The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  In April, it all comes down to this: the astounding return of both sound and color. There is life in winter too, and often it is keenly felt, with the senses sometimes poised and heightened in their deprivation. But April is like sitting in a dark theater thirty minutes before the show, or an hour before the show—arriving early, and waiting, and waiting, and then finally seeing the light come on, on the screen before you, and hearing the reel-to-reel tape begin to flicker. The restlessness, the delicious anticipation, among the audience—or in your own heart, whether the theater is full or whether you are the only one in attendance. Your full attention is directed to the screen; with those first words, that first scene, you are galvanized, transported away from wherever else you were just a short time earlier.

  It seems that I can't stand how happy I am that winter is finally vanquished. The sparkling effervescence that returns to my blood in April. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed by it that I have to get up from my desk and step outside and walk out into the marsh a short distance and just stand there, in the night amid the moths just beyond the throw of window light from the candle still burning in the empty cabin, or, if it is daytime, with my face uplifted to the sun and my arms spread wide, pale skin open and absorbing the dull but strengthening return of light, and just stand there, resting, so glad to be alive, nothing but alive. No ambition, no envy, no angst, no nothing. Only life.

  Against all my better efforts, I'm slowing down, growing older—becoming, despite my wishes, though perhaps also in full step and pace with my wishes—an old man.

  It was not so long ago that I would never have dreamed of slowing down enough to do such a thing—to wander tired like an old hound, or warhorse, out into the marsh in April, and just stand there, face tilted back and arms widespread: to do nothing but stand in the sunlight, like a scarecrow, for the longest time.

  Back at the house, bopping around on the front porch, or inside, my daughters—my modern daughters, modern despite our remove from the central fuss of the world—lifting their heads from their CD Walkmans to greet me when I come back inside from a day's work, still love me.

  But the next day, in April, and the next, and the next, there I am again, out almost up to my knees in the marsh, sinking deeper and deeper into the marsh, it seems, and moving slower and slower.

  Listening.

  MAY

  MAY IS THE MONTH of disorderly conduct.

  In the uproar of spring, the shouted vibrancy of life re-creating itself, you expect for order to be woven from all the matted strands of the long, hard winter; and you expect, from all the long waiting, an exuberant and elegant, considered grace to finally occur.

  And in the end—far into the heart of May—that's what will come. But at the dawn of May, it's not that way at all. It's all rush and indecision, with everything scrambling to be first, then changing its mind and hurrying to the back of the line, or ducking for cover Jostling, shuffling, swelling.

  I might as well jump right in and be honest and inform the reader that sometimes in May—most Mays—I get pretty low at one point or another. I used to be ashamed of it, when it would come—mortified at this fantastic personal lethargy, with the world before me so fine, and especially so, in May—but I've gotten better about accommodating or accepting it. (Fighting it, I've found, does no good, and often only worsens it. The sadness is not a character flaw, not a question of reaching deeper or trying harder, but rather some sluggishness of blood that is of the larger world's doing, not my heart's—do the bent winter brown mats of marsh grass yearn for green brilliance?—and where I've come to lay the blame, if any blame is to be placed, lies in what I suspect is a supreme imbalance between the accelerated pace of the enthusiastic year—a pace that all of wild nature, graceful and well practiced, leaps into at full tilt, each May—and my own stiff and clumsy inability to find or assume that same pace.)

  I'm not sure how to describe the feeling, beyond a heaviness of spirit, a leadenness of both body and mind. I'd liken it to a strange mix of terror and numbness, if such things can be said to coexist, or to even battle for the same territory. There is heaviness, or sadness, or confusion—I hate calling it a depression, for I do not want it to be that; I want only to be uplifted by the world—sometimes, in early May, as sharp and alarming as the edge of a newly honed pocketknife held tight against the arc of one's thumb. The world rushes on, fussing and squawking and preening, while this confused and hesitant heart of mine waits, indecisive and motionless—waiting for what?—until finally, mercifully, some inner signal is given, some adjustment is made (surely it is biochemical), and I can enter fully the joy of the month.

