through the long, silent dreams of the coming winter.

  I like to believe that those dreams, and those sleeping memories, will be all the richer for having a little extra berry fat to draw on, and that in this richness it's even possible to imagine some crude biological accounting: that this bush, loaded to groaning, will ensure a safe and good sleep for the fifteenth of January, and this bush, the sixteenth, and this bush, the seventeenth—and so on, and so on, even as I know it is not that way at all, that there is nothing linear or definable about the birth or manufacture of dreams, any more than one can plot or direct the shape and direction of a childhood.

  It's hard to imagine snow, or hibernation, as we wander heat-struck across the mountain, gulping water and sweating: salt-rimed, berry-stained, charcoal-smudged, blood-scratched.

  A little higher on the mountain, we encounter some overturned quartz boulders, summer residue of where the bear—probably a grizzly—had been digging for ants, as they do often in July, after the vegetation begins drying out but the berries have not yet appeared. And then a short distance above that, thirty or forty feet higher on the hill, we find an old hand-dug mineshaft—little deeper than a grave, really—where some gold-crazed wanderer of a hundred years ago picked apart this same little seam of outcropping yellowed quartz, scratching and scraping, trying to reach deeper but evidently not finding anything, for no mine was ever developed. The hammer-broke detritus of his efforts, the quartz rubble being slowly covered with lichens, looks like the treasure itself, not the gold: as if some master jeweler had carried a huge bag of jewels all the way up near the top of this mountain and then spilled them out in an immense pile, for no other reason than as an offering—to his God, or the mountain—or even as if offering them to some grizzly bear, or even the idea of a grizzly bear, a hundred years hence, which would paw and sift and scratch through those same boulders, feeding on the ants that lived beneath them: mining those ants, year after year, turning the larger quartz rocks over and over, first one way, one year, and then the next, the subsequent year; and in that manner, moving some of the quartz boulders slowly down the hill over the years, like the workings of one small glacier or one lone miner...

  I love the children this valley, this landscape, makes. I love how the berry-stained girls, with their buckets of ripe fruit and uncomplaining of heat or thirst or scratches, are continuing to notice and marvel at the beautiful sunset clouds, as the storm builds. I love how they examine the old miner's rubble with interest and gather a few of the crystals to take home for their windowsills, as careful with and pleased by their selections as any window-front jewelry shopper on Madison Avenue. I love their values, their choice of sunsets over silver or gold.

  I love how, when hiking back down off the mountain—half galloping, really, in the long blue dusk—we surprise a bear bedded down in a lodgepole thicket, how we hear the bear's chuff of alarm, his or her call to let us know of his or her location, and the noisy thrashing of saplings, then not a sound of either escape or advance, but merely a noise-making, a standing-of-one's ground, designed to let us know where the bear is; and a sound designed, we understand immediately, to encourage us to detour to another route down the mountain, which we do carefully, quietly, speaking calmly to the bear, or in the bear's direction, as we do so.

  I love how the girls are a little jittery—I've got them tucked in behind me—but how also, by my continued enthusiasm and expressions of amazement at our good fortune to have just had such an experience, I'm able to help them understand how lucky we are to be having such an experience—how rare it is, and how rare these bears are in this day and age.

  I love how when they get home, they will have a story to tell, several stories. And this might sound a little abstract and ethereal, but I love too how I think the lessons of place and fit must come together for them here, eventually, as naturally as puzzle pieces that assemble by themselves: the observation that this rich, wild land can include them in its giving; the observation that other beings are included in this giving, this bounty, the great bear napping there at the foot of his berry hill; the observation of beauty in the clouds, beauty stacked on top of beauty, which is, after all (how easily we forget this, sometimes!) the essence and identity of the world.

  I love too how all these little puzzle pieces go uncommented on in their lives, for the most part, but instead only form the braid, the fabric of their lives, day after day, as we travel into the future, in the manner of a mason laying down stones for some course, some wall or structure of the mason's making, the final design of which even the builder does not yet know, concentrating instead only on that day's work, and the next, and only occasionally pausing to look back at that which has already been laid.

  In the gathering dusk, nearer to the bottom of the hill, we find yet another lone blackberry bush, once again so burdened with fruit that its thorny branches are splitting, and so we sit there even into the darkness, plucking and eating—what are a few more scratches, among so many?—while the stars begin to appear above us and, or so we imagine, as the disgruntled bear we so rudely interrupted moves slowly up the hill in the night's returning coolness, browsing and grazing, storing up fat for the coming winter.

  It's hard to imagine ice and snow and hibernation as even being on the agenda in the midst of the broiling days, but it's merely another of the valley's lessons, that nothing stands alone or unconnected to anything else; everything is still attached, even if sometimes only tenuously now, to something else, to almost everything else. And whether I am spoiling them with a worldview that may not mesh well with either the future or the world beyond this place, I cannot say. I know only that this valley and its rhythms offer them riches—not just physical richness, but of the spirit—and for this I am grateful, and astounded. The richness of landscape upon the richness of childhood.

