The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Our soft bodies will be in the ether soon enough, but the nacreous oyster shell residue of where we were, what we saw, who we loved and were loved by, beneath these mountains, and in these forests, and at the edge of these marshes, seems finally so durable as to become like a polished fossil, or even a gemstone: again a jade nautilus, perhaps, with a thousand or ten thousand chambers.

  What it seems like, on certain evenings such as this one—our friends waving goodbye, walking out to their trucks with armfuls of food, a week's worth of leftovers, walking out to their trucks in the falling snow, calling out their good wishes, and warm and contented and sleepy and happy—is that in our lives here in this valley, surrounded by such grace and bounty and beauty and mystery, not even the voracious animal of time can eat away at this residual beauty: beauty being laid in like a store of firewood against the longest winter imaginable, but enough, more than enough, so that after winter is gone, some firewood will still remain.

  And that after the soft bodies of our lives are gone, these shells, polished and worn, will somehow remain, swirling and rattling around in the currents at ocean's bottom, and making a sound, occasionally, like the clinking of fine china.

  As if we filter the wilderness through us, through our lives and experiences, and that these shells we leave behind are but more pure expressions of the breath of the wilderness, as much a product of this place as the shed antler of a deer, or a feather, or even the entire skeleton of a deer, quartered and rendered and left up on a mountain while the meat and hide we carried home.

  More lasting than those things, though, somehow. Not as lasting as the wilderness itself, perhaps—or as lasting as the wilderness should be—but almost.

  And if not quite as lasting, or durable as shell or stone, then as enduring, perhaps, as the great larch trees, with their own slow-growth rings, which live sometimes to be six or seven hundred years and then take another hundred years or more to die, and which then after life has fully left them still remain standing for another hundred or more years; and which, after finally falling over—perhaps one millennium has passed, since they were a first seedling—might take another century or more to rot, as they become covered slowly with the shedding needles of those that follow them.

  It feels that way, on nights such as this one, with the year's meat secured and our friends waving goodbye and good night: that there does not need to be any other level, or any other life before or after this one; that there is no need for the concept of eternity, for it already exists, and has as its proof the chinaware sound of those little shells, sprung from the wilderness, clinking together.

  Two births: the organic birth of our lives, and then the inorganic birth, the accretion, of our shelled lives; the physical residue of whatever kind of world and breath surrounds us.

  Not long after the grace of Thanksgiving, I'm due to gather with friends at the Forest Council office for a regular monthly board meeting—trying, as ever, to figure out how to raise some funds to keep our two wonderful part-time staffers hanging on, and to strategize about various upcoming community service projects, and how to best achieve wilderness protection for our wildest backcountry.

  Elizabeth is out of town, and I've got the girls with me. The plan is for me to drop them off at Bill and Sue's, nearby, while I attend the meeting. Elizabeth will be home before the meeting is over and can pick them up.

  And that's the way it goes, just as planned, except for a little alteration. On the steep drive down to Bill and Sue's, my slick summer tires spin on the ice and snow, and when I try to ascend the hill to their driveway above the river, my tires spin again, so much so that I must stop and back up and then try it again, with more of a running start; and even then, we barely gain the crest of that little hill.

  I'm a few minutes late, and so although the thought occurs to me that I might really have trouble ascending the steep hill on the way out, I file the thought quickly away so that it's really just a little grass bur of a thing.

  I drop the girls off at Bill and Sue's—the girls are delighted to get to play with Wendy and Tyler on a school night—and then hurry on to the meeting. In typical gluttonous fashion, wanting to have my cake and eat it too, I have made plans to fix a fancy supper for Elizabeth's return, but have run out of time. On my way out the door, however, I scooped up my preparations in all their varying stages of half readiness—diced onions, diced jalapenos, grated Monterey Jack cheese, sliced avocados, toasted cumin seeds, chopped cilantro, and so on—in the hopes of perhaps being able to work on the dish (black bean huevos rancheros) at the little gas stove in the Forest Council office, while attending the board meeting.

