The Wild Marsh (3 page)

It keeps snowing; it just keeps pouring down, not like any meteorological phenomenon but as if some dense and infinite reservoir above has been opened with a knife and the snow is pouring out through that rip as fast as it can, falling like feathers—snowflakes falling so hard and steady that it seems they are stacking up on each other even as they are falling. No such collisions occur, however—each snowflake shifts and slides, does whatever it takes in that falling curtain of snow to keep from merging with the others. Standing out in such snow, you can watch any of those ten thousand flakes, and any one of them will reveal to you how isolated and independent it is; but it's no matter, you need only to take one blink and refocus on the whole to see what a vain and ridiculous myth that is; one blink, and a slight step backwards, will reveal the truth to you, that it is all but one wall of sameness, in the end, and that the much-vaunted structural differences of any two crystalline flakes are of no real importance, in the end; it all becomes compressed and molded into sameness once the flake has fallen to earth.

Still, we watch, soothed and lulled, and unable, for long moments, to turn away. It's more mesmerizing than fire. You feel that you can stare at it forever. You feel it binding you with its stillness, pulling you down and into that sleeping sameness, and yet you are not afraid.

 

It snows without pausing for ten days. A week into the blizzard, my friends Tom and Tim and I travel down to the big river that bounds the valley to the south, to drift in Tim's boat, to hunt ducks and geese one last time before the season ends.

I'll never be able to explain the hunter's paradox. It's one of the most wonderful feelings of the season, to shoot and take with skill a bird from flight—to have your dog plunge into the icy, mist-steaming river and retrieve that beautiful bird, and to take it home and pluck it and clean it and prepare it for dinner—and yet even that really matters not at all, compared to the truly important thing of being out on the open river with your friends, deep into the new heart of winter, winter still only beginning, and the forest and the mountains shrouded with the stunning brilliance of all that snow; to be drifting around each new bend, early on a cold morning, watching and waiting for the explosion of wings—mallards, usually, or goldeneyes, or, once or twice a season, Canada honkers.

To be drifting, visiting with your friends in low voices, with the dogs shivering both from the cold and the anticipation, and the bald eagles lined up like soldiers in the giant cottonwoods up and down either side of the river, and the great blue herons gliding through the fog with prehistoric grunts and croaks as they leave their morning rookery, the dawn sky aswarm with fifteen, twenty giant birds at a time, coming and going in all directions.

The bird—the duck, or the goose—doesn't matter, any more than one of those snowflakes matters. All that's important is being out on the river with friends, and strengthened by that, in the heart of winter, at the end of one year, and the beginning of another one.

The scent of old Tom's little cigar. The sight of him and that winter cigar as familiar as his old-fashioned straw rucksack. The way Tim, a fishing guide, rows so expertly, so effortlessly. The sunlight on the snowy hills above Rainy Creek. The sharklike dorsal fin of a trout swirling in the steamy river, just ahead of our bow. The cold iron of the guns in our hands, and the anticipation, and the silences.

This year I'm rowing when we spot, in the fog ahead, and on the far side of the river, the high arched necks of a sentinel goose, and then beyond that goose, the huddled shapes of half a dozen more, resting off the point of a gravel island that is shrubbed over with young cottonwoods and willows.

All year long, Tim guides for a living. He rarely, if ever, gets to hunt or fish for himself. But now the season's over; this is his time, his one hunt. He's the world's nicest man. He would never put himself before anyone. But as his friend, I'm able to insist that for once he consider himself, and his dog; that he take pleasure in hunting, and for his own sake, rather than forever leading others to the hunt.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this, but it's like this is his big chance finally. The guiding season is over; this is the busman's holiday. In some sense, this is what he's been waiting for, and working toward, all season long—though he would never tell you that, or even admit it to himself; truly, he loves to guide.

But now we've got seven geese stationed downstream of the point, and they don't know we're coming. It's Tim's one chance.