  I don't mean to prattle on about a thing that should be of no more importance to the reader than the depth of my bellybutton. And it seems slightly dirty to even mention it, that occasional heaviness, in the midst of so much of the world's beauty—almost as if, in some sad way, that excess beauty is somehow, strangely, one of the precipitating factors, in a way no one could explain or understand—and yet it seems dishonest also not to mention it.

  Consider it mentioned. By the time the grass is green later in the month, and by the time the last of the partygoers have arrived—the Wilson's snipe, up from South America, and the trilling red-winged blackbirds, from the Gulf Coast, and the first wild violets, from their earthen chambers below—the matter will be behind me, sloughed off like the dead scaly skin of the garter snakes as they emerge from hibernation.

  What grace and calibration of every tiny gear exists in the forest, and in the wilderness, and still even upon the echoes of wilderness—upon any place that has not yet been overcut, or dammed, or paved, mined, overplowed or overwrought. Those same scaly, fluttery snakeskins, for instance, are shed just in time for the returning birds to line and weave their nests with that opaque material. (And, weeks later, as those nests have produced and nurtured the writhing, chirping fledglings, many of those same snakes, lithesome and clean-skinned, will slide up the branches now to investigate those tiny birds; the giving and the taking never ends, the world in that manner perhaps nothing more than a continuum of desire...)

  I'd like to believe that my late-spring funk helps serve at least some tiny purpose in the larger, wilder good of the world—that as the scaly residue of it finally flakes away from me, some use might in some faint manner be made of that flaking detritus of tired soul and wasted time.

  Nothing in nature is ever wasted. Perhaps this is part of the guilt I feel, in my early-May near paralysis. I'm forty-two years old and still haven't learned to accept that strange heaviness as a necessary time-out, a resting period, in which to prepare for the year's coming exuberance.

  I am a slow learner. But my heart is willing. I'll keep trying. There has to be a reason.

  The green wave of May moves so fast, and with so much power, that it only seems disorderly and rambunctious to you. What is really occurring is that May's leap is laying the foundation for all the coming intricacies of the growing year—the foundation itself a complex and elegant assembly of preparations, but moving so boisterously and in so many directions at once as to seem random, reckless and unconsidered, to our eyes. We are too used, I think, to gauging the final constructed edifice rather than the glorious biological roilings and writhings of the work in progress, the living thing being created. I suspect that too often, to the detriment of our imaginations, we prefer result and destination over process and journey.

  Even for a free or willing spirit, however, the challenge of following May's lead can be daunting and disorienting. As if rushing pell-mell over April's long list of firsts, here comes May now with its own frantic, surging, savage list of firsts. First hard rain, first scent of cottonwood. First fringed bud of aspen leaf, the tapered green swollen bud-flame opening slightly to reveal the unfolding miracle of true leaf rather than engorged bud: and a thing of beauty in its own right, that sight of the first pair of unfolded leaves, as well as the foundation for all of the summer and then autumnal music of clattering leaves, quaking and rat
tling in the wind, each aspen grove its own sighing symphony, and each symphony's first score and movement harking all the way back to those silent first days of May, when the first bud swelled in the earth's new warmth until it could finally swell no further, and spread apart to make the first two leaves of spring—silent, and yet part of the music.

  In addition to the disorder and youthful, exuberant, greedy rush, alternating with the last adolescent moments of indecision—rain, or sun? Neither mood lasts for long; they wash across the landscape in alternating tiger-striped bands of darkness and light—there is intense sogginess, mirthful muck and jelly-swamp, as the last of the snow and ice departs, and as the sweet-scented rains drum down on the thaw-softened, sodden, buckling thin soil.

