The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  We might invest thirty or forty days in a row of lightlessness in exchange for a few moments of such blue-sky brilliance—sometimes the sun and the blue-sky against the snowy mountains remain visible for a whole afternoon—but it is almost worth it (when the sun's out, it is worth it) and I have to wonder if, while slumbering in their ice caves, the bears are aware of that brief appearance: if, even as they sleep, their blood lifts and their spirits surge. I wonder if the sun's appearance somehow makes it down even through the shell of their snow chambers, bathing them in a warmer, golden glow, as opposed to the usual dull blue light of winter. Sometimes the bears will even climb up and out of their snow caves and wander around for a while, like sleepwalkers, even in the dead of winter—no one's really sure why—and I have to wonder if these brief rousings are somehow tied to the infrequent return, or appearance, of the low, cold winter sun.

  Daily, like some workaday businessman, I ensconce myself in my own ice cave and attempt to descend into the land of blue dreams, trudging out to my cold cabin at the edge of the marsh, carrying in my arms a stack of papers, a thermos, a coffee cup, and sometimes a load of kindling.

  And once in the ice shell of the cabin, and with the cold little fire in the wood stove straining to heat some distance beyond my cold boot, which is propped up on its edge within a foot of the flames, I will find myself staring out at the frozen prairie expanse of marsh for fifteen or twenty minutes, without ever thinking a single thought, so that again, I might as well be hibernating.

  On the sunny days, however, it's torture to be inside—I try to work quickly so that I can go outside and play—and I am made agitated, excited, by that rarest of sights and sounds, the sun-filled icicles gleaming, becoming translucent as they warm. They're nearly incandescent, like the glowing filaments in light bulbs, as the sun strikes them—and then, most amazingly of all, dripping— and I have to sit there in my chair, at my table, and watch it rather than go out into it.

  I try to dive deeply, quickly—to get that day's work done as fast as possible. It's so hard to concentrate, though. Is this how it is for the bears? Do they fight to keep on in their task of hibernating?

  Sometimes on such a rare sunny day, I'll have just succeeded in making it to dreamland when the slab of snow that's been resting on either side of my steep-pitched metal roof will suddenly release as the sun warms the top of that metal and the bottommost layer of snow melts. Often I'll be staring out my windows, entranced by both the dream and the lovely gold light, the rare gold light, when that ice sheet suddenly releases above and goes curling past the window, hurtling past the window blocking out the sun, and all light, for an instant, with flashes of gold sunlight shuttering in through the window, piercing little cracks in that tumbling sheet of snow—and then the snow will have all passed and once more there will be a steady stream of gold light shining into my eyes—during this whole event, this whole collapse, I will not have blinked. I feel that gold light, that new gold light, shining somehow deeper into the back of my brain, after having witnessed or been primed by those erratic flash-camera shutterings of only a few seconds ago—and always, when that happens, I will arise as if hypnotized, or rather, as if having awakened, and remembering what really matters, what's really important. I will close my notebook and cap my pen and tamp down the fire and leave my cabin, then, and will step back out into the light.

  Such clear days usually bring clear nights, which means cold nights, as the day's warmth escapes back to outer space. On these nights, I put new hay in the dogs' insulated kennels, for them to burrow into, and must knock the ice from their watering bowls. And the next day, if we should be so fortunate for the sun to be out again, it's common to hear sawyers working all around the valley, cutting more firewood in that new winter light, bestirred to action by the previous night's harshness, and by its demands on the woodpile; and yet again, the link, the connection, between landscape and the individual, is immediate and direct, forming a strength of bond between the two that is not so common, anymore, rarer, even, perhaps, than December sunlight, and in a way that I cannot prove or explain, our country, our nation, somehow the poorer and more diminished for that rarity.

  I am not arguing against or even criticizing big cities, or cities and towns of any size, when I say such a thing—only reminding myself of that which poets and philosophers have been telling us for several centuries now, that the American wilderness is one of our great and unique treasures, and that it is not renewable. And that if it becomes diminished, then so too must we.

