The Wild Marsh (35 page)

 

The trance of the hunter-gatherer: it is a joy to remember that there are many kinds of peace, including that of doing contentedly without—the clean and spartan lines of abstinence, or even puritanical moderation—but it is a human joy also to sit quietly on a hillside on a cool sunny morning, before the heat of the day is up, or in the late afternoon as shadows are beginning to return to the land, and to pick steadily, sometimes daydreaming though other times possessing no thoughts at all, only the moment, and the repeated and nurturing image of purple berries all around you, and leafy cool green foliage. You will be sitting, perhaps on bent knees, and looking about, though no farther, usually, than arm's reach; and there will be berries everywhere, more berries than you could ever use or eat, and there's no rush, you're simply sitting there in the silence, alone or with your wife and daughters, picking.

Occasionally you'll pause and refocus—will lift your head and look out at the view of the green valley beyond—but for the most part, you're just focused on the here and now, and on the very close: arm's reach, or a little farther, but beyond that, no more. And there is plenty, and you are gathering more than plenty, laying in for winter—huckleberry jam, and pancakes, and pies—and even though the earth is pivoting strongly now, it is lulling. It seems that river of time has stopped, or at least paused—that August is an eddy—and no matter that it is a fulcrum for change, considerable change, and the resumption of movement; sitting there in the berry fields, gleaning bounty, you are in the valley's eddy, and every part of you knows it, every part of you feels fitted to all else in the valley, with a clarity, even an elegance, that seems almost as if it could only have been achieved by preconceived design.

 

I think that the realization of such fittedness, or the possibility of fittedness—the full and once ordinary connectedness of things—can inspire in us one of two primary responses: awe and reverence at the mysteries of a world sometimes just beyond our consciousness, wherein myriad such puzzle pieces are constantly interlocking and shifting and rebalancing, or, perhaps foolishly, or perhaps smitten with hubris or some degree of both, we are tempted to believe that, like little gods, we can impose similar order on the events of our lives—the human world, set apart from the rest of the world. That our desires need no balance, and that further, we are clever enough to come up with similar elegance of fit within our random human world, our comings and goings, and that within that design, we can control things; that with sufficient desire, we can control the very turning of the world, and can improve upon and, where desired, destroy the blueprints for any existing master plan.

Living in this valley—among its fires and blizzards, and the floods of spring, and the inexplicable, unstoppable bounties of autumn—tends, I think, to lead one more to the former idea than the latter—the awe-and-reverence response rather than the control, destroy, and redesign camp.

The truth is, the best horticulturists in the world haven't even been able to grow huckleberries domestically. What appears to be a nonchalant afterthought, up on the mountain—fields of purple
berries extending for as far as the eye can see—is in fact largely irreproducible in the laboratory, or the garden; the roots simply will not propagate, requiring instead some mysterious combination of fire and soil and sunlight and chemicals, and, I suspect, some lock-and-key combination of a rhythm and pace that can be delivered only by the wild, only by the mountains themselves. And even in the mountains there are years when the berries do not appear—lean years, with the berries' absence seemingly unconnected to any factors able to be observed by us—irrespective of basic patterns of temperature or rainfall.

It is the same way with the grouse—the ruffed, spruce, and blue grouse that inhabit these mountains. Although they exist some years in great numbers—early in the autumn, hikers might encounter coveys of up to a dozen birds—biologists have been unable to raise grouse in captivity. We can probe the furthering perimeters of outer space and can map the genetic outline of almost any living creature, but we cannot do something as seemingly simple as breed grouse in captivity—something these mountains do ceaselessly, year after year, and in humbling, sometimes breathtaking abundance.

Again and again, I am reminded that the wild cannot be managed or reproduced; it can only be recognized, protected, and honored.

