The Wild Marsh (20 page)

There's no way all that snow's going to vanish in the next ten or fifteen minutes. But still, I keep watching it, and listening to that springtime sound of running water, and watching the steam rise, and listening to the morning sound of the varied thrush.

Not for another two or three hours will all the new snow be gone again—not until the sun crests the tops of the trees will it burn off and the grass and new garden will glisten with life and new growth again. But still, so fatigued are our spirits by winter, and such is our eagerness for spring, that any little additional amount of snow that manages to vanish between now and the time Elizabeth awakens will be only to the good for not just Elizabeth but all of us. We're really, really stretched tight on this, worn down to a nub from the gauntlet of cloudy, snowy days. As lovely as snow can be, we've had enough.

 

What is life? April is surely when the pulse of it returns with the first truly noticeable leap; the month when the blanket is finally pulled back from the sleeping, or the sleepy, world.

The fresh-cut daffodils sitting in the vase on the table before me have continued to drink water, even after being cut. They drank a cup of water yesterday, and a cup the day before: thirsty, even into death. Maybe that is what April is most like, those daffodils, and that thirst—only it is an inversion of that force, so that it is a thirst into life rather than death.

The older I get, the more I love April, snow and all.

 

Wood ducks squealing at dusk. The geese, seeming as big as airplanes, circling the marsh twice before coming in for the splash-landing; coming down as if in slow motion. Once they drop beneath the canopy level of the dark old forest that forms the ring, the amphitheater of the forest, their calls echo wilder, more loudly—amplified in that closed arena, even though it is only just the two of them, these greathearted creatures sounding, once they are down below the treetops, as if there are dozens of them. Always, upon hearing that miraculous and sudden amplification, the dramatic moment when after all that circling they choose and commit to this marsh—
this
one—and set their wings and feet and drop in from the treetops so that the marsh captures and magnifies seemingly tenfold their sound, as well as the wild joy of its tone, always, the heart lifts and swells, is summoned: wonderfully confused, in a strange way—are we a wild species, or are we a tame species?—and always, exhilarated.

This too is what April is like: lifting you, dashing you, lifting you, dropping you. Stretching the awakening heart to amplitudes one would not normally reach on one's own.

Spring's so close that it could be nudged in with a feather. I'm waiting now only for the trill of the first red-winged blackbird, and the return of the felted nubs of the deer's antlers.

Again, the snow is pulled back farther. A hike with Lowry to a nearby grove reveals a carpet of deer bones, the mass boneyard of a mountain lion's winter cache: a dozen whitened legs strewn atop one another, beneath the boughs of a big cedar. Old stories from the winter gone by being revealed, even as the onrush of new ones comes muscling in, honking in, flapping in, surging.

I tell Lowry the usual nature rap—the oldest story of all. The bones will dissolve, and the cedar will absorb their nutrients. The deer will be lifted into the sky. The cedar will grow even taller and thicker, even shadier. Deer will wait out heavy snowstorms beneath the protective spread of its boughs. The old deer legs will be caught up within the sweet grain of the wood, between the growth rings of one year and the next—the deer traveling vertically now, in the xylem and phloem, as they once picked their way gingerly and horizontally through the old forest in winter, pausing sometimes to paw at the snow with shiny black hoofs and nibble at an exposed frond of cedar seedling.

I often wonder what will constitute the moral fabric of a child raised in such a setting as this time and place, this wild green valley. I am aware of the excessive blessings, aware of the shortcomings. But what does it mean, if anything, to a child who can take for granted the most wondrous sights—and for whom bulldozers, strip malls, cell phones, and the like, are not the steady background?

I'm not saying these other things are good or bad. I'm just saying that I wonder daily what it will mean to the girls, as adults, to have had one certain fabric—the senses and images and lessons—form the matrix, the background, of their lives, instead of another.

I'll go ahead and say it right out loud: I like to imagine that when they are grown and I am old, they will say "Thank you."