  Part of me wants to stay home every hour of every day, in every season, but particularly in December, the holiday season—to burrow into the snow, to sink down into the idyll of childhood with the girls—but up here, bird season ends in December too, particularly for pheasants, which are the species that most thrills and jazzes my sweet and big-running pointers, Point and Superman, the former speckled like a pale Appaloosa, strong as a bull, and mischievous, and the latter chocolate-colored, mellow and obedient, and one of the most graceful, athletic dogs I've ever seen work.

  It cannot be called work, of course. I love it—perhaps I was made for it, destined the moment my DNA twined the way it did—but the dogs love it too, and for certain, they were made for it: the scents and pursuit of the gallinaceous birds is a breeze that blows oxygen into the glimmering embers of their soul.

  The nearest pheasants are half a state away, in eastern Montana, up and over the Continental Divide, out on the plains, and generally I take the boys out there at least two or three times in the autumn for multiday hunts, but then I more or less disappear into the woods myself, deer and elk hunting in November, so that they must wait until December to hunt again.

  I want to be both places: hunting pheasants on the east side, and slowly settling into Christmas on the west side, cooking cinnamon rolls, hanging wreaths, reading Dickens, writing Christmas cards.

  In typical gluttonous compromise, I attempt both. We get the girls ready for bed, read to them, and then I lie down for a short nap before awakening to the alarm clock at two-thirty. In good weather it's five hours to pheasants; a heavy snow is falling, however, and the roads are icier than ever, so I know it'll take at least eight hours. My plan is to hit pheasant-land by noon, hunt till dusk, then turn around and drive back into the storm that night, getting home within twenty-four hours. One day. There is a sweetness, a tapering knife edge where a season's satisfaction lies on one side and a lament that it is ending on the other side.

  These dogs deserve all the birds the world can throw at them, I tell myself, particularly in light of the long and impending off-season. Given a choice of extra sleep or giving your dogs one more hunt, only a cretin would choose sleep.

  "All I want," I explain to Elizabeth and the girls, aware of how much I sound like a child petitioning Santa Claus, "is the sight of one rooster against blue sky, with new snow behind him. I don't even need to hit it: I just want a good point, and the sight of a brilliant rooster against the snow, and then rising higher, into that blue sky."

  Elizabeth and the girls have been out with me and know what I mean. They do not hold this image as intensely as I do (just as I in turn do not hold it as intensely as, say, the dogs), but they know what I mean. They've seen it, and though Elizabeth in particular shakes her head and says it's crazy to work so hard for such a brief image—one I've already seen, countless times, and will surely see again and again—she does not think it's so crazy as to try to argue me out of it, and instead only cautions me to drive carefully.

  I get off to a slow start, creeping down the untracked roads, sipping coffee, the dogs warm and excited in the front seat, and the snow still falling so heavily, and in such large flakes, that peering through the windshield, it feels to me as if we are suspended in one of those little glass globes that you can shake up to agitate the artificial snow within, and I wonder idly if it's possible to construct one of those little globes so that bright roosters likewise flutter through the snow, rising from thick cattails e
ven as all the snow is descending.

  Memories are strong, photographs are beautiful, but nothing will do for me but the real thing.

  I have traveled less than a dozen miles in solitary wonder before encountering another pilgrim, a traveler less fortunate than I who has plowed headlong into a snowdrift sometime earlier—his truck is shrouded with a night's worth of snow—and as I pass, believing his vehicle's misfortune to be days old, I'm surprised to see him step from the truck, rumple-haired, flagging me down.

  I'm the first person that's gone past, he says; he's been here five hours. For a couple of hours he tried digging out, clawing at the snow with his hands, lacking a shovel, but finally he became drenched and decided to quit and change into a dry set of clothes so that he didn't become hypothermic, and to wait for someone to pass by.

  He's a Bible salesman from New Jersey, it turns out, wandering down from out of Canada on some convoluted and lonely-sounding sojourn. He's all out of Bibles but still has a few boxes of grapefruit and oranges, which he offers me as repayment for the bother of my time. I thank him but tell him that where I'm going, they'd freeze for sure.