 

The woods are drying out, and the mountains' stones and cliffs—particularly, I think, the igneous ones—are crying out for fire. The drying grass that rubs together in any faint breeze generated by the pulse of the rising heat itself is like a friction that calls for fire, and the rich, waxy oils of the pine needles from last year, and all the years before, call out for the cleansing fire too, and before it is too late—before there is such a buildup of twigs and branches and needles that it prevents most moisture from soaking into the ground, so that the trees die from heat and drought stress far more surely than if they were to burn in all but the most severe of fires.

And as the accumulation of dead needles and branches builds each year around the trunks of the trees, unburned, it creates a
kind of self-made sarcophagus, one that will finally cook the trees if—when—the fire finally does come, so that we understand now even the trees themselves are crying out for fire—frequent fire, sweeping here and there, like a man or woman with a broom or a rake.

No amount of industrial derring-do, or even public works initiatives, could keep the forest, year after year, from drowning in the breath of its own living and dying—its own lovely detritus. Only the breath of fire can accomplish this. To cut off fire from the forest would be to take away the forest's lungs, the forest's breath. The history and identity, the character, of every tree in the forest has been shaped and sculpted by fire; some trees have developed thick bark to summon and withstand the fire, and others have chosen to run from it, seeking out the wetter places; but fire has helped create and birth them all, and it sustains them all. The forest cannot continue to survive without fire's breath.

In the Yaak, from a human-social perspective, we're fortunate in that we have a pretty high rate of rot—its own brand of fire, with many of those twigs and branches and fallen tree carcasses turning quickly into delicious orange mulch rather than even-quicker gray ash and black char.

It's one thing, however, to think these thoughts early in the year—in the safety of winter, perhaps, with snow up to your waist, or in the lovely, rainy autumn, after the fires have safely passed—and quite another to think them while the heat waves are rising from the cliff faces like the vapors of smoke already, or when the scent of smoke itself is in the air, and the creeks are dry, and the forecast calls for dry lightning and wind, and everywhere you look there is fuel—fine fuels, as combustible as hay.

The spark from a single cigarette could awaken the forest to fire, much less the galvanic birth of some million-volt lightning bolt. The best you can do with your objectivity in August, in the heat and the wind, is to keep the brush cleared away from your house, as well as the plastic ABS canoe (which would flame like a marshmallow), and hope that the animal of the fire, when it comes, passes near but not too near.

You can pick up twigs and needles on an acre or two, or even
three or four, with effort. For the million acres that form this ecosystem, however—and for the ecosystems to the north and south, and east and west—you can only wait and watch to see where the animal of the fire will walk, and hope that no one gets hurt. For this scale of change, this pace of breathing and being, it's harder to find a rhythm; though with the passage of enough years, I want to believe that even the fires can be accommodated, and even appreciated.

Once you come to understand certain of the most basic facts of fires—that they tend to run uphill, driven by the heated breath of their own combustion; that they skip and jump, moving slower through wet and shady areas and faster through the fields and openings, and that ultimately, it's all up to the wind, that the tongues of flame and showers of sparks will follow wherever the wind swirls, sparks traveling on the wind like leaves riding on a river current—then you begin, even if somewhat uncomfortably, to accept the rhythms of fires.

And tell me again—what other option is there?

To me, they're like a disruption, a breaking point, in the grace of the year. So incomprehensibly powerful and erratic, as if the sun itself—lovely, at a distance—has come down to earth; they disrupt and scatter and disintegrate, wreaking chaos, or what to us, at ground level, appears as chaos.

Only after they are gone are we able again to observe—usually more clearly than ever—the return of the slower and more supple graces, and rhythms and patterns of less dramatic amplitude.

 

Even in dormant August, this valley is dense in the world of things, vibrant upon the senses. Even in this driest of months, when all damp molecules of scent should have vanished, there is still a richness of odors—fainter in the day, but with a long finish that begins again at dusk and continues through the next morning. The scent of sun-baked pine needles, as they await the fire. The odor of shiny-leafed, snowy-blossomed ceanothus as the oils and turpenes of that plant become superheated on the south slopes (growing usually where a fire has already passed through): their own sweet, peculiar odor that tells me better than any thermometer that the ground temperature is higher than ninety degrees and climbing toward one hundred.