  I've tossed the pots and pans I'll need into a paper grocery bag, as well as our fancy twenty-dollar metal spatula with its sleek cherry-wood handle: a spatula that makes you want to fry an egg.

  I hurry on into the meeting, where, of course, there's no time to cook—the discussion is too intense, the issues too clamant to receive anything other than the undivided attention of each of us—and just about the time the meeting ends, Elizabeth arrives to pick up the girls.

  I'm a little off-balance. Part of me is still clinging to the dreamy, snowy suspension of the deer hunt, and part of me is rattled, agitated by the brittle demands of the activist. Part of me is wanting to get home and cook that meal too—as if that might be some way of establishing a transition between dreamland and reality—but part of me remembers also that little grass bur of momentary tire spin on the way in, and so I tell everyone else to drive on out ahead of me, so that if I get stuck I won't be blocking anyone else's path, and for the girls to ride in Elizabeth's truck, which already has on its studded snow tires, rather than in mine, which does not yet. (Ever the cheapskate, I was hoping to get a couple more weeks' wear out of my old tires, and to save a couple of weeks' wear on my studded tires.)

  Not quite uneasy, but feeling something —some kind of imbalance—I have the prescience, at least, to go grab some more firewood to toss in the back of my truck, for added weight over the rear axle, to give me better traction on my way up the long hill: the tilted hill that hugs the cliff that hangs out over the river so far below.

  It's snowing hard, and even though the snow is piling up on the ice skin of the road, making it even more treacherous, I'm glad to see it. Except for the one year we got way too much snow, we can hardly ever get enough. Rain doesn't count—it washes away, into the Yaak River below, and then to the Kootenai, and then the Columbia, and then the Pacific. Only snow counts, as true protection against the greenhouse heat of summer, and the apocalyptic dry winds that seem to increase in both aridity and vigor each year.

  I wave goodbye to my fellow board members as they drive off into the snow and up that steep, icy hill, disappearing safely into the night, secure in their four-wheel-drive trucks and Subarus, secure with their newly studded snow tires; secure in their wisdom for not having scrimped or hoarded but having instead put their snow tires on right away. Secure in their having stepped forward resolutely into winter; having turned their back, finally, on autumn, rather than lingering any longer.

  I ask Elizabeth and the girls to wait for me at the top of the hill, just in case I have trouble; in case I can't get up the hill and have to back down and leave the truck overnight. I hope that's not how it turns out, for it will mean having to come back and jack the truck up and take the summer tires off and put my set of studded tires on—wrestling around in the snow rather than in a dry garage—and I'm hoping fervently to get just one more run out of those old summer tires, those old street tires.

  As I start up the hill, I'm pretty acutely aware that I'm in that land of feeling two things: pleased, partly, with my wisdom, my maturity, at having sent everyone else safely on ahead of me, but uneasiness also, that niggling little grass bur of a feeling that's trying to tell me, Bass, you're about to step in deep shit again. Why can't you be more careful?

  There is an impulsive recklessness in me, and there is an overriding and unbearable caution,
a hesitancy.

  The truck makes it about halfway up the hill, wheels spinning before it can go no farther. It's not stuck, in the traditional sense—it just can't go any farther; the rubber-slick tires are spinning shrilly, whining, against the sheet of ice beneath them.

  Tilted up as I am on the steep pitch of the hill, I can't even see the road in front of me. I feel like an astronaut buckled in for a space launch.

  There's nothing to do but back down. I'll just take it real slow and easy, touching the brake lightly, and ease back down to where I started from. There's no rush. I'll come back tomorrow, change those tires out, and start all over.

  Up to this point, I have neglected to tell the reader that there is a bend in the road, a sharp bend, right there at cliff's edge. The truck has just managed, wheels spinning, to make it around this bend, and to start slowly up that final grade, so close to the top.

