The Wild Marsh

by Rick Bass

  Like conductors, they are more active than ever in early October—the berry-fat bears, their winter coats thickening in the cold weather, able to prowl the hills even in broad daylight now, so pleasant are the temperatures; and the needles of the larch turning their strange gold color, as if determined to experience, one way or another, the fires they evaded in August—the very fires that birthed and now sustain them.

  And in their beauty, entire uncut mountainsides of beauty, the eye is drawn toward them—and in that engagement, the mind begins to dream.

  You have to adjust. It's not September anymore, or August, or, certainly, July. You've got to begin considering a slowing down: and again, the beauty of the season tries to help us with this attempt. All the clues are there, illuminated and ablaze in their once-a-year rotting beauty.

  Still, being human, we cannot help but be tempted by the flesh. We dream of dreaming—of hunkering down in the shortening days in front of the wood stove and just watching, witnessing, this graceful descent, this softening of October light and fading away—but there is a part of us too that wants to be conductors, a part that loves the surface, and loves being noticed; and so we struggle and clamor between the two choices.

  The fading light inspires in us one last surge of energy, one last boost of output. Like the great bears prowling the hills in broad daylight, or the larch needles hurrying through the sky like tiny arrows loosened from thousands of quivers, we hurry on, inspired by our last chance to touch the world before it is covered with snow.

  The berries are long gone, and have been made into jam or stored in freezers, but the grouse are still plentiful, if not wilder, by this point of the hunting season, and once or twice a week the dogs and I are fortunate enough to hunt them.

  The grouse too are things of beauty, even after I've shot them and brought them home, where they hang on the side porch in that gold light, drawn and aging toward full flavor and tenderness. And after they've hung there in the steady chill for a few days, it is an evening ritual for the girls and I to sit on the front porch, just before dark, and pluck the grouse. (I pay the girls seventy-five cents a bird—the equivalent of about three dollars an hour—and as such, it seems to me sometimes that they've taken a perhaps overly keen interest in the success of my hunts, inquiring about them with full attention when I came in from the field some evenings.)

  (They are also paid for being able to memorize and recite lengthy poems by Mary Oliver—"The Summer Day," for example, fetches a whopping five dollars.)

  Beauty thrice, or four times or more, then; the dog pointing the bird in the autumn colors, and the bird flushing, and me sometimes making the shot, and the dog retrieving the bird; the bird hanging on the porch in that soft cold light for days afterward, hung high as if in a position of respect and celebration; and the beauty of a job done well, then, in the plucking. And beauty a fourth time, in the preparation and dining, whether the grouse is brushed with flour and cooked in the iron skillet, in melted butter, or brushed with kosher salt and coarse pepper and stuffed with jalapenos, garlic, and onion, basted with balsamic vinegar, and cooked low on the grill over mesquite coals, or in any of a number of other recipes, involving wild blackberry or huckleberry reductions, or wild cherry and chipotle pepper barbecue sauce, or apples and brown sugar...

  We know we should be shutting down, in the autumn, slowing ourselves down in preparation for the time of the dream-world; but the world is too beautiful, our appetites are drawn ever upward and outward, and heedless of any depletion of reserves within, heedless of any basic need to conserve our energies, our passions. "I may not survive my affections," Terry Tempest Williams has written.

  So we sit there, early in the evenings, listening to the geese and feeling the crisp bite of cold air, silent and focused on our tasks, our hands working like weavers in reverse—weavers unbraiding the lovely feathers. (We save the barred tail feathers of the grouse as keepsakes; they line our bookshelves and mirrors, our cabinets and dressers, and bookmark the favorite passages of favorite books; they continue to frame our lives long after we've cooked and eaten the birds and made stock of the carcasses.)

  By all rights, this time of year should be a stepping down, but we keep reaching out, seeing more and wanting more. Perhaps we were made for nothing but the surface, like the delicate water striders one sees skating across the glassine surfaces of small ponds and lakes in the glinting heat of summer.

