by Rick Bass
Early into June, hiking down the trail to the waterfall—flailing at the mosquitoes that form their own sheath around this north country—I am trailed by the season's first hummingbird, following my red shirt through the old forest, down by the rushing creek.
Around this same time—it can happen as early as the first or second day of June—the green cottonwood buds, swollen and turgid with the quick rush of chlorophyll, will begin shedding their heavy, sugar, resinous husks as the leaves emerge, looking like nothing else so much as the green tips of candle flame. Entire trees are alight in this manner, like candelabras, and if you are standing beneath one of these trees late in the afternoon, you can hear the sound all around you of the heavy, sticky bud husks falling to the forest floor, pattering like rain onto the forest's carpet of last autumn's dried yellow-brown leaves. And as you listen, beneath the blue sky, to that rainlike sound of the leaves being born—sticky husks landing on you, bouncing off you like hail—you can scent the exquisite odor of their emergence, and there is no other smell like it in the northern Rockies, no other smell like it in the world, when the cottonwoods begin to breathe and to exhale their sweet green breath into the valley.
(Later into June, not too much later, on an even warmer and windier day, you will be walking along a rushing creek and will stop with amazement as the sky before you fills with swirling white feathers and flakes. The temperature might be eighty degrees, the wind warm and from the south. The cottonwoods have just released their seeds, their cotton—you know this, you remember it from this time last year, and the year before, and the year before, but so ass-whipped are you still from winter's brute and sun-cheap passage that you physically flinch at the sight of what appears to be more damn snow, snow in June, even on a hot, windy afternoon...)
Shortly into June—usually within those first couple of days, as the sticky green pods of cottonwood resin are oozing and pattering to the ground, and as the cries of warblers, vireos, and red-winged blackbirds return (the snipe have been here a long time already, wind winnowing)—the deer disappear, as if they have left the country. They simply vanish, like guests leaving a party much too early—and you know that they have gone off into the most remote places, the safest, shadiest, most hidden places, to begin preparing to give birth to the fawns, which, having been conceived back during the falling snows of November, were then carried across the long perils of the sleeping winter, crossing all the way across the warming spring, finally, safely, into the tumultuous country ofJune.
The world knows the fawns are born before you do. Sometimes you'll be fortunate enough to see one newly emerged, knock-legged and groggy, limbs still unfolding from that long sleeping passage—but usually it is not until a day or two later that you know the fawns are being born. You generally don't yet see the fawns themselves but see instead their little button-size hoofs, still black and shiny, undigested in the piles of scat left behind by the bears and wolves and lions and coyotes that have been feasting on them.
(Soon enough, the predators will stop catching so many fawns; soon enough, the fawns will be big enough and strong enough to escape. It is only in those first few days, when most of the fawns are born all at once, that they are so vulnerable. Prey swamping, it's called, an evolutionary mechanism that ensures some fawns will survive by sheer mathematical probability—the lions and coyotes are too busy eating this sudden bounty to catch them all.)
The world tells you of the fawns' arrival too with the sound of the ravens. The sky is much more active with them, their black shapes flying through the dense forests of spruce and fir with greater agitation and purpose, and their raucous cawing, particularly in the heat of the day, when normally they are silent, tells you of the ravens' excitement, and you understand that they are traveling to and from the many kills, hoping to feed on a scrap or two; though rarely is anything left, only the sound of the ravens flying overhead, circling and swarming the lion, or wolf, or bear, or coyote, that is eating that fawn.
You can tell too when the fawns are being born, I think, because the same legions of mosquitoes that have been swarming you for the last couple of weeks are one day suddenly bloated. They've been feasting on the defenseless fawns for the last few days, and now when you swat them there's usually a splash of red on your arm—blood from their last meal, deer blood.
(Later that night, on the grill outside, I'll find myself cooking a venison steak taken from a deer the previous autumn. How we struggle to continue to try to believe in the myth that not everything in the world revolves around the consumption of another thing, even as time itself gnaws at the world equally, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. How we labor to believe that, for a moment, or a few moments—as during the high pendulum of solstice or equinox—things can and do exist outside the embattled realm of the utilitarian and the manipulated. How we treasure and cherish the peaceful occasions, too few in number, when we gaze upon something without evaluating its cost or its usefulness, without evaluating it at all, only gazing upon it.)
Sometimes in the mountains I will come upon a bear or an elk from behind and will observe it looking off a ridge through the trees at the valley far below and beyond, and it will seem to me for the moment in which I watch the animal unobserved that it is considering nothing, only watching the view of the valley below.
And then a shift in the breeze or some other sense or impulse will seize them and they will know that even as they are watching, they are also being watched—the bear or elk will whirl, will discover me, and in wild alarm will then gallop down off the ridge and into the timber, crashing through dry sticks and breaking branches, as the world resumes again its unfathomable but lovely forward motion...
Landscape can be a kind of body, and the rains and snows, the streams of sunlight, the creeks and rivers and marshes, and the wild lives of the animals that filter through these forests can be like a kind of blood, drawing a community together as close as if by blood, with all its attendant fidelities and frustrations, the inexplicable, passionate loves and fights. As the red blood that passes through a family connects one member to the other, so too does the integrity of this landscape, with its many complex workings, pass through and around us all, binding us.
