The Wild Marsh (2 page)

Because of all this ecological mixing, this feathering of various ecosystems, the Yaak has more species diversity than any other valley in Montana; and although it's the northernmost valley in the state, it's also the lowest elevation. The Yaak enters the Kootenai, for instance, at an elevation of only 1,880 feet above sea level. It's lush despite the long northern winters; and it is in the stippled chain, the glittering necklace, of the Yaak's boggy marshes and buggy wetlands that some of the valley's and the region's greatest biodiversity is to be found.

But about those bugs: the Yaak is a biological wilderness, not a recreational wilderness. Parts of the valley have been hit hard by the previous century—it's laced with thousands of miles of old logging roads, many of which are infused with weeds, and large sections of the valley are riddled with thousands of clearcuts—some old and regenerating with dog-hair thickets, and others still new. But other, farther parts of the valley are still pristine and possess an ecological integrity—whether they burn or rot—and a wildness that is qualitatively different from those places that have been roaded and logged.

I have spent the bulk of my adult life advocating for the permanent protection of these wilder, farther places in the Yaak through the congressional designation of wilderness areas. But right here, right now, is—in this book—the only time you'll hear me carry on about any of that.

This book, unlike so many of my other Yaak-based books, aims to be all celebration and all observation, without judgment or advocacy. I'm not sure why I made that choice, with this book; perhaps in order to simply stay sane a while longer. One of the dreams and hopes I have for the Yaak is the establishment of an intricate biological survey, a series of ecological transects and measurements aimed at identifying the presence, distribution, and, if possible, population counts of as many different species as possible, to serve as a baseline data point for the coming century. As a natural historian, I wish very much that such a foundation of ecological knowledge had been established at the beginning of the 1900s, and I cannot help but believe that natural historians and scientists who fall in love with the Yaak in the year 2100 will wish just as intensely that there was some sort of usable record about the condition of this ecosystem—the nuts and bolts of it, and how it all worked—in the year 2000. I envisioned, and still do, some kind of multiyear, quasi-private, quasi-public expedition in which some of the country's, or the world's, finest scientists—lepidopterists, mammalogists, herpetologists, ichthyologists, and so forth—lead little seasonal bands of data collectors and surveyors along their transects, utilizing easily replicable scientific methods and protocols.

In the meantime, I reasoned, I could lay down a similar if not easily replicable transect across the year in a journal; though rather than bisecting the million-acre valley north to south, or east to west, I would let the valley come to me, flowing past me, and I would make notes, observations, markers embedded within the new century, beginning a few hours before the first day of the millennium. And though a fan of wilderness, I would seek also to chronicle the characteristics, movements, and patterns of the humans who inhabit this remote valley, here at one century's end and another's beginning.

Not quite Indians, really, living amid so many moose, but still, quite a bit different from the rest of the world: different enough that when you mention to someone in Montana that you're from the Yaak, he might look at you as if a hundred years ago you had said
Kootenai
or
Blackfeet, Assiniboin, Crow, Flathead,
or
Arapaho,
the questioner taking a step backwards, even, and reassessing the one thus questioned, with traces of both fear and longing, and searching for a radiant, remnant wildness.

It still surprises me to consider where I came from and how I got here: growing up in the petrochemical suburbs of Houston in the 1960s, spending weeks at a time in the summer up at the edge of the hill country, at my grandmother's, who was born in 1898—before making it out to the mountains I longed for intuitively and attending school in northern Utah, at Utah State, then being pulled back to the South, to Mississippi, where I worked as a geologist for some years before getting in my truck one day and simply leaving, striking out back west, partly drawn and partly seeking, and aiming for the biggest, blankest spot of green on the map I could find, wandering all the way to the literal end of this country to do so. Falling in love with it at first sight and settling in, in fits and starts: a newcomer at first, but all of a sudden, or with what seems a suddenness, having become an old-timer as others fall back and away. It's always been a hard place to make a living, and to live year-round.

