The Wild Marsh (29 page)

I sit in my cool, dark cabin at the edge of the marsh, staring out at all the green light, and feel sometimes like a hunter in a blind, just waiting.

Some days nothing comes; but in all of the many thousands of hours I've been seated in this chair, at the edge of one of the most productive ecosystems in the world, it seems there is little I haven't seen, at one time or another, across the years. Black bears wandering through the marsh, bull moose walking past the window, golden eagles striking Canada geese, ruffed grouse drumming on my picnic table beneath the shade of the big alder, a mountain lion running through the woods with a dappled deer fawn in its jaws, a herd of elk passing single file through the deep snow, and on, and on: all seen through either of these two main windows, each like a periscope into the wilder, fuller world that I hold at bay the first half of each day so that I can submerge vertically into the dreamland of writing, but a wilder, fuller world that I can then reenter in the second half of each day and can wander horizontally and laterally.

It is a strange dynamic, to sit and wait and look at such a beautiful image, and to be eager to get back out into it—to taste and feel and smell it, to hike across it, and camp in it, and explore—and yet, for the first half of each day, to be merely sitting there at its edge, looking up from time to time and watching it and trying to resubmerge into a place of dreams, not entirely like the landscape or terrain or moods of the night before's sleep...

July, more than any month, is rich enough, and long enough, to accommodate this duality. In every way, it is a bridge between two worlds, and two seasons, and two rhythms or paces: and again, this quality of surging bounty, surging excess, is even more exaggerated here at the marsh's rich edge.

Day after day I sit in this same chair, often ignoring my work and instead literally just watching the grass grow. I
listen
to the grass grow, and watch the shade deepen as the leaves and needles of all the trees around me continue to grow, spreading wider and wider, making more and more shade for my little cabin, even as the bowl of green light that is the marsh, the basin, grows ever warmer and brighter.

The winds that pick up in July are like nothing but the breath of a large animal moving or laboring: bellows of noisy, heated wind building in strength all through the course of each day, bending branches and limbs and needles, causing them to grow stronger, I think, forcing them to hold on if they are to survive.

As the short growing seasons and shady old-forest conditions up here help create a tighter-grained wood, with its growth rings closer together than in other places—a higher-quality, stronger wood—so too perhaps are even our leaves, our needles, stronger, denser, different: for how can the story of an organism be different from the story of its cells, and vice versa?

The new leaves dip and dance and flutter in these ferocious July winds, but they hold on. The branches shake in July, but filled with sap, they are limber and do not snap. The alder leaves, particularly, shading my eastern window, blow wildly, out on the little point, and shudder a crazy, flashing, dancing green light across the inside of my cabin—across my face and arms—and that flashing lulls me, almost hypnotizes me. Unlike the leaves, I'm able to relax, and let go, and sink a little deeper, releasing myself from the branch of the day
and any damning awareness of time, and for a little while, as that green July dancing light bathes me, I sink down into a place where I can rework both time and space, or at least where it feels as if that's the case.

Early in the morning, and then on through the middle of the morning, all the birds will be singing from around the marsh's perimeter, and chirping and trilling and chipping from back in the forest. The Townsend's warbler, a vivid yellow-breasted, yellow-hooded, black-masked male, is my sentinel, year after year, July after July, perched on the same branch, surveying this one marsh and singing that same song, day after day and year after year—
weazy weazy weazy weazy twee
—a sound that for me announces and unlocks the middle of summer, the heart of summer, as surely as if a key has unlocked a door that has then swung open to reveal a vast and unexplored chamber, a great room; for even as every July is always the same, so too is there always something newly seen or discovered or experienced in each one, always. And even as the other birds begin to fall silent under the oppression of rising heat, the Townsend's warbler, way out there on the point, just keeps on singing, as if he cannot help it, as if he cannot stop—and in that rising heat, the winds continue to increase accordingly, proportionately, bending the marsh grass flat, as if sweeping across the fur of an animal, ruffling it this way and that, with swirls of ever-changing text scrolling across the tops of the tall green marsh grass so that it appears as if a giant hand is scribing quickly, then erasing almost immediately, some hidden text out on the living canvas or tablet of the marsh—

And these sounds, the lone Townsend's warbler and the rushing of the wind, also allow me to sink deeper, to ignore time and to turn my back on my beloved physical world, and to travel down once again into the other land of pretend and make-believe and what if...