  Firewood, too: we enjoy laying in a good supply of it, going after it with a zeal that makes it seem almost as if the wood is fuel for our very bodies rather than our stoves. And again, at a time of year when it might seem the senses should be reining in and turning back for home, heading back to the stables for the long sleep, we instead find ourselves feeling the world even more sharply than ever: as if, after these first nine months of practice, we are now finally, in the tenth month, just starting to work ourselves into shape, with regard to being able to experience the world more deeply.

  Maybe it's the beauty of the October light, or the cold nights and cold days, or the kaleidoscope of colors—red-osier dogwood, crimson bunchberry, blood-frosted vaccinium, blue sky, gold larch and aspen and cottonwood. For some reason, the wood is more beautiful to us in October: not just the forest itself, but the forest that gives itself to us, the forest that we take. The gleam of new-cut dead lodgepole, as bright yellow as butter, with the vertical fracture of it dry-checking already visible, indicating to us the precise place where the maul should strike to split it into halves, and then again to quarters, and even eighths—the round length of firewood diminishing, it seems, in rhythm with the startling reduction of days, so that here, perhaps, in the physical labor, if not in the spirit and the mind, you have begun to find the rhythm of the season.

  Even the scent of the toothy, heavy chain saw, and of the gas smoke on your clothes, smells good, in October—it smells like October, in this valley, as does the sawdust—and from a distance, even the sound of other sawyers' chain saws, burbling on and off at all times of the shortening days, sounds good, a faint kind of October music, with a cadence somehow different from the steady gnawing of clearcuts in progress.

  It might take a few hours for a firewood-getter to work a single downed log—limbing it, cutting it into lengths, splitting it, and then stacking it into the back of his or her truck. (In that same time, a crew of sawyers, working often against their will or with no other choices for an out-of-state company that, by virtue of weaker workmen's compensatory requirements, has successfully bid on a national forest timber sale at a fraction of the resource's true cost or value, might have leveled to ruin ten acres or more of mature green forest instead of a single dead tree, and with the day still young.)

  On a trip to town, then, late in the day, or a trip into the woods with the dogs to go look for grouse, you'll see your neighbors, at any hour of the afternoon, heading back into the woods with their trucks filled with wood, old groaning schooners packed tight with that gleaming bounty, hard earned, and with the battered old chain saw stuck vertically, like a sword, into the top of that mound of firewood.

  (Another dusk ritual: You unload that wood, piece by piece—the dry tinkle and clatter of it as you toss it from the back of your truck into an errant pile, the mountain in the back of your truck slowly diminishing—and then, with a weary back, you climb down and begin to stack it again, neatly, in the woodpile, order reassembling of disorder, and you finish right at dark, or sometimes even after dark, in these diminishing days, and then head on in to the yellow square light of the house, for supper—grouse, perhaps—and a shower. And again there is the double-rich, doubly alive engagement with the world—the pleasure of crafting something fitted, even if so simple a fit as that of firewood in a shed, and the human imperative of the hunter-gatherer, now gratified.)

  Almost everything else in the forest is descending, or winding down into dormancy, or leaving, heading south—though it occurs to me now that perhaps on those night journeys south, the travelers feel as r
ich and alive, in their leaving or their descending, as we do still above, and still pushing on, deeper and more richly into the senses.

  Autumn is when the native people here, the Kootenai, used to travel east, across the Continental Divide, for a quick buffalo hunt (while hoping to avoid the savage Blackfeet, who guarded the Front Range country, and those distant grasslands, and the buffalo)—and in October, we'll sometimes make a quick run east with the dogs to hunt the grasslands' native sharp-tailed grouse, so different from our own forest grouse (blue, ruffed, spruce, or Franklin's), and to hunt the grasslands' ring-necked pheasants and Hungarian partridges too: introduced species that weren't even present a hundred and thirty years ago, when the last of the buffalo were being killed off.

