by Rick Bass
And what of that emerging orange in the willow stems? Is not the sunlight, as it summons that orange-gold, the same thing as song?
The utter excitement—not just pleasure, but excitement—of walking across bare exposed ground, even in boots, rather than crunching through snow, after so long an absence.
Equinox: egg-balancing day. Mary Katherine and I are now officially another year older, she by but a week and me by a couple of weeks, so that each of us is still wearing that new year like a coat tried on in front of a department store mirror, with the wearer not yet sure of or accustomed to the fit.
Every year, after supper, we balance the raw egg vertically on the chopping block in the kitchen and marvel at its equipetal balance, at the magic in the world. And this year there's a perfect full moon high overhead, as well—we're anticipating that the balancing egg might rest, on this one day only, as firm as a concrete pillar.
We've been looking forward to it for days, but come the equinox this year, we forget; schoolwork, or a meeting, or Girl Scouts, or something mundane intrudes, so that the day, the ritual, the tradition, slides past unutilized this year.
We vow to remember it next year. We have in all the years past, and we will in all the years to come. This will be just a little knothole of skip or imperfection in the grain of our lives. All the solar and lunar gear works continue on, as they always have, whether we balance that kitchen egg or not. The absence of it, this year only, known only in our own lives, our own individual little patterns and paths, beneath that greater one rule, one story, one path.
In late March, the southern slopes begin to open up and you can walk around in the woods down low, moving from bare patch to bare patch. It's a pleasure to go looking for the winter-dropped antlers of deer—sheds, people call them. They gleam mahogany in the new spring light, as elegant as candelabras, and indeed, it looks as if they have been dropped, mislaid, forgotten by their owners.
It's a joy to be out walking in the woods, traversing bare ground. I love winter, and snow, but cannot help but think of the bare earth as the "real" world. Some folks go out in early spring, hunting the winter-shed antlers of the deer to sell to curio shops and so forth, but I go simply out of pleasure, and perhaps worship: to see, and touch, the echo of the secret deer that have been passing through our forest. It's hard to describe, and harder to explain, the feeling of richness one gets, spying an antler just emerged from the snow: treasure, discovered.
I think that the deer are our salmon, in the absence of salmon. They serve as the foundation for meat eaters in the valley (ourselves included), and in the transfer of nutrients; they are like fire, or floods, or the ocean tides. And there are people up here who brain tan the hides of our deer, which are prized because there are almost no barbed-wire fences up here to scratch and scour and mar their thin hides beneath the fur.
They feed us, they sustain some of the residents monetarily, and always, when we hunt them, they lead us farther into the forests, farther into the mountains, and in our pursuit of them, and our desire and longing for them, they teach us new things about the landscape. They lead us into corners and crevices where we would never otherwise go, and teach us to notice, with senses inflamed, things we might never otherwise pay attention to—the direction of a stirring of breeze, the phase of the moon, a bent blade of grass, a faint odor, a funny feeling of being observed—and because of deer, we notice these things with an intensity that is both feral and comfortable, as fluid as the passage of the days and the seasons themselves.
Their hoof tracks and droppings are almost everywhere, this other nation of beings, and when we go for a walk in the woods and something unseen thumps away from our approach, it is almost always a deer.
They are our salmon, our currency, and very nearly even our religion; and the dark forests and lush meadows they inhabit, particularly at dawn and dusk, our houses of worship. Their mountains are our cathedrals, and the rivers across which they wade our holy waters.
In March, especially, we are attentive to their emergence from winter's trials. They stand by the side of the road gaunt-ribbed and huge-eyed, too weary to run, and seemingly stunned, sometimes, that they have made it to the other side.
On the drive to school one morning, we watch the difficulty with which one certain deer leaps, sore-backed, over the snowplow's steep-banked icy berm to move away from our approach, this one deer moving like someone's ancient grandmother, and Lowry cries out, "Oh, the poor deer"—learned, already, at evaluating the movement of wild creatures, and possessing, in that glimpse, a wealth of understanding.
