The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  It's a big deal, this Christmas play. Every year, the whole community shows up, hermits and all. The plays are always wonderful, and there are cookies and cakes, and after the play, the kids and community sing Christmas carols, there in the log cabin community center, up near the Canadian line, in the middle of the forest, more than forty miles from the nearest town, and it's just nothing but sweet. Some years there's a hayride afterward.

  And this year, like all the other years, goes off perfectly. It's the strangest thing, hearing Mary Katherine's deep, maniacal laugh booming from behind the curtain, preceding the Wazoo's villainous entrance. It's like, Okay, if she's determined to grow up, I can still be proud of her; and though I knew already how proud of her I am, how proud of both girls, it is a revelation, and a growing-up on my part, to see her come swashbuckling out from behind the curtain, still booming that laugh of the great Wazoo, determined to spoil Christmas. It's so strange to see her giving the community, the audience of adults, a gift.

  And I feel the same sensation when Lowry, in her pink glittering ballerina suit, comes twirling out center stage, hands poised over her head in graceful, elegant ballerina pose—the Dancing Doll—and cries out, "Help, help!"

  Every parent feels it, and every audience member, this most excellent gift by the children to the community that supports them—but for me, with my hermit- or recluse-like tendencies, it's a profound witnessing to see that I don't necessarily have to pass on all of my less-than-wonderful attributes to my children, and that they will likely be better in the world for it; and that already, they have something to give to the world, and are giving it.

  All the children are giving it, breathing the breath of Christmas more fully into the community: Mike (whom, as an eighth-grader, and having killed his first deer this year, a monster whitetail buck, we can no longer call "Mikey") as a great Santa Claus; Karen as the calm and confident Mrs. Claus; Jed as the boisterous singing leprechaun, the true star of the show; Kilby, Luke, Levi, and Noah as sly trolls, dressed in camouflage, out to steal Christmas; Kyle as a happy elf; Lowry as the Dancing Doll; Zachary and Cheina as fairies.

  Outside, it's snowing hard. The pew benches in the community center are packed shoulder to shoulder, and the wood stoves are popping. Over the course of the coming year, as with every year in small western towns, there will be disagreements among the adults, fears and accusations and misunderstandings, and sometimes the plain old-fashioned chemical imbalances of humanity—disagreements between individuals, between neighbors—but this evening, at least, the beauty and purity of the children fills the cabin with a love so sweet and dense that after the play is over we linger, not wanting it to end; and when we open the door finally and step outside into the falling snow, that love is adhering to us. Some of it goes sliding out the door like warmth spilled, and off into the night, and into the woods, but a lot of it stays with us, I think, and travels home with us, and stays in us for a good long while, I hope. Peace on earth and goodwill to men.

  Such are the cycles of our lives—the regularity and repetitions of rhythms, here in this place-that-is-still-a-place, this forested island that still seems to be governed somewhat by its own system of time rather than always mankind's—that the end of one thing can feel also like the beginning. December is that way, as the last of the deer or elk is cut and wrapped and frozen, if a hunter was fortunate enough to receive one: the coming year's meat stored away safely. The snow is always down to the valley floor by December—another beginning—and while the rest of the world, including our relatives in the more civilized places, enter into the full frenzy of the Christmas season, things are so much quieter up here, amid a complete absence of malls, though in that quietness, emotions are no less deeply or passionately felt. It's just quiet and slow, is all—like walking in soft new snow at dusk.

  The days are shorter, but with the hunting season behind us and the pressure of making meat lifted, we can sleep later. We can spend any free time we might have skiing too instead of hunting. It's the beginning of rest, of sleep, of play; the beginning of being able to spend even more time with family. We begin wrapping jars of huckleberry jam, for gifts, and take the girls out into the snow for the annual Christmas card picture. Elizabeth gathers boughs of cedar and pine with which to make beautiful wreaths—she and half a dozen other women in the valley gather to spend the days making these wreaths, and then mailing them, fresh-scented, to friends and family in the outside world—and though the days are shorter than ever, and still usually sunless, they feel also brighter and newer, with all the clean white snow.

  The children, having warmed up on Halloween, and then Thanksgiving, are fully into the dreaming (Lowry's still a true believer, but Mary Katherine's dubious about Santa—though as the days progress, I notice that Mary Katherine comes back across the line, if even for only one more year, and it is a sweet and wonderful thing to see, made all the more special by the knowledge that surely this is the last year), and their Christmas lists are posted on the refrigerator. I suspect that they're as cutthroat and mercenary as any children anywhere—it's not like they'd be thrilled with but an orange in their stocking and in a good year maybe a candy cane—but I have to laugh at Lowry's list: a pencil and pencil sharpener, a Barbie (I know, I know), and, most curiously, a bottle of whiteout. And even Mary Katherine's list is somewhat of a relief: books and CDs, a new pair of snow boots, and a pair of ski goggles.

  Like a cliché of a cliché, or as if in a dream of a dream, the holiday season begins for us, I think, on the day that we go to get the Christmas tree.