We drop Tom off at the head of the little island so that he'll be able to get a passing shot at any birds that might fly upstream. Then Tim and I ease downstream, with me laboring to row as quietly as possible—each stroke a prayer, water trickling quietly off the blades of the oars, and the half-submerged cottonwoods sliding past, the current carrying us down toward that point where the geese are tucked away, unsuspecting, on the back side. I very much want Tim to get a bird—to take something, after a season. Two seasons—summer and fall—of nothing but giving, and because I'm a poor and inexperienced paddler, I'm taking extra care to be quiet, and am concentrating extra hard on making the right strokes and aiming the boat properly.

Up in the bow, as we draw nearer, Tim is beginning to allow himself the pleasure of anticipation; he crouches lower and lower, grows more serious, and I can see him entering that zone that hunters enter in the last moment before the final engagement with, and taking of, their quarry. The place that defines them as hunters. That place inside them intersecting with the place of their quarry. A ritual, a ceremony, an act more ancient than the hammering of steel against stone; as ancient as lifting one's hand to one's mouth with food.

What we'd planned to do was drift right on down to the point, snug to the shore; and upon passing the point, Tim would rise and fire at the geese, which would have leapt into flight at the first glimpse of us. But just before that point is reached, we change our strategy. There's a little slot leading in to the island, and it occurs to us that we can pull the boat in there, get out on foot and skulk to the other side, and flush the birds in that manner. Tim points to the slot, whispers to me, and I change course and start in toward that slip, just as he shakes his head to say,
No, never mind.

But I'm not proficient enough with the boat to change course so quickly or easily; I'm still struggling to maneuver it into the slot, and it turns out I'm not even successful with that; instead, I row us up over the stump of a beaver-chewed cottonwood, scraping our hull and stranding us high-centered atop that gnawed stump; and at the sound of our misfortune, the great birds honk loudly and leap into flight on the other side of the island. From a distance, we can just see glimpses of them passing upriver, flying low across the water and bellowing their dismay.

I signal to Tim to charge on through the young cottonwoods—perhaps not all of the geese have left yet—and he splashes through the water, waist deep, gains the island. His dog Lily is leaping along beside him—they're making a huge ruckus—and he crashes through the young whips of cottonwoods, but it's like a bad dream: he can't close the distance in time, they're gone, I've let him down, and a few seconds later, we hear Tom begin to shoot, upriver:
pow pow,
reload,
pow pow.

Now a swarm of goldeneyes comes wheeling past us, flying ninety to nothing, and Tim turns on those birds, fires twice, misses, reloads. In the boat, still stranded atop that stump, I pick up my gun, load, and get a shot at one of the trailing ducks, but miss. Tim fires twice more as a new batch wings past, misses twice, and upriver, Tom fires again, once, then twice, and then all the birds are gone; and when we wander, embarrassed by our poor shooting, up to where we've left Tom at the top of the island—dead-eye Tom, who never misses—we find that he's embarrassed also: not a bird has fallen, not a single feather cut.

There's nothing to do but laugh. We stand there in the falling snow and laugh, even as I've got that hollow feeling of having fucked up. I almost got Tim in on the birds. He doesn't care that it didn't work out, but I do. I really wanted him to get a bird. It's the end of the season, and that was his one good chance.

They stand there in the snow, laughing, and then we wade back out to the boat and continue on down the river, watching for more birds, though we see none. It's snowing so hard now that we can't see either shore, and the sky is the same color as the river; all is a swirl of falling snow, so that it seems as if we're falling sideways, falling from the sky, being blown through the sky, and it is the river, or time, that is standing still.

A patch of sunlight, an opening, appears in the storm. Ducks are flying through it—a flock of goldeneyes. Tom, the good shot, stands up and fires, and hits one. Lily leaps into the current, swims out, and retrieves it. Then we reenter the curtain of snow: snow falling so wet and hard and fast that it's an inch high on the barrels of our guns. We're just rowing blindly. Tim and I won't get a duck that day, but it doesn't matter. Maybe next year.

