The Wild Marsh (42 page)

The girls want to roll one more rock down a slope of bear grass far below. It's the seventh year of the bear grass's cycle—a year of outrageous blossoms—and so I let them, promising,
Only one.

It's the best roll ever. The small, round boulder gallops straight down the hill, as if fleeing us, then inexplicably veers, as if consciously choosing another path, and then veers back again, choosing the same old route. It hurtles through the field of late-season,
high-elevation bear grass, snapping the drying stalks and sending up puffs and plumes of pollen, which rise and drift slowly downslope—long after the boulder has disappeared into the woods—with the rising yellow pollen tracing an arc that briefly mimics the twisting shape of a deer's rib.

And yet, surely such formality, such stricture and allegiance to oneness does not exist everywhere, and at all times. There is a life, a pulse, and respiration—a fuel, or a force—governing the reaching toward these shapes, formulas, patterns. The bear grass, for instance, with its wild seven-year blooms, the giant sweet-scented pompom stalks rising so high above the other flowering plants: surely it is in these seven-year runs that it attempts to expand its range, not merely resting and conserving the nutrients in the thin soil where it is found, but timing its next run in order to achieve maximum colonization.

In this regard—the six years of inhalation, and the one bright year of powerful exhalation—the bear grass might be seen to possess a cunning, if limited, singularity of purpose. And yet to back away and look at the entire mountain from a distance (from the other mountain across the way, perhaps), you would note that there are so many other puzzle pieces, each with its own path and pattern of inhale and exhale, that the mind spins and you understand that it is all always moving, even if just beneath the surface—moving with the alacrity of an elk galloping laterally across a mountain, or even a boulder cartwheeling directly down the mountain.

We rise and continue down the mountain ourselves. At one point, still high on the mountain, we startle a pair of large spotted frogs, which spring away from us in spirited, terrified leaps, heading directly upslope. They're a long away from any water—the nearest seasonal pond is still a good quarter-mile away, and several hundred feet higher on the mountain, up near the crest—and it occurs to me that these frogs know that rain is imminent, and that despite the summer heat, they are migrating, expanding their own range, traveling beneath the shade of the silvery hummocks of bear grass; and that they are gambling their lives, their territorial explorations, on the belief or perhaps knowledge—the faith—that it will rain soon, before they dry out, so far from home.

The seasonal ponds will not hold water again until later in the month—it will take days of September's or even October's rains to fill them back up—but perhaps if these frogs find these ponds in time (perhaps it is where they were born; perhaps they are returning to them, after a summer of exploration, and egg-laying, downslope), they can somehow burrow down between the wide fissures of the mud cracks, squeezing down through those frog's-width crevices between the polygon tiles of the parched mudflat, and can be lubricated and nourished by the brief rain they seem convinced is coming.

We continue on our own way, astounded by what we have seen—spotted frogs, a mile or more from the nearest permanent water—a veritable herd of migrating frogs, perhaps, literally leapfrogging their way across the mountain, up the mountain, even as we are hurrying down it, and by the time we reach our truck, jagged bolts of lightning are flickering to the south, hurled from clouds no longer the shape of elk but immense purple mushrooms, and the first drops of rain are beginning to ding and speckle our dusty truck.

 

August's fires linger, even after their death. For the most part, they're out like a light, but a few still smoke and smolder, even if no flames can be seen. There's still a faint, sweet odor of smoke in the air, the sharper scent of burned twigs and needles and forest duff and downed logs different somehow from the more mellow, pervasive scent of morning fires in people's wood stoves; but where this other, wilder scent might be coming from would be hard to say, because everywhere I go on my walks, the coals are extinguished, and in many places the ash is sodden. Sometimes the last of the fires will go underground, taking bitter refuge in the roots of trees, smoldering among those roots or even crawling up into one of the drummy hollows that the fire itself might have carved and hiding there amid the punk and charcoal, holding out and hanging on, not unlike the last surviving grizzly bears in this region: stubborn survivors, waiting for a break that may be a long time in coming.

