The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  And though he will be perched right by my open window, and though his call is sharp and strident and clear and urgent, I am usually too far gone, by that point, too lulled and waterlogged, sunk to the bottom of the sea like some ancient wreck; and the sound of his call will sound much more muffled and distant than it did only a few hours earlier, when I first sat down at my desk and began staring out at the brilliance beyond.

  First baby robins on the porch, where they fledge each year, first Pacific tree frog in the garden, seeking each day now the watering can's moisture. First bellflower blooms, first twinflower, first monkshood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. First wild strawberries—so much color!—and, unfortunately, but inescapably, the first blossoms of hawkweed, a noxious invasive weed that is infinitely more aggressive than even the scourge of knapweed and thistle. Knapweed's bad, invading dry sites and displacing native grass directly—nothing eats knapweed, and as it spreads, it chokes out the grasses that the elk herds rely on—but the hawkweed grows everywhere, dry or wet, shade or sun, and seems to know no limits. It displaces all of the complex and crafted native flowering plants—lupine, bellflower, kinnikkinnick, paintbrush, yarrow, Oregon grape, wild strawberry—and while it's bad enough, from a biological perspective, the colonization seems also to taunt a lover of wildness and diversity from an aesthetic standpoint, for the blossoms of the hawkweed, by itself, are beautiful: a brilliant, almost hallucinogenic orange, the roadsides and old logging roads now ablaze in July like fields of poppies.

  (Though in those monochromatic sweeps of such rich, even luscious orange, I think that even someone unfamiliar with the ecology of the region might sense the ominous danger beneath that beauty, might notice the mosaic of diversity throughout the forest and notice the homogenous and wide blazes of orange as the anomaly, and the dis-uniter, and not possessing the cohesive cooperating, fitted spirit of the place, no matter how beautiful the orange might seem, in and of itself.)

  So there is a sleepiness in July, a summer leisure—an in-betweenness—though there is also the beginning, already, even in the midst of summer vacation, of a rising responsibility; for those weeds must be picked, if not sprayed. And for as long as we can combat them by hand, we will, for it seems that to bring spray and poison into our lives, and near the marsh, with its tender amphibians, and into our watershed, and our lives, would be to admit defeat—what good are the natives, if they possess poison in their veins? And even if we did decide to try to poison the hawkweed and knapweed and dandelion and thistle, and this year, increasingly, the St. John's wort, the same poison that kills these broadleaf weeds would also kill the natives.

  Instead, we pick. We get down on our hands and knees in the tall waving grasses of July, and pull up, by the matted, tuberous roots, the insidious runners of moisture-robbing hawkweed. Like hunters, we know where the weeds are likely to recur each year, and we keep pulling them, hoping to weaken and stress them so that the natives can outcompete them. We remain vigilant for new outcrops too. Our battle is just one tiny battle in the wilderness here at marsh's edge—we will change nothing, will at best only buy a little more time—but we have not yet reached a level of acceptance at which doing nothing is tolerable, and so we pick, and pick, in July: kneeling in the mixture of tall grass and weeds, surrounded by mosquitoes, sweating, pulling, stuffing trash bags full of weeds. It is such a break-even battle—some years, our progress is visible, though each year, we have to pull harder, and again, from the entire landscape's perspective, two million acres of national forest, so ultimately futile, that we realize early on our efforts are really like nothing else so much as prayer and penance to that landscape: a sort of Zen exercise, or tithing to the land, and to the marsh. Though I can't help but wonder too, some years, if the truly Zen or prayerful thing to do would be to stop fighting loss and change and to simply let the weeds of the world come rolling in.

  Each year, however—each July—I pick each weed, every weed, that I see, on our property at least, as well as on my hikes through the woods; and I suspect that even when I am old, I will still be picking them, out of some deep and stubborn allegiance to my own perhaps arbitrary and singular concepts of integrity. And I think that it is not that I hate weeds so much as it is that I love this landscape, this incredible ecosystem, so deeply, just as it is—in the fullness of its incredibly unique diversity, ten thousand years in the making.

