The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  I'm staring at my blank page through the blue smoke, trying to dive deeper into the novel: trying to find a silence, and another reality, within. Trying to hear other music as beautiful as this is, and as the sights are, in the land above.

  We grow antsy, impatient, irritable, for all the various reasons: the steady presence of helicopters, the ever-present smoke, the astonishing heat, and the slight feeling of imprisonment—of not being able to wander off into the forest. We consider, with perhaps some degree of paranoia, a changed and warmer earth in which many months of the year are like this one, decades hence, rather than these few weeks.

  Summer itself seems to be burning like a chunk of coal, or a fire laid of dry sticks, and autumn seems to be on the other side of a high mountain wall, on the other side of a divide that despite our endurance grows no closer. And at night, as the stars continue their march, it seems as if we are being left behind, even betrayed.

  We are awakened one morning at dawn to a sky the color of smoke, or fog—at first I think there is another, newer fire nearby—and to the sound of our dogs barking the way they do when a stranger comes down the driveway.

  I go to the window and look out to see who might be here at this hour of the morning and realize that the dogs are looking straight up at the sky, their heads tilted back, and are barking at the rain itself, which they have not seen in so long, and which has disturbed their sleep. And it seems to me that I feel another clicking of the gears, of cogs entwined and intermeshed, rotating the valley, and our lives, back into a pace and pattern with which we are more familiar—as if the stars have paused just long enough for us to catch back up—and I go over to the other window and look down at the garden, which is glistening, and at the water dripping from the eaves of the roof, and there are no helicopters flying this morning, only my hounds barking their fool heads off, and I am filled with the strangest sensation, the strangest image of domesticity: I am like a commuter waiting outside of a subway, about to step on a subway to travel to work—call it the 6:45—and once again the world is filled with predictability and punctuality, and all of the quick uproar of the past few weeks was as if but a dream, no more real than smoke or fog.

  It's a nice, steady, gentle rain that lasts for two days. It bathes our hearts.

  I think we enjoy fires, are drawn to and even mesmerized by fires—that our lives, and our spirits, can often possess the characteristics of wildfires—but it feels right too for this settling rain to be falling, as if it came just in time; as if everything is working exactly the way it is supposed to—in step, and on time.

  SEPTEMBER

  THE RAINS COME every Labor Day, as if reading a calendar, as if they have an engagement, an appointment, not with the gear works of effect and recompense but with the more arbitrary, even frivolous ideas of man: as if we have succeeded in our petitions for rains to fall by the first Monday of September, as if we have negotiated with some deity, saying, All right, bring the fire in late July and August, if you must, but we demand rain by the first or second of September. Or by the third or fourth, at the very latest. Otherwise ...

  Otherwise, what?

  Regardless, the rains always return. Perhaps the heat and smoke seed the clouds sufficiently that once the cooler, longer nights of September return, rain cannot be avoided—just as in a long, hot, dry summer, fire cannot be avoided. Whatever the reason—a negotiated settlement with God, or the unavoidable mechanical clockwork of a tilted, cooling earth, with the days foreshortening in an ever-steeper plunge now—the rain comes.

  It extinguishes the fires and finally begins to mute the politicians' brayings, and their patrons, the multinational millionaire or billionaire CEOs, who have been assuring the American public that, despite half a century of clear cutting, if only we would allow them to clear cut it all, there would be no more fires...

  Peace. Always, I am stalking peace. Some days it gallops away from me, other days I seem to be very close to its presence, and still other days it almost seems to be searching for me, as I am for it; and occasionally peace and I will find ourselves in each other's company. And with the heat and haze and smoke beginning to be vanquished, September is as likely a month to find it as any, and perhaps even more likely.

