The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Phil hasn't even seen the fire yet—I get the impression that he overheard some of the bomber pilots discussing it while he was monitoring their reports to the dispatcher—and as we walk and ride our bikes up the road, through the lovely green forest on a warm summer morning, it seems a bit surreal to imagine that around the next bend, or the next, there is going to be a forest fire: but there it is, finally—a blackened landscape appears before us, on the right side of the road—and from the looks of things, it has already been busy for quite a while, has already burned itself out in places, it appears.

  It seems so strange to me, the way we assess it immediately, instinctively, as hunters likewise assess, in that first glance, an animal that might be their quarry.

  Even as we are marveling at the visual astonishment of it—so much smoke and ash, so much fire-scorched black, and the flames themselves, still dancing and leaping—we are also evaluating the shape and size of it, the general vigor, and the direction it is heading, as well as possible escape routes, and possible angles of attack. It amazes me sometimes, what's in us—old memories, the old loves and fears and cravings and shunnings of nearly all of our ancestors—and among us, Phil seems the most transformed, the most alive, and he is staring at the flames with a rapt and unguarded appreciation for their beauty, power, mystery.

  He deploys us to the four corners of the fire. It is about the size already of a large airplane hangar, and has angled steeply uphill, where it seems to have burrowed into some rocks and then disappeared. It would have been a sight to see, in its full glory—last night, perhaps—but other than one rushing finger of flame down low, it appears to be burning itself out already, like a dog that has chased its tail into exhaustion. From time to time a juniper bush explodes into noisy flame, as the waxy oils sizzle and crackle—the teenagers, with their limitless energy, rush right over to those and begin beating at them, chopping at them, rather than waiting the ten or twenty seconds it takes for the junipers to flame out anyway, while Chuck and I work a little more methodically, trying to dig up some bare earth in advance of that one wandering finger of fire, which is moving now through a stand of cedar and lodgepole, leapfrogging its way across the ground at about the speed of a man or woman walking briskly.

  The fire seems to be carrying some secret message that it wishes to pass on to the country in front of it, passing it forward as if handing off some unseen baton; and it seems too as we approach with our shovels, grubbing and scratching at the matted duff, that the fire is seeking to evade us: that it dodges and wanders laterally, that it feints and backs up, and even lies down for a while, as if waiting for us to turn our backs or relax a bit, before making another charge.

  The heat is intense, making the work, which would be tiring even under normal circumstances, grueling, and it's hard to breathe amid such smoke. As we work in the still warm ashes, our boots are hot, but finally, or so it seems, we have a little line scratched around that one groping, troublesome corner of the fire. And although there are still trees and logs and old sawn stumps burning in the center, the fire has already passed through there, and in our exhaustion, and our short-handedness, we are content to let them continue burning, isolated and not menacing.

  "Some water would be nice," Phil says, meaning a few bomber runs to cool things down, to take the edge off this vast bed of hissing, glowing coals, but there are too many other fires elsewhere, larger and wilder fires, and too few planes, and too few pilots—we're truly on our own—and we stand there coal blackened and sweat begrimed, smoke scented, and consider yet again such things as mercy and luck and chance. And once more, we are reminded deeply of how tiny we are, and how incidental our own hopes often are, compared to the flow of the larger world.

  Even Phil, with his intense love of firefighting, is beginning to look slightly sated. He looks up at the sky as if hoping for a miracle—if not a cloudburst, then even a single plane, or a single helicopter, with one big bucket of water—and says that when the bombers do fly over, you have to hurry over and hug in tight against a big tree for shelter to keep from being walloped with that four-ton water drop.

