The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  The larch trees, with their autumn gold needles blazing, do not just look like candles or flames, birthed long ago of fire, but they have become the fire, so enthusiastic in their initial uptake of the soil's fire-rich nutrients that they might as well be burning already, and anyone who will take a walk through the woods in October after the big wind has blown through can see how perfectly they were made for this place, or this place for them—this wet place of fire, this perfect mix and balance of the burning out and the growing old; of rot and char in a duel, a titanic struggle.

  How could there not be a tree like the larch?

  The snow can be here any day now. One year eight inches fell on the sixteenth of October and we didn't see bare ground again until May. Another year, on the opening day of deer season—the twenty-sixth—it was twenty-six degrees below zero.

  Usually it comes slowly, though, in the form of valley rain and fog and mist, the blue-sky days ebbing, and with the highest tops of the mountains receiving an inch or two of rain, rain, rain, soaking and then saturating the summer- and autumn-parched soil so that in the spring water will be available to newly emergent plants even before all the snow has melted. Tucking the earth into bed for the long sleep, is how I think of it: taking care of everything.

  So frequent are the rains now that it seems almost as if it is the landscape that is moving rather than the seasons, and the cant of light across this land; as if the landscape is traveling by mechanical conveyance, clicking forward a few gears, over into the northern Rockies and those basins of sunlight, but then sliding backwards—again, as if by mechanical gear works—back into the rainy shade of the Pacific Northwest.

  Not all of the alder leaves have been knocked loose by the wind and the rain, so that the branches surrounding my cabin still have a few individual leaves left, like lone decorations, weather tattered.

  When the steadier, later rains of October beat down on these frost-fatigued, blood brown remainders, it knocks them loose, finally, but as they fall, they descend much more slowly than the steady rain that is drumming now on my tin roof. And in my cabin, hunkered next to the stove, listening to the sleepy sound of that hard rain against the roof, it seems to me that there's a dissonance, a disparity, between what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing. If the rain's coming down so hard, how can the leaves be falling so slowly, so gently?

  In my morning trance, and perhaps my winter-coming-on trance, it seems somehow that the physical distance between those two senses—the sound of the fast rain, and the sight of the slow-falling leaves—contains the same space, the territory, in which lies the short story, the fiction I am pursuing—that there is a crack, a niche in which the story is hiding—but that I cannot quite figure out how to work or earn my way into that space but can instead only see it, as if across the lateral distance of the rainy marsh, on the other, farther side of the marsh.

  I think that to achieve that place in fiction, which seems to be some lateral distance, you really have to descend: that this perception of a farther, lateral shore is an illusion, and is a vertical distance, really; that you have to go down a set of damp stair steps, into another place, as if lying down to sleep in winter, for all the rest of winter, perhaps.

  A turning away from the sun, with the days and nights chilling slowly, gradually, half a degree at a time, and the snow line creeping down out of the mountains a few hundred feet each night, is how it goes most years, until one morning, finally, the snow is down in town, and we feel a joy and relief that the waiting is finally over, though a bit of regret too, at the loss of the lovely autumn, and at the responsibility of winter. How much easier it would be to sleep, or leave, than to stay.

  One sunny morning I'm sitting at the picnic table, in the fading alder bower, writing, when I feel the barometer dropping. The sky is blue and unchanging, and there's no wind, but I feel nonetheless an onrush of invisible pressure, like the breath of something, a pressure so dense that brown and red and yellow leaves begin falling from the alders and aspen despite being unbidden by any stirring of breeze— leaping from the branches, it seems, and tumbling straight to the dank and rotting black earth, obeying autumn.

  Or perhaps the moisture in the air has so saturated them that they are now too heavy to retain their tenuous, lingering hold on the branches. Whatever the reason, they are all falling, melting, with no breeze, just falling, and it is like watching snow fall in a silent, windless storm, this same motion a preface to the coming months: as if there is always only one story, one pattern, in all of nature, but that it is too vast and complex for us to ever see anything but glimpses and edges of that penultimate answer, or knowledge.

