The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  What is the reason for this cant, this tilt, and will we ever earn our way into the larger flow? Did we once exist in it, and fall from it? Or is it—this distance, this wobble or separation—the fuel that inspirits us, that gives us life and moves us across the landscape of the centuries; this distance, or slight loneliness, at first glance seemingly regrettable, all the difference, just as the antlers of a deer or elk are different from the branches in the forest through which that deer or elk moves?

  The larch are starting to glow at their tips—the needles on the uppermost branches turn yellow first, with the wave of gold progressing steadily downward through each tree, each forest, then, as autumn progresses, an amazing thing to witness in any one tree, the color gold washing through the entire tree, gilding it, much less to witness that slow, beautiful fire happening to an entire mountainside.

  The straight and simple truth of it is that September becomes so beautiful so quickly that you can scarcely bear it. The berries are finally all shriveled up by the frosts in the high country, the leaves of those low bushes burnt as red as garnets and the leaves of aspens are turning yellow, and the rain-washed sky is bluer, and the soil, moist again, is softer when you walk on it.

  The bears are eating the kinnikkinnick berries—their scat is everywhere, through the forest—and the sophisticated, complex matrix of odors specific to the enormously complicated, enormously diverse vegetative mix in this valley is returning, strengthened by the new moisture and cooler temperatures.

  The tall dead-yellow grass of summer still obscures the gray stone walls—the umber grass one of the last visual clues of a summer gone by so quickly—and then one day there is frost not just up in the mountains but in the marsh, each saw blade of grass glistening with its crust of ice—the morning-world sheeted with silver and gold—and the elk are bugling even more loudly, high in the last remote untouched backcountry And even though you always knew it was coming, that first hard frost on the valley floor, it still hits with the same surprise as when at the beach, as you try to walk along the strand line, an onrushing wave nonetheless comes skating in and surges past you, suddenly up to your ankles.

  And then another, and another. And more elk bugling, as if they are not simply announcing it but creating it with each breath, each grunted exhalation.

  The larch look exactly like candles or matches just struck: as if this fire-loving species is so determined to burn—and in that burning, to have its world made newer, and grander—that it will manufacture its own flame, in September; as if August was not enough. It's the grizzly bears—the last tiny population of them—that many people think of when they consider the Yaak, and they are an amazing and powerful and unique story. But I think that it is the paths and patterns of the larch that might be most fitted to this land of fire and ice, of intense wakefulness and then deep sleep. And in September, the forest, and the burning larch, are nothing if not awake.

  The antlers of the deer are free of their summer velvet now, are unsheathed and fully hardened and polished, ready for fighting. The deer bound through the woods, their antlers the color and texture of rich mahogany wood, glinting and flashing in the patches of sunlight, reminding you they are not ornaments but weapons.

  The ravens have been still in summer's heat, but grow more active. They've never been away, but now you see and hear them more often. Awake.

  Driving to school some early frosty mornings, we'll see them sitting on the side of the road, jet black in a slant of crisp September sun, steam rising from their bodies, as if they are but one step away, one wingbeat from vaporizing into pure spirit. But they are not pure spirit; they are as alive and physical as anything on this earth, and as beautiful, and they edge farther to the side of the road, still steaming, as if newly born, and watch us pass, as if waving or ushering us on through the woods—as if we've passed some checkpoint.

  On the fourteenth of September, the girls capture the most amazing spiny green caterpillar, a huge thing with garish yellow eyes. We watch it crawl around, as fat as a sausage and as green as a lime, for fifteen minutes before doing the childhood thing of putting it in an empty mayonnaise jar for closer examination.

  We take it to school the next day—"It's so cute," Lowry says—but when we enter the room with it before school, this caged, horned dragon, the little boys scream and scatter from the computer.

  That afternoon, we release the caterpillar into the alder grove at the edge of the marsh. I know that we stand at the verge of creating life in a test tube—that indeed, we might already have passed that threshold—but before we get too arrogant or boastful or even confident, tell me who, please, could have dreamed such a thing as this caterpillar?

  Every September, when the marsh is still fully dry from the heat and drought of summer, and before it begins to rehydrate under autumn's rains, the girls and I go out into it some afternoons to play a game we call Tiger in the Grass. The marsh grass is over their heads—a maze of fecund, vegetative uproar—and we play hide-and-seek in the labyrinths we've created below, forming warrens and burrows with our crawling around beneath that high, dense canopy of grass.

  The rich, cool, sweet scents of the marsh down at the roots' level are like those of a candy store, of ginger and chamomile, and while the September light glints off the bent tops of the grass, reflecting as if off a curved shield, the world-below is not bronze like above, but instead, deep, cool, dense green.