Sometimes, in July, I don't make it all the way down into that netherworld of story and imagination and instead, like a fish in a blue lake, descend only halfway, just beneath the reach of the sun, and hang there suspended, in that perfect interface between darkness and light, so that someone looking down from above would
not even notice that fish, which would seem to be part of the depths itself.

On those days, it will seem to me that I could will myself just a little lower, and I would be there, in story-land—but so beautiful and engaging is that upper world, particularly in July, that I just don't want to let go. And so I'll hang there, finning, in the interface between the two, able to ease down a little deeper if need be, but able also to begin rising slowly back to the surface if need be: if opportunity arises.

Anything can lift me back into the green world, in July. The sandal-flopping sound of the girls hurrying down the path to my cabin, wanting me to come out and play. The barking of my dogs. The snort of a doe out in the marsh, or the cawing of the ravens.

Other sounds, though, send me deeper, down where I need to be—or rather, where I need to be if I am to get any writing done. The heat itself, its steady increase buffered by the cool and shade of my cabin but rising nonetheless, is like a blanket being laid over me, urging me downward; and beyond my cabin, as the day progresses, the heat is such that the birds fall silent, even the Townsend's warbler, for a while.

Though as with my own sleepy, suspended ambiguity—the landscape and me in synchrony, in this rhythm or pace—the darkness tries to rise back into the overpowering light, and the cool shade tries to ease back out into the heat: for as the day's winds stir across the tall marsh grass, gusting and combing the tall grass in those indecipherable directions, the wind lifts from the roots of the grass the scented, secret coolness that has been lingering there, beneath all the light above. The wind searches out, finds, and lifts up the last of those cool green shadows and scents from deep within the marsh grass and swirls them across the marsh and through my open windows, even as I gaze out at a paradoxical vision of dazzling heat and brilliance; and in the going away, the giving up, for that day anyway, of the marsh's last coolness—the dying of the last of that day's coolness, not to be resurrected until dark—I'm able to descend that last remaining short distance into the lull of writing-land, and pretend-land. And in that new silence, the absence of birdsong, there is now only the rush and roar of that summer wind,
a wind so strong it seems to be generated from the bowl of the marsh itself, this strange prairie landscape deep in the dark north woods—and that steady, roaring sound allows me to sink still deeper.

And again, for all its roaring, the wind itself pauses, as if wanting to be two things, to do two things: to make its lovely rushing, roaring, sweeping sound, and yet to also admire and observe silence. Often through the course of a July day, the winds will stop for a while—as if the weight of the heat that has spawned them finally oppresses them too for a bit—and in that lull, and despite the heat, the Townsend's warbler will begin to sing again, as if calling out to the heat, or as if frantic to fill the space of that lovely midday silence. As if he cannot help himself.

And though he will be perched right by my open window, and though his call is sharp and strident and clear and urgent, I am usually too far gone, by that point, too lulled and waterlogged, sunk to the bottom of the sea like some ancient wreck; and the sound of his call will sound much more muffled and distant than it did only a few hours earlier, when I first sat down at my desk and began staring out at the brilliance beyond.

 

First baby robins on the porch, where they fledge each year, first Pacific tree frog in the garden, seeking each day now the watering can's moisture. First bellflower blooms, first twinflower, first monkshood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. First wild strawberries—so much color!—and, unfortunately, but inescapably, the first blossoms of hawkweed, a noxious invasive weed that is infinitely more aggressive than even the scourge of knapweed and thistle. Knapweed's bad, invading dry sites and displacing native grass directly—nothing eats knapweed, and as it spreads, it chokes out the grasses that the elk herds rely on—but the hawkweed grows everywhere, dry or wet, shade or sun, and seems to know no limits. It displaces all of the complex and crafted native flowering plants—lupine, bellflower, kinnikkinnick, paintbrush, yarrow, Oregon grape, wild strawberry—and while it's bad enough, from a biological perspective, the colonization seems also to taunt a lover of wildness and diversity from an aesthetic standpoint, for the blossoms of the hawkweed, by itself, are beautiful: a brilliant, almost hallucinogenic orange, the roadsides and old logging roads now ablaze in July like fields of poppies.

