The Wild Marsh (33 page)

 

They see me out the window, picking those weeds: stooping to pluck up a daisy, to unroot a thistle, to grub a sprout of hawkweed, to assail the gentle dandelions. Sometimes, when they are with me, they stoop to do the same. It's a dilemma. How much do I teach my children to fear the weeds of the world? Do I want their happiness to be even slightly or infinitesimally diminished, or rather, prevented—by an occurrence as common as the pressure of weeds, an occurrence that will be made only more common in the future? Who would wish such a thing upon his or her children?

And yet, how else to define beauty, and how to define values and standards? It seems easy on paper to parse out an equilibrium of moderation, but less easy out in the real world.

I want them to know of unrestrained love—not just mine for them, but even for lesser things, such as a meadow of green grass. I want fiercely for them to know of uncompromised things, both large and small. Of the lessons of compromise, I believe there will be plenty of opportunity later, and always, to learn those.

Can one know compromise and unrestrained joy or love or any other passion both? Like a landscape perhaps that is sometimes one
thing and other times another; or like an animal, some certain species, that has two dwellings.

 

More wind, rivers of wind further into July—brushing against the end of it—so that not only the tall marsh grass itself is bent flat, shuddering, but even the more slender of the lodgepoles are bent over like taut fishing poles that have hooked their tight lines to some invisible underground force, one they might or might not have been seeking in the first place. Bright orange sparks of hawkweed rest in the trash can in my cabin, as if the fires have already arrived. The wind gusts through my open windows, knocks pictures from the wall, and heat lightning flashes and rolls to the west, but still no rain, nearing four weeks now without rain, only an ever-increasing heat. The faint scent of smoke somewhere, and the slightest haze.
Change.
I pick the pictures up, hang them back in their places. The heart quickens.

 

The next morning, a goldfinch is perched on the alder branch closest to my window. Though it's early, already the dry wind is blowing again. Out along the marsh's edges, Bohemian waxwing chase moths, stalling and swooping, but that one bird, the greenish-yellow goldfinch, sits there next to my window with its head cocked, looking in. Its eye is dark and wet and fixed, and as I stand motionless so as not to frighten it, looking back, it seems certain to me that across that short distance—three, four feet—I can feel deeply the first summonings, already, of migration. As if only this morning, for the first time all summer, has that biological imperative surfaced. As if today, only today, finally today, it is time to begin to begin. As if there is somehow an immeasurable but profound difference between yesterday and today.

 

Even in July, perhaps the surest and most stable of months—the safest and most reassuring—there is almost always, in every moment, and in every moment between a moment, the steady march forward, or downward, and some aspect of leave-taking, whether seen or unseen, like an underground river that flows just beneath the surface of a fixed slab of sun-warmed rock.

F
IRST BELLFLOWER BLOOM,
first twinflower, first monkshood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. Wild strawberries too, red as fire, and hawkweed, colonies and colonies of it spreading through the forests and meadows, displacing native plants, eaten by nothing, its blossoms brilliant orange, like glowing sparks. Butterflies congregate in huge swarms near any cliff-side seep or spring as water dwindles, with the swarms, the butterfly colonies, becoming larger as the heat expands. To our north woods shade-loving selves, it feels as it does when you stoke a stove too full of dry wood, too much too fast—as if someone is throwing such wood on the sun itself—and though doubtless one of the reasons the butterflies gather in such immense numbers around the drying-out damp patches is to feed on the saturated mineral residue left behind as the puddles and ponds evaporate, they are after the pure water too, I think; and to happen upon such a colony while on a walk through the heated woods (trying to stay in the shade of the trees), the impression one receives at first—just before they all spring into the vortex of flight in a random chaos swirl, disrupting all those thousands of fruit vendors' stands over in India, Morocco, and Hong Kong—is that the butterflies have been gathered at those seeps and springs, hunched over them with fluttering wings in an attempt to fan some faint coolness onto those waters, or even to provide, with the stained-glass church windows of their wings, some glimmering protection, as if even trying, with the filter of their wings, to disguise or camouflage that water from the consuming gaze of the sun.