 

I remember when I was a small child, perhaps six or seven, riding with my mother in the car, in Houston. Let's suppose it was 1964, or thereabouts. For one reason or another, the topic of the year 2000 came up, and I asked her if I would still be alive. "You will be," she said, laughing. "You'll be forty-two"—a number that of course seemed at that time depressingly, impossibly, old. "You won't be a young man anymore," she said, "but you'll have seen some things by that time"—and I remember asking her how old she'd be, and whether she'd still be alive then.
Maybe,
she said,
hopefully. Probably.
Sixty-six.

She would have been around thirty at the time of this conversation, and still a long way even from forty-two herself. She died several years ago, and as the millennium approached, she was much on my mind. I was filled with a feeling both large and hollow, crossing over that not-insubstantial line by myself—or rather, without her. Of the two of us who began that conversation, only one has continued it; though in my heart, as that date appeared, it was a small solace to know that even nearly four decades ago she took the time to consider it, and I can recall the thoughtful look she gave the subject as she answered my child's questions.

 

It's not just for the scientists of the future that I've profiled the passage of a year, here in a northern land still fortunate enough to have four full seasons despite the rising tide of the world's increasing heat, the ever-increasing global exhalations of warmth and carbon. I like to imagine that this record has value, in a scrapbook sort of way, to my family, and to others who will in the future inhabit, and love, the Yaak. Often, particularly as I grow older, I am aware of wanting to share with my children little secrets, little points of interest, about the valley—where the huckleberries are best in a dry year, or late in the summer; where the elk are in November; where the wolves dig their dens; where the grizzly claw marks are on the old cedar—and that the passing on of such knowledge constitutes a transfer of some of the most valuable currency, other than love, possible; that the transfer of that kind of intimate and place-based knowledge, the knowledge of home,
is
a kind of love, and rarer and more valuable now certainly than silver or gold.

Some days I worry that there is a sand-through-the-hourglass effect to such observations, and the passing on of that knowledge; that though the knowledge might be passed on to the next generation, and the next, so rapid now are the ecological changes in the West, so severe the dissolution of various biological underpinnings as one piece after another is pulled from the puzzle, the map, of previous integrity, that the future will render such knowledge irrelevant: as if, already, I am describing things that are gone-away, or going-away.

But one of the key components of love is hope—enduring hope—and to let fear replace hope would be a bitter defeat indeed, a kind of failure in its own stead.

Already, nearly a full decade has come and gone since I set out on this project, undertaken when Mary Katherine was eight and Lowry, five—after much anticipation, the millennium got here so quickly, and then passed, even more so—and it is with no small degree of wonder and bittersweet reflection that I look back now across the unknowing divide of then and now, to a pre-September 11 time when we thought we were ready for the future, and possessed what already, in near retrospect, appears to have been a phenomenal, if unsustainable, pre-millennial amount of innocence.

I'm struck also by the prevalence of euphoria in these pages—the exhausting, exhilarating cycles of ever-ascending, as the seasons, and the valley, deliver more beauty, and more bounty, with each passing day. Who was the young man, or younger man, who wrote those pages?

I like to believe he was the same one who reads these pages now: who had the luxury, there at century's turn, of slowing down for just a moment, and paying attention. That he was an observer to whom innocence was not an impediment, nor wonder and unknowingness a liability. As if each day, no matter what the season or century, we each and every one stand always on the other side of such a divide.