  We'll hunt antelope also, and in fortunate years might return with all kinds of wonderful and exotic meat, and memories of wide-open golden grasslands, and horizon-to-horizon blue skies, and ceaseless dry wind, and all but abandoned trailer courts, cottages where we can stay, dogs included, for less than thirty dollars, with clean beds and hot running water. It's a landscape of tangled thickets of chokecherry and wild roses, of rattlesnakes and porcupines, and with grasshoppers clattering in front of us with every step we take, and the wide Missouri hauling its muddy load through an empty landscape, writing sentences in the very geology of the earth.

  It's lovely country, but lonely, and after even only a couple of days we find ourselves homesick for the dense green intimacy of our forested valley, lonely for the music of our creeks and waterfalls, and the richness of the specific scents of our forest, and the sight of our own plants and birds and mammals; and so we head back home, across the wide state that belongs to us, and to which we belong, even though it's easy to forget such things, living holed up like recluses in the dark, shady, inaccessible corner. We forget that there is another world beyond ours—a world of Conoco one-stop stations and big chain stores and interstates and commerce, a world beyond our world, which is itself but one step beyond the dream-world.

  Sometimes it feels as if, in going east, we have gotten too far from that dream-world—have removed ourselves one step too many from a thing that breathes into us the vital elements of our existence: not just food and air and water, but the very spirit that animates us.

  As if, out here on the grasslands, we become someone else—the people we might have become, perhaps, had we not found our lush green valley—and it is a frightening, lonely feeling, and soon enough, we hurry home.

  Our own deer and elk are going to be calling to us, before too long. You can lay in all the berries you want, can catch the little trout from high mountain lakes, can gather sacks and sacks of mushrooms from the previous year's wildfires, can harvest your potatoes, can make jams and jellies: but none of it compares with the thrill of going out into your forest—your forest, in the woods where you live—hiking for five or ten miles, or farther, and finding the animal you want to take, that year. The staggering bounty of hunting fairly, passionately, intensely, and then—suddenly, after many days of pursuit—finding yourself with several hundred pounds of meat to pack out and butcher and wrap ... It's an entirely different process from the day-to-day procurement most folks have become accustomed to, an entirely different rhythm—a tour de force of boom and bust—and when it happens, we are deeply grateful: aware, I think, that such mercy is tolerating, even catering to, our grasping and reaching-out, even in a time when we perhaps should be slowing down, hunkering down.

  More, more, more, beats the metronome within our own hearts, set somehow to a slightly different meter, it seems to me, from much of the rest of the world.

  It is not time yet to go into the forest looking for deer and elk—looking for meat, for so much meat. It is not yet time to follow their tracks, and their scent, wherever they will lead you. But soon: a couple or three more weeks. This is the last quiet, mellow, fruitlike time of hanging out at home, battening down hatches, before the dream-time of the hunt arrives, and, usually a short time after that, when the first snow arrives.

  So in many ways, it's the sweetest time of year, as can often be the case with any going-away thing. We know the thing—the "real" world, in this instance—will be coming back, though not for a long time. And despite our hungers and desires, the great wheel of the world does begin to work its way upon us, even if our own cant is slightly off-balance by a few degrees, and a few weeks.

  Belatedly, and almost against our wishes or impulses, we do finally find ourselves beginning to move more slowly: lingering, on those bird-plucking evenings on the porch, to smell the scent of wood smoke in the air, as people begin once more to build fires in their wood stoves in the mornings and evenings.

  And in the daytime, the sunlight seems to become both denser and softer, so that sometimes it is almost as if we are becoming trapped, even entombed in it, as if preserved in amber, preserved in beauty.

  We move slowly around in the yard, picking up loose things—a child's toy, a hoe, a stray piece of firewood, an empty dog bowl—in the last days before the snow comes.

  It could come as early as mid-October, or as late as mid-November. But it will be coming, and in October, there is only the thinnest, last little window of possibility, and the freedom of the old world, before the cleansing new white world returns, with that world's own new set of dreams and possibilities.

