The Wild Marsh (24 page)

Anyone who's resided here for any time at all—not even four full seasons, but for even a month's cycle of days—can feel this tightening and loosening of things, out in the woods. Hunters, I suspect, can feel it most intensely—moments when the woods begin to stir, and moments too when all goes slack and still, when the inhabitants of the forest seem not to be thinking anything (there's a distinct sag in the forest's energy) and neither do they seem to even be breathing, but instead resting, almost catatonically, in the manner of a fish that rests for long minutes, motionless, in the seam between currents, or the backwater of an eddy formed behind a boulder.

As to what might help determine this specific and unique degree of torque within the Yaak, I cannot say. I sense that, more than the physical, formula-like character of the previous two forces, cant and topography, this one is more organic, perhaps even a living entity.

Some of the factors that might have a hand in the care and feeding of this organism could be the fact that not only do we lie so severely north—so inflamed to the max with Bergmann's rule (and the rule of his associate, Allen, who noted that the farther north one went, the larger the animals became, as a means of retaining more efficiently their valuable body heat during the long winters)—but also that we lie so severely west: more westerly, and in some regards wetter (because we're snugged in low against the wet side of the Continental Divide) than many other valleys deeper into the Pacific Northwest.

Another aspect of this torque, then, would have to do with the double richness of our incredible sampling of biodiversity. Not only do we possess much of the representative flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest, coexisting in often unique assemblages and relationships with Rocky Mountain species, but many of our species also are represented from a third ecosystem, the far north of Canada's northern Rockies—the massive Purcell range—and are the southernmost extent in the world where those icebound denizens are found: woodland caribou, and snowy owls.

Even if such numbers do exist, in the end they are no more than metaphors or abstractions for understanding the stories of this place, which sometimes go hurtling past our sleepy eyes, and other times seem to progress at an infinitesimal creep. But if the picture or model of what I'm proposing has any authenticity or integrity to it, then the pattern of it should hold true in the glance of a moment, as well as be expressed across a season, or a year, or a century—just as the principles of the life of a cell should hold true, in logic and pattern, for the principles of an entire organism, and beyond that, a population.

And I believe that this is the case. I believe that there are certain days when the leaning arc of a single hour's worth of sunlight contains in each moment, all of the physical aspects, and the structural patterns, of the entire canted power of the entire season, and the complete year; and in those perfect and distillate moments, those perfect hours, you can taste and feel and know and sense in a single moment the essence of a place's nature and character, a place's voice. Such recognitions carry in them the echo of a time back when such awareness and fluency in the natural world was more common—was in fact perhaps one of our birthrights, as it is that still of the wild animals, for whom a single glance into the woods, or a single wisp of odor, or a single sound detected, might carry to them a better understanding of the identity of that one place than you or I might be able to accomplish or know in a year or even a decade of traipsing methodically and studying those same hills.

In those kinds of moments, however, in which the patterns of a place are to be glimpsed or known in that single hour, what the nature of that light, that hour's revelation, might be like late in November, with the cant leaning down more precipitously than ever, and the days shortening frightfully—an entire day's worth of sun appearing, rising, and then falling between the hours of two and three p.m.—is the quality of fireworks. That one hour's worth of sun, in November, might rise straight up over the ridge, like a sputtering Roman candle, but then descending too within the same space of that very hour. In May, however, the light contained within that same hour's passage, rather than possessing the quality of a lone, fizzling firework, might be more like the taper of some long and wavering blossom, or the fire on some distant August ridge, growing brighter even into the dusk, and on into the night: a flame, a light, that it seems not even night itself can extinguish.

In May, such is the richness and length of the newly arriving light that the languorousness and confidence of it, the
fullness
of it, carry over into our blood, and our spirits, and our own patterns of the heart, and rhythms—just as winter's strangely compressed light (and absence of light) can carry in it a density that can at times be a bit too much to handle, sludging up the blood of those older folks whose blood no longer burns or boils bright enough to keep the sludge at bay.

(Increasingly, I think that one experiences the lightless winters up here as one might a series of concussions, in which, although each individual blow is not too bad, a kind of cumulative effect begins to exert itself—a toll with a price and a cost not apparent sometimes for many years. And when we are young and our blood is joyous and tumultuous, May-like in its own unique and powerful uproar, we do not hear or heed or otherwise notice the arc or cant of those patterns of light and rhythm and mood; but when we are older, and more settled into and accustomed to the world, our moods and rhythms will more closely track those of the sun's and the season's arc across the skies.)

In May, when the sun returns—and not just any old sun, but the delicious, exciting, lengthening sun—then there is for me a feeling of gratitude toward the very earth itself, as you might feel gratitude to some Samaritan who helped you back to your feet after you'd just been knocked down.

And herein, in May, is perhaps one of the definitions of grace in the world: You don't even have to reach out a hand for help. You can crouch or even lie there whipped and beaten finally by the density of winter's lightless weight, disheartened or even defeated into a stupor by the great mass and length of darkness, and yet without your even lifting a hand, the world will find you out in May, will find and reach each and every citizen—both the human and the nonhuman animals, and each and every plant—and will pick you back up and deliver the long slant of that green light into your heart, will pick you up and breathe a warm breath back into your soul, no matter how cold and stiff and dormant it might have become in the winter, and in the absence of green, and the absence of chaos.

You cannot escape this long shaft of light, in May—no more than the warming black soil and flame-tapered green buds of aspen and cottonwood can escape it.

Nothing can hold the light back when it is unleashed into May. We all receive it—the animate as well as the inanimate—as if being lifted onto, and riding, a great green surging wave.