Mostly, though, by September—after those great rains of Labor Day—the fires exist now only in our memories. And as they remain a shadow or a wave, we still dream of them, in dreams that are hauntingly specific. So deeply lodged is the tension and engagement of the previous month in me that, even though I'm moving around free in the beautiful new clarity of September, in my dreams I am still back in the time of fire and am helping other people fight their fires: counseling angles of attack and plans of defense, watering hot spots, setting backfires, evaluating wind direction and possible ignition fuels, and scratching fire lines in the dirt. I awake from such dreams the next morning exhausted, as if I have physically been doing those things; and the scent of the old fire, particularly in the mornings, is dense and everywhere.

 

Still, nothing can be held on to beyond its time. September must flow out of August, pushing eagerly on with its own life, through the eddies of time and heat and dreams, and one cool morning not long after Labor Day, two black bears come striding through the center of the marsh in single file, noses pointed into the cool north breeze, just out wandering in the middle of the day, and like the actors in a school play who usher in a new scene, they might as well have been pulling behind them a banner that said
AUTUMN.

 

I do not mean to complain about the imbalance or loneliness that resides somewhat in all of us, I think—sometimes deep-rooted or all-aflame, though other times merely hidden, like dull coals hunkered warm in the trunk, the cavity, of a hollow tree—but I mean instead to accept and marvel at it: this slight (though other times significant) clumsiness that almost always sets us some distance apart from the rest of nature, and the calling of the seasons.

There is a different calendar, internal and pulsing, alive, like the creature of time, that is slightly tilted from the mechanical overlay of our own precise but lifeless calendars. This other calendar is not metered by the precision of solstice and equinox, but is fluid, maybe even cunning or stealthy, and our separation from that hidden river, whether below us or farther above, may be to some degree the measure of that strange loneliness, the scent of which we all catch, from time to time, unbidden and inexplicable.

Certainly, the changes in our own self-imposed or self-described
seasons crest well before true solstice or equinox. The panic seems usually to crest in us a couple of weeks earlier than in the rest of nature. Impulsively, we rush, we roar. Hence summer arrives in our hearts on June seventh, say, rather than the twenty-first; and autumn, with that bittersweet mingling of pleasure and confusion—a feeling very much like, come to think of it, first love—comes in the first week of September rather than matching the balanced grace of equal dark, equal light, on the true equinox in the third week.

What is the reason for this cant, this tilt, and will we ever earn our way into the larger flow? Did we once exist in it, and fall from it? Or is it—this distance, this wobble or separation—the fuel that inspirits us, that gives us life and moves us across the landscape of the centuries; this distance, or slight loneliness, at first glance seemingly regrettable, all the difference, just as the antlers of a deer or elk are different from the branches in the forest through which that deer or elk moves?

 

The larch are starting to glow at their tips—the needles on the uppermost branches turn yellow first, with the wave of gold progressing steadily downward through each tree, each forest, then, as autumn progresses, an amazing thing to witness in any one tree, the color
gold
washing through the entire tree, gilding it, much less to witness that slow, beautiful fire happening to an entire mountainside.

The straight and simple truth of it is that September becomes so beautiful so quickly that you can scarcely bear it. The berries are finally all shriveled up by the frosts in the high country, the leaves of those low bushes burnt as red as garnets and the leaves of aspens are turning yellow, and the rain-washed sky is bluer, and the soil, moist again, is softer when you walk on it.

The bears are eating the kinnikkinnick berries—their scat is everywhere, through the forest—and the sophisticated, complex matrix of odors specific to the enormously complicated, enormously diverse vegetative mix in this valley is returning, strengthened by the new moisture and cooler temperatures.

