The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Fallen tree trunks gleam in a beautiful latticework of glowing red coals that reveal the gridlike structure of the cell walls once the mask or skin of the trees' bark has been burned away. And it is sobering, each time I think I have extinguished even a single burning log, or the roots of a single burning tree—thinking, finally, that I have at least put out that part of the fire—to find, upon my return a half-hour later, with another ten gallons of water, that the stubborn log has burst back into flame again, is sucking air with every bit the vigor of some newborn, strident creature.

  It's amazing to me how much heat has been produced in only forty-eight hours of burning. It's amazing to me how much fuel, how much biomass, can be contained in one acre—how much history—and no amount of water is going to put it out. I'm only fighting hot spots within that acre, and dampening the edges. Puny.

  It quickly becomes an exercise, a lesson, in the giving up of control. The fire might appear one way to me upon leaving—upon emptying my paltry ten water jugs—subdued, even, in that one certain hot spot I might have targeted, only to appear completely another way when I return an hour later: as if I had never been there, and with wild new orange flames blossoming elsewhere, as if in some beautiful, savage garden.

  And even within this one simple lesson, observed each time between the back-and-forth of my trudging, the lesson expresses itself in even smaller, similar patterns, the same rule and law written now in miniature, within that acre. I can be pouring water on one end of a flaming, cracking log, for instance, and the flames will be extinguished for a moment, but then the other end of the log will begin to flame, spontaneously, it seems, or as if on some sort of seesaw in which some perfect balance must always be struck: where some certain amount of fire must exist, and displacing it from one area only sends it elsewhere. That it is a meteorological phenomenon, as impossible to control as rain or drought, or a hurricane; or a living, biological organism, as impossible to control as life. Or that it is its own thing, a hybrid that is partly meteorological, and yet almost alive too—as time itself sometimes seems to have almost a biological, physical component. In these moments, the fire seems to be almost an organic, living thing, with all of life's various stages—birth, youth, middle age, old age, senescence, death, decomposition. Birth.

  Clearly, the fire is feeding on something at the surface—the various fuels, particularly the decades' buildup of needles and twigs and branches—the dust and detritus, the shed skins, of life—but it seems to be feeding on something in the air, too—temperature and humidity, I suppose—for it is more becalmed early in the morning but then increases in energy throughout the day, each day, as the temperatures increase, no matter how much water I tote, so that it soon seems to me that the fire is exactly like a restless, living thing, corralled only tenuously by that hastily scratched fire ring; and that the animal of it sleeps or at least rests at night but then gets up and wanders again in the daytime, looking for a place to feed.

  (Even as up in the mountains, similar but larger animals of fire—indeed, entire galloping herds—are running, accelerating in the daytime, on the rising convective winds of their own consumption, up the slopes of the mountains, driving themselves up into higher, rockier, drier country, where they will eventually run out of fuel, or food.)

  It seems to me too that the fire is feeding on a third thing, not just wood at the surface or the heat and aridity of the day's air, but on some secret set of instructions or code below—almost like a yearning or desire, perhaps: some conspiracy or partnership between geology and time (if indeed the two are dissimilar enough to even deserve separate names) that calls out for this type of forest to grow in this one place, at this certain point in time, and for this tilt of mountain to receive this much sunlight, and to drain away this much moisture, and to generate, and receive, these certain winds, until one day finally the fire must come as if beckoned.

  And to the land, at the confluence of that hard-rock essence of geology and the wandering animal of time, the fire might feel as pleasurable, as necessary, as the scratching of an itch, as complete and satisfying a fulfillment of fate, perhaps, as when the natural histories of our own lives conspire to assemble with such fitted grace that we are compelled to use words like destiny and preordained.

  After the first twenty-four hours, by which point I've come to understand that though still dangerous and unpredictable, the fire is—for the moment—contained, I'm able to sleep, weary and sore, having learned already to adjust myself somewhat to the rhythms of the fire: resting when it rests, and awakening when it awakens.