  We call to one another, delighting in our hidden-ness, our invisibility, and track the new-made paths of each other, crawling down those hollow tunnels. Shafts of light occasionally filter through the tall grasses with pencil beams of light. One person is the tiger and the others hide, and try to run to home base—popping up somewhere in the marsh, up from the green, cool, subaqueous light into the bright, shimmering bronze haze, often emerging fifty yards or farther from where we thought we were, or from where the tiger thought we were; wonderfully lost, wonderfully disoriented, in even so short a time as the span of one game.

  Running for home, then, shrieking and laughing. The tiger bounding after them, after us. The grass shaking, rattling. A thousand sweet marsh scents stirring in our passage. The girls' laughter reminding me, somehow, of that shimmering light rising, reflected from the tops of the grass.

  The world is full: as one thing is taken away, another fills its place. Surely this is but a myth that is convenient for us to believe, and the closer you look at any cycle, pattern, or process, the more you see that it might be more than a myth; that it is also an observable article of science.

  The earth tips and turns farther in its angle from the sun and the days grow shorter, but the quality of the available light becomes finer, so that even though the weight and contact of things is shifting, a kind of balance is being maintained. It is neither a physical nor an emotional balance, but some other kind.

  How few words we have, really, in our language, and at our ultimate disposal. I suppose the best that can be said is that it is a kind of spiritual balance, and it is somewhat a source of comfort to consider that it must exist in the hearts and center of all things—in ocean tempests and typhoons, in the eye of the hurricane, in the wobble of an elk calf, in the leaf chewings of any one species of caterpillar—everywhere, always balanced, or seeking balance, even when our own eyes or minds cannot discern it: even when we cannot feel it in ourselves.

  It has to be there. If it is everywhere else, how can it not also be in us?

  The fading light just keeps getting richer and richer as it shortens. Even the candle glow of aspen and larch seems to conspire to gently fill the heart—even a heart previously believed to be full—and the blood's strange autumn chemicals themselves seem to be filling with light as the days grow shorter and we are weaned—gradually at first, but then quickly—from that summer bounty of light, that summer bounty of yellow and gold.

  The twenty-ninth of September, and I feel further buoyed, life swept, by this autumn light, so rich now as to seem almost tangible, like the rattle
of parchment paper or the sound and sight of a crisp pear being bitten into.

  The girls and I spy another black bear on our way home from school—a big fat one sitting out in a meadow, beneath a lone hawthorn tree. He's sitting there like a man at the beach, is pulling the branches down with both front paws and eating the ripe hawthorn berries, and just watching the world go by. The field he's in is the color of bright yellow straw; his rippling coat is deep black, almost iridescent. His white teeth flash as he chews the berries, his composure is utterly relaxed, and surely the September sun is filling his blood as well as mine, and he is soaking it in.

  On some of the frostier mornings, I've had to start making a small fire in my wood stove again to keep warm enough to work. It took me a long time to get comfortable calling it work. The issue is not whether you enjoy it or not. The issue is, does it make the blood leave your head, do your cells feel afterward as if you've physically traveled to the places encountered in your mind, are you pleased with but weary from those travels, those creations?

  It fulfills a need in you, this creation—a fit you have bartered with the world—but wouldn't you rather be out on a mountaintop more often, or canoeing an autumn river? Aren't you making a trade, a morning or an afternoon at the desk instead of on the mountain? Is one more real than the other?

  September raises these questions more intensely—awakens them more sharply, if they have been slumbering below, perhaps more than any other month.

  The woodshed in my cabin is filled with split wood for the coming winter, but I don't want to dip into that stockpile yet. Instead, I keep a loose pile of unsplit wood by my cabin door, and it becomes for me part of the process, the transition from the physical world into the dreaming world, to split each morning's supply there by my cabin door before going inside to light that small warming fire by which I will work until the day itself grows warmer.

  An adult lifetime of splitting wood, and yet it never fails to amaze me—the beauty, the astonishing brightness of a newly split piece of dry lodgepole, the shock of white flesh, the fiber opening before the maul's blade, like the bright and perfectly paired pages of a book opened in that brilliant morning sun. The vertical lines on the growth rings land open in cross-section, reading like the lines of text.

  One of the loveliest things about sitting perched at the edge of the marsh, day in and day out, across the span of each year, is how once you're deeply enough immersed in the year, you find yourself more often than not totally forgetting not only what day of the week it is but even the months—the names of them—and instead see the days, the patterns of them, in mosaics of color and temperature, as thick-bodied and animate as a living creature. Their passage seems a flow rather than any named or bounded thing. Or if boundaries exist, it is as if only for the purpose of showing, pointing, the way to freedom; and with the scents and colors of the passing months, and the seasons, rolling along like a path or a map and with no real need for the names of months or any other things. A clacking grasshopper does not have to be August; a yellow leaf does not have to be September, and neither does the first hard frost.

  So sharply felt are the senses at this time of year for me however that the names of the things fall away and in my heightened and marveling awareness, it seems I can forget once again the names of the things and instead live only more fully in the presence and taste and odor of the things themselves: as pungent as they surely once were to me before they had names, and as they will still be after the names are forgotten. At least as much as any others, September is the month of touch and scent and taste and sight and sound, with language and other filters somehow being partially removed, in this new and foreshortening light. The world is—dare I say this?—more real, it seems.