You can see this while standing by the side of a lake, watching the mosquitoes swarm; watching the fish in that lake cruising the surface, sucking down those dancing sunlit clouds, water splashing. You might cast out into those fish, might catch one and take it home and clean it and eat it. If you did, you would be eating the flesh of the fish that had eaten the mosquitoes that had been living on the blood of deer and ourselves, ourselves who had been living on the blood of the deer from last autumn's harvest.
It's enough to make you dizzy. It's enough to make you fall down in the high green grass and call out in some sort of surrender, as if all your life you have been struggling to hold up some false idea of how you fit into the world.
It's like waking up to realize someone, or something, loves you.
The tender fury ofJune! Nearly every little thing, every tiny thing, is born in June. Even as the world is swelling to its full and busy drama, the tiny world-to-come is murmuring beneath the grass, wandering and creeping and plotting and planning for the world-to-come, for the next wave, and the next. Little yellow grouse chicks the size of Ping-Pong balls scuttle through the forest, following their mothers. Salamanders the size of fingernail clippings wriggle beneath damp leaves, barely larger than mosquito larvae.
The needles on the larch trees, those ancient, primitive trees that are both one thing and yet another—the world's only deciduous conifer—are just now beginning to grow, surging on the sudden leap of June sunlight, even though in ten to twelve weeks they will be done growing, will be dying already, gold by August, September at the latest. The larch attack the summer, with their vigor and beauty, like a man and a woman who have been told they have only one day left to live, and all the rest of the forest, in June (and every other month), acknowledges their strength an
d beauty and bravery.
By the second week of June, as the soil begins to warm, on a hot day when all else is momentarily still and silent, you can hear beneath the new heat a rasping, grinding sound coming from the fields and the forests—coming from the soil, is what it sounds like—and you can spend hours down on your hands and knees searching for its provenance without ever finding it.
It sounds like croaking frogs, or a strange kind of cricket, and yet it's strangely disembodied; it's all around you. Whatever it is, there must be thousands of them, and sometimes even as you are down on your hands and knees, parting the grass to search for the rasping sound—lifting rocks and peering under them, and stalking the sound—the tenor and directional flow of the sound will change so that now it seems to be coming from above you, from up in the trees. It's as if the forest is shouting, or at least grinding its teeth, and it's extremely unsettling.
It's sawyer beetles, doing their best to eat the world.
In his book The World of Northern Evergreens, E. C. Prelou describes the mechanics of the sound.
You are most likely to hear it if you go into recently cut-over conifer forests while the logs are still on the ground. If the logs have been there for any length of time, they will almost certainly contain immature sawyer beetles, voracious grubs with no legs but strong jaws. The steady, rhythmical sawing sound of their chewing is easily heard from as far as ten meters. On a hot, windless summer afternoon, when the birds are silent and (except to a naturalist) the cut-over land seems lifeless, the only evidence of active life may be the sawing sound of the sawyer grubs, steadily chewing wood with the relentless regularity of metronomes.
And what of our lives? Are there always subterranean disintegrations, reverse currents of disassembly, moving beneath us, even in green June? Even as one thing is being built, is another being torn down?
Can such sound be detected? Or in June—green, wet June—do such gnawings cease in our own scattered and confused lives, bringing us the momentary peace that early summer is so adept at delivering?
I think it is the latter. In June, when I lie in bed at night, in the cool evening, and muse upon, and look forward to, the rest of the summer, and the rest of my life, I can hear no subterranean gnawings. I can hear only the chorus of the frogs down in the marsh, and the snipe up in the stars, and the owls booming down in the old forest. I can hear only the here and now.
By the fourteenth of June, the scent of the wild roses is in full roar—perhaps my second-favorite fragrance of summer, next to the green cottonwoods—and around this time the days are often filled with alternating thundershowers followed by intense sunlight, so that the effect on the roses is that of being in a greenhouse; each new thunderstorm waters the roses, summoning brighter colors and denser odors, and then each new appearance of the sun lifts the petals of the blossoms slightly farther apart, releasing a new wave of scent, and the sun-warmed air currents carry the odor in that clean-washed air just a little farther, until by the end of a day of such intermittent rainstorms and sun passages, the scent of the wild roses is so strong as to be intoxicating, as fulsome as a large meal.
What I like best, with regard to the roses, is the way some of them smell when they are next to a cliff, a talus slope, or a rock wall. I love rocks and stones, and because the roses prosper in rocky, fast-draining places, I'll often find a tangle of scented roses nestled amid a tangle of rocks, and my happiness will be doubled.
As well, the rocks act as a reservoir for extra heat, so that with that refracted heat they help elicit even more odor from the roses in their vicinity: a rose growing out of a rock wall is always going to smell stronger, more wonderful, on a sunny day, than a rose growing anywhere else—and again, it's a cliché, but sometimes passing by such places I'll pause, feeling intoxicated, and might even lean in against that rock cliff or rock wall for a moment, dizzy—leaning in against it as if for support, or to worship it.