  Little glimpses of the world tilted onto its strange and burning end—different visions, different perspectives, that week:

  The fact that the ash looks so much like snow falling from the sky—the two things so different, and yet so linked, so similar, so connected;

  The sight of a boy named Cedar fighting a fire in a cedar grove, battling a burning cedar tree with his ax;

  The curse-out-loud irony of my burning a forgotten grilled cheese sandwich to a smoking crisp in the iron skillet one day, smoke rising from the black skillet even as just outside the kitchen window smoke still rises from the woods and helicopters pass over the marsh like gigantic dragonflies. As if there are really only a very few set patterns to choose from, in the world—though within those few grooves or patterns, infinite variety.

  All of the fire we have seen up until now—nearby flaming gardens of it, as well as distant billowing mountainsides, Popocatepetl-like—has been as nothing, compared to that which builds, which blows up, one certain windy day, a windy day with forces that surpass even those of the winds that spawned this second wave of lightning strikes. Phil and I and the others were puny, battling our little fires bush by bush, and gnatlike too are the bombers, tiny flecks in the sky with little faucet drips of water, against these larger fires that are now merging and running like a pack of wolves, like a river of salmon, like a herd of buffalo. (The Plains tribes referred to wildfire as "the red buffalo" for the way it moved across the grass, rejuvenating it with its quicksilver passage.)

  Some of the fires, in their rushing and braiding together, can now be measured in the tens of thousands of acres—still but a fraction of the two-million-acre forest, but more than was here a week ago, a month ago—though within each fire, there are different degrees of burn intensity, ranging from untouched to crispy. (After the fires, one of the strangest things will be to walk through burned stands, forests in which some of the trees have vaporized like marshmallows, and to then encounter islands of green within those charred areas: as if here, the fire paused to take another breath before moving on, or turned its attention, for a moment or two, elsewhere. Or as if the fire just got moving too fast to burn anything—skipping over certain places like a scrap of paper tumbling down the road in a high wind.)

  The fire on the hill above our house—the one that Phil and Chuck and Cedar and Chad and I went up and fooled with—has resurrected in this new, more powerful wind, and has sent sparks and flames skittering downwind, and is now threatening those homes directly in its path. The bombers and helicopters are fighting it, as well as another thousand-acre fire that is trying to creep strangely downhill, into the bogs along the South Fork; and all that afternoon, towering mushroom clouds of smoke build and build, until they're visible more than a hundred miles away, looking precisely like the violent mushrooms of Hiroshima.

  The winds beneath those mushrooms—the winds in our yard—are flattening small trees, are swirling counterclockwise, and bits of ember are floating down on the neighbors' tin roofs less than a mile away.

  By fiery coincidence, Darrell, the FedEx driver, happens to be making another delivery—another manuscript to read, which strikes me, under the current conditions, as quite possibly shoveling coal into the furnace—and as it's his last delivery of the day, his truck is empty. Elizabeth has an old antique sofa, a great dense crypt of a thing, as uncomfortable as an old Greyhound station bench, and though I'd be only too glad to see the thing return to dust and ash, Darrell offers to load it into his truck and take it, as well as the boxes of photo albums, down to town to put in a storage unit for safekeeping.

  For my part, I've got a box of favorite books, and a shotgun, which can fit easily in the back of my truck—the evacuation is beginning—and Mary Katherine brings down some stuffed animals, while Lowry, strangely, or so it seems to me, brings her bedside lamp.

  It all goes into the back
of the FedEx truck. We thank Darrell, wave goodbye to him as he drives off into that wind-bending forest of smoke, and I feel like telling him, I'll see you when the war is over. As the ash continues to swirl, and the mushroom cloud continues to build, rising now to unimaginable heights, higher than any cloud we've ever seen, and glowing with a beautiful rose and mustard color, we put out the call to other friends, who arrive quickly in their old pickups, and we load the second tier of possessions—extra changes of clothes, a china hutch, a favorite painting, the children's artwork, a dining room table, four chairs, sleeping bags—and the mood is both festive and alarming, though not quite frantic. As we ferry boxes and furniture out of the house, Elizabeth prepares a blender of margaritas, to fight the heat, and we stop and sip them briefly.