  You can never have enough firewood; you can never have enough berries. In September we'll begin gathering a little bit of firewood (not until the autumn breath of October, however, will we really kick up into production gear), and in the first few days of September, there are still, amazingly, sometimes a few more huckleberries to be found up in the high country, where summer is only just now arriving, as if squeezing in through a barely open window, where it will then visit for but a few days, or a week or two at most, before departing again, sliding back through that window crack and on down the mountain, with autumn coming in over the mountaintop, then, like a blanket drawn.

  Another pint, another quart, sometimes another half-gallon. Each day could be the last, the berries shriveling in the sun or withering finally from a fierce frost; and as we sit there in the huckleberry fields (the bushes lower to the ground, up at that wind-scoured elevation), our fingers and faces stained purple, while it would seem that our thoughts would be on the coming months and all the different ways we'll use these berries throughout the year—jams, jellies, syrups, pies, cobblers, cheesecakes, in pancakes, on ice cream, in smoothies—what's really on our minds is nothing, only the somnolent peace of the moment.

  We sit there in the high mountain wind and the thin sun, lost in the hunter-gatherer trance of provision, connecting and reconnecting to a deeper, older place with each berry chosen, each berry plucked, so that already, it is as if the mountain is feeding us, and the berries are nurturing us, even before we have eaten the first serving.

  The haze of the sun-heated mountains, haze seeming to rise in shimmers from the rocks themselves, will waver before us, and the unending blue waves of mountain ridges will likewise span before us to the horizon, and beyond.

  Is there a gene within me that so fills me with love for this wild landscape and makes me so willing to fight for its defense, and to guard so fiercely against the going-away of any of this landscape's other inhabitants, be they grizzly or wolf or sturgeon or rare water lily?

  Butterflies drift past us, colorful wings paper thin, sometimes translucent, rallying for their autumn migrations: sucking down the last of the blossoms' nectar, drying yarrow, still pristine white, and blazing blue aster, and the incredible other-planet-seeming magenta of the last of the summer's fireweed.

  The ravens have been fairly silent for much of the summer (with the exception of earlyJune, when they feed so lustily on the scraps of lion- and coyote- and wolf- and bear-killed fawns)—but in September they begin to grow more vocal again, often audible as only a single taut-screw croak, like the winding up of the last of summer: a one-syllable, one-note guttural sound of cinching up and battening down.

  And whether that one note is saying summer (is over) or autumn (is here), I can never tell. Perhaps the perfect one-note sound is made as the raven flies over the perfect cleft or crevice between these two seasons—as visible to the raven's bright eyes as would be a literal niche or crevice in the cliffs in the physical landscape below, formed only a few hundred million years ago.

  And sometimes, if we're up in the berry fields early enough in the morning, or late enough in the day, into the cooling blue light of dusk, we'll be lucky enough to hear the utterly wild, hair-raising flute-and-grunt call of a bull elk, bugling to announce to the world, and the season, his presence on the landscape, and his position, as powerful and focused.

  I have crept in on the big bulls when they've been announcing themselves in this manner—have peered through the brush and watched, from a distance of only several yards, as the giants thrash their shining antlers against the trunk of a young sapling, scraping the bark from it in joy or fury or something else before lifting their head (their eyes wide, bulging with life) and bugling again, a sound that resonates in my own ches
t, so close, and causes tremors of vibrations similar to those experienced when you stand too close to the railroad tracks and a locomotive passes by, roaring its wail-whistle and shaking the ground, causing a tingling in your jaw and your arms and legs, even all the way into your hands and feet.

  Sometimes, from the tops of mountains, the girls like to roll big rocks down the mountainside—not down toward any trail or road but down some steep slope, to see how far the rock will go before reaching its angle of repose. This is totally opposite of how I like to be in the world, and particularly in the woods, and yet occasionally I let them roll the thunder-rocks, not so much for the joy and power the act gives them (and I have to say, the sight of a rock cartwheeling down the slope, sometimes bolting twenty feet into the air, is hypnotic, awe provoking) but rather so that they will at least have a fighting chance of not becoming exactly like me. Not that that's good, bad, or indifferent, but rather, what matters to me is that they at least have a chance, now and again, of taking a different path.

