The Wild Marsh (34 page)

Dragonflies rise from those dying tangles of swords, seemingly as infinite as the grass blades and sedges themselves, and they alone are the only movement out over the great plain of the marsh, swirling in no ordered migration but merely each to his or her whirling and clattering own, stirred by the heat, and filling the air with the sunlit prism-glitter of their lace wings, each dragonfly illuminated in this manner as if lit from within, as if burning, and as if fueled by that beautiful jewel-fire.

Even from a distance of four or five hundred yards, clear across to the other side of the marsh, your eye can fall on, and watch, the flight of any one individual dragonfly, filled as it is with its own corona, and with the cool, dark blue-green of the old spruce forest standing as backdrop.

The sight of all those dragonflies is calming, as the marsh always is, and it occurs to me that often it is the two poles of the extreme that becalm us; that we can be led to serenity by austerity, and yet we can also be comforted by extreme bounty: the fruit stand with its bushels full of vibrant color and rich odor and supple textures, the full smokehouse with its hanging array of meats, the full woodpile, the immense and diverse green-leafed garden...

As if we are trying to find a way—a confidence—to live in the more complicated space between these two larger, more visible, more nameable primary poles or places, the black and the white. As if—still so relatively new to the world—we are not yet fully accustomed to the middle ground and its mosaics of subtlety and paradox.

How can we love a kind of animal such as a deer or an elk and yet love to eat it too—and worse yet, or so it seems, love to hunt it, even to kill it? How can we love the deep wilderness, the places
where there will never be roads, and yet love the museums and concert music halls, the fine restaurants?

These vast distances, these extraordinary poles—these dramas of boom and bust, of rank wilderness solitude and exploration, and of seething humanity, are the easy things to love, the things that clamor for our attention. I suspect that one of our more unobserved challenges as humans—as a species—lies not so much in the noisy explorations of those occasional and highly visible dramas, but in how well we pass through the middle ground, the quiet days: the drift between the rapids, and the lovely distances between flood and forest fire and blizzard.

 

This is the last place there will be water. Even when the creeks and rivers themselves are but dry racks of bones, shining cobbled and white beneath the eye of the drought, and beneath the prolonged accumulating weight of climatic change, the peaty depths of the marsh will almost always retain some moisture, deep in its earthen breast of the centuries.

Yet even the marsh will not be here forever. As it slowly dries, the trees standing at its edges—nurtured by the marsh's center—will fall into the center, sinking and rotting, and feeding the marsh grasses; feeding, in their decomposition, the sun-struck, waterlogged soup that helps support, like a puff of warm breath, all those beautiful clattering dragonflies, and so much more: geese and moose and wolves and deer, warblers and vireos. But eventually, if a drying spell continues for a long enough time, the rate of rot will slow and the tree carcasses will begin forming soil.

Seedlings will take root in the nurse-log carcasses of the fallen, and will rise, living long enough to provide some shade, which will be the beginning of the end for the marsh. The process is called eutrophication, and is one of the slowest nongeologic organic processes I can think of. It might take thousands of years, until one day—was it really only the blink of an eye?—the marsh will be a buried lens of coal, a lake of brittle carbon beneath ten thousand feet of time.

 

We want stability, we want reassurance, we want knowledge. And yet how frail we are, really, how wonderfully we quake and tremble beneath the fullness of emotions (or knowledge), purely felt or deeply known—wavering beneath such weight like windswept grass, or as if in ecstasy. This is part of what it is like to be human, so new to the world, and all in all, I do not think I would trade it for the quiet confidence of the other animals, so much more assured in the world and in the seasons; though I have to say, there are times when I envy them the majesty of that assurance, and that instinctual knowledge: those whose reservoirs are so much deeper and older than our own still developing wells.