  What I mean to say is, even the weed pulling in July is one of the ways I relate to this landscape now, is an aspect, a component, of that relationship, so that it is not even so much a matter of whether I "win" or "lose" (I'll lose, for sure; no one can defeat time) but rather that I continue on in that relationship, according to my beliefs and values, for as long as I am able—which, I like to imagine, is for as long as I am alive.

  July is its own month too, in addition to being a bridge between others—July is the hammock, July is a crowded West, happy people on vacation, crowded gas pumps in town, crowded gas stations, crowded trailheads—and yet July, perhaps more than any other month, seems to me also to be connected, almost like a twin, to the month that will succeed it. Or July is that way with regard to fire, at any rate. Sometimes, in a dry year, July is the month of the first fires, but usually up here it is the last month before the fires—and while it would be concise and neat to partition the twelve months into equal wedges of pie, it's hard to do that because of the incredibly primal, elemental, and dramatic force of fire (the destroyer and creator both). The coming fires are always somewhat on our minds, upon this landscape, in any month, just as those who live in farming country are almost always aware, even if calmly, of the year's running total of precipitation, and in this regard too we are farmers of a sort, though we seek not so much to grow any certain crop as to simply receive the merciful precipitation for its own sake: the snows of winter and the rains of spring sculpting this Pacific Northwest forest, and in that lushness, that excess and rank bounty and splendor, shaping our moods, our culture, our days.

  But because we lie in a seam, a borderland—the landform of our twisted geology, glaciated and slip-faulted, is more that of the northern Rockies—we are shaped and sculpted too by the breath of fire, the animal of fire. Ice birthed this country, at the end of the last ice age, but it is fire as much as rain that brings the pulse of life to it, helping select our biggest, healthiest trees, and in particular the thick-barked larch, with its unique beauty and strange and ancient duality—a deciduous conifer!—and while we love the look and fit of what the fires have achieved across the many centuries, we fear them some years, and respect them always.

  Usually we get a good rain on or around the Fourth ofJuly And always we get a good rain on Labor Day, without fail—like clockwork. But of the sixty days between those two holidays, we might some years get only one or two thunderstorms; and the trouble with thunderstorms, particularly in parched and heated years, is that they fill the sky with lightning.

  It's thrilling, invigorating, terrifying, intoxicating. In a hot year, as the forests begin to dry up and grow snappy-crisp, oven-baked beneath greenhouse temperatures that the vegetation on this landscape never evolved to deal with—fields and forests both dying from the heat as much as the drought—we watch the skies, and the weather reports, in an anxious kind of emotional dance, in July: wanting rain, but not wanting a thunderstorm. Or if wanting a thunderstorm, then a big, violent drenching one, so that the downpour extinguishes the simultaneous lightning strikes from the selfsame storm.

  As if our wishing has any bearing on any of it. Wishing it with the fervor of farmers, or sports fans. Totally lacking in control. Learning, year by year, humility.

  The specific anguish, in a drought year—watching the tender green vegetation wilt, and then die, across an entire landscape, a beloved landscape, and looking at the seven-day forecast and seeing not even a thunderstorm. The forest, and people's moods and tempers, growing as brittle as thin glass. The specific outpouring of gratitude and relief, and the feeling of incomparable
richness, if or when cooler temperatures ease in, as well as a soaking rain, in the second or third week ofJuly, cutting that long run to Labor Day almost in half.

  The irony is that anyone who's lived up here for any amount of time, and who's been through some fire seasons, knows firsthand how incredibly beneficial the fires are: how they thin and prune the weedy overstock of tangled saplings that the timber industry could never afford to take. The larger trees survive the fires, far more often than not, and benefit from the reduced competition and increased nutrients. (Industry, and indeed, even people within the Forest Service itself, continue to try to sell us the emperor's myth that clearcuts imitate wildfires, and as such, are healthy, but clearcuts don't leave behind the forest's nutrients, and don't leave behind standing spars and snags for hiding cover and cavity nests for birds and small mammals. Saying a clearcut is like a wildfire is like saying a bank robbery is the same thing as a savings withdrawal.)

