The Wild Marsh (32 page)

How else to consider the slight components of both comfort and loneliness that attend to our watching of the movements of a flowing river, or a wavering fire, or even the movements of the gusting summer wind passing through tall grass?

 

After twenty years of listening and watching and hiking around and hunting—twenty youthful years, no less—we're starting to learn some things about this valley. We'll never know enough, or even a fraction of what we'd like to; but we know, for instance, or believe that we know, where the wild strawberries are sweetest, in the tiny little lanes and clearings no larger than a house, where little patches of soft, filtered, damp light fall down from the midst of the old-growth larch forests, little clearings where the snowshoe hares come out (despite the protestations of timber company biologists who say the rabbits, and their primary predators, lynx, don't live in the old forests) to nibble on those new sweet berries, in July.

Late in July, we like to try to get into some of those patches just before the legions of rabbits do, and pick a little basket of berries. The girls have a tiny doll's basket (the berries are no larger than the nub of a pencil eraser, but contain more sweetness within them, concentrated, than an entire bushel of the supermarket mega-irradiated jumbo giants), and because I'm red-green colorblind, I can't find the tiny strawberries and have to rely on the girls to do the harvest.

They're delighted by my weakness, and by their sharp-eyed superiority, and delighted also, as junior hunter-gatherers, to be providing for me. We all three have little baskets—in the dimming blue light of dusk, I absolutely can't find a single one—and from time to time the girls take pity, and come over to where I'm searching, down on my hands and knees, and drop a few into my basket.

And as is their habit, they eat far more than they pick, not even really hunter-gatherers but more like wild animals, feasting in the moment, letting their bodies do the hoarding rather than jars or cabinets—the girls more a part of the forest, in that manner, in that moment—and by the time it is too dark to see well and we
walk back toward our truck, our baskets have barely enough strawberries to drop into our pancake batter the next morning. But they will be memorable pancakes, and it will be enough.

Just as we reach the truck some friends come driving by, and they stop to visit for a while in the dusk, with the old sentinel larches so immense all around us. Their children are grown now, and they reminisce about picking wild strawberries with their children, when their children were Mary Katherine's and Lowry's ages.

They keep telling me what everyone has been saying since each of the girls was born, and what I have found to be true: about how fast it goes—and I agree, and thank them for their counsel. My friends keep looking at the girls' little baskets of berries and smiling, and saying that same thing again and again, throughout the course of the lazy-dusk conversation—about how fast it goes—and yet I don't know what to do about that truth, that inescapable flight, other than to go out into the patches of light scattered here and there along the edges of the old forest and pick strawberries with them in the evening, just as we're doing. And while I'm very grateful for the advice, any advice, I also wonder often if it, the time of childhood, doesn't pass faster for the parent sometimes by considering, and noticing, the speed of its passage as opposed perhaps to a sleepier, less attentive, less fretful awareness of that passage and its nearly relentless pace.

Either way, it's going to go fast. I know I'm doing what I can to slow it down. Reading to them in the evenings, cooking with them, taking them on hikes, and swimming in the mountain lakes...

Any activity I do with them could be done faster and more efficiently, but only recently have I come to understand that the slower and more inefficiently we do these things, the greater is my gain, our gain; the less quickly that galloping stretch of time passes. Taking three hours to fix a single, simple meal is a victory. Coming back from two hours in the woods with only a dozen strawberries left over is a triumph. Chaos and disorderliness can be allies in my goals of spending as much time as possible with them. If I'll only watch and listen, they'll show me—for a while—how to slow time down: instructing me in a way that I could never otherwise learn from the caring counsel of my friends, and their experiences.

Still, it's good to hear it, even if bittersweet. I know not to argue with them, or deny it. I know, or think I know, the sound of the truth, and it's wonderful to have their support in the matter.

We say our leisurely goodbyes and part company in the hanging dusk turning quickly now to darkness so that we need to turn our lights on, traveling down the road on our way through the old forest. On the way home, the girls would eat every single one of the last of the berries if I let them—would run right through the last of our supplies in only a minute or two—and so I put the little straw baskets in the cab of the truck, out of reach.

 

A couple of days later, after an afternoon spent at the falls, we're walking along a gravel road, again at dusk, and again the girls are finding the tiny wild strawberries. The twenty-seventh ofJuly: hot days, cold nights. It's a couple of miles back to the truck, and the girls alternate between running and walking slowly; and again I try to relax and release, and give myself over to what seems to me to be the irregular, even inscrutable logic of their pace, their seemingly erratic stops and starts. Stretching their freedom, then coming back.

They run pell-mell for a while down the road, then slow to a saunter. Lowry stops at one point and looks up at the sky for long moments.

"What are you doing?" I ask.

"Listening to the leaves," she says. And she's right; just above the louder sound of the rushing creek, the drying leaves of the riverside cottonwoods are rattling slightly, and sounding different, drier: autumnal already.

She's four! It pleases me deeply, so much so that I don't even say anything other than offering some mild concurrence.

Farther down the road she stops again, and announces, "It smells good here." It's the creekside bog orchids, intensely fragrant—almost overpoweringly so, like cheap perfume—and both girls walk out into the orchids to smell them better, and Lowry tells us that they "smell better than the shampoo with the silver cap."

They run for a short distance, with me trailing right behind them, for safety—giving them their freedom, yet guarding them in
lion country—and they stop yet again. And when I ask what they're doing this time, Low says quietly, as if from dreamland, "Listening to water."

They're both just standing there, staring at a glade below, in the dimming light: mesmerized, it seems, by the very fabric of the landscape, the interlocking of all those different species and sizes of trees; and I realize with a wonderful bittersweetness that I really don't have a clue as to what either of them is thinking or feeling, only that they are fully suspended in the business of being children—that they are in a place I want them to be, and yet where I cannot go; though even as I am thinking this, and thinking about how totally oblivious they are, in the moment, to my adult presence, Low turns her gaze from the mountains and tells me she thinks I'm standing too close to the edge of the road and the steep slope leading down to the river.