  And as I learn the terrain of that burning one acre, I become more confident, walking out through the ashes to douse a burning stump or to rake soil and ash together with water to make a slurry, a paste, helping to cool down or even extinguish the various hot spots within that acre.

  The woods around me are filled with the militaristic sound of helicopters that I cannot see through all the smoke, the airships coming and going, fighting other fires, many of them hundreds or even thousands of times larger than this one, and I can hear also the deeper, steadier drone of the B-52s and C-130s, giant carriers loaded with thousands of pounds of fire retardant. The air is tense with the electricity of engagement, of battle, and the news of each day's developments passes quickly from neighbor to neighbor, through phone calls and visits.

  Fire meetings, briefings, are held regularly at the community center, and there are firefighters and people in uniforms everywhere, coming and going, responding and reacting. People in the valley—residents—begin making checklists, in case a few days of strong dry winds should sweep through. Family photos, heirlooms, that sort of thing.

  Sometimes when I wade out through the ash to get to a burning log with one of my jugs of water, I will encounter a deeper well of ash, as if plunging into a snowdrift, and I'll stumble, momentarily off-balance, and I will have to remind myself to be more careful, to go slower. What if I were to pitch forward into some bed of glowing coals just beneath that blanket of cooler gray ash? How quickly we become accustomed to almost any situation; how readily we learn to assume that as a thing becomes familiar it can no longer be dangerous.

  The smoldering roots are the hardest to extinguish—impossible, really, so that only the snows, when they come, will accomplish that—and there are instances in which root systems smoldered all winter long, venting through the husks of the fire-blackened spars like chimneys. The roots take the heat far underground, as if that is where the fire came from in the first place rather than from the sky, and as if the fire is seeking to return to its secret lair. Sometimes you can feel the roots burning below, even though the patch of ground above is unburned, and that is one of my main concerns—that even though the fire line might hold up all right at the surface, little fingers of fire will burrow beneath the containment ring, like escaping prisoners tunneling to freedom, following the paths and fuel of the underground roots, traveling slowly but undetected, before finally popping back up to the surface on the other side of the line.

  And indeed, I find evidence where such a phenomenon, such a yearning, is occurring—places over on the "safe" side of the line where the ground cover, kinnikkinnick, wild strawberries, and pipsissewa, are drying out and curling, scorching and browning, for no apparent reason; and when I touch those places with my bare hand, the ground is uncomfortably warm, so that I know the fire is just below. When I dribble some of the precious water onto those spots, steam rises from the ground and I can hear the muted, underground gurglings and hissings and belches of the smoldering fire protesting, pausing, and perhaps—for a while—retreating; and my sleep is troubled, and in the afternoons, the dry winds continue to blow.

  This is where we live, however, and because I want the girls to learn it all, to know it all, and to respect rather than fear the power of this place, I recruit them to help me work on the containment, so that by the third day, they are walking through the woods with me, carrying their little garden can sprinklers and splattering
the flames and coals and ashes with me, and scratching at the hot spots, turning the older, cooler ashes up to reveal the warmer ashes below, doing this again and again, ventilating the fire, trying to get some of the heat out of it, turning the ashes over and over as if working autumn tillage into a garden, or as if furrowing the soil already for a spring planting.

  It's a new world for them, this burning forest, and their eyes are sharp; they quickly spy a singularly beautiful sight that I have overlooked, a lone bead lily plant growing unharmed, untouched, near the fire's epicenter, its bright blue egg-shaped fruit glowing like a jewel in that coppery, hazy sunlight.

  The fire crew has been coming through at dawn some days, checking on the fire, stirring the ashes themselves, and Lowry and Mary Katherine have baked a plate of cookies for me to leave for them on a stump there at fire's edge, as if the crew's comings and goings are as mysterious, and appreciated, as those of Santa Claus. When we return the next day, most of the cookies are gone, with only a couple of fragments remaining, with human bites taken out of them, to show us that it was indeed the fire crew and not bears or squirrels or deer or wolves who nibbled at them.

