The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  This fire, at least, is running out of things to eat, but I keep pouring water down those root chambers and listening to that underground, gurgling music of hiss and belch—as if some great stable of circus animals, or wild animals, still resides uncertainly below, animals that might finally be considering moving on—gathering to migrate, perhaps, or to sleep, to hibernate, beneath their blanket of cooling ashes.

  Other times, the fading fire seems to me to be now like a drowning or sinking swimmer, trying to rise for one more breath, looking for air and looking for fuel but finding neither, and sinking lower and lower under the weight, finally, of the residue, the ash, made by its own exuberant burning.

  You think you know the world; you think you have seen it all. Then you wake up one night and look out your window and see that smoke lies dense over the marsh, again like a blanket of fog—and that the moon is shining on that silvery smoke, as luminous as metal, and that there is a rainbow in the night sky, that the intense light of the moon is filtering through smoke particles in the air and making a prism of colored light, even in the middle of the night, right out over the center of the marsh.

  The smoke shifts and the rainbow dissipates, like prisms of colored glass disassembling themselves—but it was there for a few moments, and, who knows, might yet one day be again.

  During the days, as the August sun and the summer wind and the fire itself dries the forest out even further—how much drier than dry can we get?—it's possible sometimes to notice the odor of the smoke that stacks up over the valley, and even the smoke coming from the fire nearest the house, changing with the subtlety of a different kind of wine: creeping its way through kinnikkinnick, then ground cedar, then into an old decadent forest, then back into a flashy young green stand of lodgepole. The odors of burning alder are significantly different from those of cedar, or spruce, or larch. The intense sappy scent of Doug fir is its own thing.

  In the mix like that—the whole forest burning—you can rarely be quite sure of any one scent, but they keep swirling, mixing throughout the course of the day, as the fire creeps and crawls, runs and leaps, stretches and gallops, reaching for some things and avoiding others, pushed by the wind, and sometimes rendering the essence of a thing all the way back down to dusty ash.

  In the heat of the days too, there is the odor of life as well. Not new-beginning life, coming in after the fires—not that, quite yet—but the old regular hanging-on life, sweeter than ever. The hotter the days get, the more intense the odor of the shiny-leafed ceanothus becomes, until it seems you can almost see the oils dripping from their waxy green holly-like leaves; and the browner and more desiccated the other vegetation becomes, the greener the ceanothus shines, and the more forcefully it exudes its almost overpoweringly sweet scent, which, like the fires themselves, all but shouts the word August.

  My old writing cabin, and the newer house, creak, in August, in the extra degrees of heat that they are experiencing—that the world is experiencing—since they were built: creaking in this drying, windy weather as they never have before. One can imagine in that sound that the house is turning on its foundation to look in the direction of the fire.

  August is supreme leisureliness—it's often too hot to get out and hike in the middle of the day. Instead, the days drift, like haze. And yet it can be a time of supreme focus too, of supreme waiting, not unlike that of the hunting season, in which, while deep in the woods, you strain to hear the sound of one deer's approach, stepping through the snow.

  Yellow butterflies drift through the yard, buffeted wildly by the roaring afternoon wind that continues to feed and drive the fires, and for a moment, in that waiting, and in that focus, they look like the sparks flung by an advancing fire.

  My little fire is almost nothing now, just a few fallen logs burning like the remnants from a party's bonfire, and ash, so much ash, and those simmering root fires, which I am still watering twice daily, again as if tending to some garden. And while contemplating my other garden, the domestic one, four hundred yards distant, it occurs to me that it will be nice, once the ash cools further, to take a few buckets to work into the soil like compost. This entire landscape was once buried with a thin sheet of ash from the Mount St. Helens-like explosion of a volcano known as Mazama, seventy-five hundred years ago—the gray sheet of the ash lies several inches below the ground now, and still serves as a source of nutrients for the trees, the roots of which still suck at that ash, back in the wild forest. And in this manner, while enriching our garden, it will be somewhat as if we are eating the fire itself, distanced only a few months in time—just as the deer themselves, browsing the new forbs next spring and summer, will be eating the fire, just as later in the fall, we the garden fire-eaters will be eating the deer that ate the fire.

  What lasts? Not even the mountains. But it is all here, right now, in our bellies and in our eyes, in our hearts and in our legs, and in our wakefulness and in our dreams, for a little while. Today, and maybe even tomorrow.

  Fires or not, we're cresting and now passing berry season; timeless leisure or not, the year's berries must still be gathered if we are to have huckleberry jam in the coming year, and pancakes and muffins and milk shakes, if we are to have huckleberries on our ice cream, if we are to prepare huckleberry glazes for the grilled breasts of wild duck and grouse.

  Late one afternoon I head back up by myself to the mountain where Wendy and Mary Katherine and I surprised the bear. The blackberries are gone, but there is still an ocean of huckleberries, though not for much longer: a few of them are beginning to wither and wrinkle already beneath the astounding heat.

  Will they have the slight scent of wood smoke in them, this year? I try to taste it as I sample them, but can't; they still taste like huckleberries. Or perhaps everything is so saturated with the scent of smoke that I no longer notice any difference.

