The Wild Marsh (15 page)

For now—for whatever reason, or reasons—we are a hundred feet too high, it seems, for turtles, an elevation of thirty-three hundred feet, rather than the valley floor of thirty-two hundred. Maybe the warming earth will allow this marsh to receive them, however, in my lifetime. Or it might take a hundred years, or two hundred, beyond that, but no matter; I dare not tinker with so ancient and established a species, trying to coax it into a place it might never have been before. Perhaps this kind of reverence, respect and reverence, more than anything else, defines
pagan;
I don't know. Whatever it is, I know that I feel it strongly.

If this kind of attentiveness to and gratitude for the creation is excessive or unseemly in our species, or, worst of all, ungodly, then I apologize for having been snookered by the dark forces; but know that I will go to damnation for having been an ignorant or mistaken man rather than an evil one.

Some of my neighbors—friends—frown on the zeal, the restless tenor, of my environmentalism. They counsel me that with eternity at stake in the unending afterlife, there is little point or economy in getting so fretted up about clearcuts when our mortal time here is so temporal and the earth is but a proving ground for the far greater and lasting struggle of our souls, our eternal salvation.

And sometimes—when I'm really tired of the struggle—I want to believe them.

But someone—their god, my god, somebody's god—puts the spark and light of peace and joy and worship and awe in my heart when I stand in a cathedral of ancient cedars, or when I am far back in the distant mountains, so close to the sky and a scale of time greater than my own brief stay, and that spark tells me that for me, activism is a form of prayer, a way of paying back some small fraction of the blessing that the wilderness is to me, a way of celebrating and protecting that creation, and a way of giving thanks.

I meant to be writing about April, and somehow I've gotten all religious. I don't mean to suggest that I have any answers. In fact, I'm not even sure I could tell you what the questions are with regard to religion and those kinds of matters.

Maybe I'm being snookered. Maybe I'm not a godly man, for loving the woods so much. But in my defense, if any is needed, it's the only time I feel close to a god, or God. If I made a wrong turn somewhere, well, have pity on me. But there is nothing in this world that could ever convince me that God is to be set against the wild forest and the wilderness. That would be like trying to convince me that God is set also against another of God's creations, humankind itself.

I see no percentage in believing such a dire hypothesis, or any reason for its existence; and it is not the truth in my heart.

 

The next morning, driving Mary Katherine and Lowry to the two-room log cabin school they attend—one teacher and one aide for but nine students total, ranging from kindergarten through the eighth grade—the school set back in the woods, apple trees ringing the soccer field, deer standing out on the school lawn—we see the usual sights, more deer moving through the foggy forest, back and forth across the gravel road, but also a gaggle of ravens, two bald eagles—one mature, one immature—and a coyote: all within the thirteen-minute drive to school.

This is the daily braid that I want to become part of the tapestry of my daughters' childhood.

I love how the woods open up again, in April, coming back to life. I love how much there is to see and marvel at.

 

More sounds:

The wild geese.

The chuckling of the spring peepers.

The
beep-beep-beep
of feeding chickadees.

The sigh of south winds bathing all the bare branches, and the enduring limbs of the evergreens. The wind in April, making its quartering turns to come back up from the south and warming the snow and the soil with its return, might be the best sound of all in April, the sound that mixes with your dreams at night and gives you further authority to desire and dream and hope for all things.

Stir, bears, stir. Even with your eyes shut, asleep, see the world resurrecting. This world, the next April twelfth. The first mosquitoes, diaphanous in the fierce sunlight, emerging from the ice-rimmed ponds and puddles: Tourists, beware, go back. There is nothing to see here, only mud and insects and large biting mammals, and an unfriendly human population, astounding unemployment, chronic depression, and poverty, even among the rich, and rain and snow and sleet and wind. This is a place of the spirit, no place for the flesh, and a place of the imagination, but no place for a real life. Believe in this place, and pray for it, but turn back, do not come here...

