The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Like most of us, I hate asking for things, if only because I hate in particular hearing the word no. I don't even like to say the word myself, but I sure don't like taking the risk of putting myself in a position where someone else can say that word. This isn't a particularly admirable trait, I know, but there you have it. And to my small credit, I'm getting better.

  Asking Monroe for help, for instance: knowing, even as I do, that like all of us, he is overloaded with deadlines. It's not unusual to wake up on a winter night and look out the window and see him plowing your driveway in the middle of the night, rooster tails of sparks flying from his chains and snowblade as he scrapes back down to the grit and gravel, sparks flying like fireworks even in the midst of a swirling snowstorm.

  Monroe greets me in his tool yard. Today he's wearing his navy blue T-shirt. "I looked at it this morning," he says. "We can get it out. There's a lot of different options we can try, a lot to choose from, but we can get it out. It just might take a while," he says. He tells me that he had planned to drive over the mountain to go to town today—to put studded tires on his own truck, in fact, in addition to other chores and jobs and errands—but that what the heck, he's already running late anyway, so it won't hurt as bad to put it off another day: a Yaakish kind of logic that makes perfect sense to me.

  I'll spare the reader a blow-by-blow description of the various methods we attempted, but it was like a magic trick, the way an entire morning vanished simply to the logistics of digging cables here and there under the snow, attaching chains and cables here and there, going back down the hill to look for more cables, setting up sawhorses to close the icy road, sliding off the road in Monroe's big truck two or three times (though never, fortunately, over the big cliff). At one point, we came around the corner in Monroe's truck (we'd driven into Yaak to see if the gravel pit was open, to get gravel to spread on the icy road for better traction before beginning our labors) only to encounter a little tiny two-wheel-drive car coming up the driveway, the kind of vehicle that a car rental company would call a subcompact, or maybe some newer classification denoting a craft even more minuscule than that.

  The little car was coming up the hill and around that corner at a pretty good clip— I think I can, I think I can —and Monroe hit his brakes, and the other driver hit her brakes, right at the spot where I'd gone off.

  Since they were coming uphill, they were able to stop; Monroe's heavy truck, on the other hand, locked up and began sliding down the hill.

  I could see the people in the little car making horrified faces. It was a family of three generations, all on their way to Bible school—grandma, daughters, and itty-bitty baby, half a dozen people squeezed into that little sled of a car—and, certain that Monroe's big truck was going to slide right into them and thump them over the cliff like a well-placed cue ball smacking its target into some corner pocket, I jumped out again and ran alongside Monroe's twisting, skating truck, running toward the petrified occupants of the tiny car, holding out my arms and saying, "Give me the baby! Roll down the window and give me the baby!"

  Ridiculous stuff.

  Monroe's truck bumped theirs, and sure enough, knocked it lightly backwards, but only a short distance; so slow had been his skid that there wasn't quite enough mass and momentum to send them (and perhaps Monroe, likewise) over the cliff. Baby, mama, auntie, grandmother, sisters—all were safe. Or so it seemed.

  Everyone climbed out of the vehicles and congregated around the scene: ashen and terrified and joyful all over again. Everyone checked to be certain everyone else was all right, and then Monroe got in his truck to back it up to the top of the hill, which wasn't so far away.

  He was only able to go about ten feet, however, before his tires began to spin, as mine had the night before—and like in some eternally damned time loop, he began sliding back down the hill once more, heading straight for the little car, and the whole gaggle of us, baby and all.

  Like alarmed deer, we leapt in all directions—some down the hill, others of us up the hill—while the owner of the little car rushed out and waved her arms at Monroe's sliding truck, as if trying to ward it away with hoodoo.

  Once again, his truck slid into the little car; and once more, miraculously, it held its ground.

  There was nowhere to go but down. Like an astronaut, Monroe climbed into their little car and backed it down the hill, one inch at a time, and was able to safely reach the bottom, where the family rejoined their car and decided to turn around and go back home rather than attempting the hill, and church, that day.