  It feels a little silly, up there on the mountain, to be so pleased, so assured, at having finally put my little fire to rest after eight days. It feels silly to believe that everything's tidy and in order, just because that one acre is controlled—even as tens of thousands of others are burning untouched. Nonetheless, I can't help it. Even as I recognize the intellectual folly of such a feeling, the physical pleasure of it is as real and present as when one completes any long and arduous project, and never mind that the world may never see it, or that the project will almost assuredly never have any bearing whatsoever on the larger world.

  The energy has been expended, the job has been finished, and, tired but satisfied, you feel good and whole and complete, fulfilled. It can be as simple a task as digging a hole or cutting and splitting a load of wood. It is a feeling of deep satisfaction, the resonance of which, I think, dates back to the not-so-distant echoes of hunting and gathering.

  The valley remains filled with smoke and heat. Nothing has changed. The valley is filling even fuller with smoke and heat, as if it is but a vessel for these things to be poured into it; but my little one acre is extinguished, or rather, rendered to contained smoldering, and I feel fine. I sit in the middle of a rich huckleberry patch and pluck berries contentedly, falling quickly into that daydreaming lull, the satisfied trance that seems to fill me, with its deeper echoes of older times, as if I am the vessel. And having wandered, luck filled, into a place of bounty, I will do well to just sit here for a while, pleasantly satisfied, daydreaming and harvesting, daydreaming and gathering; and no matter, really, that the valley might be burning down around me, for what can I do, really, even if it is?

  I pick for about an hour, suspended in this lovely August grace, before I discern the change coming. I can feel the drop in barometric pressure almost as violently as when a plane in flight bumps and sags suddenly, pitching silverware and playing cards to the floor in a clatter. The wind of a coming storm is not yet here, but I can see it, dark in the distance. I can see the wall of dust and smoke it is pushing ahead of it, like a piston; and up on my berry mountain, in that compressing dead-air space caught between the appro
aching storm and the mountain, I can feel the vacuum that is being created, and it is as unsettling a feeling, physically and emotionally and even spiritually, as was the berry picking of only a few minutes ago fulfilling.

  Next, then, I can hear the wind as the advancing plume of it slides in over the air sandwiched below, the air in which I am still sitting, trying to pick huckleberries, trying to gather up the last of the summer's harvest—sensing or suspecting somehow that this might be my last leisure day in the woods for a while, my last leisure hour—and as that approaching upper tongue of wind slides in across the mountain, just above the mountain, it passes through the upper reaches of the Swiss cheese excavations from all the many woodpeckers that have riddled the blackened, towering spars left over from the last fire, six years ago, and through the fire-gnawed Rorschach shapes, the strange gaps and apertures left in the husks of those old tree trunks.

  The result is a kind of music like none I have ever heard before, somehow both somber and joyous, and intensely powerful, fueled by more wind than all the human lungs in the world could ever provide, and it is singing right here, right now, on this mountain, and I am in the center of it, and part of me is frightened and confused. Part of me is not frightened; and I keep picking berries, though now in the distance I can see tremendous bolts of lightning and can hear the cannonade of thunder.

  There is no rain. The air is as void of moisture as a laundered sheet taken crisp and hot from the dryer.

  The wind is still above me, the lower waves have not quite yet come sweeping up the mountain, and above, as the wind moans through those hollow burned-tree keyholes and pipe flutes, it bangs and rattles also against the taut hides of the larger hollow snags and spars, creating a deep drumming resonance to accompany all the strange organ-pipe howling, which from a distance sounds like a thousand calliopes playing for some demented, wonderful, terrifying circus—though right here where I am, beneath and amid the drumming and the howling, it sounds like tremendously amplified symphony music, a thousand of the world's largest chamber orchestras vying to play either their own version of Mozart's Requiem, or perhaps (can it be?) "Three Blind Mice." And now the wind beneath the wind is reaching me, splashing in over me like dry waves at the ocean, the wind coming so strong that when I stand up I can lean downhill into it without falling down, suspended like a hawk, or a heavy kite—and this lower wind is carrying pine needles and grit, which stings my face and arms and bare legs, and I have to turn my face to shield my eyes against it, and I know more than I have ever known that there is no hand of mankind, no technology or science or knowledge, that can influence in the least this expression of power, this breath of a living, restless earth. And again I feel tiny, puny, even invisible, and it is exhilarating, and I am reminded intensely of what an astounding privilege it is to be alive, of how rare the circumstances are that conspire to bring life.

  I can see the lightning walking up the valley from the south, striding toward me, and I hurry down the mountain, through the stinging needles and grit, with entire tree limbs torn loose from the canopy and floating feathery, lichen laden, through the sky. Now entire treetops are snapping off occasionally, and being launched into the air a short distance, like failed rockets.

  Farther down the mountain, I can hear still more tree trunks snapping, a sound like cannons. It seems to me that the earth beneath my feet is buzzing or trembling, and the sky is plum-colored now, but still there is no rain, only wind and fire, and boiling clouds of dust.