 

Owls booming, hooting and hollering at high noon, as if even our full light is shadowy compared to the rest of the world. And back in their dark forests, perhaps it is; what does it matter, daylight or nighttime? The sounds, the awakenings, must come first, before the color, joy, and exuberance. It is the fifth season, in April, the one no one talks about. Very few places in the country—particularly in these greenhouse days—are blessed with four distinct seasons, and yet we, in our bounty, have five. The brown season, the sounds-returning-to-the-woods season; we do not pass from winter straight into spring any more than a child or even an adolescent enters straight into adulthood.

I want to be clear about this, how intoxicated one is as winter is leaving. Every moment seems both familiar and magical in this reawakening. Like a wave, a wand stirring over the forest, the hoot of that midday owl rouses the geese into full honk, which bestirs then the great marshy vat of the spring peepers—the wave of life returning like a warm tide. You can feel it returning as if it is not many interlocking parts but all one vast animal; and sometimes on my walk out to my cabin I have to stop and stare slack-jawed, with a huge gaping grin, at this sheet or rolling wave, so similar to the curl of a wave of sound—invisible, but so deeply felt, stirring the heart again in its furthest places.

I stand there like a madman, or a somnolent, not budging but being swept downstream nonetheless, grinning, tumbling downstream, vibrant waves passing all around me.

A grouse drums farther back in the old forest, and a butterfly, like a bright-colored spark or ingot midday, flutters past, soundless, with its periwinkle-satyr-blue color searing a trace into my winter-dulled and softened brain. Perhaps it is in the wandering and tiny flight of that single insect that the transition from sound to color occurs—the trace of the butterfly's erratic flight like some electronic wiring, hooking the color switch back on in the deepest sleeping recesses of the mind, and in that moment, deeper nerves being touched, shorting across their synapses, awakening joy, not winter's peacefulness or steady-calmness kind of joy, but a brighter, more leaping kind of joy.

Winter was wonderful, but my God, here comes the other, here comes the
next;
and now I am fully awake and I can barely stand it. What kind of a pig would ask for forty or fifty more springtimes when even one—just one,
this one,
is so perfect, so much more wonderful than anyone could ever possibly deserve?

It is yours. All you have to do is stand at the edge of the woods and look. All you have to do is pause in your steppingstone walk, and linger and look—to wait, in that space between winter and spring. All of it is yours.

As if to produce firm evidence that the old frozen sleeping world is indeed being turned upside down, one morning a flicker chased a raven across the sky: the newly arrived, white-backed, smaller bird harassing the dark prince of winter. It's a sight you don't see every day. I stood there and watched it hungrily, like a simpleton, my mouth open, until it was gone, and then still I stood there: feeble-minded, and grateful for it, after so long a spell of feeling no-minded.

I don't mean to dress it, April, all up as being nothing but fine, nothing but ecstasy. April is of course filled with waves of psychological treachery that will break your heart if you let them.

Sheets of snow roll in from the north, muffling all that emerging sound and blanketing completely the thrilling sights of that bare black earth. Up, down, up, down, go your hopes and desires, your moods and your joys. You begin plotting your next winter's vacation in April. Next year, you tell yourself, you'll be smarter; you won't travel to sunnier climes in January or February. You will wait all the way until April, when the alternating pulses of sun and snow are breaking the backs and spirits of, toying cat-and-mouse with, the handful of valley residents who are reclusive enough, tender and fierce and wounded enough, to live here year-round.

 

The excitement of seeds, in April—all the world held in the palm of one's hand, the future of a vast forest, like a vast dream—and the excitement of saplings, apple trees arriving as bare-root stock from the nursery, to be planted far away from the house in a patch of sunlight, so that years hence it will be a long walk to harvest any of the apples, and so that the bears and grouse and deer and other wild creatures of the woods, including the worms, may avail themselves of the feast, and may do so without having to come near, or become accustomed to, the haunts of man.

I'll build wire enclosures around the saplings so that they'll be protected from the hungry deer for the first several years—ten or more?—until the trees are finally large enough to be free and clear, and on their own.

April is when I transplant other trees too, wild stock pulled up from the thawing gravelly terrain of roadbeds—logging roads that are closed a few years, saplings that would be driven over by vehicles once the gates are unlocked, as they are almost always unlocked—remaining closed for wildlife security until such point as the timber companies decide what the wildlife needs is not security after all but more logging, and open the roads back up...

