The Wild Marsh (12 page)

By mid-March, they are pouring in like bats, their unseen wing whistling heard always at dusk, so that it seems to me as if with their enthusiastic return they are helping to nudge along the gear works that are leading us all to the advancing equinox, the return of sufficient light, finally, to balance the dark.

It's still cold and snowy, but somewhere—if not yet on the marsh—there's yet another slot of open water just ahead, just opened; and they're anxious, it seems, to be the first, or among the first, to reach it. Perhaps in their power and rush they are not just helping to nudge along the gear works that lead us toward the equinox but are in fact attempting, with their momentum and desire, to speed it along. It's easy to imagine that with their fast, strong flights they are finally pulling back the covers of winter, finally revealing the black bare earth of spring and the coming meadows and marshes that will one day be as brilliantly green as the jeweled feathers on the heads of the mallard drakes that are now reinhabiting them.

You can't see any of this, at night, or into the future. But it's up there, and out there—close enough to hear, if not quite yet see. Whispered promises, now.

The gear works will never break. Easier for our own souls and spirits to fracture and drain away, back down into some rift or fissure, than for those massive, subterranean, and celestial gear works to break.

 

With the life comes the sound. The marsh is cracking, groaning, speaking to the sun, on the days when the sun returns. The ferocity of life: on the thirteenth of March, I spy the first mosquito. Surely this is no newly hatched wiggle-tail but instead some overwintering veteran, solitary, a good many weeks ahead of the coming invasion of others of his kind. But still, it's an amazing sight, and after so long an absence, almost a welcome one.

I don't mean to sound too fond. And after all, one of the birds is going to get him, anyway. When they return.

Pulling Lowry on her sled across the crust of vanishing marsh ice, skirting around the shallow puddles—each day seems to be the last day, and then the last hour, I can do this.

The trail, the wake, of our fractured ice glints and glitters in the new sun like a path of diamonds, and it seems to me that it is the thunderous, rasping noise of the steel runners themselves, the tympanic rumbling, that will urge the spring along, as much as the whistle of duck wings at night. So much noise: as if these rasps and rumblings, and even her delighted laugh, are what will awaken the sleeping season.

 

More sun, not just ribbons and tendrils seen through the dense strata of clouds, but entire hour- and two-hour-long stretches of it, the entire sky a blue umbrella, and now the snow seems to be routed, and once again, it doesn't matter to us that it'll be back: the great thing is the return of that sunlight. We feel like laughing, even giggling or snickering foolishly at our great luck, for in no way can we deserve such raw miracle, such raw luck. Hasn't it previously been our lot to know only sodden gray, so much of it that we'd become convinced, inured, that that was all there'd ever be?

More patches of open water, and open earth, appear. Ovals of mud begin to appear on the roads, like the great brown-slabbed flesh of some living thing, gigantic and leechlike, perhaps, rising from beneath the sheets and blankets of the snow.

The exhilarating, joyful sound of puddles splashing beneath our tires as we drive through the slush: a discordant sound, yet as beautiful, in March, as any aria, any birdsong. The blood thinning, in that new light, and quickening again, with joy.

 

The lichens, wet from yesterday's steady rain, today are already sun-dried and waving in the breeze, not like sodden hair now but like long hair blowing in the wind. The trees with their branches like outstretched arms, the long lichens like hair, the knots and gnarls like eyes, noses, mouths, remind me again how little difference there is between anything—how one plan, one law or rule or desire, seems to govern it all: every rock and tree, every bone and branch and feather and antler, and the path of all things. With the sun having returned after winter's long gray slog, it seems not to matter at all that I have no clue what that path or rule might be.