  So we love what the fires—all fires—do to a big and dramatic landscape, over time, we love how the wild morel mushrooms pop up in their aftermath the next year, and love how the deer and elk and moose rush in the following year, to graze and browse on the rich new feed. And we even love the pretty sight of them, I think, mesmerizing as a campfire, orange and black, Halloween colors, flames twinkling on a hillside in the distance.

  But we also know how utterly wild and uncontrollable they can be, possessing certain predictable desires, such as a yearning to run uphill, and to travel on the breath, the convective currents of their own making, as they consume and sometimes devour great helpings of this forest's bounty—twigs, branches, grasses, leaves, limbs, weeds, needles—and as long as they are not moving toward anyone's home or property, and as long as the firefighters are safe, and as long as the political powers are fairly balanced so that industry will not be able to swoop in on the burned landscape following a fire, "salvaging" the landscape in too overzealous and unregulated a fashion, well, then, the fires can be glorious: again, as long as no one is living underneath, or in the path of, that volcano.

  But here I am, talking about what is essentially an August event while still in the month ofJuly. It's really only in our minds, I think, that such forbearance and brooding exist. Out upon the landscape, it's just July: some years green, some years not.

  What is fire? In a drought year such as this one, even on the eighth of July—five days since the last rain—the stupendous heat has returned, and today I catch the first scent of truly dry heat, oven-baked dryness: the odor of baking pine needles, as sharp and distinct as if they were laid upon a cookie sheet and placed in the oven. There's been no ignition yet, no spark or flame, but smelling that scent—it's so strong that it seems almost as if they're already burning or at least smoldering, even in the absence of an open flame—you have to wonder, really, how is the readying different from the finishing, and at what point does the one become the other?

  The further along the summer moves, with us riding in its midst, the more the hidden nature of the world, which is surely fire, reveals itself, as if rising with confidence from some reservoir not even at the world's core but at some lesser depth: just beneath us, at first, but then to the surface itself, warming the bottoms of our feet, and then up around our ankles, and then higher, until everywhere we look, it seems, we see fire—or if not the flames themselves yet, then the paths the flames will follow, and the material they will consume, the fiber that will be converted to their breath. The animal of fire being born.

  It's all fire. There is a point at which even the lush green meadows, their grass tops blowing in the wind, become no longer like ocean waves but tongues of sawing green flame. And rising slowly from those grasses, over the course of the summer, are the weeds; and it takes no special vision, no leap of metaphor or understanding, to see that even more than the waving grasses, or the swaying, branch-clacking forest itself, the weeds are fire: that they are the first flames, hot cinders dropped already lit among the tinder, and that even if they do not ignite this year, or even the next, or the next, they are already burning, consuming the terrain across which they sweep, and that they are a different kind of fire, one from which there is no subsequent rush of rejuvenation the following year. Instead, the fire of the weeds is geological, as ongoing and close to eternal as anything in this world.

  Often, late into dusk, in July—not having finished my other chores and lists but unwilling to let the day end without having addressed the weeds—I will be out among the tall green grasses, feeling the cooling, scented breath of the fields' exhalations: the grasses stirring, inflating with life again, now that the frying-pan force of the sun is shielded from them, for a while, by the shadows of the mountains' wall, and the desiccating, swirling winds of the day have likewise settled down to rest for the night. And finding myself surrounded by the seemingly endless and impossible task of plucking each weed, all weeds, and with darkness settling in fast, I'll feel a kind of panic rise within me. The fiery nature of the weeds all around me will be revealed as if their essence too has come more clearly and fully into life, in that subdued light, and I'll find myself plucking them quicker and quicker, pulling the tallest ones first—the ones capable of spreading their fiery seed drift farthest, leapfrogging like skittering sparks across the waving canopy of the cool green grasses.