"Don't slide down there," she says, taking my hand. "I don't want to lose you." Like something dropped in tall grass.

We resume our journey. Not too far from where we've parked, we encounter a dead garter snake in the road, tire struck, but intact. They're fascinated, of course, both by their instinctual, archetypal fear of snakes and by the archetype of death; and they examine the snake, the specimen, like little scientists, stirring it gently with a stick—it still looks alive—and Lowry sprinkles a little dust on its head, as if in some pagan ritual.

We pass on, then, though she's quiet all the way to the truck, and when I ask her what's the matter some fifteen minutes later, she says, "It makes me sad when things die."

What do I know about girls, or anything? Would not a little boy—a boy such as myself, perhaps, have wound the dead snake around his wrist to wear as a bracelet, an amulet, or tossed it on his sister?

All I can do, often, is watch, and listen. So often it feels as if I'm treading behind them, observing, listening, and learning other rhythms, rather than being out in front, as if breaking trail for them, the way I had always assumed it would be, being a parent.

This is supposed to be a book about the months of the year, and about this one singular landscape. But again and again, watching the girls watch the landscape helps me see it more fully, and in new ways, whether down on my hands and knees at ground level, or staring off at the horizon.

There's still time for me to learn some of what they see and know and feel. It's not too late. I can still learn, or relearn, some if not all of what they seem to know intuitively about, among other things, an engagement with time. When to walk, when to run, when to rest, when to dream. When to be tender—more often than not—and, by extension, when to be all other things, as well.

I want to believe that my bitterness and cynicism, and my fears for the environment, fade when in their company; that such worries leach away, as if back into the soil of the landscape itself, where they might even be absorbed by the rattling cottonwoods and the scented orchids. It probably is not that way at all, but some days, after a good day spent in the woods with the girls, that is how it feels; and I rarely come away from such days without feeling that I have learned something, even if I'm not sure what it is, and that although time certainly has not ceased or even paused, at least it has not accelerated in that awful way it can do sometimes, slipping out from beneath and away from you, as if you've lost your footing on ice or some other slick surface.

I guess it's better to be aware of the briskness of its passage than not, after all. It's going to go fast either way. But if you're aware of its brevity, then at least you'll be aware too of the eddies and slow stretches.

But my friends who stopped and visited the other evening when we were picking berries were right as rain. It's going to go real fast either way. The best I can do is try to keep up.

 

More guests, guests pouring into the homes of all Montana family and friends, in the summer, pouring in like water through a breach in the earthen wall of the other nine months, friends and family flooding a year or more's absence, compressing it to the point, vacation, where we can only joke about it among ourselves, the intensity and busyness of summer: entertaining, cooking, taking hikes, doing so at a recreational pace that we would probably never otherwise attain, left unchallenged by summer visitage...

Elizabeth and I have it pretty easy: most of our guests are low-key and self-entertaining, particularly useful traits when one batch is leaving on a Sunday morning and another arriving on a Sunday evening.

Ferocious games of badminton out on the grass-clad rocky drain field, like some crude parody of Victorian England. The shuttlecock fluttering upward while just beyond the stone wall, and in the dark forest, lions and grizzlies wander, their footprints squishing in the mud along the little creek bank. A great gray owl, with its four-foot wingspan, cruises through the yard at dusk, made curious by the shuttlecock perhaps, and alights in a tree at the edge of the woods and watches for a while, its head seeming as large as a man's.

The girls manage to capture a tiger swallowtail, one that has already been wounded in a previous engagement, and decide to keep it for a pet for a few days. They bring it into the house and put her—they have named her Zoey, so we know she's a female—on the cut flowers in a vase. For the rest of the evening, and much of the next day, she flies around the house, looking so festive and exuberant that it makes some of the adults wonder,
Well, why
not
have a butterfly for a pet, and let it have the run of the house?
What's a little occasional yellow dusting against the kitchen window? The tiny little sound of butterfly wings fluttering, at night, just before going to roost.

Some accident befalls Zoey, however. We're not sure what. Some excess of kindness or attention from the girls is my guess—perhaps they tried to fashion a dress for her, or even a leash, to take her out to their clubhouse—and only the next day Zoey breathes her last: languishing and then expiring, with a sad and disturbing shudder reminiscent of a Hollywood heroine, and the first and easiest lesson is learned well:
wild things don't belong in captivity.
And I can't help but believe that there are all sorts of other lessons, or at least the foundations for other lessons, laid deeper, as well, in a manner that stopping roadside to examine some grille-stuck moth or butterfly could never have accomplished.

With a garden hand shovel, we dig a grave on a sunny patch of hill, amid a blossoming of the yarrow on which she liked to feed.
The girls have spent the last couple of hours making a little box for her, lining its cardboard walls with scraps of velvet ribbon and pictures from nature magazines, and when it is time to lower her into that spot, we place a few flowers around her, and Mary Katherine officiates solemnly but succinctly, informing us, "She was a good butterfly, and we will miss her."

There are half a dozen of us standing around the graveside. I quote the epigraph from Jim Harrison's novel
Dalva
attributed to an old saying—"We loved the earth but could not stay"—and then we fill the hole back in with its three shovelfuls of loose, sun-grayed dirt, and tamp in the headstone, a piece of broken clay tile, upon which the girls have scrawled, in black Magic Marker, "Here lies Zoey She was a good butterfly. May she rest in peace. She filled our days with beauty."

We stand around a few moments longer, each of us thinking our quiet thoughts, and then wander on back up to the house, to begin preparing the evening's feast.