What's wonderful and frightening now is, I suppose, what's wonderful and frightening about any childhood, and any parentage: it is all accepted as normal and taken gloriously for granted. And that, I think, is the great blessing of childhood. We can find the track of a grizzly and they do not have to lament that there are but perhaps fifteen of them left in the whole valley. We can find an exquisite salamander beneath one of the frost-heaved rocks in the rock wall and they do not have to consider that the entire species may become absent from the earth within the span of their lifetimes, as so many of the species that frequented my childhood in Texas have vanished entirely, in only half a lifetime.

None of that. Only the slow, sweet normalcy, the constancy, of the days; and from that, the braid of the seasons, as stable as a parent's love.

It's a nice thing to be so welcoming of spring, for there's certainly no force on earth that could slow its arrival. This morning the south wind is swirling, gusting, rowdy, the sky breath sending huffs of smoke back down the chimney of my wood stove and back into my cabin, with sudden drops of air pressure all around the cabin as the wind reverses, twirls, counterspins, dances: exhalations, bursts, as if some great animal is running across the sky, breathing hard.

 

Another first: this morning, as I am writing by candlelight, the season's first moth shows itself, drawn by the flame. I'm too busy staring with delight at this tangible proof of winter's end to think far enough ahead to snuff the candle; instead, I watch with a thing very close to gratitude as the moth dances around and around the candle's breath, but then it tips a wing in too close and crashes into the pooling wax, and sizzles quick and sputtering malodorous pyrotechnics.

From now on—now that the moths have reawakened, or are hatching—I'll be on alert. I'll catch them with my hands, one at a time, and toss them outside, into the cool breath of the marsh, where they came from, and where they belong.

They can pool outside at my windows of light, and bat muffled wingbeats against the glass; as if I am in the cocoon, warm and dry, while outside, the living world of the marsh at night seethes.

The laughing, drawn-out trill of the sora rails. The geese, the frogs, the ducks; the gulping, hollow-gourd sound of the bittern. The wind huffing and chuffing, the owls, and the sound of running water. The symphony, no longer just warming up in the pit but beginning, finally, to play.

 

In April, it all comes down to this: the astounding return of both sound and color. There is life in winter too, and often it is keenly felt, with the senses sometimes poised and heightened in their deprivation. But April is like sitting in a dark theater thirty minutes before the show, or an hour before the show—arriving early, and waiting, and waiting, and then finally seeing the light come on, on the screen before you, and hearing the reel-to-reel tape begin to flicker. The restlessness, the delicious anticipation, among the audience—or in your own heart, whether the theater is full or whether you are the only one in attendance. Your full attention is directed to the screen; with those first words, that first scene, you are galvanized, transported away from wherever else you were just a short time earlier.

 

It seems that I can't stand how happy I am that winter is finally vanquished. The sparkling effervescence that returns to my blood in April. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by it that I have to get up from my desk and step outside and walk out into the marsh a short distance and just stand there, in the night amid the moths just beyond the throw of window light from the candle still burning in the empty cabin, or, if it is daytime, with my face uplifted to the sun and my arms spread wide, pale skin open and absorbing the dull but strengthening return of light, and just stand there, resting, so glad to be alive, nothing but alive. No ambition, no envy, no angst, no nothing. Only life.

Against all my better efforts, I'm slowing down, growing older—becoming, despite my wishes, though perhaps also in full step and pace with my wishes—an old man.

It was not so long ago that I would never have dreamed of slowing down enough to do such a thing—to wander tired like an old hound, or warhorse, out into the marsh in April, and just stand there, face tilted back and arms widespread: to do nothing but stand in the sunlight, like a scarecrow, for the longest time.

Back at the house, bopping around on the front porch, or inside, my daughters—my modern daughters, modern despite our remove from the central fuss of the world—lifting their heads from their CD Walkmans to greet me when I come back inside from a day's work, still love me.

But the next day, in April, and the next, and the next, there I am again, out almost up to my knees in the marsh, sinking deeper and deeper into the marsh, it seems, and moving slower and slower.