  In that panic, it will feel that I have to move quickly—that each orange-blossomed hawkweed is a burning coal—and while a firefighter might attempt to attack a fire upslope, seeking to cut off the fire's ascent, I attack this other orange fire downslope, trying to contain its perimeter in that direction, which is where the hawkweed spreads quickest and easiest, following the sloping contours of watercourses.

  Orange blossoms or not, it is nothing but fire, for after the hawkweed has displaced the native grasses and wildflowers, it then withers, in August, to tinder-fluff. Nothing can eat it, and it sits there like a fuse waiting for a spark, entire fields waiting for the inferno; though the irony is that by that time, whether the ignition occurs or not, the inferno has already passed, and with our inability to act, our inability to stop the weeds, we did not even notice that first fire until after it had already passed through.

  What scale of time is appropriate for us to use—in our own lives, as well as in our management and perception of the public lands? Four weeks? Ten years? Threescore and ten? A hundred, or a thousand?

  In the blink of an eye, in day's failing light, the field of orange weeds wavers, at the corner of my vision. It's a drought year, and in less than three weeks the valley will be filled with smoke and flame. It seems to me often that the shadow of a thing can precede the thing itself, even though our present understanding of time indicates this is an impossibility, that time cannot run backwards.

  Perhaps it is more that there are simply predisposed patterns and pathways, like contours, carved as if by ancient glaciers (time, like some immense chunk of glacier formed long ago, slowly decomposing, and creeping, as it dissolves), and that those earliest-made paths and patterns help influence the shape and direction of all that falls into their provenance—like the wind-borne and water-drifting seeds of the hawkweed itself, creeping ever lower, following every runnel and swale in the landscape, seeking and colonizing, spreading and pooling like glowing lava spitting down a slope.

  Perhaps this is the nature of that word, the one for which I do not know the name, describing how the shape of the elk's antlers is the shape of the branches in the forest in which he lives: a thing that might be seen to be as simple as the style or voice of one single artist, one original creator, whose imprint is as recognizable in any work as the voice of one's mother or father.

  I want to be very clear that as I marvel at all this sameness, it is not nature, or life itself, or individual species and their complex and intricate adaptations in which I see that sameness; in those things, I see incredible diversity and infinite mystery: rampant and beautiful un-sameness.

  Rather, it is in the patterns and even contours of all t
his virtuoso diversity that I catch glimpses of what I suspect might be an overarching sameness just beyond our sight, just behind the scenes: a sameness that goes much further back, it seems, than the Adam and Eve bloodlines of any living creation. A sameness, or echo or shadow of sameness, that again is evident, in those glimpses, in both the animate and inanimate. The rocks and mountains that are shaped like muscles—like quadriceps and breast, like recumbent man and woman, like sleeping animals, like waking animals striding the earth...

  What I see in those glimpses of the sameness of pattern is not just metaphor, or "simple" cold, hard scientific life, but instead life upon metaphor upon life upon metaphor: a dense, rhythmic layering of substance and meaning, the substance of a thing creating its meaning, and then that meaning creating another, similar substance.

  Camping last week in an intensively metamorphosed wilderness basin in the Cabinet Mountains, just across the river from here, Elizabeth and I reached a windy ridge in darkness, set up our tent, and slept. In the morning, the vision from our tent of the canyons just below us was so twisted and fantastic as to be almost unbelievable, and I found myself glancing at the topo map from time to time, as if comforted by reducing and compressing all those contours to the size of the map.

  Hiking farther up the mountain, we noticed individual rocks, severely eroded quartzites, the surfaces of which seemed more than once to replicate perfectly, ridge for ridge and canyon for canyon, the same landscape magnified almost infinitely beyond. And climbing farther, I paused for breath and placed my hand on the smoothness of one timeworn rock, the flexion and indentation of which was exactly that of a bare kneecap, with part of the shin below, and part of the upper leg above. Every tendon, and every smooth run of muscle, was reflected perfectly in that gray stone, Cambrian-era quartzite that was formed perhaps a billion years before the first bacteria even existed.