I think that to look down on the larger passage of time—beyond a day, beyond a season or a year or a lifetime, or even the quick shudder of human existence—and to see not only all the geese drifting south in their annual migrations and all the elk winding down single file off the mountain, through the deep snow, but to see simultaneously the larger drifts of geologic and meteorological change, and of speciation, to see even the slight and gradual canting wobble of the planet itself, would be both sublime and terrifying, and too magnificent—for now—to even imagine.

 

By August, the weeds, their own kind of fire, have been mostly pulled. Left untended, they are like a kind of double fire, or eternal dead fire, rather than the rhythmic, living pulse of true fire. They displace the native plants and grasses and give nothing in return—nothing eats them, and often the August-brittle clot of them, explosive with seed heads, acts as a kind of fuse, making a thick mat of extremely flammable fine fuel buildup that can carry a fire quickly in places where it would not otherwise creep or travel. The weeds are the sign of an injured landscape, a harbinger of loss, and a great compromise: of trading the specific for the general, the acutely crafted for the abstract. Fecund plenitude for sterile paucity.

Grant me the serenity to differentiate between the things I can and cannot change,
goes one famous prayer; and the encroachment of weeds lies somewhere in the nebulous middle, sometimes on one side of the line and other times on the other. I don't know if I can keep the weeds out of the land I perceive myself to be most responsible for—the relative postage stamp of land that I own, which is
to say, live on, and pay taxes on—but I can try, and each year as I fight that battle, pulling the weeds—knapweed, hawkweed, thistle, St. John's wort, and dandelions—I do not so much delude myself into thinking I can hold back the tide, the drift, of their own movements, but instead look at that annual work, the dozens of hours spent on hands and knees in ultra-close proximity to the ground, grubbing and pulling, as a kind of sacrament, or insignificant tithing, or even a modest kind of prayer.

There are those who will say that change is inevitable, and that weeds are nature too, but I am not sure I would agree. For me, there is already plenty of change just in the normal cycles of the seasons, and in the infinite and specific time-crafted cycles within each day of those seasons. It's my observation that the weeds fragment and isolate and disconnect those other, more supple and interconnected changes, and that it can be said then that not only are the weeds enemies of life beyond themselves (they prepare the land for nothing other than more of themselves) but enemies of change as well.

Even a glacier, with its frozen cap of hundreds of feet of blue ice, would be more loving and life-giving than the weeds, as the glacier growled slowly over the stony world below, grinding and carving out great buried hanging valleys and magnificent cirques and rivers and mountain ranges, all to be revealed tens of thousands of years later, once the glacier retreated, like the lifting of a sheet; like the unveiling of a work of art a hundred thousand years or more in the making.

 

Eventually, however, the weeds are vanquished. Perhaps, like some foolish machine, you have traded the hours of your life for the lives of weeds—or rather, the lives of weeds in the one small patch of ground for which you've decided to assume responsibility. One morning or afternoon, they are finally all gone, you've got them all pulled, and, as if your prayers have been answered—all those hours spent on bended knees—you are rewarded once again with the beauty of what was once a simple and even unquestioned thing, the sight of a field of grass, for as far as you can see, unblemished by either weed or toxin, and a forest likewise with its full complement
of native ground cover, a place still quintessentially native, quintessentially local, quintessentially unique—as unique and fitted as if it were handmade by someone long ago, for the occasion of a gift.

Maybe I'm just easily entertained, but I can sit and stare at a forest or field free of weeds for the longest time, and be filled with a pleasure and a calmness, beholding that beauty, so deep that surely it transcends any conscious thoughts of phrases like
biological integrity
or
native diversity.
Instead, there's a spiritual component to the depth—like staring at a painting by a master, transfixed for long moments on end.

I feel the same emotions, the strange combination of joy and peace and calm and assurance, when I stare at a rock wall crafted by ancient yeomen to fit the contours of the land—the rocks, the sweat of the yeomen, and the stones fitted so tight as to seem, even from a slight distance, seamless—and too, it is not unlike the same feeling of joy, peace, relief, and wonder one gets while watching a herd of elk or deer moving through the forest, or a flock of geese passing overhead. Everything is still working. All the gears in the fine watch are still fitted and functioning. And you—tiny you, within all those gears—are therefore likewise.