You may not understand or know any new patterns, staring at the cant and cycle, the rise and fall of light, in any of those one-hour windows in May—but you will remember, enthusiastically if you have forgotten it in the long lightless winter, that up here, you are still connected to and fully a part of all those cycles that appear and play themselves out, effervescing, within that one hour of light, for you can feel the same shapes and twists and movements of light going on in your own blood.

A part of you is riding along with each hour of the new light; a part of you is feeling the big river-surge toward its high-water marks; a part of you is feeling those deer's antlers leap from their skulls, restless in the extra-long having-waited. The earth itself seems to shake under your feet, quivering like an animal tensed. It might be what it's like to be a king or queen, except that you rule no one other than yourself, but when a part of you is to be found connected to every other thing in the landscape, riding that green wave, it is quite enough to be a sovereign ruler of yourself; it is an honor.

There is a roaring in your ears, and a joy in your blood, as you ride on that building wave of light.

It's different, here. The wave has its own shape and characteristics. I'm foolish, I know, to even propose that math can capture it. Let the snipe calls capture it, and the density and frequency of the spring peepers, and the black
Bryoria
back in the old forests. Let the scent of spruce sap mixing with ice-snapped fir boughs capture it, and our ten thousand other living things, our ten thousand other living measurements. Our only chore, our only task, is to ride that green wave when the light comes back, flooding around our ankles, and now up to our waists, lifting us.

 

The weaving continues, accelerating according to that secret cant—all the spilled sprawl and disorder from the beginning of the month lining up now into firming braids of strength, like many creeks and brooks conjoining at the base of the mountains to hurtle us toward June, as if June's warm breath is already looking back at us and blowing its breezes back across green living May, the wild green garden.

Staring out my window one rainy morning, mesmerized by nothing, and thinking nothing, simply entranced by the world, I notice that pulses of green are emanating from various places in the marsh. Stripes and bands of the lengthening marsh grass are illuminated as if slashes of sunlight are falling across them, but there is no sunlight coming down through that steady rain. And gradually, and with some astonishment, I come to understand that the glow, the green light, is coming up in waves from out of the marsh, up from out of the earth itself—subtle variations in soil or peat-richness, perhaps, imbuing one stretch of marsh with extraordinary nutrition, so that the shifting, wavering beams of green light I'm witnessing, rising and moving across the marsh like some immense yet dimly visible creature walking, are nothing less than the sight of life being created, the marsh grass sucking in the rain and warmth and blossoming, leaping, into life. Gray-coated deer, their fur drenched and matted from the steady rain, are emerging from the curtain of the alders on the far side of the marsh and passing now through those waves of pulsing green light.

The deer are wading knee-deep in the marsh, veering from one green place to the next, chewing almost savagely at those living, glowing places of green life—the marsh grass surely so vibrant and alive to the deer, this one day, and so rich in protein, that it is as if the deer might as well be grazing on living fish, or frogs—and now the rain is roaring against the tin roof of my writing cabin, and is beating the deer's already flattened fur tighter against their bony haunches and ribs and shoulders, winter's signature still written sharp upon them, even the swollen-bellied pregnant does.

But they don't seem to care at all, seem in fact to be luxuriating in the rain and the warmth and the richness—and across the far distance of the marsh, they seem to be swimming in the marsh, the grass up to their chests already, so that they might well be swimming in the green light itself, riding its waves...

How the simple sight of this severe marsh heals my sadness, and hones my euphoria! It's fine to observe and learn from as many of the infinite patterns and rhythms and cycles as possible, almost all of which are visible out this one small window, beside which I sit butt-anchored for several hours each day—but more than that, it's the great and calm and simple sight of the marsh's beauty, and of the forest's beyond, which soothes my heart the most: the witnessing, more than the understanding.

It's true that any understanding I'm able to glean from the comings and goings of the marsh serves also to deepen and enrich my love for the place, but as far as the great calm hand that touches my heart each time I look out at the marsh, I do not need to know or understand the workings of the bones and muscles and internal organs of this one small landscape, but instead need only to sit quietly beside it and watch, and listen, and smell, and sometimes touch.

 

The phrase
vast amphitheater
is often a cliché when used in writing about landscape, but it's true nonetheless: in May, that's what this marsh is, as the chaos of disorder continues to swell into shimmering order. Around and around the sounds go, out in the perfect circle of the marsh, rising and falling at all their different scales and notes and levels, and stirring tired hearts back up into joy, and joyful hearts up into euphoria. The tag-team baton-relay music of sora rails: one rail calling to the next, who calls to the next, who calls to the next. The near silent winging of a raven, high above, followed by a shouted cawing that fairly alarms the listener, even though the listener knows the raven is up there. The earnest but still joyful workmanlike trill of blackbirds. The flutes of Townsend's warblers and wood thrushes, and the wet-tennis-shoe-squeaking-on-linoleum cries of the spring peepers. And in the midst of it all, the dull hum of sun-glinting, armored dragonflies, and the silent music of moths, rising by the thousands from the tall grass of the marsh, like marionettes worked jerkily by the strings of the sun's warmth.

Sometimes I wonder if this journal might stand in the near future as some naive treatise of nearly overwhelming innocence, as do the older texts from the last century appear to us now; and whether or not this journal might possess a tone someday like that of the sweetly halcyon chronicles of the ancient travelers who encountered the landscapes and cultures of this country for the first white man's time. There is a part of me that wants to believe fiercely that all these wonders will still be present in the world, even as another part of me knows they will not.

 

June is coming again, with its ellipses of sun, its ellipses of force. The bear grass, with its wild abundance of every seven years, will be returning. It's looking like an unusually good year out on the marsh for the large crane flies, and for beetles, and white moths. A good year—here on the marsh, anyway, if not so many other places in the world—for yellow-cheeked warblers.