  The larch and aspen and cottonwood hang golden for as long as they can, as do the drying brown leaves of the alder, and the blood red leaves of the red-osier dogwood. They're able to hold steady, even in their own dying, though as the winds of autumn increase, more and more of them swirl through the woods, in patterns like smoke, gold whirling spirals and dervishes that for a moment or two seem to take on the shape of a man, or a deer, before the leaves settle down randomly into the autumn-dead grass, like gold coins spilled from someone's pocket.

  When will the gold leaves run out? They all seem to be on their branches still—the trees are still ablaze with color—and yet the ground is decorated with the gold coins of the aspen, and the elegant tapered yellow leaves of the cottonwoods.

  The alder are shedding their noisy leaves too. Not as tall as the other trees, usually only as tall as a man or a woman or at the most, twice as tall, the summer screen they once provided—the bowers and corridors and hallways through the woods—are becoming bare and open, allowing a deeper look into the darkening forest. An invitation.

  The larch hold their needles longer, holding them all the way to the bitter end of autumn. The broad leaves of the other deciduous trees flap and twist and rattle in the wind and are wrested free, day after day, but the larch needles hang in there, until their cool gold wave is all the color—besides the blue-green of the spruce, fir, pine, and cedar—that is left.

  The larch have been gold now for so long that you have almost become accustomed to the beauty, have almost come to believe it is your unending due. A few trickle off, steadily, throughout the fall, but for the most part they hold on, these strange, reluctant dinosaurs, with one foot in the prehistoric past of the ancient conifers and another tentative foot in the relatively modern, sunnier, and somewhat daring camp of the deciduous trees.

  When they do let go—usually in late October—it is one of the great sights of this landscape.

  It will have been increasingly windy, all through October, but finally the wind is too much—or rather, just enough. Sometimes at night you will hear it when it comes roaring through, and the sound and excitement of it will lift you from your bed, just as the needles are being lifted from their branches.

  The big wind often brings rain just behind it as well, which helps peel the needles from the trees; but some years the wind is dry, though no matter: still the air is filled, suddenly and finally, with what must be literally tons of flying gold needles, gold needles like darts or tiny arrows; and if you go out on the porch at night, you will be able to feel the needles striking you but will not be able to see them in the darkness. They will land in your hair, though, will coat your arms
and feet, and in the morning, when you rise and look outside, the world has been transformed, sculpted in gold, with every sleeping, inanimate shape pasted with gold needles, and all roads and trails paved with gold.

  How can any of it be accident—must not all of it be some design? The larch needles, expelled from the larch trees, cast themselves down onto the forest floor, returning nutrients to the soil, but perhaps even more important, in areas that might have burned earlier in the summer or fall, they provide a woven net that helps to stabilize the tender burned soil, minimizing the loss and damage from erosion. The larch needles drape themselves perfectly, democratically, over every aspect of the topography below, and in the manner with which spider webs were once placed over wounds to aid in coagulation, they stabilize the blacked soil, and just in time, as the rains continue. It's the last window of opportunity to lay down such a stabilizing blanket before the snow arrives: snow which, later the next spring, in melt-off, might otherwise carve destructive tunnels and gullies, were it not for the protective mat of gold.

  (Some years it is not perfect, or appears to be imperfect, and slightly off-balance, ill timed by a day, or a week. The snow might arrive early one year, so that the larch needles are cast down on top of the snow—a doubly breathtaking sight—though it is still perfect, for those early snows often melt in the subsequent days, are absorbed into the soil, lowering the net, the weave, of needles gently, inch by inch, onto that burned soil.)

  It's hard to imagine a species more fitted to and desirous of its place. Those same wildfires that have selected the larch—burning up the weedy competitors but not the larch, with its thicker, fire-resistant bark—also aid the propagation of the larch. Studies at the state experimental forest in Coram, Montana, have shown that larch seedlings regenerating in a newly burned area outcompete other species for the uptake of nutrients in a burned landscape by a factor of three, so that it is as if the metaphor of larch as a vibrant, leaping, living flame has become transformed to the real. Surely this is one of the definitions of magic.