  Answer is not quite the right word, for that implies there is a question, which there isn't. There is only one beautiful day after another. One awakens, draws breath, and moves forward into each new day like a deer venturing into the tall waving marsh grass.

  Later in the day, when I've moved back into the cabin and am working, the wind does return, and it blows more leaves down, swirls them dancing in all directions, with the brief collections and assemblages of leaves taking on in their descent once more the shapes and forms of living creatures, so that it appears as if there are ghosts moving across the marsh. And so many dry leaves are landing on the tin roof of the cabin that it sounds like rain; and even though it is a dry rain, a ghost rain, I hunch up and edge in closer to the wood stove.

  Which is greater, joy or peace?

  My own peculiar dilemma, I think, is that peace brings me joy; that from peace, I soon enough escalate into euphoria. Which is lovely enough. But then, coming back down can be a frightening feeling, this descending from euphoria. It's absolutely a feeling like falling.

  Perhaps I should hold on to the one thought, in the descent, a mantra—something like Only beauty; Only beauty —and in that manner, slow or relax in my descent, traveling and landing wherever the breeze and my own weight take me, and remembering always that I am but one among billions, that there are as many of us as there are leaves in this forest.

  Still, I can't help it. I stare out at the beauty of those swirling leaves, and the white trunks of the aspen, the gold pastel of their remaining leaves, the butterscotch of larch regal against the coming purple storm sky in the north and the great brooding mountains beyond—the leaves scurrying across the marsh now—and I get too far out there, into joy, too quickly, and then I don't know what to do with that joy, don't know how to process such beauty, and I feel a touch of panic or even sorrow, without having a clue what it's about.

  Do you know what I mean? Is it this way for others of us, in the autumn? Why is it this way?

  One more year. And one more. And one more. Always, one more.

  One of the sweetest things about October, finally, I think, is the hush that comes right before the start of hunting season. Some of us will have been out hunting birds in September and early October, and might even have gone out with the bow, hoping to call in an elk. But for most of the state, and most of the culture, hunting season does not begin until late October, with the start of rifle season—the ultimate opportunity for bounty gathering—and I wonder if part of the hush that precedes the season's start—kind of a soft spot in time, in which time seems disinclined, for once, to move forward—might come because almost all of us have finally made our peace with the human decision to push on and reach for more even as most of the rest of the world is lying down and going to sleep.

  For the next five weeks, we will be more active, physically, than we have been all year. We'll run ourselves ragged, rising hours before dawn and hauling ourselves up one mountain and down another, traveling always to the deeper, farther reaches, the back sides of places, following tracks and scent and intuition and landscape. And perhaps in this exhaustion, we will reach the dream-state, the descent or immersion that is required of the season after all. Perhaps the hunt is our own migration, and our own fit in the world, and in this rank and bountiful place.

  I have to say something here that I'd really
rather not say. For all of my penchant for navel-gazing, I still think it's easier to walk your way into a fit with landscape than to think your way into such a fit.

  I do not mean to alienate intellectuals, or overly glamorize woodchopping and rock-toting. And I need to remember not to offer my own thoughts as prescription, but rather simply as my own observations and predilections. But for my own volatile, mood-tenuous, drifty self, any assurances or resolutions about the world and my place in it that I have gotten by thinking or pondering—the abstract—have almost always been second rate, compared to the physical, tangible specificity of fit that seems to happen most often when I'm not even aware of searching for such a fit: near the end of a long hike, or at the top of a mountain, leaning winded against a big rock and staring out at the valley below.

  Or hunting: following a deer, or an elk, all day long. Adjusting my pace to his, and seeing the landscape—topography, precipitation, substrate, temperature, wind direction, everything —with an intensity that matches his. A stepping-up of hunger and its broader, wider, perhaps more interesting cousin, desire.