  For as long as the girls have been able to walk, they've gone into the woods with me each year to find a tree—always a young Doug fir, a species that is overabundant in many of our fire-suppressed forests, and in need of thinning, literally by the millions—but finding the perfect one is never easy. Any tree is beautiful in the forest, but we only had to bring one home one year, pleased with it ourselves, only to hear Elizabeth's considerably more subdued reaction, to vow never again to settle for anything less than perfect.

  What once sometimes took us half an hour now takes us an hour, sometimes an hour and a half: and though the pleasure is in the hunt, there is pleasure also each day and night thereafter in admiring the tree all throughout the holidays.

  I prepare the girls for it, the cutting, as I would were we to be going on a real hunt; on Sunday night, before they get ready for bed, I tell them that when I pick them up after school on Monday I'll bring their cross-country skis and we'll go out and look for the tree. And the fact that they're as thrilled with this news as if it were Christmas itself pleases me greatly, and though I know they love having regular markers of tradition and security in their lives, I know also that I love it as much as they do, and perhaps more.

  It's bitterly cold when I pick them up, about fifteen degrees, but with a rare breeze that makes it feel closer to zero, and the sky is its usual beautiful ragtag mix of purple and gray clouds, with more snow coming any minute. I've brought a thermos of hot chocolate, and on the way home we share a cup of it, drinking it out of the screw-on top like duck hunters, and then we turn into the little road where we always turn, and get out where we always get out.

  We engage in a brief snowball fight, and then I buckle on my snowshoes, and they put on their skis, and we start up the rocky ridge, which is now covered with snow.

  The skies are beautiful—the color of plums, the color of the back of a seagull, the color of sharks, the color of oyster shells—and we take turns breaking trail through the new snow like explorers, and it pleases me that the girls remember where we are going from all the other years. They're bundled up with as many clothes and coats as they can wear, and I have more of my own larger coats in my backpack, along with the thermos.

  It pleases me to see what natural backcountry skiers they are, having grown up on them—such a strange difference from my own south Texas upbringing—and those beautiful skies hanging dense above the somber blue-green mountain, and amid the star
k winter forest through which we're skiing, also elevate my spirits, even at a time when biologists or physicians might tell us that they should not be elevated as we enter more fully now the depths of winter and its at times extreme lightlessness—and I can't tell who is happier, me or the girls.

  As we move on through the woods, seemingly the only living creatures out and about in this vast snowscape and sleeping forest, there is a spirit that accompanies us, that emanates from the three of us—a happiness, to use an old and worn word—that braids together to form a larger whole; and in accompanying my daughters up the ridge, I can sense and at times taste the flavor not just of that new-made happiness but even of their own elemental happiness, which I remember, dimly now, from my own childhood thirty-five years ago.

  I fear that I'm not saying it clearly. In my experience, it's rare for an adult to experience, ever again, the happiness of a child. There are a million different sorts of adult happiness, mixed in with perhaps a million different nuances—satisfaction, pride, relief, euphoria—but what I feel, moving up that hill with my daughters in the soon-approaching winter dusk, self-sufficient, for the time being, on our skis and snowshoes, and moving deeper into the woods, is a child's happiness, and I cannot remember having felt that in a long, long time.

  Once we reach the ridge, we begin to encounter the young Doug firs growing in between older lodgepoles and larch, and again, the girls are old enough this year to be good judges of physical character: bypassing weaker or asymmetrical trees and judging also which trees are too large and which are too small. Making guesses, and mental notes, about certain trees that we might be able to come back and examine in years hence. But searching, still, for this year's.

  We look for a long time. The wind blurs our eyes and sometimes makes far-off trees look better than they really are; we'll ski and snowshoe down into a bowl or ravine and up the other side to some such tree, only to discover upon reaching it that it's not even remotely like what we're after.

  For a long time now, we have been bringing back a perfect Christmas tree, one that even Elizabeth will acknowledge is perfect, with every branch, every needle, balanced and symmetrical—a tree with a beauty that is somehow magnified in looking at it, compounded by each tier of branches until surely its beauty exceeds any possible summation of its parts—and though the girls are not aware of any sort of pressure, are unable, I'm sure, to imagine anything other than success, simply because that is all they've ever known, in this one tradition, I'm less secure; and as the dusk deepens, we travel farther, looking hard.

  We pass over the stippled, methodical trails of deer, and the seemingly aimless tracks of snowshoe hares; across the tracks of a mountain lion, one that has probably not eaten in a while, and is probably hungry, because we do not hear any ravens squabbling over the remains of a kill nearby, and so I keep the girls close to me.

  We're all three beginning to grow chilled, and so we duck down into a little ravine, a windbreak, and huddle beneath the shelter of a big spruce tree, as if in a little fort or clubhouse, and share another cup of hot chocolate. I bundle them further, putting my heavy overcoats on over their own, and make sure their mufflers are snug; and warmed now, they're ready to play again, and climb back up out of the ravine, herringboning on their skis, only to ski right back down, again and again.

