The Wild Marsh (43 page)

 

The world is full: as one thing is taken away, another fills its place. Surely this is but a myth that is convenient for us to believe, and the closer you look at any cycle, pattern, or process, the more you see that it might be more than a myth; that it is also an observable article of science.

The earth tips and turns farther in its angle from the sun and the days grow shorter, but the quality of the available light becomes finer, so that even though the weight and contact of things is shifting, a kind of balance is being maintained. It is neither a physical nor an emotional balance, but some other kind.

How few words we have, really, in our language, and at our ultimate disposal. I suppose the best that can be said is that it is a kind of spiritual balance, and it is somewhat a source of comfort to consider that it must exist in the hearts and center of all things—in ocean tempests and typhoons, in the eye of the hurricane, in the wobble of an elk calf, in the leaf chewings of any one species of caterpillar—everywhere, always balanced, or seeking balance, even when our own eyes or minds cannot discern it: even when we cannot feel it in ourselves.

It has to be there. If it is everywhere else, how can it not also be in us?

The fading light just keeps getting richer and richer as it shortens. Even the candle glow of aspen and larch seems to conspire to gently fill the heart—even a heart previously believed to be full—and the blood's strange autumn chemicals themselves seem to be filling with light as the days grow shorter and we are
weaned—gradually at first, but then quickly—from that summer bounty of light, that summer bounty of yellow and gold.

 

The twenty-ninth of September, and I feel further buoyed, life swept, by this autumn light, so rich now as to seem almost tangible, like the rattle of parchment paper or the sound and sight of a crisp pear being bitten into.

The girls and I spy another black bear on our way home from school—a big fat one sitting out in a meadow, beneath a lone hawthorn tree. He's sitting there like a man at the beach, is pulling the branches down with both front paws and eating the ripe hawthorn berries, and just watching the world go by. The field he's in is the color of bright yellow straw; his rippling coat is deep black, almost iridescent. His white teeth flash as he chews the berries, his composure is utterly relaxed, and surely the September sun is filling his blood as well as mine, and he is soaking it in.

 

On some of the frostier mornings, I've had to start making a small fire in my wood stove again to keep warm enough to work. It took me a long time to get comfortable calling it work. The issue is not whether you enjoy it or not. The issue is, does it make the blood leave your head, do your cells feel afterward as if you've physically traveled to the places encountered in your mind, are you pleased with but weary from those travels, those creations?

It fulfills a need in you, this creation—a fit you have bartered with the world—but wouldn't you rather be out on a mountaintop more often, or canoeing an autumn river? Aren't you making a trade, a morning or an afternoon at the desk instead of on the mountain? Is one more real than the other?

September raises these questions more intensely—awakens them more sharply, if they have been slumbering below, perhaps more than any other month.

The woodshed in my cabin is filled with split wood for the coming winter, but I don't want to dip into that stockpile yet. Instead, I keep a loose pile of unsplit wood by my cabin door, and it becomes for me part of the process, the transition from the physical world into the dreaming world, to split each morning's supply there by my
cabin door before going inside to light that small warming fire by which I will work until the day itself grows warmer.

An adult lifetime of splitting wood, and yet it never fails to amaze me—the beauty, the astonishing brightness of a newly split piece of dry lodgepole, the shock of white flesh, the fiber opening before the maul's blade, like the bright and perfectly paired pages of a book opened in that brilliant morning sun. The vertical lines on the growth rings land open in cross-section, reading like the lines of text.

 

One of the loveliest things about sitting perched at the edge of the marsh, day in and day out, across the span of each year, is how once you're deeply enough immersed in the year, you find yourself more often than not totally forgetting not only what day of the week it is but even the months—the names of them—and instead see the days, the patterns of them, in mosaics of color and temperature, as thick-bodied and animate as a living creature. Their passage seems a flow rather than any named or bounded thing. Or if boundaries exist, it is as if only for the purpose of showing, pointing, the way to freedom; and with the scents and colors of the passing months, and the seasons, rolling along like a path or a map and with no real need for the names of months or any other things. A clacking grasshopper does not have to be August; a yellow leaf does not have to be September, and neither does the first hard frost.

So sharply felt are the senses at this time of year for me however that the names of the things fall away and in my heightened and marveling awareness, it seems I can forget once again the names of the things and instead live only more fully in the presence and taste and odor of the things themselves: as pungent as they surely once were to me before they had names, and as they will still be after the names are forgotten. At least as much as any others, September is the month of touch and scent and taste and sight and sound, with language and other filters somehow being partially removed, in this new and foreshortening light. The world is—dare I say this?—more real, it seems.

As September's intense senses travel more deeply into you—being transmitted in their new richness and sharpness faster, and
more completely, I think, than the time it takes to stop and name them—it seems that time, conversely, and perhaps paradoxically, slows.

I know intuitively as well as intellectually that the physical world is every bit as real in every month—that there is just as much wonder to be prized out of the world in any one month as another. Perhaps then it is simply me who feels more real, in September—less bounded by the tradition and trajectory and momentum of old paths and habits.

The frost hangs longer now, clinging to the coarse marsh grass and sedges with glimmering blades of ice and hoarfrost until noon. By this time of day the children will have already said their pledge of allegiance, will already have completed a couple of lessons, will already have laughed, and sung, and might at this very moment be out on the playground, their school day half done, while this long, slow, lazy light seems to hang forever.

I continue staring out the window, adjusting yet again to the world's changing gear works. I watch as those blades of frost finally release, steaming slightly, as the cold sun slowly warms them, and in that gentle sliding down, the tumbling of those intricate frost plates into the deep grass below, the dry grass stirs slightly, briefly—all else is still, the day is perfectly poised—as if unseen animals are moving around in it, just beneath the surface.