I've got about two hundred acres of trees. It's kind of ridiculous to be planting more, but I can't help tinkering; I want to help return diversity to this grove of woods I'm now responsible for. (It was logged hard around 1970, with almost every tree of any marketable size back then—forty years old or older—being taken, so that most of my forest is between thirty and seventy years old, though there are also a few whoppers that were in too distant a location to fell, or that were spared because the chain saw ran out of gas, or the sawyer took a break that day and then was diverted elsewhere; I cherish those big ones, survivors by mercy...)

Cedar, aspen, and ponderosa or yellow pine are the rarities up here. The ponderosa, or p-pine, prefers hot, dry, south-facing slopes, of which I don't have many, but my marshy swamp of a place is well suited for the cedar and aspen.

The explosive deer herds have helped keep the cedar and aspen pruned back, however—more than pruned: there's almost an entire lost generation of aspen and cedar, harking back to the clear-cutting days of the early seventies. The clearcuts promoted the conversion of a dark forest of old growth into big fields of early successional forbs, which benefited (for a while) the deer herds, building them up into unsustainably high populations. (Soon enough, the limiting factor became not summer forbs and browse, but winter range—the shady old-growth forests that had been eradicated, leaving this abnormally high deer population shit out of luck.)

The too-high deer population wandered the valley, chewing down anything and everything—particularly the young aspen and cedar saplings. The deer herd didn't suffer any massive die-off (there weren't enough wolves in the valley to prune them back) until the harsh winter of 1996; and as a result, there's about a twenty-five-to-thirty-year echo, a gap, a missing generation, of aspen and cedar, from the Long Time of the Deer: an indirect echo of all our clear cutting, and the absence of wolves.

So I'm putting wire cages around cedar and aspen saplings, trying to bring them back into my forest, at least, if not the whole million acres, as if blowing on the kindling-spark of a campfire, trying to resurrect flame.

For a while I toyed with the idea of doing something funky and artistic: of designing, in an open area next to an existing grove of mature aspen—remnant survivors of the days before clearcuts, and the days before the too-large deer herds—a corral, a wire enclosure, in the shape of a pack of five or six running wolves.

My theory was that young aspens would safely propagate in this wolfine enclosure, free from the ceaselessly grinding jaws of marauding deer. A dense colony of young aspen shoots would leap up in this enclosure (as they leap up in open fields every year, only to be clipped back by the deer's teeth, every last sucker shoot being clipped back).

In the safety of the wolf-shaped enclosure, however, the aspen would prosper. All they really needed was a three- or four- or five-year head start, to grow tall enough—in leaps and bounds—to be above the height of the deer's teeth, even when the deer stood on their hind legs and endeavored to stretch out their necks like giraffes; four or five years was all the aspen needed to grow tall enough to be safe.

Not coincidentally (there is no machine of man, no intricate feat of engineering nearly so marvelous as even the most basic and simple designs and intricacies of wild nature), the deer herds themselves generally require only three or four years to rebound in numbers adequate to prune sufficiently the aspen suckers that have, in the deer herds' absence, made their break for the sky.

I can't help but be struck how much like a symphony it is. Even when there is no sound issuing forth, there is the rise and fall of measures, sequences of three-four deer time laid over cadences of four-five aspen time. Some trees squeak through that gap, by luck or chance or design, and live to grow beyond the teeth of the hungry deer, given half a chance, given any break at all—leaping for the sunlight, dodging and weaving and hoping each day in that one year of critical overlap to evade the relentless hunger of the recovering deer.

Sixty or eighty years later, the pleasing dry rattle of golden aspen leaves high overhead in a cold October wind beneath incomparable blue sky will be like a tympanic prefatory for the next century, the great score playing itself over and over again with only the subtle variations differentiating one aspen grove from the next—on one hillside in this century, wandering slowly over to the adjacent hillside, in a slightly different pattern, in the next, like a slow-curling wave far out at sea—and with no shore in sight, only curl after curl of gold aspen wandering across the mountains, herded and shaped by the deer: as if the deer, not man, were some kind of god of creation.