March twenty-seventh, a brilliant and warm day, and in a shocking piece of natural history, the kind that makes you want to shout out loud, I spy the first butterfly at marsh's edge, a vigorous orange checkerspot, its wings every bit as dazzling as the branches of the resurrecting willows, so that now there are two pieces of color in this snow-blind world, willows and butterflies: not yet a kaleidoscope, but the earliest beginnings of the carnival, the first tentative brush strokes of pandemonium.
This year, Easter falls on the next-to-last day of the month; and on the last day of the month, a Monday, on the morning drive to school, the girls and I spot a snowshoe hare, still perfectly white, sitting on bare earth, beneath the canopy of a cedar tree. He is so brilliant, the white rabbit against the black earth, and so motionless—like a statue—that it seems, somehow, that he is our Easter, he is the pure and holy unstained thing. The sight is so beautiful that we stop and stare at him; and still he does not move, as if believing himself to be hidden—as if believing his snowy coat still serves him in good stead.
And that same afternoon, out on the snowy marsh, we see his inverse—a black wolf trotting across the frozen hardpan of white—and he too trots along as if believing himself unseen.
We dash out the door with our camera, wanting to document, or somehow capture, the miracle, or what seems a miracle to us but which is really only the way the world used to be—and we skulk through the forest to marsh's edge. But the wolf scents us, or hears us, or otherwise discerns our approach, and whirls and flees; and afterward, when we go out onto the marsh, all that's left are his big tracks and nothing else.
It's proof enough for us, though. A snow white rabbit, and a coal black wolf.
The great world, with all its cast and players, resurrecting: first in black and white, but soon enough in color, and sound. It's starting slowly and powerfully, this birth, the month of my own, and tell me—I want to know—why is it that after forty-two of them, I still feel new to the world, almost as if each one is still my first?
APRIL
IT'S NOT A LONG WAIT. The first frog tests his voice against the fading ice and snow on the first day of April. Not until the spotted frogs dare with their bravery to cry out against the season's long tyranny (even if their courage is the bravery of their ancient chilled blood) does winter seem, finally, able to be defeated. A bully melting quickly now at the first hint of the force of a superior heart. It is not really this way at all, but when that first frog begins to call, even while the marsh remains a mix of ice and snow and milky meltwater, that is how it seems.
For all our lives we have been told about, and have accepted, the four seasons and their neat symmetry. I don't know why the fifth season, the space between winter and spring, is never named, but it is certainly as real and seemingly enduring as any or all of the others. If it needs a name beyond the time when all the snow is gone but the ground remains brown and unchanging for weeks on end, I guess we could call it just that—the brown season, or the mud season.
And it is brown. The bare limbs of all the deciduous trees remain as leafless as in the heart of winter. Only on the earnest aspens can you detect even the faintest swelling of darkened buds against winter-pale skin, and even that so insignificant as to seem each day more a swelling of one's imagination than of life stirring within the slender branches.
Stirring it is, though, for even as the ground remains resolutely, stubbornly, r
ecalcitrantly brown, color is returning to the stems of plants, the first new color after winter's incredible abstinence. The shock of gold of the willows, and the crimson of red-osier dogwood, the limbs turning as red as blood. Again, it's hard to imagine that these slender sticks of color will act as fuses for the detonation of color that will soon be our bounty, taken for granted, but in the brown season, these little glowing red and gold sticks are enough—are more than enough.
A single glowing bluebird hurtling across the snow would be too much; we would fall over backwards, smitten. We have to start small, and slow; our bodies must ease back into a world of color, and its specific joys and enthusiasms—emerald, topaz, cobalt, ox-blood, winestain, mustard, teal, cerulean, sapphire. Too much too soon and our brains would be bruised by the sudden expansion of color into a place where for so long there has been an absence.