  It's at that point that we give up on all our various plans. "Let's just go home and call it a draw," I say, "and try again in a few days, when the ice isn't so bad." It's impossible to even stand up without holding on to a tree, or the side of a truck. But just as we have reached that agreement, another neighbor, Chuck, who has heard all the commotion, comes wandering down to investigate.

  Chuck has a big old skidder that he sometimes uses for logging, a machine even bigger and more powerful than Monroe's backhoe, and with the hopeful arrogance of a man who might think his racehorse is a little faster than it really is—or so it seems to me—Chuck says, "I believe I can get that truck out."

  Trees and deer: the fabric as well as the foundation of our lives up here. With a jury-rigged assemblage of mismatched chains and hasps, we fashion Chuck's belching skidder to a giant Doug fir that leans out of the slope above us. The tree will serve as Chuck's anchor, it is hoped, to keep him from being pulled over the edge of the cliff during his labors. I ask out loud the question for which Chuck does not have an answer—"What if it pulls that leaning tree out of the ground?"—but his opinion is that it probably won't, that the power of roots, even on a steep hillside, is significant: sufficient for the task, if not quite the miracle requested.

  The machine disgorges a clatter of ancient valves and a burst of black diesel smoke, and Chuck lowers the stabilizing legs onto the ice, planting them two-square, like the abdominal dabbing of some arachnid, probing the ice, positioning itself for some kind of predatory excavation, or settling in for a war of besiegement.

  From the skidder, we unwind a long choker cable, to which—surprise! It's not quite long enough—we have to knot another one, and attach it to the back end of my truck.

  The plan is simple: elegant to me in its shocking reliance on brute strength.

  In the first phase, Chuck will pull the tail end of my truck up the hill, unwrapping it from the tree's clutches and lining it up so that it's aiming straight down the cliff, dangling from the end of the skidder's winch cable like a plumb bob; and after reeling the truck in a few feet, to make sure it's hanging straight, Chuck will employ a kind of reverse Yaak logic, unspooling the cable, letting the weight of the truck and the cliff grasp of gravity pull the truck slowly (one spool click unwinding at a time, hopefully) down the cliff, weaving its way through the trees, over stumps and boulders, to the lower road, farther below.

  And that's how it works. Once he gets the back end pulled off the tree and the truck is straightened out, I climb in and buckle up, and it's like a carnival ride, one of those Ferris wheels in which the bucket, the cage, spins upside down so that you're staring directly at the ground.

  I'm strapped in like a fighter pilot, already pulling G's, even at a standstill. A little audience is gathered at the bottom, watching. If the tree that Chuck's anchored to cracks, or if one of the jury-rigged cable knots breaks, or if the winch fails, or the cable otherwise pulls free of my salt-rusting old truck, things will get more interesting than they already are, and with a river looming below me like the possible landing site for a ski jumper, I've already prepared myself to leap from the truck again, if need be. For the time being, though, I will keep my harness snug around me as I try to help navigate the truck through the forest, down the last of the sixty-degree slope, steering in slow motion around boulder, stumps, and trees.

  Far up above, Chuck lets out the first gear click of winch spool, and the truck shudders as i
t eases roughly down its first foot of terrain. Coins, plastic forks, sections of unread newspaper, gloves, baseball caps, and wrenches all go hurtling past my ear and fall against the windshield, then slide down into various dashboard heater apertures, like small rodents ducking back into their burrows—some perhaps to disappear forever, while others might eventually trickle out through the carriage to the ground below, so that it might be possible, if we ever get the truck out, to come back some years later and track the strange path of our descent as if following the spoor of some wounded animal.

  Another spool click and the truck lurches another foot closer to the river, and yet another foot closer to freedom. Like a running back drifting along the line of scrimmage, peering through the seethe of bodies tangled before him, I can see a little lane that has opened slightly to the left, and I crank the wheels that way, and Chuck lets out another length of spool. We slide into that gap successfully, and then, perhaps emboldened by his success, Chuck begins letting the line out more steadily, and it's more frightening that way, and yet it's also bringing us closer to success faster, and so I hang on tightly and try to steer the vertical truck, feeling supremely awkward and yet ridiculously, vaguely hopeful, as when on occasion one might get suckered into playing one of those coin-slot gripping-talon games such as are found at carnivals or in pizza parlors, in which the victim, the sap, tries, through clumsy maneuvering of oversize toggle switches, to direct a three-pronged claw into a pile of purple stuffed teddy bears and other useless clutter, attempting to latch on to one of the those bright objects of desire.