 

It seems to me there are two vital ways of looking at the world, beliefs that have contributed to the various wars and religions throughout our history—all the various
isms
and experiments in commerce, all the centuries of yearnings and muddled strivings.

Mankind, as typified by the individual, is either but a tiny cog within a magnificent, majestic, unknowable larger whole or is the very reason for the world's existence, the fulcrum for all other turnings of fate and the seasons, and divinely empowered, made as we are in the image—the exclusive image, mind you—of God.

For my own part, and like a glutton, I believe both. My own life seems like that of a yellow upturned leaf that has landed on a stream, a river, and has been carried along on the larger current. Sometimes the bright leaf is in the center of the river, riding elegantly and with such verve that it seems to be the center of all else around it, and imbued with meaning and direction, even fate; other times, as with a drawing back of scale or perspective, it is just one yellow leaf on
one small river in one small valley in one small mountain range, on one vast continent moving very quickly through the even vaster mass of time—mountains and glaciers of time, wildfires of time, oceans and deserts and prairies of time.

What I mean to be saying is that it is not the labor of my hands pulling all those weeds, pulling them like prayer or beseeching, that causes the berries to arise, in August, after the weeds are gone. But there is a story-making part in us, an eye for flow or narrative, and an attempt to discern order and pattern and rhythm and perhaps even meaning, which lures us again and again into wanting to believe in such connections.

To believe that not only are we included, fully participatory, in the seasons, but that our own desires help drive them. That our desires supersede those of the herds of elk desiring fields of green grass, or the desires and yearnings that cause millions of wild geese to rise from their autumn fields in the north and travel thousands of miles each year and thousands of miles back again. That our brief desires, the sparks of our lives, should power all such miraculous turnings—that we hold the world stable and aloft through power and cunning and divine blessing, and that these other desires, the millions of such other desires of all the other species, and all more deeply seated, time-tested, and enduring, do not even exist, or are entirely secondary...

Still, it's a lovely temptation, to feel in rhythm, to feel fitted to the place where you live—the place you have chosen, the place that has chosen you. As you hike up into the mountains, empty plastic water bottle in hand, and begin plunking the plump sweet huckleberries into that bucket, one by one by one, a bounty as full and seemingly interminable as the day is long, you cannot help but be reminded that this is the exact same movement, the reaching and pulling, with which you addressed the weeds only weeks earlier. As if all that work, or prayer, was but preparation for receiving this bounty that now appears for the taking, and that therefore it might somehow be your reward, your due.

I suppose what I think about all this is that sometimes for brief, shining moments the gaze of the world falls and rests on us, with favor and even undivided attention—though most other times,
that gaze lands on the mountains themselves, or on the rivers, drifting downstream then, awash in and amid so much beauty: our own, and all else.

The roar of the ceaseless winds, high in the mountains, turning the world—not us. We are just leaves. Beautiful leaves, but leaves.

 

This is the beginning of yet another change, then. It seems to me that this valley almost always has something to give—but in August, the turning of the gears is such that even in our occasional inattentiveness, we cannot help but take notice of the gifts.

 

The bears are entering the huckleberry fields, just as we are, and with far greater earnestness—desire—than any human pickers. They're beginning the stages of hyperphagia, in which they eat almost nonstop, particularly the sugar-rich sweet berries, in an attempt to put on as much weight, as much fat, as possible with which to journey though winter's long sleep. The bears are almost like funnels as they pluck the berries from the branches with their teeth, stripping the ripe berries with their jaws: as if the earth itself has shifted to begin pouring its autumn bounty into the bodies, the lives, of grizzly bears, in order that they might make it through winter. As if the world, or the force that created the world, desires grizzly bears to be in these mountains.