  I let them roll these rocks, and then we move on. "This is the bears' home," I say, unable to resist. "We have to remember they live here too, and they probably don't like too much noise."

  Still, I tried to let them choose their own way. For about thirty seconds. How unchanging, it seems, are any paths, and instead as foreordained as the runoff of snowmelt down the grooves carved in mountaintops from the claws of the glaciers that scratched their way down these same mountains ten thousand years ago.

  Hiking down, we spy a pale, curved stick, a branch, that is the exact size and shape of a deer's rib—so much so that we have to pick it up and examine it more closely to be sure that it is not—and this reminds us, again, of how nearly identical are the shapes of deer and elk antlers, and the branches of the trees and bushes behind which they take shelter, so that without a doubt, as in Genesis, the one thing—the forests, arriving on, say, the third day—has shaped the next thing, the beasts and fowl, arriving on, say, the fourth.

  We lie on our backs for a while and watch the astounding clouds, with their animal shapes. Indeed, just this moment, one of the larger ones, drifting up from the south, looks almost precisely like an enormous bull elk—so much so that even the cloud's shadow, projected on the mountain across from us, looks like that same elk.

  It's gliding like a schooner, nearly galloping, as graceful in its traverse of that mile or two of distance traveled as would be a real elk, and it calms and soothes us, lying there watching it: not as if it is being presented to us for any message or instruction, but merely beauty, only beauty, and the tight order of a day among the living.

  The girls want to roll one more rock down a slope of bear grass far below. It's the seventh year of the bear grass's cycle—a year of outrageous blossoms—and so I let them, promising, Only one.

  It's the best roll ever. The small, round boulder gallops straight down the hill, as if fleeing us, then inexplicably veers, as if consciously choosing another path, and then veers back again, choosing the same old route. It hurtles through the field of late-season, high-elevation bear grass, snapping the drying stalks and sending up puffs and plumes of pollen, which rise and drift slowly downslope—long after the boulder has disappeared into the woods—with the rising yellow pollen tracing an arc that briefly mimics the twisting shape of a deer's rib.

  And yet, surely such formality, such stricture and allegiance to oneness does not exist everywhere, and at all times. There is a life, a pulse, and respiration—a fuel, or a force—governing the reaching toward these shapes, formulas, patterns. The bear grass, for instance, with its wild seven-year blooms, the giant sweet-scented pompom stalks rising so high above the other flowering plants: surely it is in these seven-year runs that it attempts to expand its range, not merely resting and conserving the nutrients in the thin soil where it is found, but timing its next run in order to achieve maximum colonization.

  In this regard—the six years of inhalation, and the one bright year of powerful exhalation—the bear grass might be seen to possess a cunning, if limited, singularity of purpose. And yet to back away and look at the entire mountain from a distance (from the other mountain across the way, perhaps), you would note that there are so many other puzzle pieces, each with its own path and pattern of inhale and exhale, that the mind spins and you understand that it is all always moving, even if just beneath the surface—moving with the alacrity of an elk galloping laterally across a mountain, or even a boulder cartwheeling directly down the mountain.

  We rise and continue down the mountain ourselves. At one point, still high on the mountain, we startle a pair of large spotted frogs, which spring away from us in spirited, terrified leaps, heading directly upslope. They're a long away from any water—the nearest seasonal pond is still a good quarter-mile away, and several hundred feet higher on the mountain, up near the crest—and it occurs to me that these frogs know that rain is imminent, and that despite the summer heat, they are migrating, expanding their own range, traveling beneath the shade of the silvery hummocks of bear grass; and that they are gambling their lives, their territorial explorations, on the belief or perhaps knowledge—the faith—that it will rain soon, before they dry out, so far from home.