  On the way home, we talk about pies, debate the merits of cobblers and tartlets; discuss milk shakes, berries with cream, berries in muffins and pancakes and waffles, berries in yogurt: worshiping them, and the force that crafted their wonderful specificity, just as up on the mountain, the bear moves through the bushes, down on all fours, worshiping too—giving thanks, no doubt, and praying his or her way toward winter, even though there are still the flames of summer to pass through first.

  When the fires finally come, we are up in Canada, having driven up there with Elizabeth's mother, who has always wanted to see Banff and Lake Louise. It's pretty country, I suppose, although I'm reminded, as I am so often, of how much we tend to look at the notion of wilderness from a human recreational viewpoint rather than through the lens of biological wilderness—species richness, diversity, and biotic productivity—so that as a result, our swamps and lowlands and other less visually glamorous places get short shrift during the discussions of whether to protect a place or not protect it.

  I'm made more than a little antsy by all the roadside miniature golf venues, nearing Banff, and the bide-a-wee cottages (such as the one where we'll be staying), and am reminded again how very much this country, this continent, needs to protect the last of its big wild—the last of its rank and unruly and often impenetrable places, which still contain in their core that essence of spirit that, as Wallace Stegner and others have pointed out, has had such a vital hand in shaping and influencing the very American culture that we profess to cherish: the strong, the free, the wild, the individualistic.

  I'm made antsy too, on our little vacation journey, by the ferocity of the lightning storm we've driven through—a truly spectacular, even phantasmagoric display of electricity bouncing around in the tops of the craggy Canadi
an mountains, the sky crackling and booming with wind and lightning but no rain.

  It's probably not doing this at home, I tell myself. This storm probably went north of us.

  We put in our two days at the resort swimming pool, the water slide, the games of horseshoes and volleyball, yadda yadda— Forgive my wolverine-ishness, I beseech my family, and myself, silently, and focus on being in the moment and participating in the midst of the world rather than its outer fringes, which I so love to haunt. And finally, though not soon enough, we're ready to journey back home, and it is only on checking out and paying for our room that the desk clerk hands us a message, a note, that they received the day before, which says, in essence, that there is a forest fire in our yard.

  "We tried calling your room yesterday afternoon," the clerk notes, "but nobody answered."

  We make a quick call to Wendy's mother, Sue, who tells us that things are under control—that the FedEx driver, Darrell, was delivering a package and noticed the smoke and reported the fire, and that a Forest Service crew composed of local high school students was able to get in and scratch a ring around the fire to contain it before it got out of hand. The fire was back in an old-growth stand of cedar and larch and spruce, protected from the wind, and the soil was moister there than if the fire had been out in the open, exposed to the drying of the sun—but still, they caught it just in time, felling brush and ringing the fire with bare earth as if hastily building a corral around some unruly wild animal before dashing off to other fires.

  In the last twenty-four hours, Sue tells us, there were tens of thousands of lightning strikes on the Kootenai, and hundreds of fires sprang up overnight. In fact, after the fire crew left our fire, another, larger one was discovered several hundred yards farther south—downwind—and Sue's husband, Bill, and other neighbors went in with their saws and shovels and attacked it, felling the flaming trees and fighting the advancing walls of flame, and they were barely able to get that one under control. Even so, they needed the help of helicopters airlifting thousand-gallon buckets of water.

  Things have stabilized for now, Sue says—there's no real need to rush home, but we might want to start thinking about it, she says, because the forecast is for more wind and dry lightning.

  The drive seems to take forever, and we have not traveled even an hour before we see that, in addition to the Yaak, southern Canada is on fire too. Huge plumes of gray smoke rise from various mountains like the activity from vast and scattered encampments. The sight of it is primal, deeply affecting, and not altogether unpleasant. Part of your body responds with instinctive fear, understanding that the landscape you call home is being changed dramatically, not by the pace of glaciers but by an acceleration of time that rivals almost the proverbial blink of an eye.

  There is a part of you too, however, that is mesmerized by the beauty of it, the spectacle and magnitude of nature's fuller force revealing itself—of the sleeping or latent energy of the forest combusting to manifest itself all at once, so that anyone can understand, suddenly, how powerful nature is, and how ultimately our illusions of control are but fragile myths. And even though we're traveling in a twentieth-century automobile, on a paved road, it feels to me at least as if we're getting a glimpse back in time: that this is how these hills and mountains looked in late summer a hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago—even five hundred years ago—and that the columns of smoke could be the signs of various Indian camps gathering for trade.

  The morning sun is obscured by smoke and haze, casting a sepia-bronze light over the landscape, and the closer we get to home, the more smoke we encounter, until finally, crossing the bridge at Lake Koocanusa, it is as if we are driving through fog: and above us, military helicopters swirl, journeying to and from the lake, dipping their giant buckets like dragonflies dabbing eggs, and they ferry their loads into the mountains, and then back out again, empty—each thousand gallons little more than a single launch of spit against the mountains' fires.

  Forest Service trucks, military green and with headlights blazing through the smoke, are everywhere, as are the yellow-slicker-suited fire crews, their bright gear already dirtied by charcoal and ash: the hardest, dirtiest work there is.