Before the color returns—when the color is moving only slowly at first, in the stems of certain branches, like the quickening river running just beneath the milk-colored ice, or like the sludge of wine-blood deep in the veins of mud-buried reptiles and amphibians, whose blood in winter actually contains shimmerings of ice crystals—the sounds arrive first, as if those subterranean or sub-spring stirrings of color create, in their first subtle and unseen movements, the phenomenon of music; sound waves traveling across April, just in advance of the subsequent waves of color and light. As if sound is but a preliminary form of color.
And in the beginning, after the brute and lovely length of winter, the sounds are enough. Were the music and color to arrive simultaneously, it would be more than our frail and sensitive systems could handle, and beyond tipping us over backwards with the jet-wash of such a powerful dual arrival, such simultaneity might rob some of the individual force of each of the two primal phenomena.
As it is, there is a lovely counterbalance: first one, and then the other, summoned, as if one is leading the other slightly, in some ancient and sophisticated dance.
And what we begin to hear, in April, after that first frog, is the wind-winnowing trill of snipe circling the marshes overhead, making what well might be the eeriest sound in the woods—a quavering, wailing, keening rise-and-fall tremolo that is strangely not borne from their throats, but the beautiful music of their fluttering wings as they pause in midflight and then plummet, letting their quick-beating, drumming wings and the world-specific aerodynamic shape of their perfect bodies create the sound, as might a flute player who utters short and staccato bursts across the opening of the flute: the snipe becoming the flute, with the quickening shapes of their wings opening and closing, and their headlong plummet self-generating the rush of wind that would otherwise be created by the pursed exhalations of the flutist.
What brutal confidence or desperation of heart must such a creature possess to choose such a tack while all the other birds "merely" speak to the world by perching and singing, or by hunkering down and calling with their own equally wonderful but more orthodox melodies?
The owls are calling, mostly the eloquent "Who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all?" of the barred owls, but also the dramatic double-clutch booming of the great horneds, and the much rarer trail-away bellow of the massive great gray owls. The ducks join in too after that first frog summons them—plaintive squeals of wood ducks, and classic duck-muttering gabble of mallards—as does the thunderous, tone-tingling, and soul-stirring resonance of the Canada geese, which nest in the marsh.
These are the big-bodied, hard-hitting cries and calls of the durable and able-bodied—the percussion calls, the tuning-up, that precede the clarity and precision of the waves of songbirds that will be rolling in soon behind them—but after a winter of silence in which the only sounds other than the lonely language of the stay-behind ravens were the howl of the wind and the splitting of frozen trees, these first and newly arriving sounds are all we can possibly stand right now; more than enough.
As it is, it's almost too much. It's like walking into a crowded, noisy party, with loud high-energy music playing—coming in a little late, on a cold dark night, and with the great room so warm and well lit—and there's that surging feeling that is both pleasure and alarm at the stunning and sudden energy of it, the waves of sound felt in your bones, just as later on the waves of color will reach back to the farthest recesses of your throbbing and waiting brain...
As if all the rules are changing, as if all boundaries are being restructured, the taut cold-cast iron-skin of the earth is turning to waves of softened, even quivering jelly. Not mud yet, just softened earth, so tremulous that when you step or jump on it heavily in one place you can see a shimmering wave of your energy pass through it, traveling on for some distance. The ground feels springy beneath you—like a trampoline.
It's a devastating time for heavy trucks to drive the backcountry roads—with their mass, they would quickly press and shape the soft and tender roads into some knotted, twisted, rutted impasse—and so there's a weight limit established during these soft days to come by which no commercial traffic can use the roads: no logging trucks, cement mixers, tractor-trailers, backhoes, or bulldozers. And, save for the hollering of the frogs and the birds, and the gusting breath of the south winds, it is a quiet and gentle time, like some kind of vacation, in which homage is paid to the very soil itself during its soft and vulnerable waking-up period.