  The last bridges and cornices of ice cave in alongside the river, floating downstream like rafts or leisure boats, sometimes stacking up at the bend in the river or against a logjam: piling up quickly into a hastily constructed but impressive piece of jumbled architecture. The little rushing river piles up higher behind that ice jam, swelling and rising and broadening across the floodplain until the river appears, over the course of only a couple of days, to be as wide and brown and ambitious as the Missouri or the Mississippi, a giant sprawling through our little valley; and in those shallow, spreading floodwaters there is a shimmering glitter of silt and all kinds of other organic matter—bear dung and rotting log mulch and deer pellets and dead trout and winter-killed elk and everything else within the river's hungry reach—sparkling suspended, distributed far and wide into the forest and across the brown and sullen floodplain.

  The river will keep rising, choosing at first those myriad paths of lesser resistance and carrying the richness of its spreading breadth into all the places that are so hungry for that distribution of wealth.

  But beneath the easygoing demeanor—beneath the gentle, sleepy, wandering flood—a desire is quivering, and an anxiousness. The river is running late now, on its path to the great curve of the Kootenai, which receives this straight-running river (notched with the many feathery fletchings of side tributaries) as the arc of a bow receives and cradles an arrow drawn. The Kootenai flows into the greatest American river of the Pacific, the Columbia, which follows, as much as the dams will allow it, its mandate to the ocean, and the salmon, and the sturgeon and the cedars...

  For a while, then, before its release, the be-jammed river meanders, seemingly confused, and spreads nutrients and richness into the most unlikely places, or so it seems; appearing to ignore—even avoid—the pressure that continues to build and strain against that thickened bridge of milk-colored ice.

  The river wanders chocolate-covered off into the woods, seeming lost, moving away from the ice bridge—just wandering, and even in a fashion seeming to retreat or draw away from the ice bridge.

  One day, though, the ice begins to tremble. Not noticeably, at first, but faintly. Trembling, then stilling itself, trembling, then stilling. It might be only one's imagination. Perhaps nothing of consequence is occurring.

  A few days later, however, the trembling is more pronounced, and noticeable—audible all the time, as a shuddering. And at night, as the day's surge of high-mountain meltwater only now, twelve hours later, makes it all the way down to the ice bridge on the valley floor below, all the way down from the tops of the mountains that had been bathed in May sun a dozen hours earlier, the first melodies of cracking or straining ice can be heard, sounding at first like the perfunctory stroke of a fiddler's bow drawn but once or twice across the quivering taut strings of the instrument: the warming-up, the preparation for the real thing.

  It will sometimes take a full week beyond that first draw of the bowstring before the entire opera is engaged; before the gates of ice crash open and the river is born or resurrected again and goes hurtling down its old waiting stone canyons, carrying along in its roar a winter's worth of driftwood, entire forests bobbing and surging along in significant—for now—disarray.

  The sun returns and dries out the coat of mud slime that was deposited in the floodplain, these rich gardens of river dirt speaking in a mosaic to where the ice bridge, or bridges, were that year; and in subsequent years, rich willow and meadow encroach upon, and are nourished by, those flood gardens; and in late May, and on into the calm of summer, moose and deer and elk wander out into those wild and seemingly random gardens to graze and browse on the fruits leaping up out of the legacy of that random richness, with the same story told over and over again, the same story in only slightly different places, up and down the length of the wild river, each year...

  There are other kinds of gardens too. And what is grown is not easily if at all replaceable, and cannot be measured by any scale other than that which acknowledges depthlessness, timelessness.

  From such gardens a harvest is possible, though not in the traditional sense of any of the hard commodities of the world—oil, gas, timber, hay, livestock, electricity, gold, copper, silver: the detritus of industry—but rather, a harvest of spirit, though perhaps it is not even a harvest, for perhaps no more is taken from the mountains or the forest than that with which the traveler already arrives. Perhaps the mountain, the forest, is only the catalyst, so that these wild gardens merely summon or elicit the reverence, or potential for reverence, or joy, or potential for joy, that already exists within the traveler.

  In our valley, we have but fifteen such gardens of any significant size left. They require a minimum size of one thousand acres to be classified as potential candidates for wilderness designation—formal, permanent protection by Congress—and in order to qualify must not ever have had any roads built into them.