 

The scent your skin makes, in intense sunlight, as if it is cooking: I haven't smelled it in six months, not since last September, hiking high up on a rocky ledge. The sun going down, back then, giving up its intensity for half a year.
Hello, welcome back.
At this moment, looking up at the cumulus clouds, the blue sky, the alder branches still bare against that blue sky, but with the birds chittering and chirping and singing and pairing up, and the warm wind pouring now across the thawing marsh, there is only one spider web's strand separating me from euphoria, and in my deepening middle age, forgive me, I'm trying to keep that strand from snapping me and re-leasing me (like some balloon) into that euphoria. Instead, I'm trying to stay slightly lower and centered, so worn out and frightened have I become—so weary—of the subsequent and necessary and correlative down-swoops of spirit that accompany such euphorias, later on, in the natural law-and-order system of cost and recompense.

I just want to sit here in the mild sun and be happy, peaceful, content. I am no longer always as brave as the small birds around me now, returning to the marsh—birds that are said to, in the springtime, sometimes sing until a vessel in their throat ruptures and bright blood sprays from their mouths.

 

I aim for these journals to be nothing but a celebration, portraits of joy—this is what I hope to train my eye to look for—and yet to look too closely at one thing while purposely avoiding the other thing sitting right next to it is myopic at best. There is a part of me, hopefully a larger part, that can look at the pattern of the emerging, fledgling springtime and feel the larger spirit of the world—the joy, and awakening—that runs like fast meltwater just beneath the surface of all things, and in the return of southerly breezes, and be swept along, carried along, by this momentum.

But I see the fracturing and disintegration too, the greed and injury—the bizarre geometries of clearcuts, up one mountain and down the other—and as the white world vanishes and the remaining forests slowly release their snowpack to the thawing, hungry, muddy soil, the patchwork of clearcuts hang on to their snow stubbornly and become even more noticeable, and unnatural-seeming, in the springtime.

With no overstory to trap the awakening earth's warmth and respiration, they just sit there, strange little glaciers, hoarding all their water, even though this is the time of year that the soil and vegetation of the surrounding forest most need it, and have evolved to receive it.

Giant unencumbered snowpacks, the old clearcuts insulate and keep chilled an earth that is otherwise seeking to awaken, and they reflect the sun's solar rays back into space.

They sit there and wait, accomplishing nothing, while life—wild, rambunctious, hard-earned, and glorious life—races past all around them. (And when they do finally release, burned by the sun, it is in a useless, calamitous collapsing rather than in the slow, sustainable, nutritious trickling away that occurs farther back in the stability of the old forest. They dump their water load all at once, sometimes several weeks later than what the ecosystem historically was used to receiving—and everything, all movements of nature, are skewed and disrupted, sometimes even scoured away by these clearcut-caused releases of artificial peak flow.)

It does no good to dwell on it, or to allow your one sweet and precious and wild life to be made bitter by such observations, but it's out there, all around you, and you cannot help but see it. Two centuries ago, before the first ax or saw ever dreamed of a place like the Yaak, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "O if we but knew what we do when we delve or hew, hack and rack the growing green!"

Over the years, I've become almost accustomed to the horrific views—not benumbed, by any means, but inured, summoning sufficient residue, I think, to bear up beneath such injurious, daily witnessing—in part, by learning to focus on the wild and soothing beauty of what's still left. But as each new season reveals yet another round of new clearcuts—two hundred or more years of interconnected grace being swept clean—I can't help but wonder what kind of savage and ineffectual people would allow such a thing to be done not just to their own land, or any land, but to the views that flood and fill our senses thereafter in each glimpse of those denuded hills, day after day after day, and ever increasing—such views filling their children's lives too until one day perhaps there is a generation of children that knows nothing else and accepts such a view as due or recompense, with each season's thaw melting new scours and gullies of erosion, the mountains themselves washing away, trading mystery for scab.

Some days I feel we're very near that tipping point—wherein one or two more clearcuts tip the balance of wonder versus rage, joy versus despair, too far the other way, so that we know only the latter, and very little, if any, of the former.

How much is too much?

 

I love the way the phone calls and e-mail messages spread slowly north, in March. A friend in Trout Creek, more than a hundred miles to the south, and at a lower elevation, saw the first red-winged blackbird nearly two weeks ago.

The rumors drift slowly north.