We're all waking up. We're all cautious and careful and joyful and considerate; and best of all, there are patches of sun appearing again, brief columns and windows of it striking through the heart of gray.
The earth continues to stretch and yawn in the softening metamorphosis, the trembling that precedes the green leap of spring. The stone walls running here and there through the woods sag and sway inch by inch with each warming day, the bottom course canting slightly one way or another as the ground heaves and whispers then belches and yawns, arching its back, arching its belly, stretching and reaching and sending the smaller stones one by one up through the soft brown soil that is still between seasons, and it is another faint night sound, this dull and sporadic clattering, as if in the brown season, just at the edge of spring, even the rocks themselves are striving to be called back to life.
In the subterranean vaults and tombs of their own making, buried beneath the shallow lakes and ponds, the painted turtles, asleep like ancient cosmonauts whose vessels might have been separated from earth centuries ago and which are tumbling adrift through the void now, suspended so precariously between the inanimate and the barely animate, dormant as seeds, find themselves being strangely tilted and canted likewise, like cards in a deck that is being oh-so-slowly shuffled. The earth helps lift them, expelling them, like the upthrust risings of tilted bedrock, the turtles awakening with a dim consciousness at which we can only guess as they ride this slow, slow wave of dull warmth, hauling themselves up from the muck and torpor with the resolve of draft horses.
Salamanders too haul themselves out from beneath the rotting logs and the flat stones under which they have spent the winter, suspended as if in a dream: fire-engine red, with lightning-bolt streaks of cobalt and chartreuse, they crawl across the ice and snow in dogged bravery, as hairless and tender as any organism that ever blinked upon the earth: inching their way delicately across the snow with a force, an endurance, that I hope and believe will surely outlast our interstates and skyscrapers, and even our libraries and churches. As long as there is moisture on the earth, I hope there will always be long-toed salamanders, creeping across the snow in early April, heading from the forests back down into the vernal ponds to arrive just in time for the first opening of the water—getting an early, trudging jump on spring in order to arrive there scant days, or sometimes even hours, ahead of the whirling influx of swooping, swarming predators, snake and hawk, thrush and bear cub...
Still the stones in the rock wall lean and list, like the serpentine uncoiling of some new and awkward kind of life being created. Each morning a new section of wall will have collapsed so that the meadow has the look of an unru
ly graveyard, one with tombstones upended when the sleeping inhabitants below awakened and descended to go for one more stroll, unable even in death to say no to spring, one more springtime, in the northern mountains.
(In less than two months the grass in those fields will be knee-high or taller, wrapping around these stilled-again stones and waving in the wind like the underwater trellises of some mermaid-lover, and the stones will seem content again, as if it was only that short distance that they needed to travel—as if it was they who were on the move, not the buried dead—but that now, with one more year's rotation, all is where it needs to be, adjusted properly.)
To say what day the snow is gone, all gone, really gone, or even mostly gone—that final absence exists as much in the heart's interpretation as out on the land. There are winters when the snow never piles up very high and recedes early but are winters that nonetheless burden the heart as if the pilgrim or endurer had been locked in a lightless igloo for more than half the year; and there are also winters in which the snows pile up high in both the mountains and the valleys, beginning before October is even halfway done and persisting on into the beginning ofJune, and are winters that nonetheless seem as light upon the heart of the sojourner as an easy melody, or a wonderful piece of unexpected news.
Up in these mountains, you can always find snow if you need to—any month of any year—but when those first bare patches of earth begin to appear beneath the heat-trapping limbs and branches of the trees, and when there is one day in the woods a certain flowing sound that the concertgoer has not yet heard before, all winter long—well, it doesn't matter to me how much snow remains, as long as I can see any patch of dampened, darkened earth, a sight so thrilling and rare as to seem to the winter-snowed eyes and mind, almost illicit, and as long as I can hear the music of water dripping from the roof's icicles, and water trickling down the driveway, and water mumbling beneath the snow.