The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Instead, early March is more like early October; April, more like late September.

  Somewhere in between these two parts—their variance from the perfectly cleaved half—lies a rough outline of this valley's formula of cant, based on angles of and amounts of light alone. The formula—the secret—could be further studied and refined by examining temperatures, wind directions, and innumerable other physical or biological processes, but to begin with learning about this place, the sheer tilt of the earth-meeting-the-sun could first help derive that formula, even if crudely: enough of a working model, perhaps, to begin noticing and understanding other patterns falling under the same governance of the laws established for the territories within the shadows and rhythms of this one place, or any one place.

  And isn't it an error right from the beginning to desire or even expect an easy-to-understand, perfect bipolar cleave of symmetry—the apple, the avocado, the strawberry, the orange, halved so cleanly? The mistake in such a wish, it seems to me, is to assume that there cannot be balance in asymmetry. Who knows? Perhaps it is even that slight tipping, that subtle leaning of the specifically asymmetric—and the slight tension and effort required to compensate and balance that tilt—that provides, in some way, the generative forces and rhythms that attend to any one certain place, and which are nothing less than the driving force of life for this or any place: a thousand or ten thousand such cants then braiding, elliptically, asymmetrically, and in that convergence, the world easing forward with its peculiar and powerful surges and pulses.

  Chickadees swarming now as the blood within all of us begins to thin and stir beneath the returning light, tree and bird and man alike—the chickadees singing and swarming and chittering, buzzing and tweeting, calling and squabbling, some singing their sweet two-note courting song, singing it so relentlessly that I can't work, can't concentrate, after so long a winter's silence.

  The dull sunlight bouncing off the marsh's snow, a glare pushing through the woods-fog, is nonetheless intense enough to throw shadows from my hand and the pen across the page as I write, further distracting me, as do the flitting shadows of the birds themselves, passing back and forth before my window.

  I can't work today; I'm edgy, pacey, antsy. I'll get up and go for a walk, a ski. These are not the things a writer does, normally—usually a writer writes—but I can't help it. It's as if I'm trapped on a raft or island of ice that is breaking free from all the other ice, and the cold black current is pulling it, spinning now, down the river, and if I sit here any longer I'll get so dizzy, I'll fall off. I have to get up and go for a walk.

  It's the shortest month, and yet in many ways the most convulsive. It's too soon to begin leaning forward, sometimes too soon to even begin moving at all, and yet even in the midst of all that stillness, things are falling away. At dusk on the last day of February, while I'm walking up the icy driveway, a band of seven elk crosses in front of me, six cows and a one-antlered bull, like golden horses in the blue foggy gloom and mist. They pass from right to left, heading down farther into the woods, and I turn to the right and begin backtracking them, trying to find where the bull might have shed his mahogany-colored antler, like some great burdensome sword or scimitar laid down in the snow, with the war finally over.

  MARCH

  AT NO POINT of the year are we more incorporated into the seasons, more completely owned by the world, and the woods. Summer and autumn, and even the first holidays of winter, are traditionally the seasons we think of as most easily summoning the joy of the human condition; and yet in February, March, and April, the Slog-O-Matic mud season, the long brown night of the soul, never are we quite so owned by the beautiful world. Beaten down, made malleable as if by the accruing weight of the ivory snow itself, we become tempered to the very shape of the land itself, and by its rhythms and processes, as surely as if we were buried by that snow and lay pressed flat against the darkened ground, our bellies spooned against each curve and hummock of soil, each swell of stone, and the snow above pressing down, kneading and pressing and sculpting us physically, while at the same time impressing upon us somehow some deeper, unspoken counsel of rhythm and pace.

  On the surface, there's very little difference; in fact, the sameness seems to be spreading, as the snow—which initially mimicked the sleeping shapes of every humped and curved and buried thing—becomes deeper, smoother, more homogenous.

  But down below, things are moving, being reshaped by the mounting pressure, even if only a tiny bit each day. The bears and frogs are sleeping, letting the season pass on by, largely undisturbed by its slow but powerful dynamics, and the songbirds, and so many others, have fled south, likewise disengaged from the snow's incremental but forceful grip. But for those of us who remain, whether buried by the snow or shrugging off each day's mantle, we are always emerging, changed and sculpted a little more each day. The valley owns us as surely as it owns any of its rocks or rivers, forests or fields, or any of its other animals.

  Everything still seems the same, in March. But beneath the snow, and within our blood, there are stirrings that tell us that the land too is stirring.

  The stems and branches of the willows have begun to glow yellow—seeming incandescent, particularly in the falling snow, with the willows the only color on the landscape, so that the eye is drawn to them, mesmerized, almost with the intensity or focus of one in need of rescue or salvation, physical or otherwise. They burn there, at the far edge of the snowy marsh, glowing and waiting, unchanging, it seems, against the same joyless gray sky: a dendritic spread of color looking like our own veins and arteries, which—we can only hope—are filling likewise with that same gold light.