W
E'RE HAVING FRIENDS OVER
for New Year's Eve, as we usually do. Not a lot—just the Janssens, the Dailys, the Linehans. The Janssens' two children, Tyler and Wendy, as well. There's food and music, and, hellions that we are, we're playing Pictionary and Scattergories. We've got apple cider for the children, and beer and wine and margaritas for the adults. There's a lot of food, and it's all incredible. We joke about the sign that was out on the marquee in front of the Ben Franklin store down in Libby:
SHOP NOW, THE END IS NEAR.
All year long we've been amused by the flurry of activity, nationally—folks buying generators (as if the supply of the gasoline required to run them would not be disrupted) and hundred-pound bags of navy beans, and fifty-gallon barrels for rain catchment. Gold bullion, extra ammo, and that kind of thing. It's so strange to see the rest of the world scrambling to prepare for an attempt, a possible attempt, to live, for an indefinite and frightened period, the way we live day in and day out. I'm not quite sure how to explain the feeling. For a fact, we take both pleasure and pride in feeling set aside from the rest of the world and the confusions of civilization—
it's why we're here
—and it's slightly disconcerting to feel the world rotating as if to assimilate itself, even temporarily, to our worldview and practices. It makes us feel less an island, less isolated. Less independent, even as we understand, upon any kind of examination at all, that there is no absolute independence, that it is all only relative.

What it feels like, in a subtle way, is that the world is joining up with us, when we do not
want
the world to join up with us; it's why we left the world.

 

Around ten o'clock, the lights go out, just as everyone has been predicting they would when the new century turns over and all those computers freak out. Power grids collapsing, satellites falling from the sky, bank accounts spinning to zero point zero. There's no punch line, no alarm or surprise for even the briefest and most delicious of moments—we all understand that because we're off the grid, there's no way this power outage can have anything to do with any computer in the world. Or can it? Are even the generators wired somehow to acknowledge this computerized doomsday meltdown? But still, the darkness is sudden and absolute, and, laughing, we light the candles and pass out the flashlights that are always a staple in any of the homes up here. The main propane generator is down, and we've been using the backup gasoline generator, and it's run out of gas, is all; I walk out into the silence of hard-falling snow, away from the party and my friends, and visit with my mother above for a while before refilling the generator and starting it back up. She's been gone nine years and still it doesn't seem right; still I see things almost every day that I think how much she would enjoy or be amused by. Sometimes it even seems that I will see her again.

When I go back inside, my friends are visiting with great animation. There's just something about candles, and though I announce that the power's back on, there's no rush to turn the lights back on, and indeed, we realize that we prefer the candles.

It's snowing like a son of a bitch. We haven't had much snow yet down in the valley, just rain (though up in the mountains, for the last couple of months, it's been snowing steadily). Today however it's been coming down all day: almost a foot and a half so far, and it's still coming down harder than ever. There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards—the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty. It's quite possible our guests won't be able to get out of the driveway when it comes time to leave, but so what? That's what the holidays, and the end of the century, are for.

It seems like something from a fairy tale—such a soft, heavy, calming snow, one of the heaviest and most beautiful snowfalls I've ever seen. And how wonderful it seems, if this evening is somehow near the end of the old world as we knew it, that that end should come not in fire or chaos but with silent, beautiful burial. We're all becalmed. We all feel joy. All the year's despairs—and there have been many; who among us does not carry them in great quantity, days?—feel swept clean, or even better than that, not merely hidden or absolved but transformed, covered with beauty, converted to beauty. As if all failure or disappointment or hunger or absence has been redeemed.

I go back out to check on the generator and then stand in the falling snow for a long time. I haven't felt this happy in a good long while—and best of all, I'm happy for no reason.

I go back inside, with an inch or more of snow on my shoulders from just the brief time spent outside. We continue to browse on the bounty of food, to drink and joke and visit. All of our discussions are of the future: our hopes, our certainty of joy. We play board games, games of skill and chance, all night, and on toward the gray morning.

The children wander into the forest with sparklers in the last hour before light. It's still snowing hard. We set off a single firework, a large one, hissing and sputtering and smoking upward into the illuminated sky of falling snow, sparks and traces of light streaming and clattering in incandescent blossoms. Our friends embrace us and then drive home, their trucks all but buried beneath the mounds of snow, and even after they are gone, we do not feel alone, can feel them lingering, and we clean the dishes and wander up the steps in the morning light, to rest for a while. The century has ended, the century has begun.