  I love the intellectual world—the life of the mind, which is to me sometimes like a shadow life, the shadows and echoes and memories of other things. Such a landscape seems to possess infinite depth. But what I like about the physical world, the life of the body, is how much the world craves, it seems—despite our strange drifting, and our physical awkwardness—to make a fit with all things.

  Every hunt is different, every hunt is special and wonderful: but one that I am remembering right now involved a big bull that I tracked through a mix of rain and falling snow. I followed him all day, into and through a place in the valley where I had never been before, until finally, I think, he himself came to a place he too was unfamiliar with: a gnarly tangle of lodgepole blowdown.

  When I caught up with him, near dusk—sneaking as silently as I could, in the soft new snow, and the fog, and the dim blue light, both of us drenched—he was looking back, knowing that I was somewhere out there, and the reason he had paused was that he had boxed himself in: had hopped over a wind-felled girder work of lodgepole and found himself in the equivalent of a small corral.

  He could have gotten out; he wasn't entirely trapped. But he was weary, like me, and was just standing there in the hard rain and blue fog, coat drenched, antlers gleaming, breathing hard.

  Of all the thousands of trees that had blown over in this one stretch of forest, he had found the sixteen or so that had toppled four-square into a small corral, a roofless cabin. It seemed to me almost as if he had decided to go no farther; and though he was not ceding any of his wildness—was in no way yielding to domesticity—he was nonetheless, finally, in a sort of wild corral, and I felt that I was meant to find and take this animal.

  Some days—many days, in this wild blue snowy valley—the world's grace and desire for order (despite what physicists say about the world craving disorder) seems to shout its message, over and over again, until you see it, that order, in every glimpse and glance. Infidel that I am, I do not always want to quite accept the enormity of the idea that some one person, or some one deity, could make all of this, or that it could be so elegant, and I want to instead propose some certain dry mathematical formula, y ' m 1/x X r-1/3 (V-1/m), or something of that nature, by which all things will suddenly fit, evident in all shapes. And all movements—this one formula capturing even the laminar flow of the wind itself, the invisible ribbons of air that might be the pulse and breath of a God, perhaps: nothing less, one thing, only one thing.

  You see it in the daily rhythms of things—this sameness, this sacredness—not just in the cycle and whirl and repetition of seasons.

  Twenty years ago, when I first wandered into this marsh, I found a set of fresh wolf tracks, not hours old, in the October mud, behind some willows. I never saw that wolf—indeed, wolves were not thought to even be here, back then—but this October, as I was staring out the window, daydreaming, a black wolf emerged from those very willows, paused, and then struck out across the marsh, traveling through the precise place where I had seen those rare tracks long ago.

  Twenty years is a long time, to us. To the world, of course—as well as to any gods or God, much less any mathematical formula—it is so insignificant as to perhaps be unnoticeable. Even though it could not have been the same wolf, perhaps that is a distinction known only to you and me, across time's vast landscape.

  In the front yard, there was for a long time a log that we'd felled, a big leaning green but beetle-infested pine that, until we felled it, had been in a position where it could fall over onto the house.

  For years, the girls and I used it for a crude balance beam, playing follow the leader on its knotted, tapering spine. When the log finally cured, we had it sawn into lumber to make a bookshelf (which might one day hold a children's book I'd like to write, about, among other things, tightrope-walking along the spine of a fallen tree).

  The log lay there for nearly three years, drying, and changing, ever so slightly, the chemistry and compaction and vegetation of the soil just beneath it—forming a kind of invisible shadow, in that manner.

  And when this year's first snow arrives in the valley, the rain turning one night to slushy white, in the morning the front yard is blanketed, perfectly white, and we think, All right, it's here again, already.

  A strange thing happens though, later in the morning. A mild sun appears, and by noon some of the snow is melting—as if time, and the seasons, are reversing direction, pulling back to reveal some earlier time again.

  The first place to melt is the ghost shadow of where that log was. For whatever reason, that space warms faster, so that even a year later we can see precisely where that log—the ghost log, now a bookshelf—rested.