  I crawl under his truck, and then mine, fastening my old tow rope—he's all but clueless about such matters—but tugging his back end uphill, as the cant of his truck forces me to do (the front is swallowed almost entirely by the snowdrift), I'm unable to get enough bite and torque to free him, though I snatch and jerk again and again until we're both risking whiplash. I can almost get him out, but not quite.

  Neither of us has a shovel—it's still too early in the year for us to be fully equipped; always, winter catches me by surprise, as if, by my not fully preparing, I can somehow stall its arrival—so we're clawing with sticks and empty coffee cans at the snow in front of his truck, with the resigned hopelessness of prisoners trying to dig an escape tunnel with nothing more than a soupspoon, when the headlights of another truck appear.

  I've been fooling with the salesman's truck for about an hour by this point—an hour I don't have to spare—so I'm extra chagrined when the truck passes by us without even stopping to inquire whether we need help or not. For some strange reason, however, I hold off from making a judgment—so unlike me—and my virtue is rewarded a few moments later when the truck, its occupants perhaps having reconsidered, turns around and comes driving back down the hill.

  It's a truck full of lion hunters—they don't have time to spare, either—but they get out and visit for a while. They've got several hounds in the back of their truck, and it strikes me as an odd juxtaposition, the three groups of us moving around on the mountain beneath the cover of darkness and snowfall, as if in some netherworld, while the rest of the citizenry sleeps: a Bible salesman with his crates of grapefruit in Montana, and two trucks filled with hounds. As if only in the middle of the night, and in the midst of a blizzard, are such travelers willing to emerge from that lower, secret world and move about in the realms of the upper world...

  By hooking their chain to the back of my truck, and then my yellow tow rope to the back of the salesman's truck after connecting it to a longer chain owned by the lion hunters, we're able to generate enough pulling power in tandem like that to ease him out of the drift, although in the process, my tow rope has gotten knotted and is cinched so tight from the force generated by our pulling that we have to cut the knot where it was fastened to the lion hunters' chain. This leaves a scrap of bright yellow embedded in their rusty chain, like a marker, a memento, of their good deed.

  We part ways, then—the lion hunters heading north and west, and me and my bird dogs, south and east—and though I would rather have not had to stop, it's a code of the north, and, I suspect, a code of any place that still has any kind of identity at all, that when someone's in trouble, you stop and help.

  It's slow going, even slower than I'd planned. I have to stop for gas in Libby—what a recent miracle the twenty-four-hour gas pumps are, the ones that accept credit cards, even at gas pumps far out in the hinterlands; in the old days, not so long ago, night travelers in the outback had to plan their gas stops around big cities—and then, twenty miles farther, I have to stop again to let the dogs exercise and void, lest their rumbling, hissing flatulence asphyxiate me.

  They take their sweet time wandering around in the hard-falling snow before finally settling into the obligatory hunker, like twin yard ornaments, and then we are on our way again, later than ever; and after only twenty more miles, my oil pressure drops—evidently some leaked through the valves the other evening while my truck was perched lightly on the side of the cliff—and twenty miles beyond that, I must stop yet again to retighten the lug nuts, which are nearly unspun, causing all four wheels to wobble lugubriously, and it is clear to me now that the party, the dawn party of bright roosters, moving at first light, will be starting without me—without us.

  By midmorning we are nearing the Divide, traveling along the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park, and making pretty good time—the road is plowed and sanded—and as I pass through the town of West Glacier, I notice the Amtrak cars idling there, off-loading a few passengers and taking on a few new ones, and I have the wish, not for the first time, that Amtrak would travel directly to my hunting place, and that the dogs could travel on it with me, so that we could sleep, or so that I could ride in relaxation, reading a paperback, perhaps, and looking out the window at the beautiful winter scenery without having to worry about staying on the road.