  There is no clutter before me, however: only snow and forest and mountains and river. The irony is not lost on me that for much of the last twenty years I've been working hard, along with other local residents and activists, to protect the last public lands where we the taxpayers have not yet built roads on our national forest, and yet here I am, driving anyway, through the forest where there is no road—even if only for fifty feet, and even if only across a little wedge, not of national forest but of private ground, caught between two other roads—a higher one, and a lower one.

  Actually, as I get closer to the bottom—closer to safety—it's kind of fun, and it occurs to me that were some of the extreme motorheads to witness this, it might give them new ideas for recreational activities and the national forests: that they might soon clamor to bring cranes and cables to their favorite cliffs and canyons of the public lands and lower themselves spinning over the edge in similar fashion when bored on some certain Sunday afternoon.

  The last part is the steepest—a little three-foot sheer ledge, like a ski jump. There's a thumping and scraping beneath me, and I'm traveling faster, careening through brush and dry branches, and then suddenly, like a deer bounding from out of the woods, I'm out onto the icy road and then am crossing it, my brakes useless once again, and out into the snowy field that lies between the lower road and the river.

  I reach the end of my tether, though, and now all Chuck has to do is reel me back a bit to that lower road, which he does; and I climb out and unhitch the cable.

  Both Monroe and Chuck refuse to accept any payment for their day's labors, saying that they like the feeling of doing a good deed every so often, and so in the end all I can tell them is that I was happy to be of service. (Later that year, on a drive into town, Elizabeth will find Monroe ditch-skidded off the road, and will pull him out.) Another neighbor, Geoff, has helped us shovel a truckload of gravel into Monroe's truck, and the three of us spread it up and down the long icy hill, and then it's time for me to drive home.

  It's nearly dusk, and though I've finally changed into my studded tires and we have some of the new gravel on the road, there's still very much the feeling of climbing right back on the horse that has thrown you—but this time the truck makes the corner and climbs right on out, slipping and spinning only a little right at the top. My truck is running a little rough—some crankcase oil evidently spilled into the old worn valves during the night, while the truck rested on its side—but by nightfall, I am safe and warm and dry in my own home, alive and well, and still encased in that cyst or cocoon of shimmering, lucid grace where time slows and, again, the world's full beauty is revealed in every glance, and every moment.

  It is a wonderfully light and luminous feeling, one that cannot and will not last forever, it seems, but it is with me that evening, and even for several days afterward; and the distance between what is versus what could have been is both as steep and vast and yet as hairline minute as it ever was. It is only that on this occasion I have been permitted to walk all the way to the edge of that constant gulf and peer down into it—as if into an abyss—and witness, with all of my senses, how narrow the breach is in that gulf, and yet how infinitely deep also the chasm is.

  To witness it, but then turn away; to turn back.

  Even after the cocoon of grace and heightened awareness has been worn down by the passage of time, traces of it will remain, however—not just on me, but, it seems, on my family. Months later, Lowry will misplace a treasured candy bar in the back of my cluttered truck: one of those big, supremely expensive dark chocolate bars, for which some of the proceeds go to help protect the habitat of this or that endangered species—grizzlies and swans, flamingos, polar bears, manatees—and we search and search for it but cannot find it.

  She's disappointed, of course, and so I go back out again and keep looking; it's only been missing for a couple of days. And finally, I find it, and she's elated.

  It will have been months since the accident, or near accident, at the time I am speaking of now—we will not have discussed or even mentioned it for weeks—but as if from out of the blue, and overjoyed to have found her candy bar, Lowry will say, "It sure is a good thing you didn't die when your truck went over the cliff, Dad."