  One of the larger cedar trees still has a steady fire burning in its gut—the heartwood has been hollowed out, so that it's like a chimney—and it seems that no amount of water I can pour down into its roots will faze that fire. Every time I return it is burning again, as ceaseless as an Olympic torch—and when I tap on the tree with the end of my shovel, it makes a wonderful tympanic drumming sound; and again, I'm disoriented and nearly mesmerized by the speed with which the landscape, or this portion of it, has changed. I used to be a geologist, and am more accustomed to the pace and rhythms of glaciers, to the scribings of ice and stone rather than this breathless work of fire.

  Many people, when they are in love with a landscape, will speak wistfully of their desire to have seen that landscape in an earlier time, before the fragmentation and reduction—before its diminishment to what is indisputably a more human scale. I share that useless wistfulness often, and sometimes find myself trumping it, wondering what the country, this valley, would have looked like when the sheets of glaciers last melted away and retreated: when this most recent reincarnation was completed and the new land lay glistening and just born, sharp-edged and brilliant, awaiting its ecological destiny, or ecological opportunity, as the colonists first began to explore it with fingers and roots and waves and pulses, wind and water and fire and crumbling stone mixing together across the centuries, reassembling as if clay thrown by a potter, and that remixed assemblage blooming, blossoming, with specific life; and from that life, spirit, and from those accumulated layerings, a certain density of spirit.

  I would have liked to see that being born. (Of the time, and the land, before the glaciers came and did their carving, I cannot even imagine: easier, perhaps, to imagine the deserts of Mars, or the ice rings of Saturn.)

  It occurs to me, however, that this might be as close as we can come to such a witnessing—to being present at such a birth. To someone who has not lived through a season of fire, it might seem like an odd comparison—speaking of the life that fire brings rather than that which it ushers out—but that is how I perceive it. I like to believe that after the fire has retreated, sinking back beneath the surface to rest for a few more seasons, the newness and cleanliness upon the land—the fields of cooling gray ash, still smoking, and the new architecture of bent and fallen spars, charred and hollow—possesses a new openness, a raw new readiness of spirit, a tabula rasa, that is as close to how it was when the glaciers finally retreated as we will ever see; and that the speed with which new life comes rushing back in is how it had first been, ten thousand years ago, when this valley—or rather, the latest reincarnation of this valley—was first born.

  I find myself standing for long moments, heel-deep in the cooling coals and ashes, shovel and bucket in hand, delighted by the realization of how infinitesimal I am, how microscopic against both the scale of time and the land itself; and delighted too by my realization that time is not the only thing moving, as organic and alive as a river, or a horse, or a herd of elk, but that even the land beneath us is moving slowly, in similar fashion. That when we were created from the dust, perhaps the rib of man, the image of God, was plucked from a mountainside; that that selfsame image comes originally, initially, from the sleeping-body humped-animal shapes of the new-carved mountains, and that the voice of God is in the wind that once swept, and still sweeps, across those mountains, across these forests.

  So the forest is burning: little cells and pockets of it, one acre here and a thousand acres there, the weave and fabric of this valley's million acres as punctuated by these fires as are the demographics of any human population complemented by daily births and daily deaths. The presence of the fire is normal; the absence of it would be abnormal.

  And as with a birth—those final contractions, and the expulsion, then, of the living, breathing, bespirited thing into the world—the matter of timing is one of primal, archetypal fascination. At what hour, what moment, will the new life arrive?

  And in a reverse sort of conception, which of last winter's snows, which extra bit of moisture, was it that has caused the fires to first be delivered to us on this one date rather than yesterday, or the day before, or the week before?