  Such has been the frenzy of extraction on this forest, the subsidized liquidation of the biggest and best of the timber—well over a million loaded logging trucks have rolled out of this forest, out of this valley, and out of this impoverished county (Where did all the money go? Was there ever any money, or was it all simply given or traded away?)—that in the million or so acres lying between the Canadian border and the curve, the bow, of the Kootenai River, east of Idaho and west of Lake Koocanusa, these fifteen gardens are now scattered in a gasping strand of one wild archipelago, and are refuge not only to the last threatened and endangered species such as wolves and grizzlies and caribou and wolverines but also to those reservoirs of spirit.

  Fifteen gardens: and worse yet, not a single one of them has any form of permanent protection whatsoever. Despite the living, pulsing, breathtaking wildness of this landscape (a biological wildness, rather than a recreational wildness—perhaps the wildest valley in the Lower Forty-eight, in that regard), there's still not a single acre of designated wilderness protected on the public wildlands of this valley.

  It's a big injustice. I hate the flavor, the taste, of that injustice.

  I love the scent, the taste, the feeling—and certainly, the ecological justice—back in the farthest hearts of those fifteen gardens.

  I've said it before: This isn't a place to come to. It's a place to dream of. It's a biological wilderness, full of frog roar and swamp muck and tangled blowdown and mosquitoes and deeply angry, suspicious people, none of whom would be pleased to see your happy, vacationing face.

  This is a place of mud and muck, a celebration of the rank and the fecund, the cold and the uncomfortable, the frayed and the wild. This is a place whose last wild gardens should be protected for its own sake, not yours or mine.

  They are gardens. While much or most of the world in May is puttering about in the warming black earth, coaxing carrot seeds and lettuce sprouts into the bright new world, the gardens I am most interested in have not been planted by the hand of man or woman but are instead bulging, swelling, shifting, on the verge of delivering kicking spotted elk calves back into the world, and are delivering bears back into the world, tumbling once more to the surface from their earthen burrows like astronauts returning from the strangest of journeys; mountains delivering torrents of rushing water, recharging the buried aquifers between immense slabs of
tilted stone. The fossils of ancient sea creatures tumbling with the season's new talus down into the bed of bright glacier lilies below: trilobites, fenestellids, cephalopods, and ostracods on the prowl once more, and the earth itself stretching and yawning like a wildcat, supple and hungry, awakened, youthful, vibrant.

  A garden of dragonflies rising from the waving marsh fronds like sunlit jewels summoned by no gardener we will ever meet in this life, and one whose careful and calculated, fitted and meaningful work, closely studied, can bring, I am convinced, immeasurable blessings of peacefulness to the student of that work, the careful student who observes and ponders the goals of that precise gardener...

  A garden of loosened fur, a garden of fire, a garden of recovered earrings, or the dream of recovered earrings. One May our friend Tracy, while roughhousing with Lowry, particularly around the slide and swing set, lost her earrings, and searched for them to no avail. It was late May, almost into June, so that the grass and clover were high enough already (and the earrings were small ones) that we were unable to locate them, though we looked until dusk.

  "Don't worry," Tracy said. "They'll show up."

  Except they haven't. Every year, in early May, before the green-up—once the old dirty snow has pulled away and the earth has warmed to sodden mud, dappled with glinting puddles and the shortened silvery stubble of the winter-dead grass—we go out and search, again and again, for those earrings, combing the yard in all directions, though never to any avail.

  How can they just disappear? Year in and year out we search, confident that there will be some accrual of luck, some cumulative tally or summation that will eventually transcend failure, and that no matter how secretively they might be slipped into the ground—two little silver leaves hidden beneath a flake of bark, or a bent matting of grass—our diligence will be rewarded and we will find them; that each early May spent searching is not a new beginning, isolate and unconnected to all the other years, but is rather an extension, a continuum of all that has come before, and if our efforts and luck in previous years have not been quite sufficient, well, never fear: all those years' labor plus one more, this one added to all the others, will surely turn the tide.