  At first I laughed, thinking she meant, Who else would be able to find my candy bar in the back of your truck? Which is what a six-year-old should say.

  But now, in the remembering, I think she was just remembering the general upside-downness of things in the truck the day after I returned home. The way some things can change—can be turned completely upside down—even as other things, such as a father, can and must forever, stay constant. And that while for me one lingering story or memory will be my liberating leap from the plunging truck, a story or deep-set memory for the girls might be seeing where my tracks went off the road and disappeared, and yet at the same time that they were witnessing that, they were also seeing me come climbing back up the slope, up through the snow and out of that chasm, illuminated in headlights and swirling, falling snow. Everything's fine, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine.

  Nothing is ever always fine, of course, but how nice for children, growing children, to believe that story, that myth, so that they are free then to focus their energy and attention on the wonders and beauty of the world, worry-free.

  While we adults, likewise—as we come increasingly to understand how impermanent everything is, or almost everything—are similarly helped to focus on the same message, the same understanding, even if coming to that understanding from the other end of the spectrum.

  Shyly, Lowry breaks off a piece of her candy bar and hands it to me—and whether as reward or communion, I cannot be sure. I know only that it is delicious, and I remember, for a few moments all over again, what it was like, to be in that cocoon of grace: immersed in the world not just of luck and chance but also of the concern and assistance of my neighbors.

  Everything.

  DECEMBER

  DRAMA! ON THE DAY of the school Christmas play, Wendy, who is to play the lead actress, is sick, throwing-up-and-fever sick. Her part in Santa Claus and the Wicked Wazoo is that of none other than the Wazoo herself, and as an eighth-grader, it's her last year to be in the play before she graduates and heads on to high school down in Troy. Her classmate, Karen, can't take her part, because Karen is Mrs. Claus, who is often in the same scene as the Wicked Wazoo (whose goal it is, of course, to spoil Christmas
).

  If Wendy doesn't rally, it'll be up to Mary Katherine to learn the part—not just the forty lines, but the timing, blocking, entrances and exits, the whole structure—in addition to keeping her part as "Martha, a peasant girl." (There are only five girls in the Yaak school this year—the eighth-graders, Wendy and Karen; Mary Katherine in fourth grade; Lowry in first grade; and Cheina in kindergarten.)

  Mary Katherine doesn't find out about this until midmorning on the day of the play, but takes right to the task; she and Karen spend the day practicing, and when Mary Katherine comes home that afternoon, she's cool as a cucumber, casual and confident: not arrogant, just confident. If anything, she's subdued, because it's Wendy's last year. But about her lines, and their delivery, she's confident, with neither stage fright nor overconfidence: just another day in paradise.

  Either Elizabeth or I would be jittery; and I can't help but think that this low-key nonchalance on Mary Katherine's part—a native durable confidence rather than the affected confidence of bravado—is one of the products of place, one of the myriad benefits of a small school, the two-room log school, in which all the different grades sit together, and interact every day, year in and year out, like family—learning lessons such as responsibility and friendship and loyalty in addition to all the prescribed traditional curricula.

  She's not nervous, I think, because she has everyone's support. And no one else is nervous because there's so much trust and teamwork. The two teachers, Jeannette and Bill, have been working with the students for almost a month, and so accustomed have I become to the easy familiarity of the little school—the older students helping to teach and take care of the younger ones, and the younger ones benefiting from all that "extra" instruction (and learning the model of leadership that they'll grow into, as the older ones graduate)—that it's easy for me to forget that it's not necessarily like this in other schools. I try not to ever take it for granted, how wonderful this opportunity is for the girls, for all the students, and how much strength it will give them as citizens of the twenty-first century, to have had this log-cabin experience—but still, I've become accustomed to it, even if I don't take it for granted, and it is moments like Mary Katherine's and the other students' poise that remind me again of the fuller value of that rarity. Her response, and their response—taking confident pleasure in the arrival of a challenge rather than melting down into the jitters—is probably the normal or "natural" one, whereas the self-induced nervousness that Elizabeth or I would encounter, though common, a less natural response...