  The seasonal ponds will not hold water again until later in the month—it will take days of September's or even October's rains to fill them back up—but perhaps if these frogs find these ponds in time (perhaps it is where they were born; perhaps they are returning to them, after a summer of exploration, and egg-laying, downslope), they can somehow burrow down between the wide fissures of the mud cracks, squeezing down through those frog's-width crevices between the polygon tiles of the parched mudflat, and can be lubricated and nourished by the brief rain they seem convinced is coming.

  We continue on our own way, astounded by what we have seen—spotted frogs, a mile or more from the nearest permanent water—a veritable herd of migrating frogs, perhaps, literally leapfrogging their way across the mountain, up the mountain, even as we are hurrying down it, and by the time we reach our truck, jagged bolts of lightning are flickering to the south, hurled from clouds no longer the shape of elk but immense purple mushrooms, and the first drops of rain are beginning to ding and speckle our dusty truck.

  August's fires linger, even after their death. For the most part, they're out like a light, but a few still smoke and smolder, even if no flames can be seen. There's still a faint, sweet odor of smoke in the air, the sharper scent of burned twigs and needles and forest duff and downed logs different somehow from the more mellow, pervasive scent of morning fires in people's wood stoves; but where this other, wilder scent might be coming from would be hard to say, because everywhere I go on my walks, the coals are extinguished, and in many places the ash is sodden. Sometimes the last of the fires will go underground, taking bitter refuge in the roots of trees, smoldering among those roots or even crawling up into one of the drummy hollows that the fire itself might have carved and hiding there amid the punk and charcoal, holding out and hanging on, not unlike the last surviving grizzly bears in this region: stubborn survivors, waiting for a break that may be a long time in coming.

  Mostly, though, by September—after those great rains of Labor Day—the fires exist now only in our memories. And as they remain a shadow or a wave, we still dream of them, in dreams that are hauntingly specific. So deeply lodged is the tension and engagement of the previous month in me that, even though I'm moving around free in the beautiful new clarity of September, in my dreams I am still back in the time of fire and am helping other people fight their fires: counseling angles of attack and plans of defense, watering hot spots, setting backfires, evaluating wind direction and possible ignition fuels, and scratching fire lines in the dirt. I awake from such dreams the next morning exhausted, as if I have physically been doing those things; and the scent of the old fire, particularly in the mornings, is dense and everywhere.

  Still, nothing can be held on to beyond its time. September must flow out of August, pushing e
agerly on with its own life, through the eddies of time and heat and dreams, and one cool morning not long after Labor Day, two black bears come striding through the center of the marsh in single file, noses pointed into the cool north breeze, just out wandering in the middle of the day, and like the actors in a school play who usher in a new scene, they might as well have been pulling behind them a banner that said AUTUMN.

  I do not mean to complain about the imbalance or loneliness that resides somewhat in all of us, I think—sometimes deep-rooted or all-aflame, though other times merely hidden, like dull coals hunkered warm in the trunk, the cavity, of a hollow tree—but I mean instead to accept and marvel at it: this slight (though other times significant) clumsiness that almost always sets us some distance apart from the rest of nature, and the calling of the seasons.

  There is a different calendar, internal and pulsing, alive, like the creature of time, that is slightly tilted from the mechanical overlay of our own precise but lifeless calendars. This other calendar is not metered by the precision of solstice and equinox, but is fluid, maybe even cunning or stealthy, and our separation from that hidden river, whether below us or farther above, may be to some degree the measure of that strange loneliness, the scent of which we all catch, from time to time, unbidden and inexplicable.

  Certainly, the changes in our own self-imposed or self-described seasons crest well before true solstice or equinox. The panic seems usually to crest in us a couple of weeks earlier than in the rest of nature. Impulsively, we rush, we roar. Hence summer arrives in our hearts on June seventh, say, rather than the twenty-first; and autumn, with that bittersweet mingling of pleasure and confusion—a feeling very much like, come to think of it, first love—comes in the first week of September rather than matching the balanced grace of equal dark, equal light, on the true equinox in the third week.