  The boom box is playing the Live Wire Choir's rendition of "Shady Grove," and from the hurried chaos of evacuation, those are the four things I remember most sharply, woven together in a strange way to form one new and denser memory: the towering mushroom cloud, and the heat and wind outside; the goodwill and industry of neighbors; the luminous green of the frozen margarita—just a sip, just a swallow, as we'd be driving—and the music of that one song, "Shady Grove," with the evacuation in full swing.

  Todd and Mollie, who live farther upvalley and who, for now, are out of harm's way, have several jugs of an experimental new gel goop that you can spray over your house to protect it from the flames. I'm dubious at first, but Todd tells me he's seen the video and that it works, that it's phenomenal: that the goo protects against even a direct flame of something like fifteen hundred degrees. It's what the firefighters use, when they have time to deploy it.

  There are two limitations: it's expensive, and it's effective only for about eight hours—you basically have to wait to spray it on until you see the flames advancing, and then run like hell—but I'm touched by their generosity, by their insistence that I hold on to this product that they've gone to the trouble to purchase from the fire department, and which they've had on hand for their own needs.

  The plan is for Elizabeth and the girls to go stay with our friends Bill and Sue, along the river—on the other, nonburning side of the river (we'll store the furniture in their barn, which, while not fireproof, is at least out of the present path of the running fires)—while I'll stay here at the house, truck pointed out and ready to run, if need be, with chain saw and gas in the back. I'll be keeping the new-mown grass good and wet, and will nap out on the porch in that high wind, listening and watching for the flames—ready to begin applying that pink or purple goo before turning and running like Bambi.

  I have no illusions about my frailty before such a force. I think I have a complete understanding of how important I am to my family—particularly to my young daughters. I am not going to be foolish, am not going to attempt to be a hero over a thing, or things. I am going to be careful, cautious, conservative.

  And sitting there that evening, watching the marsh grass bend and blow after everyone has driven off—sitting there with the house so much emptier than it was before, and waiting, watching the treetops bend into almost perfect horseshoe shapes, each one a fly rod battling some giant fish just beneath the ground—there is a lonely feeling, but also one that's more than a little liberating: like exploring an entirely new country after having traveled on a long journey to get there.

  The roof and lawn are watered, the fire-retardant gel is at the ready, the photo albums are safe. There's nothing else to be done, really, but to sit on the porch and wait, and ponder the beauty before me, and to contemplate—having finally reached the nature of acceptance.

  And later that night, stretched out on my sleeping bag, with the trees still swaying and the night so warm around me, I awaken with a start to see the stars flashing between the waving boughs of the trees above, and am disoriented, thinking at first that they're sparks swirling on that wind, that they've finally arrived, and that I've almost overslept and it's time to leap up and begin spraying the house.

  But they're only stars, and little different from how they were last night, and the night before, geared to ride as ever in their slow, methodical creep across the sky, like the pulleys and cables and cogs and guy-wires for all that transpires below.

  Still, for a moment, I thought the windy treetops were full of sparks. My heart's still thumping hard, racing nearly as fast as the fires themselves, perhaps, as they're driven by each day's dry and heated winds; but as I lie there on my back and stare up at the stars, my pulse eventually begins to settle, slowing perhaps in much the same manner as the fires at night, beneath night's calmer, cooler blanket.

  The next day brings news that the forest will be closing at the end of the day, that the public lands will not be available for hiking, or berry picking, or fishing, or firewood cutting, or anything else, until further notice—until the rains return, which usually happens on or around Labor Day.

  The forest closure is a real hardship on fishing guides (as well as bird-hunting guides, whose season begins on the first of September); and on people who gather firewood for their own use, as well as to sell. The closure is hard on berry pickers too, and the lesson learned is a hard one: in a dry year, don't assume there's going to be a tomorrow for getting your chores done, in August. The stars' march around the sky might be pretty much the same, decade after decade and century after century, but down below, some Augusts might be leisurely and long-reaching, like an old man nearing the end of a full and considered life, and others might be compressed dramatically—as if whittled down to a single remaining day.