  Was it that extra foot and a half that fell on New Year's Eve? Was it the last big wet snow of April that helped to shape and foretell the timing of this fire's arrival in this one time, this one place, with me standing deep in the ashes, as if once more amid snow?

  History; cause and effect, connectedness. Which impressions of childhood, I wonder, act similarly as anchors, as foundations, for the subsequent timed release of awe for the natural world—precursors for the birth of conscious reverence for the grace of our last remaining truly wild places?

  Which slant of light, which odor of fir boughs, which cry of wild geese laid itself into the subconscious mind and then grew slowly, like character forming?

  How does landscape braid itself into, and form and reinforce, our memories, our character, and our reactions and responses to things—our compassions, our understandings, our patience or impatience? Surely there can be no formula for this question, or any answer, but what does it mean for a child, or a population, to be bereft or unknowing of any significant or unique landscape? What emptiness, what gap or hollowness, loneliness or impoverishment, might exist within that place of absence?

  Day by day, I become increasingly familiar, and then comfortable with, the wildfire that continues to pace and gallop in its dirt corral just beyond my home. Night is one of the calmest times to visit the fire, with only the hottest spots burning actively, and all else either a dull glow of orange or complete darkness. It's beautiful, moving through the woods at night toward the fire, and even the burning mountain walls beyond are beautiful in the distance, on the cooler nights when the smoke grows heavier and damper and sinks and the mountains are visible.

  On those mountain walls, the flickers and flares look like the glimmerings of countless jack-o'-lanterns, or even as if the night sky has been lowered and filled with more stars; and no one is being injured, nothing is being hurt, the mountains are merely breathing.

  It's like the rest between rounds for a boxer, late in a fight. In the daytime, when the temperatures rise again and the humidities drop and the animal of the wind begins to stir and yawn once more, things will become dangerous again and fire commanders will worry incessantly and justifiably about the vagaries and unpredictabilities of fire and weather and fuel, and about luck, and chance; about new or inexperienced firefighters, particularly, and about the dangers of getting upslope of a fire, or upwind; about violent shifts in wind direction, about falling trees, about helicopter malfunctions, about water supplies and fuel logistics and food and shelter and medicine for the firefighters, about communications between squadron leaders, about the homes and property of people living in the valley—but at night, when the fires are calmer
, the fires are beautiful, and I cannot help but stare at them and feel that deep-seated lure and attachment one gets while staring at a campfire, or even a lone and wavering candle.

  And as the fires wander through the forest, August visitors, like some vast herd of migratory animals—caribou, perhaps, down from the north, braiding their way through the forest, unraveling one thing and yet weaving another—people in the valley will sometimes drive up into the mountains at night to look down upon the bowl of distant winking, glimmering light that is the valley afire, while those whose homes seem to be more directly in the path of one of those wandering herds of fire will stay at home packing, to be ready, should the time for leaving approach. They cut the grass around their houses extra short, and sweep the larch needles from the roofs of all structures, and water the ground around their houses.

  The sheriff's department visits each house, tells them that things look fine now, but to always be prepared, in August, for a quick evacuation. Each house is assigned a number, so that the fire teams can locate it on their maps and respond if the need arises. And in every pulse and breath of our waking moments as well as our dreams, there is the remembrance of a thing that many of us had forgotten long ago: we are not in control, we exist as if only because of some strange and wonderful mercy, we are not all powerful, we are not in control ...

  By the eighth day, my fire is as common to me as a hound or a horse that might need feeding and watering each day, and my usual schedule of work and play is but little disrupted by the tending to it. One morning there are deer tracks in the still warm ashes, as if indeed the fire is a hoofed thing and has passed through and gone on its way; and some of the needles from the hemlock trees that were scorched are already falling, sometimes landing on the cooler ashes and resting there like a fabric of gauze bandages laid across a wound, though other times landing on a hot spot and igniting, flaring up one by one in quick, tiny winkings of fire that burn cleanly, purely, leaving no trace, not even smoke.