 

Work—writing—is hard, in January. The words come no more or less easily, but the physical act of hunkering next to the dull-glowing fire in the pissant wood stove out in the drafty log cabin where I work, candles fluttering in the cold, hands and feet chilled so much that often I prop my feet up right by the flames, and have to stop and tuck one bare hand or another under my armpit, or hold it perilously close to the flame, midsentence, before being able to continue on with the sentences, is just plain hard.

During the deepest of freezes—generally anything colder than ten below—the cabin's uninhabitable, even for a few minutes at a time, and so then I'll arise at two or three o'clock each morning so I can work in the warmth of the house, downstairs, before anybody awakens, finishing by daylight, in time to make the school run, before returning home disoriented and weary to nap for half an hour or so.

Out of such irregularity, a rhythm eventually develops. It is a rhythm of fatigue, as you're stretched thinner and thinner by the odd hours. This couples with the natural insomnia that plagues many of us in winter and combines with the brilliant full moon to lure you into another world entirely different from the one most of the rest of the country's engaged with. Add to this the fact that you're frequently working on short stories or novels, in which that part of your world, though believed in deeply, is entirely made up, and the results can be very disruptive to your grasp on reality. You become convinced that the bears, who for the most part don't fight January but instead sleep straight through it, have it right; and that the animals that migrate are also wiser than us.

Like a prisoner, or a puppet, or some brute utterly lacking in imagination, you reel on through January, enraptured by its beauty, but always, it seems, unmindful of the cost: spending energy in January that will then not be present in February.

 

Not every day is frigid. There are some, many, when I can and do work out in my cabin, out at the marsh's edge. On the warmest mornings, the mornings when it has snowed the night before and the new snow rests atop the cabin like the warmest quilt in the world, I'll often work for two or three hours before the sheet of snow above me—warmed by the faint heat of my old stove, and the candles, and my own breath—begins to creak and moan—the ice-skin between tin roof and snow becoming slick, viscous, and then suddenly the whole shittaree releasing, with the beautiful curve and arc of a whole rooftop of snow cascading past my window, followed immediately by a sparkling shower of smaller ice crystals in the big slab's wake, crystals shimmering like fairy dust. And then more snow still falls from the highest reaches of the sky, ready and able to begin replacing again, replenishing immediately all that just slid down the roof, and more...

The only thing that keeps me from exulting fully in this nearly complete burial of the old world is my concern for the deer. (The same deer that, make no mistake about it, I love to hunt and eat.) In this kind of weather, amid so much snow, the deer will ease into the shelter of the last groves of the oldest forests, which, with their closed canopies above, provide much-needed refuge from the deep snows that pile up in the younger forests. As these large groves of old growth become fewer in the world, however, and farther between one another, the deer (and elk and moose) have less sanctuary in times of such acute stress, and they sometimes take shelter in the smaller groves of old growth, where the mountain lions can then target them easily. In this manner, it is as if the deer have wandered into a trap and become more vulnerable than ever: doomed by the thing they are relying on to save them.

Often, I wish I could let go of my worries for the wild world, letting go in the same manner as the snow sliding from the steep roof of the cabin. I wish I did not have a sense of duty; I wish I were oblivious to the feeling of obligation toward these last wildlands tucked here and there in the national forests, and could instead only glory in them, without almost always feeling the need to argue, and fight, for their continued existence.

I wish I could simply drink in this landscape like a glutton: gulping it down, simply taking it, without having to return anything.

I don't know. Maybe I don't wish that after all.

 

My sociability, limited though it is, hits full peak in January; at its apogee, I might go and visit a friend, or friends, two or three days in a row, or four times in a week. I love how frail and lonely I get under January's great snowy claw; we all do. My friend Bill is a master telemark skier, and for these past couple of winters he has been giving me lessons in the backcountry of our favorite mountain. We ski up through the forest, and carefully across the avalanche slopes, keeping to the edge of the forest for relative safety, climbing sometimes for two hours, sweating like horses, in order to gain a ten-minute ride down—but what a beautiful climb it is. And though the ten minutes whiz past on our way down, such is the amount of beauty and joy that's compressed into that little wedge of time that it almost doesn't seem to matter how ridiculously short it was.