  For the next fifty miles or so, the train and I seem to engage in a push-and-pull game of tag—the train catching and passing me occasionally, tracking a straighter line along the other side of the Flathead River, though with me usually catching it and then passing it again, on the straightaways—and I cannot help but imagine that there is some passenger on the train who is noticing my truck, with the dogs in the back, thinking, Aha, the lucky devil is going hunting this beautiful blue winter day, just as I am thinking of the train's passengers, Aha, how nice to be simply riding, without worrying about anything.

  And although I recognize it as silly, even immature at best, after a while I discover that there's a part of me that wants to stay ahead of the train, even if only by a minute or two. I know, it's ridiculous! And I'm not going to compromise my safety—our safety (often while driving with the dogs I find myself aware of how they aren't wearing seat belts)—but on the straightaways, well, I don't lollygag, but ease down on the accelerator; and if I'm a hundred or so yards ahead of the train, I soon realize that I'm trying to maintain or even increase that distance; and if I'm a hundred or so yards behind, I'm trying—within the limits of safety, certainly—to close that distance.

  It's not anything as serious as a competition—I'm not that immature. Instead, it's more like a kind of an awareness, is all: something to rouse me from the postdawn torpor of all-night driving.

  And on the train, is that hypothetical passenger, or passengers, likewise urging the train on?

  Not far from the summit at Marias Pass, we hit another straightaway, the train and I, and I'm able to pull ahead again, and to improve the margin of my lead, so much so that the train isn't even in sight any longer, and I drive along feeling strangely better.

  I don't want the season to ever end. I don't like the feeling of being left behind, and I don't like things ending.

  I'm so far ahead of the train now—a mile? two miles?—that I can't even see it in my rearview mirror, and soon enough, it's all but forgotten, as if but a trifle. I'm bored again, trying to stay sharp and awake, and begin fiddling with my daughter's CD Walkman, trying to get it to play. (There aren't any radio stations up in the mountains—not even the narcoleptic stock and farm reports—and my truck's tape player hasn't worked for three years now.)

  The disc—Gillian Welch's sleepy, wonderful Time (The Revelator) —is skipping on the bumpy road, and I glance down for a second to make sure I haven't bumped the Pause button. When I look up again the view through the windshield is of nothing but a wall of snow spraying up over the wi
ndshield—immediately, all around me, there's a muffled silence that tells me that although I'm still moving, I'm not on the road anymore. And then we are sinking, descending, and there is blue winter light all around us, and we come to a stop—the dogs, jolted by the impact, rouse themselves from their naps and look at me as if wondering whether it's time to go hunting, finally—and when the snow spray finally clears, I'm surprised at how far off the road I am.

  I shift down into four-wheel low and attempt to back out, but it's pointless, I'm buried up to the headlights, and resting atop another four feet of snow, below the wheels—and so I burrow into the snow beneath the truck and begin attaching the tattered yellow tow rope to the frame, so that it will be ready to fasten to the chain of the first Samaritan who happens along.

  It's not too long of a wait. The train passes first—though I can see no passengers through the small window portals, I wave anyway—and not long after that, a truck driven by two men working for the railroad passes by, and stops.

  One man is my age, the other, much younger, and they're dressed in heavy coveralls and are sipping steaming coffee from insulated cups. Their truck—the Burlington Northern's truck—is a big, new, fancy one, and they've got a super-long new tow rope, which they loop on to mine.

  I buckle up, start my truck, put it in reverse, and then experience the strange and resurrection-like feeling of being uprooted from all that snow, tugged free with immense power; and just like that, I'm out, my extraction nearly as smooth and effortless as my entrance.

  Once again, my tow rope is knotted inextricably around theirs, and so I saw the rope off again, leaving another little butterfly tuft of gilding on their rope, a remnant marker—like some strange kind of Montana-winter chain letter, I think, on either side of the Divide, so that soon enough, at this rate, many Samaritans will be wearing fragments of this yellow rope on their own tow chains, and their own tow ropes, both the pullers and the pullees—and I thank and shake hands with the two railroad employees and then continue on my way, hoping to make it to the plains now by noon in order that the dogs and I might at least have half a day of hunting before turning right around and heading back.