(Though in those monochromatic sweeps of such rich, even luscious orange, I think that even someone unfamiliar with the ecology of the region might sense the ominous danger beneath that beauty, might notice the mosaic of diversity throughout the forest and notice the homogenous and wide blazes of orange as the anomaly, and the dis-uniter, and not possessing the cohesive cooperating, fitted spirit of the place, no matter how beautiful the orange might seem, in and of itself.)

So there is a sleepiness in July, a summer leisure—an in-betweenness—though there is also the beginning, already, even in the midst of summer vacation, of a rising responsibility; for those weeds must be picked, if not sprayed. And for as long as we can combat them by hand, we will, for it seems that to bring spray and poison into our lives, and near the marsh, with its tender amphibians, and into our watershed, and our lives, would be to admit defeat—what good are the natives, if they possess poison in their veins? And even if we did decide to try to poison the hawkweed and knapweed and dandelion and thistle, and this year, increasingly, the St. John's wort, the same poison that kills these broadleaf weeds would also kill the natives.

Instead, we pick. We get down on our hands and knees in the tall waving grasses of July, and pull up, by the matted, tuberous roots, the insidious runners of moisture-robbing hawkweed. Like hunters, we know where the weeds are likely to recur each year, and we keep pulling them, hoping to weaken and stress them so that the natives can outcompete them. We remain vigilant for new outcrops too. Our battle is just one tiny battle in the wilderness here at marsh's edge—we will change nothing, will at best only buy a little more time—but we have not yet reached a level of acceptance at which doing nothing is tolerable, and so we pick, and pick, in July: kneeling in the mixture of tall grass and weeds, surrounded by mosquitoes, sweating, pulling, stuffing trash bags full of weeds. It is such a break-even battle—some years, our progress is visible, though each year, we have to pull harder, and again, from the entire
landscape's perspective, two million acres of national forest, so ultimately futile, that we realize early on our efforts are really like nothing else so much as prayer and penance to that landscape: a sort of Zen exercise, or tithing to the land, and to the marsh. Though I can't help but wonder too, some years, if the truly Zen or prayerful thing to do would be to stop fighting loss and change and to simply let the weeds of the world come rolling in.

Each year, however—each July—I pick each weed, every weed, that I see, on our property at least, as well as on my hikes through the woods; and I suspect that even when I am old, I will still be picking them, out of some deep and stubborn allegiance to my own perhaps arbitrary and singular concepts of integrity. And I think that it is not that I hate weeds so much as it is that I love this landscape, this incredible ecosystem, so deeply, just as it is—in the fullness of its incredibly unique diversity, ten thousand years in the making.

What I mean to say is, even the weed pulling in July is one of the ways I relate to this landscape now, is an aspect, a component, of that relationship, so that it is not even so much a matter of whether I "win" or "lose" (I'll lose, for sure; no one can defeat time) but rather that I continue on in that relationship, according to my beliefs and values, for as long as I am able—which, I like to imagine, is for as long as I am alive.

 

July is its own month too, in addition to being a bridge between others—July is the hammock, July is a crowded West, happy people on vacation, crowded gas pumps in town, crowded gas stations, crowded trailheads—and yet July, perhaps more than any other month, seems to me also to be connected, almost like a twin, to the month that will succeed it. Or July is that way with regard to fire, at any rate. Sometimes, in a dry year, July is the month of the first fires, but usually up here it is the last month before the fires—and while it would be concise and neat to partition the twelve months into equal wedges of pie, it's hard to do that because of the incredibly primal, elemental, and dramatic force of fire (the destroyer and creator both). The coming fires are always somewhat on our minds, upon this landscape, in any month, just as those who live in farming
country are almost always aware, even if calmly, of the year's running total of precipitation, and in this regard too we are farmers of a sort, though we seek not so much to grow any certain crop as to simply receive the merciful precipitation for its own sake: the snows of winter and the rains of spring sculpting this Pacific Northwest forest, and in that lushness, that excess and rank bounty and splendor, shaping our moods, our culture, our days.