  Are the shapes and paths of all ghosts so very nearly the same—indeed, often exactly the same—as those of the living? Call it the unbreakableness of things, and know, almost surely, that again this must be at least partly designed, cannot be fully accidental. And whether designed by us, or Another, or some collaboration of force between the two—between all—make no mistake: some kind of effort is being made, and it is in the fullness of the year, perhaps, that we sometimes get our best chance, our best shot, at seeing this.

  NOVEMBER

  WHAT MAKES A SEASON? What is the nature of time? How much of time's passage is a mathematical abstraction, and how much of it, if any, is a living, breathing organism, a life process, stirred and generated in part by our passage through it—a symbiotic relationship, or perhaps even at times a parasitic one, but a relationship nonetheless, in which two forces act and are acted upon by each other?

  The way an injury to us on a certain date, years ago, can mar the shape or path of a subsequent year—that same date becoming as specific to the body of a year, of subsequent years, as might an injury to one's kidneys, or ribs. It's been ten years since my mother died young, died too early—dying in November—and yet each year thereafter, a heaviness enters my spirit around that time, and my dreams are filled with a sadness I seem unable to control.

  And this year I find myself injured again, around that same time: not in anywhere the same fashion, or with even a fraction of the same grief, but strangely, near the same point in the year.

  Less than a full day after the date on which my mother died, a stranger comes driving down our long driveway, lost, and drives over our old blind and deaf Homer-dog, killing her. Neither the grief I feel nor the circumstances of it have anything to do with the loss of my mother; it is merely another, infinitely smaller loss, at that same point in time.

  Elizabeth was down in Missoula, visiting friends, and the girls were in school. I was out hunting in the rain, and when I came home at lunch, I didn't even see Homer, who was laid out next to Point and Superman's kennel. Instead, there was a note on the table, expressing how sorry the driver was, how he didn't see Homer, yadda yadda—and my mind froze, not knowing what the note was talking about and yet also knowing somehow immedi
ately.

  I went out and looked for Homer, called her name, whistled in the high pitch that sometimes she could still barely hear. Certain she would come bounding around the corner—still spry, for sixteen and a half—and would shatter, as if with the force of the myth, the stranger's ragged note.

  There was only the sound of hissing rain. The other dogs whining a little in their kennel, watching me.

  The note had said she was laid out by a stump alongside the driveway. I went to the stump and she wasn't there; and again, it seemed to me that by her not being there, the myth of the note could be broken, that time itself could be reversed, as if in a river's eddy, if even only for an hour or two, or for however long it took to get her back upright, standing, and alive.

  I found her by the other stump, the one at the corner of the driveway, laid out neatly enough, but soaking, sodden in the cold damned rain.

  The driver had been gone only a few hours. Homer was still not yet as cold as the rain and snow around her. Not warm, but not yet cold or stiff. I kept thinking, desperately, of how she might yet be saved; how I could rush her down to the miracle vet in town, who had on so many occasions before rescued her from one calamity or another.

  I picked her up to carry her back into the house. There was a certain way she would lean into you when you bent to pick her up that was meant to assist you in the act; and without it, I scarcely knew how to lift her.

  I laid her on her bed and wrapped her in an old jacket. Her lips were curled back, as if she had been in pain, and her hindquarters were torn from the gravel, and again I felt desperate, felt that I had let her down. I had picked her and her twin sister, Ann, up on the side of the road in Mississippi, back in late May of 1985—indeed, there'd been a third pup with them, already dead, struck by a car or truck—and though part of me was aware that I had saved her, had given her sixteen and a half great years, there was another part of me that knew she deserved much better, that she deserved for me to be there with her, comforting her, and that she deserved a painless death. She was the most loyal and affectionate dog I'd ever had, and I was angry at the carelessness of the pilgrim who had not been more cautious, coming down a strange driveway out in the country, and angry at the unthinking disrespect of trespass, but angriest of all that after all those years together, I had been unable to give Homer even that one small dignity of a natural death, that one small comfort, at the end: that instead, after all those years of service, she had known at the end only pain and confusion.