  As September's intense senses travel more deeply into you—being transmitted in their new richness and sharpness faster, and more completely, I think, than the time it takes to stop and name them—it seems that time, conversely, and perhaps paradoxically, slows.

  I know intuitively as well as intellectually that the physical world is every bit as real in every month—that there is just as much wonder to be prized out of the world in any one month as another. Perhaps then it is simply me who feels more real, in September—less bounded by the tradition and trajectory and momentum of old paths and habits.

  The frost hangs longer now, clinging to the coarse marsh grass and sedges with glimmering blades of ice and hoarfrost until noon. By this time of day the children will have already said their pledge of allegiance, will already have completed a couple of lessons, will already have laughed, and sung, and might at this very moment be out on the playground, their school day half done, while this long, slow, lazy light seems to hang forever.

  I continue staring out the window, adjusting yet again to the world's changing gear works. I watch as those blades of frost finally release, steaming slightly, as the cold sun slowly warms them, and in that gentle sliding down, the tumbling of those intricate frost plates into the deep grass below, the dry grass stirs slightly, briefly—all else is still, the day is perfectly poised—as if unseen animals are moving around in it, just beneath the surface.

  Still later in the day, the grass is entirely dry again, ready for play—and I'm ready for the girls to be home from school.

  Did I get much work done today—any labor of world-changing substance, any acts of merit or consequence on the global stage? No. Elizabeth and I baked a huckleberry pie, which rests, cooling by the open screen window, completely uncut, awaiting the girls' return.

  If you can't reexamine and reprioritize your life in September, then I feel pity that you may not be able to do so at all. If you cannot remember what it is about the world you love most, and which matters most to you in this slowing-down time, as the days return to a more equitable balance of darkness and light, then when, if I dare ask, do you think you can?

  In September, writing is not the real work. In September, taking the girls to school, then staring out the window and thinking about them, and waiting for them to get home, is the real work.

  Any year now, they will be hurtling past you, with their dreams and desires and ambitions. If you are smart, or lucky, you will slow down your own and turn away—will turn and go back to meet them in their territory, while it is still so slow and leisurely and timeless, so poised between then and now.

  OCTOBER

  CATCH ME ON ANY ONE fine certain day, any month of the year, when things are going well and I am out in the natural world, and I'm likely to say that this day, this week, is the best of the year, superior to all others. Eventually, then, after enough of those kinds of pronouncements, such statements would lose all currency; but I have to say, the case can be made, yet again, for the first week of October being far and away the finest. Sure, October is suddenly cold as hell, or seems that way, with lows in the twenties each morning, a sheet of frost spangling the bent and submitting tops of the marsh grass—diamonds everywhere, once the lazy sun finally struggles above the trees—and with your skin, and your mindset, not yet thickened to winter's demands. And the days are so unbelievably short now, with the downhill slide of the equinox still a surprise, still a shock.

  In that first week of October, you understand that it's not any kind of laziness with which the world is slowing, but a heroic fatigue; and that from that fatigue, even as all manner of vegetative matter are dying, crumbling and disintegrating, there is an elegant new thing blossoming, the crafting of a plan and pattern every bit as sophisticated and complex as spring-and-summer's roar of clamant growth.

  It is an invisible blossom, this new plan, and as such, it rises before you like a ghost, so that it takes a different sort of seeing to know it. The increasingly leafless frames of the deciduous trees and shrubs are not that flower's absence but its new presence.

  The newer silence of birdsong (save for the going-away clamor of ducks and geese, and the shouting of the ravens) is likewise simply the inverse of the complicated thing rather than its utter absence.

/>   If only we could learn this same lesson of brief senescence and strategic withdrawal when weary; to push hard and strong, living fully for as long as possible, but then to back off in graceful taper, and to descend, almost seamlessly, into the lower levels, when it's time to rest.

  It's simply a different kind of living, a different pace. The sleeping dream-world beneath the snow can be every bit as rich and colorful as the bright world of stone and antler and feather above; and for a little while, anyway, if parsed out sparingly enough, and wisely, the memory of the bones and antlers and stones and feathers can be as real as the bones and antlers and stones and feathers themselves.

  And if the exodus, the descent to sleep and rest is graceful enough, even the disintegration and disorder will not matter, for in these elegant dreams and memories, desire will still be maintained and nurtured: a desire sufficient, when the time becomes right again, to reassemble those loosened pieces and raise them all back up again, in resurrection and ascent.

  The bears and larch, it seems to me, help orchestrate this descent to rest. Even their coloring—the golden bears, and the blaze gold needles of the larch—seems designed to draw our attention to them as they remain active on a landscape where all else is going away. (And then, in only a few more weeks—if that long—they too will leave, descending. But they are the last to go.)