  Nothing else is different, and yet for (perhaps) the first time, you sense the movements. Change—dramatic change, the kind our species is better at noticing, and paying brief attention to—seems closer now, if even only through the gap or difference between the two words February and March, one long and backward-moving, the other shorter, brisker, and more forward-moving: as if the force of our nouns can be almost enough to help nudge a thing into motion—as is said to be the case, sometimes, with even our dreams, and their bold summons of a thing much wished for, much desired.

  Our little nouns, February and March, as plaintive against the gray sky as the faint cries of the birds that are no longer here, and yet their own part of the world, helping—along with all else—to ease along and urge along the chain of the seasons.

  In March, it would be hard to say whether one is witnessing the end of winter, the beginning of spring, or some strange and dreamy land between the two, wherein some of the world awaken and rise while others in the world remain suspended—summoned, perhaps, but not quite awakened. And even for those fully awakened, in March—Pisces, and the fish beneath the ice, unblinking—perhaps the world is still half dream. And in that half-dream, then, surely the yellow glow of the willow is a beacon in the storm, a signpost and candelabra lit, or a conductor's baton, encouraging all to rise—to dare to rise, reshaped by another year's passage—and to move forward toward that curtain of falling snow, and through that curtain, with faith and confidence that a bright and joyful, explosive world of color and life lies waiting just on the other side.

  ***

  Some years—not every year, but some—the snow will begin to finally grow lower, in March, or will lower for a while, only to fill back up in April, which is another matter entirely. (It amazes me, the way each month has such a separate identity. We think of time as a river, and know intuitively that it is. But if one pauses to look back almost any distance, the months might seem as discrete blocks, chunks of stone, all stoved up and jagged against one another, like the spines and teeth of glaciers, gnashing at the sky and both devouring and yet creating the mountains and, in the mountains' dissolution, creating the dusty plains below.)

  And perhaps it is this way, with the months not any ethereal river braid but rather devourers and creators of time—the individual months gnawing away at some bedrock of time.


  And as these stone blocks of the months exist sometimes jagged, other times smoother, above the bedrock form of a God-made landscape, a Creator-made core of the irreducible, then so too might there exist a third and higher level, something more graceful and seamless—something truly more riverlike—flowing just above those jagged blocks, jagged devourers. Though I suppose it's just as possible, if not more so, that this is all there is, the months above and the bedrock below, and that we, and our lives, our little histories, are the glacier dust, ground fine and sifted as flour, caught eternally between the two.

  And in those years when the snow melts a bit, in March—regardless of whether it fills back up in April or not—only as the snow level begins to drop a little bit, finally melting slightly on the rare and warming sunny day, do you start to really understand how deep the snow has been. The tops of fences and rock walls begin to emerge from beneath you (even as you still are walking above them, looking down upon their emergent shapes as they begin to crown, popping up through the snow—just a dark shape beneath the translucent thinning at first, but then, barely, the real thing, like the heads of crocus bulbs), and you understand how, for a few months, you might already have been up in that higher, even celestial level, up in the more graceful place where the laminar flow of time moves with less friction—moving around in your winter life at some significant distance above, elevated several feet above the "true" world; though if that is the case, why has it still been so damned hard, at times, so gray-blue leaden, sludge-blood hard?

  And yet, whether trudging five feet above, or down on terra firma, navigating one's way through the rocks—whether asleep and dreaming, or wide awake and fully sensate—it is all still always pretty much the same world, regardless of the gnawing blocks of months, or centuries, or millennia, or eons; and in the close examination of a single month, I often feel a kinship with all who have ever lived before me.

  Are we still sleeping, or are we awakening? Change is dramatically imminent, eternally poised for its grand entrance, and yet there are still, particularly in March, I think, these long moments when it is all the same. The frilled and braided lace of wax forming runnels from the lip of the candles at my writing desk, out in my cabin as I work far into the night, at the edge of the winter-silent marsh, is the same as the crenellations of ice that creep down over the eaves of this same cabin (warmed by those candles, and my breath, and the dim little glow of the wood stove); it's the same translucent, moonstruck filigree of ice, not wax, leaning in past the frost-spangled window.

  Everywhere I look, some months, and particularly, it seems, when in the womb of ice, the womb of winter, it is all almost the same, both pattern and image, dream and sensation. As if we are not quite ready for the furor and clamant wonder of the "true" or living world, the green world of living and dying, and must emerge into it slowly, like crocuses ourselves, or chunks of stone in a rock wall, reappearing above the surface and only gradually becoming enspirited, and animated.

  What dreamer dreamed us, that we might begin dreaming? Thank goodness that in these moments of our realization of a shimmering background sameness in the world there is so much beauty too, or we might all get incredibly bored with so much unity, really, at the heart or core of all things.

  Faced with the recognition of such sameness, our souls and spirits might abandon us, no longer needing the specificity of us; might fly right out the window if one day we lost the ability to look around and perceive the individual beauties attendant—like lace or fringes—to all this other sameness—the rest of the world's unchanging core or essence.