 

Almost every year it is this way, in August—hot and dry, with the guessing game that really began back in the heart of winter, as we watched the snow fall, or not fall, coming right down to the whittled point of
now.
Will the fires come today, tonight, tomorrow? Later this week, or the middle of next week?

As the woods become ever more still and hot, as the last
ghosts of moisture oven-bake dry from the last twig, and the last pine needle—as the green and living trees themselves begin to dry out, with some of them dying even while still standing up, their needles browning as if the fire has already passed through—the question that back in January or February might have been an
if
seems inescapably now a
when.

Weather reports shift by the hour and take on the immediacy of war briefings: wind directions and velocities, temperature, humidity, and storm forecasts. As the heated rock shell of the mountains grows hotter each day, like so many bricks baking in the oven, the convective updraft from those violent heatings takes on the force of coal-fired bellows, or even the exhalations of a lung-heated living thing, sending invisible towering plumes of heat, pistons of unlit fire, straight up, where—thirty and forty thousand feet later—they finally cool, condensing and spreading into apocalyptic-looking mushroom clouds.

They are not yet done, in their cooling. The fire is still in them. It seeks to return to the rocks from which it was birthed—or if not yet birthed, conceived, in that August heat.

The weather reports tell us who is getting what and where, all around the state: lightning with rain, or lightning without rain. Worst of all—or rather, most frightening of all, if one is frightened of these things—lightning with no rain, accompanied and driven by high winds.

It comes slowly, in August, the awareness that the lush bounty of spring and green summer, the rampant growth, has now become like a sort of trap or prison, if one allows oneself to be frightened by such things—the cell walls of every living plant, every grass and forb, twig and branch and limb, leaching paper dry, kindling dry, gunpowder dry—all this botanical exuberance, all that
life,
surrounding you now, surrounding everything, with its husks—husks everywhere—and even if you love fire and love the pulse of life it brings back to a landscape in its aftermath, you cannot help but be a little frightened, standing before the immensity of such a power, and waiting.

 

The sun seems almost always to be overhead, beating down. Ten o'clock seems as hot as two o'clock, barely tolerable, and beneath
such an unchanging zenith, the already weak human sense of direction becomes further challenged so that only the silhouettes of familiar mountains can guide you to north or south, east or west, rather than the traditional cant and tilt and rise and fall of the sun.

Except for the force of the life shriveling from the forest, the woods are extraordinarily silent. Sometimes a lone raven will glide past, high overhead—how can they fly in this heat, and them black as obsidian; are their wings as hot with absorbed heat, perhaps, as fire itself?—and you will see its shadow on the ground as it passes in front of that directionless sun. And spinning, looking backwards, trying to see where the bird that cast that shadow is, or was, you can rarely find it, for by the time you have turned and looked up at the sun and then quickly away, trying to figure out which way the bird was traveling, it's already gone, and it is as if someone again has tossed another stick onto the fire of the sun.

 

In this, the hottest month—just as with the coldest—there are long days in which nothing happens, or in which nothing seems to happen. A journal no longer even bothers reporting the weather, which is always the same—windless, clear, hot—and there doesn't seem to be any significant or dramatic animal activity. Even the trees and forbs and grasses are dormant in their drying out, beginning to seem as lifeless as if already in the true leached-out heart of winter. The birds are silent in the heat, as are the fledglings on their nests, tiny, fuzzy, bulge-eyed, crooked-limbed scrabbling things that are due somehow, miraculously, in Costa Rica and points farther south in only three or four months.

This is the key to peace, I think, or at least one of the major keys that will allow one inside one or more of the gates that might surround the kingdom of peace: a learned ability to observe and catalogue, perhaps even if only intuitively and emotionally, as many of the different paces of life, and its changes—order into disorder, and vice versa—as possible; and to become comfortable, even fluent, in the recognition of these cycles: whether the one-day's arc of light across an equinox sky, or a month's tracking of the moon, or a deer or elk herd's annual migration from mountaintop to valley bottom, or the thousand-year cycle of a cedar forest growing old, or
even the tectonic creep of continents, the imperceptible slip and thrusts of glaciers.