And if it is this intense for our dull senses, what must it be like for the animals?
Often the rose blossoms, still studded and sparkling with rain from the day's earlier shower, will be humming, shaking, as round bumblebees burrow into the heart of the rose, and the sun will be warm against the back of your neck, so that you understand clearly the one basic gospel of all this activity, all this music and noise: that the gospel is heat, heat is the driving force of change—the thing that has been missing for so long but is finally here, once more, and right on time.
Other things you can count on, in June: the rich scent of lupine, blazing so royal blue beneath the old larch that you understand, perhaps for the first time, that blue does have a scent, or at least that particular deep shade of blue, in this particular forest. It is a sweet smell, yet so dense that that night as you undress you can still smell it in your clothes.
Heat and rain, heat and rain, are what lift June, in this forest, from the wreck of winter. No month passes quicker up here, despite the absurd lengthening ofJune's days. June growing like a crop, like those green fields leaping into grassy flame; June leaping past us like the bucks' antlers, which, still sheathed in velvet, can grow as much as an inch a day as the deer feed on the richness of those newly emerging plants.
If you do not hold on to your reason, you might for a moment become confused, watching the deer browsing the fast-growing bush, the shape of which is almost identical to the fast-growing branching of antlers—the bush shaking as the deer browses among it, and the antlers shaking, as the deer nibbles and chews—and for a loosened moment, off-balance by the drama of gentle June, you might feel again that you are falling, even as the curtain of grass leaps quickly up and past you. Up in the north country, the first time you encounter this feeling you're a little bereft, initially, feeling fooled as the old belief in which the world has instructed you—the belief that you, we, all of us, are huge and important, significant and dramatic and creative and daring—falls away like a small brown coin dropped into the middle of that field of rising grass...
In subsequent years, if you survive and accept the shock of that initial surprise, you will still be thrown off-balance by it—June's whooshing, singing, scented, bright-colored arrival—but you'll take pleasure in the reminder of your invisibility; you'll be comforted by the graves of grass, the graves of shouting, stretching life leaping up all around you, with your own life so small and sedate and safe by comparison that the world is entirely as it should be, that you are like a mouse down at the bottom of that cool green waving grass, hopelessly lost, hopelessly safe beneath the huge mystery and motion and uproar of the world above and beyond...
You can smell the grass growing, in June. You can smell the shafts of sunlight piercing the translucent blades of grass.
You can smell all the forests' different odors as they cool and settle in pools and eddies, later in the day, as the light grows soft. Cooling lupine, cooling chlorophyll, cooling cottonwood. Spruce, fir, tamarack. Cooling yarrow, cooling sedges. Owls hollering, down by the marsh, and back in the old forest, beyond. Snipe.
Sometime around the seventeenth of June, the first wisps of panic are able to be scented. In the beginning, it's not even so much actual panic as much as the idea of panic: a dawning awareness of how truly fast June is moving.
Oh my God, you think, one morning around the seventeenth or eighteenth ofJune, waking up to it like a middle-aged life, or a middle-aged marriage; or a feeling like sleeping late, awakening at nine or ten to find the morning half gone and the day itself considerably reduced.
You can't keep pace with June. No one can keep pace with June. It's this realization, of the distance between reality and desire, that conspires in you one morning to cause you to sit bolt upright and exclaim, My God, where is it going? or My God, it's going so fast.
Relax. Later into June—almost into July—you will begin to take naps. After the initial panic, you realize how truly long the days hang this month. It's true, by the third week of June, nearing the solstice, there are only nine weeks of summer left. B
ut more than half a year's worth of light will be crammed into that sleepy, dense richness in the nine weeks to come. There's no hurry. You can slow down. You can pretend that there's no hurry, can pretend it until you will it into becoming the truth, and it's true, there is no hurry. You can make it be so simply by wishing—in June, at least.
Rain, heat, rain, heat—the two elements alternating like the twin hoofs of some prancing animal, drumming on the land, then summoning the grass, raising it higher each time. On a walk down an old abandoned logging road, you stop beside a puddle and notice the dozens of baby salamanders, barely larger than these commas, resting in the sun-warmed water. You lift one out of the water on the tip of your finger and hold it up close to your face so that you can see it. Even embryonic, almost humanly so, its sleek body is muscular and appears to be tensed, as if ready to spring back into its puddle, as if ready to leap back into the forest. You stare at it, and it stares back at you, unblinking. Its gold eye looks back at you, beholds you steadily, as if looking through the lens of the millennia, or as if watching you from the moon. You're a little spooked by the hint of sentience in a creature you can barely even see. You set it down carefully back into its puddle and walk on, huge-footed.
The solstice comes and goes. It's an absurdly long day. You think of those sawyer beetles, chewing, gnawing, breaking those logs down, crumbling from within.
My daughters and I go for a hike through the old forest, the ancient forest, along a rushing creek not far from our home. We walk for a long time, passing through shafts of late-afternoon summer light filtering in beams and columns down through the latticework branches of old cedars, light falling softly through the feathers of the old larch, and later in the day, on the walk back, Lowry asks, seemingly from out of nowhere, Where is God?