Still later in the day, the grass is entirely dry again, ready for play—and I'm ready for the girls to be home from school.

Did I get much work done today—any labor of world-changing substance, any acts of merit or consequence on the global stage? No. Elizabeth and I baked a huckleberry pie, which rests, cooling by the open screen window, completely uncut, awaiting the girls' return.

If you can't reexamine and reprioritize your life in September, then I feel pity that you may not be able to do so at all. If you cannot remember what it is about the world you love most, and which matters most to you in this slowing-down time, as the days return to a more equitable balance of darkness and light, then when, if I dare ask, do you think you can?

In September, writing is not the real work. In September, taking the girls to school, then staring out the window and thinking about them, and waiting for them to get home, is the real work.

Any year now, they will be hurtling past you, with their dreams and desires and ambitions. If you are smart, or lucky, you will slow down your own and turn away—will turn and go back to meet them in their territory, while it is still so slow and leisurely and timeless, so poised between then and now.

C
ATCH ME ON ANY ONE
fine certain day, any month of the year, when things are going well and I am out in the natural world, and I'm likely to say that
this
day,
this
week, is the best of the year, superior to all others. Eventually, then, after enough of those kinds of pronouncements, such statements would lose all currency; but I have to say, the case can be made, yet again, for the first week of October being far and away the finest. Sure, October is suddenly cold as hell, or seems that way, with lows in the twenties each morning, a sheet of frost spangling the bent and submitting tops of the marsh grass—diamonds everywhere, once the lazy sun finally struggles above the trees—and with your skin, and your mindset, not yet thickened to winter's demands. And the days are so unbelievably short now, with the downhill slide of the equinox still a surprise, still a shock.

In that first week of October, you understand that it's not any kind of laziness with which the world is slowing, but a heroic fatigue; and that from that fatigue, even as all manner of vegetative matter are dying, crumbling and disintegrating, there is an elegant new thing blossoming, the crafting of a plan and pattern every bit as sophisticated and complex as spring-and-summer's roar of clamant growth.

It is an invisible blossom, this new plan, and as such, it rises before you like a ghost, so that it takes a different sort of seeing to know it. The increasingly leafless frames of the deciduous trees and shrubs are not that flower's absence but its new presence.

The newer silence of birdsong (save for the going-away clamor of ducks and geese, and the shouting of the ravens) is likewise simply the inverse of the complicated thing rather than its utter absence.

If only we could learn this same lesson of brief senescence and strategic withdrawal when weary; to push hard and strong, living fully for as long as possible, but then to back off in graceful taper,
and to descend, almost seamlessly, into the lower levels, when it's time to rest.

It's simply a different kind of living, a different pace. The sleeping dream-world beneath the snow can be every bit as rich and colorful as the bright world of stone and antler and feather above; and for a little while, anyway, if parsed out sparingly enough, and wisely, the memory of the bones and antlers and stones and feathers can be as real as the bones and antlers and stones and feathers themselves.

And if the exodus, the descent to sleep and rest is graceful enough, even the disintegration and disorder will not matter, for in these elegant dreams and memories, desire will still be maintained and nurtured: a desire sufficient, when the time becomes right again, to reassemble those loosened pieces and raise them all back up again, in resurrection and ascent.

The bears and larch, it seems to me, help orchestrate this descent to rest. Even their coloring—the golden bears, and the blaze gold needles of the larch—seems designed to draw our attention to them as they remain active on a landscape where all else is going away. (And then, in only a few more weeks—if that long—they too will leave, descending. But they are the last to go.)

Like conductors, they are more active than ever in early October—the berry-fat bears, their winter coats thickening in the cold weather, able to prowl the hills even in broad daylight now, so pleasant are the temperatures; and the needles of the larch turning their strange gold color, as if determined to experience, one way or another, the fires they evaded in August—the very fires that birthed and now sustain them.

And in their beauty, entire uncut mountainsides of beauty, the eye is drawn toward them—and in that engagement, the mind begins to dream.

 

You have to adjust. It's not September anymore, or August, or, certainly, July. You've got to begin considering a slowing down: and again, the beauty of the season tries to help us with this attempt. All the clues are there, illuminated and ablaze in their once-a-year rotting beauty.

Still, being human, we cannot help but be tempted by the flesh.
We dream of dreaming—of hunkering down in the shortening days in front of the wood stove and just watching, witnessing, this graceful descent, this softening of October light and fading away—but there is a part of us too that wants to be conductors, a part that loves the surface, and loves being noticed; and so we struggle and clamor between the two choices.

The fading light inspires in us one last surge of energy, one last boost of output. Like the great bears prowling the hills in broad daylight, or the larch needles hurrying through the sky like tiny arrows loosened from thousands of quivers, we hurry on, inspired by our last chance to touch the world before it is covered with snow.

The berries are long gone, and have been made into jam or stored in freezers, but the grouse are still plentiful, if not wilder, by this point of the hunting season, and once or twice a week the dogs and I are fortunate enough to hunt them.

The grouse too are things of beauty, even after I've shot them and brought them home, where they hang on the side porch in that gold light, drawn and aging toward full flavor and tenderness. And after they've hung there in the steady chill for a few days, it is an evening ritual for the girls and I to sit on the front porch, just before dark, and pluck the grouse. (I pay the girls seventy-five cents a bird—the equivalent of about three dollars an hour—and as such, it seems to me sometimes that they've taken a perhaps overly keen interest in the success of my hunts, inquiring about them with full attention when I came in from the field some evenings.)

(They are also paid for being able to memorize and recite lengthy poems by Mary Oliver—"The Summer Day," for example, fetches a whopping five dollars.)