The Wild Marsh (19 page)

It is the same country in which the bears first come out of hibernation, as those sheets of snow pull back like so many blankets being tucked back; and the glacier lilies are edible—they are nutritional and delicious, sweet and crisp, although, truth be told, more than a handful can give you a bit of a stomachache.

The bears, particularly the grizzly bears, which have been sleeping beneath these mini-glaciers, suspended like astronauts in the frozen earth, or like seeds themselves, will prowl these warm sun fields just beneath the snow line, grazing on the delicious lilies, and though insects are the plant's primary pollinators, sometimes the yellow pollen will get caught in the fur and on the snouts of the great golden bears as they go grubbing and pushing through the lily fields, pollinating other lilies in this manner. In that crude fashion, they are farmers of a kind, nurturing and expanding one of the crops that first greet them on resurrection each year; and the lilies follow the snow, and the snow pulls back to reveal the bears, and the bears follow the lilies, and the script of life begins moving with enthusiasm and reckless style once again, a script and a story far more exuberant than any that has been seen so far this year.

And on those same glistening ice shields, growing smaller each day, the grizzly mothers with their cubs slide down the slopes on their backs, riding the ice to the bottom for nothing but the joy of it—cartwheeling into the fields of yellow glacier lilies resting at the bottom of the vanishing glacier, and then climbing right back up to the top—sliding and playing for hours at a time, in the old world, safely distanced from the new and changing world that lies below, along the river bottoms, and in the valley of man, with nothing but joy and new wakefulness running through their blood. And though there are none of us who can tell by a certain murmuring or coursing of our own blood when it is exactly that the bears climb back up out of the earth—out of the spirit world, the natives say, and back into the world of man—I like to think that the other creatures of the forest can feel it, that they can sense it as easily as we might hear and feel the warming south winds moving through the tops of the pines.

I like to think too that that joy is as transferable, as felt and connected among all the inhabitants of the forest, as are the south thawing winds of April upon the land, and upon and among us.

 

Like any parent, I try to teach the girls moderation, economy, prudence, and forbearance. I want them to know the euphoria of unfettered joy, and the leaps of childhood, and I believe deeply in the ritual and repetition of simple physical models—like a catechism—as a means of helping train them into these patterns and ways of seeing the world. (Each evening before I go back out to work, I let them leap off the porch headlong into my arms—a six-flight leap—and each time I catch them; and midair, their faces are always, always purely radiant ... I do not want their hearts to be a stranger to the wild flights of joy...)

But I want them also to know respect and restraint, discipline and economy. (Knowing that these things are my weakness, and that they are not likely to get it naturally, not through my shared blood, anyway, I suspect at times that I work overly hard at bringing them these lessons.)

Like any children, they love to pick flowers, and because we live amid such a richness and bounty of botanical profusion, in the springtime we always have new-picked bouquets of wildflowers throughout the house. But there are responsibilities and lessons that go with their rights and privileges; they have to learn (and have learned) not to pull the whole plant up by the roots. They have to learn sensitivity and rarity. Although we have numerous trillium, they don't do well in a vase, so we don't pick them. And even though the magnificent and ornate purple and gold fairy slipper—a member of the orchid family—is abundant in this northern forest, they are much diminished elsewhere in the world, and so out of respect for their worldwide distribution, each girl picks only one per year; but I must tell you, we all enjoy the week or so that that little orchid is showcased in our kitchen, and the tradition of it speaks to April almost as much as any other.

(Later in the summer, into the full vegetative roar of the season, they will be able to pick to their hearts' content: double fistfuls of sweet-scented royal blue lupine, huge bouquets of fire-red paintbrush, cerise fireweed, pearly everlasting, and that great and common weed, the only weed for which I can find no lasting enmity, the oxeye daisy ... We gather the seed heads of yarrow too, to dry and save for use the next winter, in treating the sore throats of February and March, steeped in a hot tea...