  They're laughing, shrieking, and I do not want to caution them to conserve their energy, to not tire themselves out; I do not want to counsel moderation to their joy, though I am concerned that we're so far from the truck, and with the hour so late, and the evening so cold.

  Carefully, cautiously, trying hard not to disrupt the spirit of their play, I begin to ease and urge them back toward the truck—not following our old tracks, but triangulating. They're still looking up from time to time, evaluating various trees, but in their happiness, and in the fast-fading light, their evaluating skills seem also to be diminishing, and a couple of times they urge me to take a tree that, in my opinion, is less than perfect: recommending one because it is "cute," and another because it is "stately."

  We drift on, buoyed by happiness, floating above the snow on our skis, our snowshoes.

  We find the perfect tree right at dark. I spy it initially, and at first hardly daring to believe our luck, snowshoe over to it without saying anything, wanting to be sure. I call the girls over, ask them to check it out and see what they think—wanting unanimity—and even though I think they are taking our eventual success for granted, they're very excited by the beauty of the tree, and after double-checking to be sure they're sure this is the one they want, I take my saw out of the pack, tell the tree and the forest thank you, out loud, like a pagan, and then saw through the sweet green bark and sap, and the tree leans over slowly, softly, lightly, and settles into the snow.

  We head back to the truck, taking turns pulling it. It's surprisingly hard work, and the tree's needles leave a beautiful wandering feathery trail behind us, completely erasing our tracks.

  Unprompted, as darkness settles, the girls begin singing "Jingle Bells," and then, right after that, with no prior sort of communication save that unspoken kind that exists between sisters, they break inexplicably into the chant of a street-side political rally, a protest, really, that we witnessed (all right, participated in) a few years ago: "What do we want? De-moc-racy! When do we want it? Now!" And in a strange and silly singsong way, the chant seems to make perfect sense, out in the middle of the unpeopled forest, in the deep cold, beneath the gathering night, unseen and unheard by anyone other than our own selves. It is a catchy chant, fitting perfectly, it seems, the cadence of our progress through the snow, so that it could be the mantra for boot camp marching Marines, or Arctic explorers seeking to make a certain destination just before a storm hits.

  By the time we reach the truck, we're all three cold again, and after loading the tree into the back—it fills the bed, and even lying on its side, looks perfect—I warm the truck up and we sit there in the cab, vapor breathing and clouding the windshield, and drink more hot chocolate before turning around and driving the short distance home, where, upon our arrival, Elizabeth comes out onto the porch to inspect that which we have brought home to her.

  She looks it over carefully.

  "It's perfect," she says, finally.

  Long after the tree is gone, and the year, I will remember that afternoon.

  When we first moved up here, I used to believe that the people I heard complaining about winter's length, and particularly winter's lightlessness, were malingers, nabobs of negativity—chronic lightweights deeply entrenched in the hapless pattern of seeing the cup as being half empty instead of half full. I looked at them as a callow youth looks at an aging person and believes or at least suspects that the physical diminishment of age must surely be due at least in part to some sort of character flaw, so unimaginable is that diminishment to the youth, in his or her full strength, and having known only its increase, day after day and year after year.

  All I saw, my first several winters, everywhere I looked, was beauty.

  I still see winter's beauty, in every glimpse, but like those old-timers who pined for the sun and lamented its absence, I too miss it deeply, desperately now, in winter, and have come to believe that winters up here can have a debilitating cumulative effect: that they are like concussions, wherein the first one or two seem to have no lasting or even negative effects, until suddenly—or so it seems—you wake up after your eighth or ninth, or tenth or eleventh, and have difficulty remembering your name, and do not always recognize the face in the mirror.

  Scientists, of course, are discovering the neurochemical and physiological causes of these traumas, these debilitations—seratonin disruptions, seasonal affective disorder, and so on—and there are drugs and medicines and treatments that can be prescribed now to try to counter the brute force of the phenomenon—sunlamps, vitamins, Prozac, and strategic trips to the Caribbe an.

  More and more each winter, however, when I catch myself in the throes of lightless
ness—staring slack-jawed out a dusty window at the dim light, unblinking and incognizant of any one coherent thought—I find myself understanding the biological adaptations of not just the species that migrate but the bears, with their deep sleeps of hibernation. It seems to me often, in winter's midst, that I have entered a quasi hibernation myself—a mental hibernation—and I am reminded yet again of how closely we are all wedded to this landscape, shaped and sculpted by it and always at some level attentive to it, as it in turn is attentive to us.

  When the sun does come, our spirits surge like those of children, and for the few hours or even minutes that it might be present, we wander out into its beautiful blue embrace, staring up and out at such rare and magnificent illumination, saying things like "Wow!" and "Geezo-peezo!" over and over again; and we can feel deeply, intimately, the puppet-string leap and pull of our bloodstream's chemicals being scrambled and rearranged, bestirred and invigorated, awakening even if only briefly, and become refreshed.