To not automatically apply a human-centered or individual-centered scale of time and its perceptions on a subject other than oneself surely allows one entrance through at least one of the many gates of the high walls surrounding that kingdom of peace.

It's hard enough to learn our own cycles, and even those are not so intimate and always with us, completely in our control; how can we possibly expect to control those of the world, at the fringes and in the margins of which we stand briefly, for our eighty-eight years, or whatever strange and ultimately small number we are allotted?

I would like to think this is what spirit is like, what dying is like—and what waiting to be born is like too: looking down on the green earth, the gold and red earth, the white earth, the black and brown bare earth, and watching all the changes drift across it, again and again—deserts becoming old forests becoming ice-capped mountains becoming oceans becoming deserts again, the changes drifting across the calmly scrutinized terrain below with the gently inexorable power and assurance of cloud drift, or even the shadows cast by cloud drift.

From such grander scale, more beauty, not less, would be able to be seen and understood. The brief lives of humans, and humans' histories, would appear like tiny flashbulb poppings of light in the darkness—the synapses of a moment. The blossoming of an individual flower on one hillside on one mountain range, another flash of light.

What scale should we use when we look at a thing? Different scales for different things, right?

I'm old fashioned, I know, but I'm convinced that in almost all regards, the slower and longer and more moderate a scale, the better, with regard to our own plans and machinations, and particularly with regard to our relationship with nature. There's certainly nothing new in such a thought—isn't this but a windy attempt to define the words
patience
or
humility,
or even
forbearance?
But for someone as impulsive and scatter-minded as I am, this is a task, even upon so substantial and assured a landscape as this one: a task that still, twenty years later, I seek to learn hungrily, in almost every moment of every season, on every hill and along every creek
bend, in every consuming glance, every quick, ravenous memory, each one like the spark of light made by a single match on that dark mountain in the night.

Even these pages however are but a compression of the events and images I've gathered in my drift across this landscape, and in the seasons' cloud drift across me, anchored or moored here at the marsh: a gathering of the sparks, or the things that have appeared in my mind as sparks.

And again, in the spaces between those sparks (not spaces in which no sparks were occurring, surely, but merely spaces in which I failed to perceive or observe the background cyclic sparking), there are long spaces of landscape and long spaces of time in which nothing seems to happen: as if such space, such nighttime, is the matrix for those sparks. From a distant enough perspective, then, even amid that vast night, there would be light anywhere you care to look, perhaps; light everywhere, a sky and firmament of light, perhaps, even where we might perceive darkness.

Or maybe these pages, with their compression of the days forming a filter through which to look at this landscape, are not even so much like match strikes in my mind (though even now, in the remembering of them, that is still how they seem to me: ignitions of yellow light flaring up in an otherwise black and sleeping void in which nothing is perceived). It's not even as if I'm sleeping, but as if I'm simply resting again, waiting to be born, or having already lived.

Perhaps in these pages, as I remember the hours and the days even as they are vanishing behind me, these observations and notes and memories become for me like the mineralized residue, the concentric rings of salt rime left behind in each vanishing August seep and puddle of moisture, thin shining layers of glittering salt dust being fed on briefly by butterflies before being scrubbed entirely clean again then by the rains that return later in the autumn.

 

Even as the world seems to become beaten down by the heat—browning, wilting, entering dormancy, even dying and preparing to burn, or to be tested by the burning—the marsh itself remains, as ever, a thing of beauty, as astounding in its senescence as in its spring and summer vibrancy, or its winter serenity. Neither
words nor paint can capture the sepia tone of the marsh grasses as they dry out, for their color, or vanishing-of-color, is somehow more than compensated for by the mysterious rustling and clattering sound that accompanies the grasses and sedges in any rare bit of breeze; and the loss of color, the indescribable nature of it, is somehow also accompanied—compensated—by the increasingly metallic reflectivity of the August sun glinting across those bronzed blades, like ten thousand or ten hundred thousand drawn swords.