What to make of such lessons? What hostages all children are to their parents' fears and values! I suspect that rarely there passes an hour of the day that I do not remember this, and think to myself,
What can I do to help them know more joy? What can I say or do to help present to them this lesson, or another?
And again, such fretting or consciousness derives largely, I suspect, from my own clumsiness in the world, my own misdirection and awkwardness. I want them to know the things I do not know; I want them to know grace, and as constant a peace in the world as is possible.

Our tradition with the glacier lilies is this: We try to find some for our evening salads, around Easter time. That Sunday, after the eggs have been hidden and found numerous times over, both in the house and out in the woods, we will take a walk up toward the snow line on one of the south-facing slopes, and there, walking along the snow's edge and listening to the sound of dripping water, we'll forage among the glacier lilies, as if partaking the food of the resurrection, and we'll bring home a handful to place in our salads.

Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. Maybe I'm being too rigid, too much of an eco-freak. But I try to teach them gratitude and respect. I try to remind them that these flowers are the season's first food for the bears—for the fifteen or twenty grizzlies we have left living in this valley—and I counsel them to take only one or two blossoms from each clump or cluster, as a show of respect; as a reminder, a remembrance, that we are visitors to this mountaintop and that our own needs are usually excessive, rarely as primal anymore as those of the other forest-dwellers.

I can't use that language, of course. I can just tell them to pick one or two from each clump; and to leave far more than they take. To eat some there on the mountaintop and to save some for our evening's dinner of elk steak (sometimes from that same mountain) and garden potatoes.

It's something we try to do every Easter.

I believe firmly in the sanctity of the seasons; in the promised regularity of cycles; in the bedrock foundations of loving ritual, celebrating feasts, and thanksgiving. I don't know why I feel these things so strongly—I know only that I do.

I don't have the words yet to tell or explain these things to them.

Instead, on our hike out, I show them, when I'm fortunate enough to find them, the big footprints of where the bears have been walking, and playing, and sliding in the snow.

 

Mary, the genius gardener, is coming over today to help Elizabeth design a strategy for this year's garden. Mary doesn't plant her crops in rows and columns but in a wilder mosaic, a little of this and a little of that, certain things flush up against other things, a curlicue of patterns that resembles more than anything, I think, the arrangement of lichens on a rock high in the mountains. Mary says that this "wildness" helps make the garden more resistant to pests and disease, and looking at her garden, a visitor can see that she's right; her garden is but a microcosm for the plan of this landscape itself, which comprises forests mixed with similar mosaics of diversity, and possessing, in that diversity and shared dominance, astounding richness and health.

Just across the state line, over in Idaho, our friend Julie is doing the same thing, planting corn right next to and among her beans, so that the beans will have a natural trellis—the cornstalk—to climb.

After harvest, then, it can all be turned to fallow.

I'm staring out at the garden this morning, continuing to be astounded by the notion of color, mesmerized by the irises and daffodils. Why does color even exist? Isn't it just the differential absorption and reflection of light rays falling on different surfaces? To the sun, isn't everything below just a black-and-white palette of various reflectivities and absorptions—and the pattern and arrangement of all those myriad differences as random and aswirl as the sprawl of lichens creeping across one vast boulder? Why color?

Enough navel-gazing! And yet, upon awakening from winter's grip, it's hard to stop the mind's sluggish, even feeble, stirrings. With appreciation, not petulance, you want to ask
Why?
to everything; and as when a child asks that question, there are no real and final answers, only an unending succession of the same refrain—one
Why?
leading only to the next
Why?,
and then the next.