  It'll be a little tricky, backing down around that sharp corner, but again, I'll take it as slow as is humanly and mechanically possible.

  I am not unmindful of the cliff just on the other side of my truck, or the river below.

  For a little while, things work fine. I back up a few inches, stop; back up a few inches, stop. Safety first. I'm hugging the inside edge, the uphill-tilted edge, trying to catch a bit of roadside snow with my left tires for some wee bit of traction, and just about the time I think I've got it whipped, the truck begins to slide, or worse than slide, really—more of a skate or a glide—with a cleanliness of movement so completely void of friction that for the tiniest of moments I am impressed by its beauty.

  There is terror too, of course: the sickening, total kind, one I-can't-believe-this-is-happening kind, and a powerlessness that is absolute and astounding, as the thing that once seemed an advantage—the great workhorse weight of a big machine—is suddenly reversed to become deadweight liability, a two-ton skateboard, an avalanche, a virtual free fall.

  There's no sound, only that frictionless, steady backwards skate. Ridiculously, I try to turn the wheel to navigate the sharp bend above the river. The truck is moving along backwards at a pretty good clip now, things are happening fast and then faster, and when the truck doesn't change direction at all despite the wheel being turned, I decide completely, unambiguously, to part company with it, in one of the cleanest decisions I can ever remember making.

  I unbuckle and jump out just as the truck is sliding over the edge—my truck door is spread open like a bird's wing, and I have to hurry away from it to keep from being swept over the edge like some last crumb being scooped along by a dustpan—and then, just like that, I am standing unsteady on the steep sheet of glare ice, and the big truck is going over the edge backwards, being swallowed into the quiet of the night.

  It looks like the Titanic going down, twin high-beam headlights piercing the sky vertically, illuminating the spinning spirals of snowflakes above—and what I feel, standing there clean and uninspired on the ice, is not financial remorse at having just severed myself from such an expensive piece of machinery, but instead, strangely and perhaps illogically, liberated: as if I have just shed two tons of weight, a two-ton burden. I feel light and clean and whole and imminently alive; and the grating, rasping, bouncing sound of the un-piloted truck rolling down the cliff, scraping rock and earth, seems only to accentuate this alive-ness.

  I'm not there. I'm here.

  After a while, the crashing stops—the night is almost immediately, instantly, peaceful again, with giant snowflakes falling softly and steadily—and almost casually, as if approaching some scenic overlook, some natural landmark of interest, I walk over to the edge and look over it and see that the truck has stopped about a hundred feet downslope, pinned on its side against an immense and ancient and unmoving Doug fir. The crazy, plowed-up trail of snow looks like the staggering last steps of some great heart-shot mythic beast, and because the headlights are still on, I climb down the slope carefully and crawl into the side-tipped truck (opening the driver's side door as if lifting the hatch to a submarine), and turn the lights off.

  In a little while, I know, Elizabeth will come driving back down the road, worried, and will see where my new-snow tracks leave the road and vanish over the edge, and will be further worried, perhaps even alarmed, and I hurry back up the slope so that I can walk out to the upper road before that happens.

  The tracks, the furrows of black earth and stone, are already being covered, so heavily is the snow falling, and all over the hillside, I'm finding various Ziploc bags and pots and pans from the dish I'd intended to cook, which spilled out as the truck went down the slope.

  How fiercely we cling to the mundane; how stubbornly we grasp at ritual and routine! Like some hillside berry harvester, I pause, trying to gather all of the spilled accouterments—the bag of smashed Roma tomatoes, which were meant to be diced anyway, and the avocados, which at a dollar nineteen a whack are not to be left behind, if possible; and I search in vain for my twenty-dollar spatula, casting up and down the hill for it, and going back into the submarine of a truck to search for it, all to no avail; and when Elizabeth comes creeping back down the hill in her truck, peering over the edge to see me climbing back up, hand over fist, that is the first thing I say to her: "I'm okay, but I can't find the damn spatula."