Listening.

M
AY IS THE MONTH
of disorderly conduct.

In the uproar of spring, the shouted vibrancy of life re-creating itself, you expect for order to be woven from all the matted strands of the long, hard winter; and you expect, from all the long waiting, an exuberant and elegant, considered grace to finally occur.

And in the end—far into the heart of May—that's what will come. But at the dawn of May, it's not that way at all. It's all rush and indecision, with everything scrambling to be first, then changing its mind and hurrying to the back of the line, or ducking for cover Jostling, shuffling, swelling.

I might as well jump right in and be honest and inform the reader that sometimes in May—most Mays—I get pretty low at one point or another. I used to be ashamed of it, when it would come—mortified at this fantastic personal lethargy, with the world before me so fine, and especially so, in May—but I've gotten better about accommodating or accepting it. (Fighting it, I've found, does no good, and often only worsens it. The sadness is not a character flaw, not a question of reaching deeper or trying harder, but rather some sluggishness of blood that is of the larger world's doing, not my heart's—do the bent winter brown mats of marsh grass yearn for green brilliance?—and where I've come to lay the blame, if any blame is to be placed, lies in what I suspect is a supreme imbalance between the accelerated pace of the enthusiastic year—a pace that all of wild nature, graceful and well practiced, leaps into at full tilt, each May—and my own stiff and clumsy inability to find or assume that same pace.)

I'm not sure how to describe the feeling, beyond a heaviness of spirit, a leadenness of both body and mind. I'd liken it to a strange mix of terror and numbness, if such things can be said to coexist, or to even battle for the same territory. There is heaviness, or sadness, or confusion—I hate calling it a depression, for I do not want it to be that; I want only to be uplifted by the world—sometimes, in early May, as sharp and alarming as the edge of a newly honed pocketknife held tight against the arc of one's thumb. The world rushes on, fussing and squawking and preening, while this confused and hesitant heart of mine waits, indecisive and motionless—waiting for what?—until finally, mercifully, some inner signal is given, some adjustment is made (surely it is biochemical), and I can enter fully the joy of the month.

I don't mean to prattle on about a thing that should be of no more importance to the reader than the depth of my bellybutton. And it seems slightly dirty to even mention it, that occasional heaviness, in the midst of so much of the world's beauty—almost as if, in some sad way, that excess beauty is somehow, strangely, one of the precipitating factors, in a way no one could explain or understand—and yet it seems dishonest also not to mention it.

Consider it mentioned. By the time the grass is green later in the month, and by the time the last of the partygoers have arrived—the Wilson's snipe, up from South America, and the trilling red-winged blackbirds, from the Gulf Coast, and the first wild violets, from their earthen chambers below—the matter will be behind me, sloughed off like the dead scaly skin of the garter snakes as they emerge from hibernation.

What grace and calibration of every tiny gear exists in the forest, and in the wilderness, and still even upon the echoes of wilderness—upon any place that has not yet been overcut, or dammed, or paved, mined, overplowed or overwrought. Those same scaly, fluttery snakeskins, for instance, are shed just in time for the returning birds to line and weave their nests with that opaque material. (And, weeks later, as those nests have produced and nurtured the writhing, chirping fledglings, many of those same snakes, lithesome and clean-skinned, will slide up the branches now to investigate those tiny birds; the giving and the taking never ends, the world in that manner perhaps nothing more than a continuum of desire...)

I'd like to believe that my late-spring funk helps serve at least some tiny purpose in the larger, wilder good of the world—that as the scaly residue of it finally flakes away from me, some use might in some faint manner be made of that flaking detritus of tired soul and wasted time.

Nothing in nature is ever wasted. Perhaps this is part of the guilt I feel, in my early-May near paralysis. I'm forty-two years old and still haven't learned to accept that strange heaviness as a necessary time-out, a resting period, in which to prepare for the year's coming exuberance.

I am a slow learner. But my heart is willing. I'll keep trying. There has to be a reason.