I'm staring at the bare garden, the black earth receiving the soft morning light (filtered through fog and mist), and watching it strike the garden, and wondering which is better for a garden, morning light or evening. I'm wondering what purpose morning light plays in a garden—if, though soft and seemingly insignificant, it fulfills a function by awakening the plants' cells gradually, gently, perhaps, to some preliminary realignment of stomata that then prepares them to receive more efficiently, later on, the more rigorous photosynthesis obligations of the day, receiving that seemingly useless dull golden glow of weaker morning light as an athlete might perform seemingly menial stretching or warm-up movements before beginning heavier exercise, or as a philosopher might meditate before addressing some long-standing conundrum.

Who will ever fully know the real value, if any even exists, of morning light upon a garden?

Who will ever fully know the real value of anything?

Enough navel-gazing; too much! The green world is rising, beckoning.

And yet I cannot leave the residue of this thought; it clings to my morning mind as does a spider web when one hikes through the woods early in the day. If the sun's soft light "awakens" the garden, do the geese's cries, out in the marsh, at first light, likewise summon other things—including, perhaps, the seeds beneath the soil, and the plant cells within the stalks and leaves, goose music like a kind of sunlight (for that is what it sounds like to me, in April, sunlight)—as we too, listening to the geese's return, first stir beneath our blankets?

 

I know April is lingering on, but I can't help it, I want to savor every bite and taste of it, every fragment of flavor like the claret of a fine wine, like a communion, like a weeklong drunken wedding party. Sometimes I think that April should be the first month, the portal of the year, leading us first onward into all the other months. The one that starts everything else moving.

I will never be able to decide which is my favorite month, but I know that each year when April arrives it is as if I have been beaten down by a stranger, or a more persistent foe, and am down on my hands and knees, not yet giving up but knocked down yet again, knocked down this time for what feels like maybe for good—I'm down on my hands and knees, head ringing, thinking about, seriously, for the first time, quitting—quitting joy, quitting hope, quitting enthusiasm—but then wait, here comes a sound, a stirring in the branches, and an odor, something carried on a dampening south wind; and here, coming through the forest, is someone, or something, approaching, reaching down to give me a hand up, not because I deserve it, but because this superior force is—in April, anyway—loving, and full of gentleness, with generosity to spare; and thus summoned, and deeply grateful and mystified, I rise to one knee, and then stand.

 

The mated geese, out in the increasing emerald vibrancy of the marsh, are so elegant: white masks, black helmets; their long black necks craning up from their nests out in the marsh grass, and again those two colors, black and green, seeming to go together so well. The geese's black necks and the green reef of marsh grass, the blackened char of fire-gutted logs and the brilliant green of the fire's aftermath, the new growth.

The creature of fire itself, the salamander, possessing the lightning bolt jag of green right down the middle of its damp black-and-maroon back. Will we ever fit the world as well as do the other residents who have been here so much longer? What must it feel like to be so graceful in the world, so connected and alive?

 

Up before daylight, and working this morning, the twenty-fourth of April, not down at the marsh cabin, but in the warm house, working in silence before anyone else awakens. It snowed during the night—again, I felt the temperature of the house rise by a degree or two, as that heavy blanket of insulation was laid over the whole of the sleeping household—and in the dimness of morning's first creeping light, it is an unpleasant sight indeed to see that the world is entirely white once more, and yet again; an extremely unwelcome image to see snow atop the baby lettuce, atop the basil.

The light slides in so slowly, and as it is a slightly warmer breath than that of the night's darkness, the simple breath of it is enough, already, to begin melting the night's snow in patches, here and there. As if—so thin and insubstantial is this latest blanket of snow—the breath of one morning alone will be sufficient to erase it.

That is certainly my hope, as I watch the steam of rising sun continue to melt more and more of the night's snow. Elizabeth, like me, is ready, really ready, for spring, and because I do not want her to have to witness the rude sight of that snow atop the lettuce, I am balancing in my mind, the rate of the dawn's rapid snowmelt, and the number of minutes remaining before she awakens; hoping against hope that the two numbers might balance out so that she will not have to witness this psychologically discouraging sight of even its brief return. How does the old joke go, about how when Mama's not happy, nobody's happy?