And here, in my own marsh, two bedraggled but freshly bathed sparrows singing, shaking cold water from their wings and singing, as if completely unaware that up in the mountains, as the earth warms and awakens, the old logging roads are turning into rivers, taking millions of gallons of water straight out of the forest and funneling it, silt-laden, down into the creeks and rivers, and away: the sparrows singing instead as if governed by some mythic, merciful equation in which joy must always somehow exceed, even if only slightly, despair, so that the more there is of the latter, the more there is, or must be, also, of the former.

The willow branches become even more vibrant orange-gold, washed and birthed by come-and-go rains. Where has all this sparrow-song been, all winter? Sleeping, beneath the snow, so that the arriving sparrows have gotten here just in time to intercept it and claim it, as it emerges—or have they carried it with them, sometimes hidden, all this way?

And what of that emerging orange in the willow stems? Is not the sunlight, as it summons that orange-gold, the same thing as song?

 

The utter excitement—not just pleasure, but excitement—of walking across bare exposed ground, even in boots, rather than crunching through snow, after so long an absence.

 

Equinox: egg-balancing day. Mary Katherine and I are now officially another year older, she by but a week and me by a couple of weeks, so that each of us is still wearing that new year like a coat tried on in front of a department store mirror, with the wearer not yet sure of or accustomed to the fit.

Every year, after supper, we balance the raw egg vertically on the chopping block in the kitchen and marvel at its equipetal balance, at the magic in the world. And this year there's a perfect full moon high overhead, as well—we're anticipating that the balancing egg might rest, on this one day only, as firm as a concrete pillar.

We've been looking forward to it for days, but come the equinox this year, we forget; schoolwork, or a meeting, or Girl Scouts, or something mundane intrudes, so that the day, the ritual, the tradition, slides past unutilized this year.

We vow to remember it next year. We have in all the years past, and we will in all the years to come. This will be just a little knothole of skip or imperfection in the grain of our lives. All the solar and lunar gear works continue on, as they always have, whether we balance that kitchen egg or not. The absence of it, this year only, known only in our own lives, our own individual little patterns and paths, beneath that greater one rule, one story, one path.

 

In late March, the southern slopes begin to open up and you can walk around in the woods down low, moving from bare patch to bare patch. It's a pleasure to go looking for the winter-dropped antlers of deer—sheds, people call them. They gleam mahogany in the new spring light, as elegant as candelabras, and indeed, it looks as if they have been dropped, mislaid, forgotten by their owners.

It's a joy to be out walking in the woods, traversing bare ground. I love winter, and snow, but cannot help but think of the bare earth as the "real" world. Some folks go out in early spring, hunting the winter-shed antlers of the deer to sell to curio shops and so forth, but I go simply out of pleasure, and perhaps worship: to see, and touch, the echo of the secret deer that have been passing through our forest. It's hard to describe, and harder to explain, the feeling of richness one gets, spying an antler just emerged from the snow: treasure, discovered.

I think that the deer are our salmon, in the absence of salmon. They serve as the foundation for meat eaters in the valley (ourselves included), and in the transfer of nutrients; they are like fire, or floods, or the ocean tides. And there are people up here who brain tan the hides of our deer, which are prized because there are almost no barbed-wire fences up here to scratch and scour and mar their thin hides beneath the fur.

They feed us, they sustain some of the residents monetarily, and always, when we hunt them, they lead us farther into the forests, farther into the mountains, and in our pursuit of them, and our desire and longing for them, they teach us new things about the landscape. They lead us into corners and crevices where we would never otherwise go, and teach us to notice, with senses inflamed, things we might never otherwise pay attention to—the direction of a stirring of breeze, the phase of the moon, a bent blade of grass, a faint odor, a funny feeling of being observed—and because of deer, we notice these things with an intensity that is both feral and comfortable, as fluid as the passage of the days and the seasons themselves.

Their hoof tracks and droppings are almost everywhere, this other nation of beings, and when we go for a walk in the woods and something unseen thumps away from our approach, it is almost always a deer.