  On the seventh of March, my birthday, the woods are all but silent. The laugh-out-loud sound has not yet returned: the sound of water running through the forest in sheets, water dripping from every branch, water dripping from the roof, a laughing, awakening sound. There is still only the nighttime hooting of owls, which begin their nesting so much earlier than any other bird. The bears are still sleeping, and all the forest's other creatures have not yet returned from their southward migrations, or have not been born yet—though it's very close now, with those first bare branches of the willows beginning to glow gold, like the upraised wands of so many orchestral conductors: the last moment of deep silence that builds and swells before the conductors stir their wands and summon that music.

  The golden orange wands are lifted and poised along every creek and river and beside every marsh, and at night, back in the forests, the owls are calling to an audience not yet arrived. I like to think that in the bellies of their mothers, the elk calves and deer fawns can hear these first summons and can understand too from the all-else stillness that surrounds them, the last of the stillness, that their time is coming soon, and that a world, a whole new world of song and movement and color and warmth, is being made for them; and that in their mind's eye, perhaps, or their other ways of knowing, they can already somehow see those uplifted bare branches, burning in the falling snow and spring rain like beautiful candles seen across a great distance.

  Who knows how these things work, or where the dream begins? My grandfather, father, and one of my brother's sons all have the same birth date, October sixteenth. My oldest daughter came into this world only six days after my birthday. Is there a fraternity and sorority of time—of the days, seasons, years? The birth dates for me and my best friend are but two days apart. It goes on and on, such accountings, far beyond random coincidence. There are patterns all around us, above and below us—of that there can be no dispute. The only real question that seems to me worth wrestling over is whether they are designed or not.

  How could they not be?

  And here, perhaps, is blasphemy, though it is not intended as such. In the genius of the design, perhaps the beauty and elegance of the initial or developing organic system is what gave rise to the designer—demanded a partnership, a designer, for such beauty and elegance of fit to continue, and be carried further. Perhaps the world's beauty and intricate desire for order produced a god, or a God, through all of that relentless fit, relentless adjustment and readjustment: a god or God being formed from the very clattering of rocks and rivers, the swelling and sanding down of mountains, like the terminus of such a process, such a long and wondrous and breathtaking work; and that that god, that God, then produced us.

  It has to begin somewhere. Perhaps it is linear rather than circular, and there was nothing—no order, no design, not even any dream or dreamer. Or maybe the dreamer dreamed the rocks and rivers, the forests sweeping in the wind; dreamed the near silence of winter, and the awakening sounds, beyond that. We're here. It's wonderful. And from it, who could possibly not dream a dream, then, of this or another life eternal?

  Soon enough, the laughing dream returns. Often, in this country, it comes in the form of rain, rain on top of snow, weakening the snow so that as you walk across it, it opens up to bare ground with each step. You can hear the water running just beneath the skin or crust of snow, the water warmed by the awakening earth, even as the snow above is still chilled by the wintry nights. The rain falling through the trees makes a hissing sound as it lands on the slushy ice. There will be more snow, but this is the first sign of weakness, if one chooses to look at it that way.

  Through it all—the silence, and the waiting—the deer are trudging down the icy latticework of the trails they've been making all winter long, their hoofs compressing the snow into dense, hard-packed ice that will remain long after all the rest of the surrounding looser snow has melted away, the remaining latticework of their passage as white as bones cast randomly across the dark floor of the forest. The rain drenches the hanging black moss, the lichen, Bryoria, that they feed on whenever they can reach it. The lichen absorbs the March rain until it looks like a woman's long black hair after she has just stepped out of the shower; and becoming heavier still, the super-wet lichen pulls free of the branches and lands on top of the fading-away snow, to where the deer hurry over to eat it, so that it is as if the deer are being nourished directly by the rain, like a
crop rising from the earth, even though they have always been here, loyal to this place through hardships as well as the rewards of the softer seasons.

  When Mary Katherine was born (I can barely remember the days and years before, as if they were in some ways their own form of sleep), she emerged stone-faced, as we all seem to—stone-faced, or snarling—and though we had been up all night, it seemed to me that she was bathed in a strange sheen, strange light. Then immediately upon her full arrival, her face relaxed, and she smiled this wide, beautiful smile and slowly brought her hands together—it seemed to be occurring in slow motion—and clasped her fingers together, interlocking-style, without a single hitch. I knew nothing about babies, but knew enough to be astounded.

  It was an early spring that year, and when we came home with her, the ice in the pond beside the cabin we were renting had already opened up, and though the mornings were still below freezing, the Canada geese had already returned. There was a big wide plate-glass window looking out onto the pond, and when we walked into the cabin with her that first time, bright early morning, the sun was just clearing Waper Ridge and coming up the valley.

  It was a blue-sky day, and the new gold sun was coming right through the window, lighting nearly everything in the cabin. A flock of geese came flying up the narrow river valley, honking loudly, and we stood there with her in our arms, watching and listening as the geese kept coming closer, descending, their braying honks growing ridiculously loud until it seemed they were in the room with us, or we with them.