  Huckleberries are like firewood: it's almost impossible to have too much, too many. They can keep almost forever, preserved as jam, and will last several years in the freezer too. I think I've gathered enough already to last the coming year, but I'm not quite sure. Another half-gallon, or even a quart, would sure let me rest easier through the winter.

  That morning, I call over to Bill and Sue's to check in on Elizabeth and the girls, and then, because the fire seems to be moving northward—it looks as if its momentum might carry it past our house and up the ridge, half a mile away—I hurry over to one of my favorite berry-picking mountains to gather extra berries as well as to get in one last hike.

  And again, even in the accepting, I find that my heart begins racing once more as I climb higher on the mountain and watch all the various other mountains smoking and smoldering, as if, despite whatever my intentions, I am so much a part of this valley, even at a subconscious level, that as the duff burns, as the twigs and limbs and piled-up branches from all the years past burn, so too does something within me—though what that accumulated detritus within me might be, I cannot say, only that I can feel it and that I am agitated by it, and restless, though cleaner-feeling too, and lighter. Perhaps it is only the sense of refreshment and understanding that often comes whenever the scales are lifted from one's eyes and one is able to look at an old thing in a new way.

  On the distant road below, I can see a few trucks traveling, pulling horse trailers behind them—some filled with household items, I suspect, while others have the real item, horses, being transferred to other, safer pastures.

  It seems strange to me, to be trying to carry on in my same old routine—berry picking in August—even as so much unraveling and reordering is taking place below, and in the woods beyond.

  By late afternoon I've filled two empty water bottles full of berries—I'd like to have a few more, but if the season has to end today, which it appears it must, I think we'll have enough to last us—and in the dimming light, I hike the rest of the way up the mountain, thinking about freedom, considering the presence of it, this day, and its impending absence, in the coming days, as well as looking over the other side of the mountain and the great forests beyond, stretching all the way over and into Idaho and Canada.

  Once up top, I sit there on the knife-edge blade of the divide and look over at the two sides of the valley, the burning side and the nonburning side, and even as I am watching one of the unbu
rned stands, a forest that seems to have no fire in it, a single tree silhouetted on the next ridgeline over bursts into sudden light, shrouded by a tall and tapered yellow flame. Nothing else around it seems to be burning, just that one tree among so many others, up on the skyline, and as blue dusk comes sliding in over the day, and then true night, the distant candle of it keeps burning, mysterious and isolate, and I continue watching it until finally the flame grows subdued, is no larger than the glimmering beacon of a faraway lighthouse; and then it extinguishes altogether, with no others springing up around it. And in the darkness, with my pack full of berries, I start down the mountain, with the forest closing itself off to me and the slopes before me shimmering with all their little fires, looking strangely festive.

  By the eighteenth of August, the big fire has climbed on up out of the valley floor, up into the safety of the farther, stonier mountains, and my family has moved back in with me, though the devil couch and china hutch and chairs remain stored in Bill and Sue's barn for safety. The mornings are much colder, and it seems that the fires are settling down, are being worn down, with each day's run becoming a little less vigorous, as if they are being sapped by the vitality of each cold morning.

  I'm in my cabin, trying to close out the novel I've been working on for years—trying to keep, or find again, its rhythm—and am staring out at the sunlight on the bent grass of the marsh, the sunlight filtering through the smoke, with that blue haze not just pressing against the dusty windowpanes of my cabin but seeping in even through the chinks between the logs, blue haze floating in small clouds between my eyes and the page.

  Helicopters are still coming and going, trying to snuff out the fires in the mountains above town, and I can hear the sawyers buzzing away on the steep slopes of the twin humps of Roderick Buttes, cutting fire lines designed to stop that fire's slow, damp downhill creep.