  There are fires everywhere, and wisps and plumes of Bryoria lichen, old-man's-beard, are drifting through the sky, as are entire branches. I can feel the whole earth stirring, rising and then lifting up as surely as if it is some immense animal on whose back we have been sleeping, each of us smaller than a flea: and now the animal is standing, and now the animal is beginning to stride forward, going about its own eager business, and we must scramble to even simply hold on; and whether the animal is even aware that we are on its back or not seems irrelevant, for now the world has other needs and desires, in August, which is to burn, to seek the burning, and to move toward and into the burning, so that old things may be cleaned and groomed or otherwise retired or refreshed, and the new things born.

  Is there one massive fire making all that smoke? Or are there hundreds of smaller ones seeking to conjoin? (After all is said and done, only four percent of the forest will have burned—but four percent of a couple million acres is a lot, and even a small fire yields a lot of smoke, so that to our thumping, frightened hearts, it seems as if everything is burning, and as if there is no chance, none, that anything cherished—such as a home, or a favorite grove—will be spared. As if it has all been but a bright dream, and that now the rug is being pulled out from beneath our feet, the very earth itself being pulled out from beneath our feet, and some other, perhaps truer version of the world, some abyss of loss, revealed. Such is the nature of panic, and weakness...)

  I don't know what we're expecting, when we finally drive up: the sight of flames, perhaps, advancing like the tide; trees burning like candlesticks, perhaps, and swirling sparks. We're veterans of past fires in the valley, but always before they have been in the mountains, never down low, where people live.

  The crew has already come and gone—has moved on to other fires, other defense. In the dry bent grass, it's easy to follow their path into the forest; less easy, then, to track them, and I can't discern any one towering column of smoke, as if from a single chimney, like I'd imagined; instead, there is smoke everywhere, smoke low to the ground like fog, smoke in the trees, smoke in the sky, smoke lost inside of smoke.

  It seems different, however, from past fires—in a way I can't quite describe in words, it smells closer, and living, somehow, and it even seems to me that I can discern the odor of green, living trees burning as well as dead and dry logs, and twigs, and branches, taking in the scent of it as one might the nuances of an aged wine in the first sip.

  It's odd not to be able to pinpoint the fire at first, for it to be so close. As I draw nearer, I can smell it—the charcoal odor of burned-black wood denser than the living smoke—this burned-tree odor anchored rather than drifting, and then, even before I see the flames, I can hear them crackling, and it's a most unsettling sound.

  I ascend a little rise and look down into a swale where the fire is still burning, and the sight of it is both beautiful and awful, exhilarating and terrifying, and I stop for a moment, spellbound by this sudden change. All the hundreds of times I have been through these woods, in all seasons, they have always been more or less the same, and unsurprising—comforting in their regularity, reassuring in the predictability of the face they present to me and the world, in step and on time with the meter and rhythm of the seasons.

  Now, however, it is as if the woods have changed identity entirely, as if having abandoned that old logic and accepted a more reckless and less calculated course, or even as if the woods have thrown off some mask, one that had led me to believe I knew these old woods—patient, steady, and enduring—and that some deeper and more volatile and completely contrary way of being has sprung flaming into the world, rising from so far beneath the surface that there had never even been any clue to its prior existence; or none that I had recognized, at any rate.

  My firs
t impression is that the fire is still totally out of control and is still consuming whatever it wants, eating anything and everything it can reach. Breaking out of my frightened reverie, however, I walk closer, down into the ravine where it is located—the fire is about an acre in size, circular in shape, like a glowing, burning eye—and now I can see the human presence that was here yesterday, the new-sawn brush cut and piled away from the fire, and the foot-wide scratching of bare dust, a tiny barrier across which the fire, in theory at least, will be loath to creep, if indeed no wind arises; or rather, if indeed the old forest remains windless, even as the rest of the valley, and particularly the mountains, receive their winds.

  In technical terms, this fire is only contained, not controlled, and certainly not extinguished. In theory, it's burning in on itself, wandering, gnawing at tree trunks and pine needles and branches and limbs, and eating its way underground too, when it can, consuming even the buried roots of trees: traveling anywhere there is a sufficient combination of fuel and oxygen.

  With my heart pounding—even the heat from this small fire is intense, and the wild energy it's throwing out, the unpredictability and forcefulness of it, is considerable: far more than any one person's, or indeed, even any small group of people—I turn and hurry back to the house, where I begin filling gallon jugs of water and loading them into my backpack.

  For the next twenty-four hours, I will haul water nonstop, ten gallons at a time, and will water the fire as if tending a garden, or an antigarden, in which I want a thing to stop growing. Later, in my exhaustion, it will come to seem like a form of prayer, a sacrament and offering both, breathing in the smoke, and making an offering with each labored step, one after the other after the other, back and forth: offering the water to the burning soil and hissing coals and ashes, and to the flames themselves, and understanding, with each additional trip, that there can never be too much water, can never be enough water, and continuing on anyway.