  There's certainly nothing to be done tonight. The back of the truck bed is wrapped around that old Doug fir like a crumpled-up gum wrapper—the word unpeel comes to mind when considering possible extrication—though what kind of machine might be capable of setting up on the glare-ice road above and hoisting the truck up a hundred feet of cliff, I can't imagine—some sort of military helicopter, perhaps, next spring—and I'm fairly certain that this is going to be the final resting place for my truck, that here it will lie forever, with birds eventually building nests in the engine block, and wild roses sprouting up through dusty cracked windows. Though again, what concerns me in the moment is that wonderful spatula.

  It's snowing so hard that if I don't find it quickly, it'll be buried until March or April, and so I take a flashlight from Elizabeth's truck and once more canvass the cliff, though again with no luck.

  I ascend the hill one last time, climb into her nice warm dry truck, safe, and we drive quietly home, through swirling snow. I do not try to explain to her about how liberated I feel—though she knows what I mean about the spatula, and laments its possible loss too.

  "It'll be there in the spring," she says. "It's got to be around there somewhere."

  The girls are pretty quiet, asking to be sure I'm okay.

  "I wouldn't have gone up that hill if y'all had been in the truck," I tell them. "We'd have walked up."

  "You're sure you're okay?" they ask.

  "Absolutely," I tell them. "Just fine." But they're quiet, all the way home, thinking things over, even if I am not, quite yet.

  In the morning, after we drop the girls off at school, Elizabeth takes me back over to the cliff. The truck is still there—the great hulk of the Doug fir has not somehow decided in the middle of the night to release it, like an angler turning a caught fish back into the river—though because of all the snow that has fallen, it appears at first that the truck has vanished, that it is no different from any of the other hillside boulders, snow shrouded, as if sleeping. Only the black tires, two of which are up in the air, like the hoofs of some recently expired and newly stiffening ungulate, draw notice to the fact that there is a truck down there in the woods, at the bottom of the cliff.

  I'm worried that we might have to saw that magnificent tree down to get the truck out. I don't see how any engine of man can pull that truck back up over the cliff, and am thinking a lane, a path, may need to be cut through the woods, for a distance of fifty or sixty feet, to reach the little dirt road farther below, the little river road that is my neighbor Monroe's driveway.

  I've called Monroe, have asked if he can take a look at the situation and come up with any ideas. Monroe has both a snowplow and a backhoe, and he does much of the valley's heav
y work. He's a large, bearded man who sometimes dresses as a werewolf at Halloween and Santa Claus at Christmas, fitting each part equally well. Monroe is perhaps most recognizable to us in the valley from a distance not by any certain silhouette or bushiness but because he will be the one not wearing a coat.

  Almost always, only jeans and a T-shirt. In the most inclement weather, perhaps some kind of long-sleeve canvas shirt. But ninety-nine winter days out of a hundred, just a T-shirt.

  Elizabeth heads on home—she'll come back and check on me later in the afternoon, when she comes back to pick the girls up—and I walk down the snowy drive to Monroe's. The roads are icier than ever, which last night I would not have thought was possible, and several times, even in the simple act of walking, walking on flat and level ground, I slip and fall so hard that I bounce back up into the air, hitting so hard that my teeth are jarred—it's a bad time of year for vertebrae—and yet I keep getting up cheerfully, the residue of my luck from the night before still so fully upon me that I still feel light and unburdened, liberated, even almost untouchable. The snow world around me seems to be vested with the full potential of its almost unbearable and overwhelming beauty—that is to say, on this day, this day after, the fullness of the beauty that must surely be always present but which is for whatever subtle reasons of plaque, accrual, and routine too often obscured from us. And unless it is only my imagination, other people I encounter on this day after, friends, seem to be feeling or witnessing this same common little revelation of how clean and fine and wonderful the world is: as if it did not have to be any of them who leapt from the plunging truck and was saved but that merely hearing or knowing of the story is enough to remind them of that larger beauty.