The tall dead-yellow grass of summer still obscures the gray stone walls—the umber grass one of the last visual clues of a summer gone by so quickly—and then one day there is frost not just up in the mountains but in the marsh, each saw blade of grass glistening with its crust of ice—the morning-world sheeted with silver and gold—and the elk are bugling even more loudly, high in the last remote untouched backcountry And even though you always knew it was coming, that first hard frost on the valley floor, it still hits with the same surprise as when at the beach, as you try to walk along the strand line, an onrushing wave nonetheless comes skating in and surges past you, suddenly up to your ankles.

And then another, and another. And more elk bugling, as if they are not simply announcing it but creating it with each breath, each grunted exhalation.

The larch look exactly like candles or matches just struck: as if this fire-loving species is so determined to burn—and in that burning, to have its world made newer, and grander—that it will manufacture its own flame, in September; as if August was not enough. It's the grizzly bears—the last tiny population of them—that many people think of when they consider the Yaak, and they are an amazing and powerful and unique story. But I think that it is the paths and patterns of the larch that might be most fitted to this land of fire and ice, of intense wakefulness and then deep sleep. And in September, the forest, and the burning larch, are nothing if not awake.

 

The antlers of the deer are free of their summer velvet now, are unsheathed and fully hardened and polished, ready for fighting. The deer bound through the woods, their antlers the color and texture of rich mahogany wood, glinting and flashing in the patches of sunlight, reminding you they are not ornaments but weapons.

 

The ravens have been still in summer's heat, but grow more active. They've never been away, but now you see and hear them more often.
Awake.

Driving to school some early frosty mornings, we'll see them sitting on the side of the road, jet black in a slant of crisp September sun, steam rising from their bodies, as if they are but one step away, one wingbeat from vaporizing into pure spirit. But they are not pure spirit; they are as alive and physical as anything on this
earth, and as beautiful, and they edge farther to the side of the road, still steaming, as if newly born, and watch us pass, as if waving or ushering us on through the woods—as if we've passed some checkpoint.

On the fourteenth of September, the girls capture the most amazing spiny green caterpillar, a huge thing with garish yellow eyes. We watch it crawl around, as fat as a sausage and as green as a lime, for fifteen minutes before doing the childhood thing of putting it in an empty mayonnaise jar for closer examination.

We take it to school the next day—"It's so cute," Lowry says—but when we enter the room with it before school, this caged, horned dragon, the little boys scream and scatter from the computer.

That afternoon, we release the caterpillar into the alder grove at the edge of the marsh. I know that we stand at the verge of creating life in a test tube—that indeed, we might already have passed that threshold—but before we get too arrogant or boastful or even confident, tell me who, please, could have dreamed such a thing as this caterpillar?

 

Every September, when the marsh is still fully dry from the heat and drought of summer, and before it begins to rehydrate under autumn's rains, the girls and I go out into it some afternoons to play a game we call Tiger in the Grass. The marsh grass is over their heads—a maze of fecund, vegetative uproar—and we play hide-and-seek in the labyrinths we've created below, forming warrens and burrows with our crawling around beneath that high, dense canopy of grass.

The rich, cool, sweet scents of the marsh down at the roots' level are like those of a candy store, of ginger and chamomile, and while the September light glints off the bent tops of the grass, reflecting as if off a curved shield, the world-below is not bronze like above, but instead, deep, cool, dense green.

We call to one another, delighting in our hidden-ness, our invisibility, and track the new-made paths of each other, crawling down those hollow tunnels. Shafts of light occasionally filter through the tall grasses with pencil beams of light. One person is the tiger and the others hide, and try to run to home base—popping up somewhere in the marsh, up from the green, cool, subaqueous light into the bright, shimmering bronze haze, often emerging fifty yards or farther from where we thought we were, or from where the tiger thought we were; wonderfully lost, wonderfully disoriented, in even so short a time as the span of one game.

Running for home, then, shrieking and laughing. The tiger bounding after them, after us. The grass shaking, rattling. A thousand sweet marsh scents stirring in our passage. The girls' laughter reminding me, somehow, of that shimmering light rising, reflected from the tops of the grass.