  I hurry through the tangle of old blowdown, old fire char and new berry bush, new green saplings, running as a deer might run, into the wind, hoping to weave my way unscathed through that maze of falling branches—and once I'm back at the truck, and driving down the logging road (hoping that no trees fall across the road: I have a little emergency bow saw in the back, but it would take a long time to cut through a tree with that), I'm disoriented by the way the entire forest around me seems to be waving like nothing more substantial than the undersea fronds of kelp or reed-grass, or like the thick hair on an animal's back, pressing flat and then swirling in the wind.

  What a revelation it is, to have one's perceptions—one's universe—so startlingly reordered, so corrected or amplified. Yes, the forests of immense trees are powerful and awe inspiring, but yes, even they are tiny beneath these gusts of breath from a living, sometimes restless world.

  Once I'm home, we all four go out onto the porch and watch the lichens and limbs continue to sail through the sky, and to gaze at the strangely glowing sky, a greenish hurricane sky, and to watch the streaks of lightning, and to count, with thumping hearts, the number of seconds before we hear each crack of thunder. And still there is no rain, not even a little spit of it, and like a beggar or a miser or even a rich man gone broke, I find myself remembering again that wonderful big silent snow of New Year's Day, and those heavy, wet surprises of the late snows in April. I'm hoping that that moisture has been retained to hold back some of the fire, even as I understand more clearly than ever that the fire must come, that it is no different from the wind or the snow itself—that it has shaped and continues to shape, this landscape: that it is its own kind of season, and that the time for it has arrived.

  The informal, unofficial volunteer fire brigade, led by my neighbor Phil, comes by the next day to see if I might be able to help them fight a larger fire that's started across the road, about a mile to the south. There's also an official Yaak volunteer fire department, but they're stretched too thin already, and their specialty isn't forest or rangeland fires anyway. It's Phil's hope that if enough neighbors jump quickly enough on these new fires that have sprung up all around the residences down on the valley floor, those fires can be stopped a lot easier than if we wait the extra day or even half-day for a fire crew that may or may not be able to attack each low-elevation fire.

  About the fires burning up in the mountains Phil is unconcerned, even adulatory, having spent enough time in the woods—sixty-two years, thus far—to know that in those upper, wilder reaches, the fires are exactly what the mountains need most.

  For that matter, they're pretty darn healthy down here in the flatlands too—we just don't want them burning up anybody's house, or property, much less risking any lives.

  Increasingly, fire managers and postfire analyses are indicating that the best thing you can do to protect a structure is to create a "defensible space" around your home—that land management activities beyond a certain distance from your home have no significant bearing on whether the breath of fire, as well as the breath of wind, travels one way or another, but that if you clear or reduce flammable materials within two hundred feet of your house, the home can be defended, even if a fire does pass through.

  Still, this fire that Phil wants to jump on is headed toward a small group of cabins of the four or five families that live just to the south of us. If the fire continues on its present course and tries to travel upslope, it might pass right through their midst.

  I have deep respect for Phil—he's a staunch and brave conservationist, an environmentalist who practices what he preaches, walking instead of driving whenever he can, and living a life almost completely unencumbered by possessions. A seasonal laborer in Washington's apple fields, and a carpenter, he lives close to the land. He engages actively, regularly, in dialogue with the local Forest Service, isn't afraid to call bullshit when he finds yet another high-grade clearcut masquerading as something else.

  Even in the best of times, Phil's a little ragged, and at this time of year, already a couple of weeks into the fire season, he's real ragged, having been on his own free-ranging unofficial duty almost nonstop, sleeping only a couple of hours every other night or so. He loves to fight fires, and strangely, despite his own lack of material belongings—he lives in a tiny little hut of a cabin—he wants desperately to help keep anyone else from losing theirs; and so every fire season, he's out there roaming the hills with shovel and hoe, running through the woods from one fire to the next, scratching and grubbi
ng and sawing and digging, David dueling Goliath, David dueling Medusa's serpentine hair, each strand a snake of flame. And by the time he shows up at my door asking if I want to go help, he's as haggard and blackened as a fire-charred snag—as if the fires have already passed through and left him behind and he is now hurrying to catch up with them.

  In typical Phil fashion, he's grabbed anybody he can find on his way over to the fire, and isn't going to waste or spend time on the phone when he could be in the woods, in the flames, grubbing. He's put in a request for a water truck—the fire is up behind a gated road—but in the meantime Phil and his neighbors, Chuck and Chuck's teenage son, Cedar, and another teen, Chad, are going in to do what they can.

  I grab a couple of my old bicycles from the garage, for us to ride behind the gate, and some old shovels and axes, and we drive over to the gate and start up the old logging road, some of us walking and some of us riding, carrying our bristling assemblage of odds-and-ends makeshift firefighting tools.

  Nearly all of us are wearing duct-taped overalls, and it seems inconceivable to me that our ragtag militia is going to be capable of defending anything against so powerful a force as fire and wind; but the fire is too close to our neighbors' homes not to try. To not make the attempt would require a fatalistic acceptance of an inherent rightness in the universe that is deeper than any of us—even Phil—currently possesses.