Such a richness of things. Surely I am the richest person in the world, to love a place, and a life, so deeply—to have been accepted readily into this place of things.

On one of our huckleberry outings, we find a surprise, a bonus—a wild blackberry bush, spectacularly loaded, rich black fruit bending and sometimes even snapping the slender thorny branches: the bush itself a remnant of a previous fire not so long ago. And for the rest of that week we have blackberry pie with vanilla ice cream, blackberry cobbler, blackberry cheesecake; and the little latticework of faint scratches on our arms fades quickly to ghostly pale scars, and then nothing, as we move on further into the season, encountering bounty now almost everywhere we turn, and even still further ahead, all the way to the horizon, and beyond.

 

Here is another tiny element that is one of the innumerable parts of the cant, the tilt and angle and rhythm and movement that is specific to this one place on earth, only this place: the differential, in August, between the hottest days and the coldest nights, with the amplitude regularly reaching fifty degrees, doubling, and then halving, all within the space of twelve hours, a neap tide of temperature, of heat.

We get to where we can set our clocks by the wind, as the days grow hotter and begin creating their own wind: the first subtle movements in the grass around ten-thirty; the first sigh, twelve-thirty; the first movement in the treetops, one p.m.; the marsh grasses bending halfway back by one-forty, or two or three at the latest. The awakening, the yawning, the stirring, the stretching. The world—or this one place in the world—waiting only for that one spark of ignition. And it seems that between pulses now you can even hear it calling, asking, summoning that spark, those sparks.
Praying
might not be quite the proper word—but definitely, there is a fervent, confident, necessary asking. The forest wants, needs, fire.

 

Even as we are watching the middles of the days, calibrating our biological clocks to the various stirrings of the wind, the days are wobbling, melting, burning at either end, with the solstice halfway behind us and the equinox halfway before us. Look away for a day,
an evening, and you lose only three minutes of light. The sun still sets around ten. Look away for three evenings in a row, however—a short trip elsewhere, or simple preoccupation, around that time each evening—and suddenly you've lost, misplaced, ten minutes, and then twenty.

 

I love the children this valley produces, the children these parents produce, the children this community produces; the children this landscape shapes and instructs. Our friends' twelve-year-old daughter, Wendy, joins me and Mary Katherine, eight, for a hike into the backcountry, to a hill, call it Huckleberry Hill, where we are finding—this year, at least—more huckleberries than I have ever seen anywhere: enough huckleberries, it would seem, to feed the world for a few days.

We pass through an old stand of cedar, the trees' odor fragrant in the cool shade, and then back out into the broad sunlight of an old burn. Blackened sentinel snags, riddled with the excavations of woodpeckers, tower over the hillside, with jigsaw- or Rorschach-shaped openings burned through the husks of their still-standing carcasses, through which we can view the portals of bright blue sky beyond. Bluebirds flit and swoop through the blackened poles, disappearing briefly when they pass in front of those portals of blue sky.

To get to the berry field, we have to pass through a mind-boggling array of blown-down, blackened cedar and lodgepole spars, a matrix, the interstices of which are filled with new-sprouting alder and cottonwood, and more cedar and lodgepole, a boisterous, shouting vegetative exclamation of the world to come.

The girls cross through this tangle as if it is a game, not a task. They tightrope-walk along the fallen trees, and hop from one to the next. Wendy, not knowing we would be going into the backcountry, is wearing only her summer sandals, but she has insisted she'll be fine; and though the branches and bark are scratching the tops of her bare feet as we bushwhack upward, she pays no mind, is instead only aflame with the pleasure of the day, stopping to admire and point out the beauty of a sublime layering of afternoon clouds to the south: gigantic heat-spawned cumulus clouds, vibrant with distant electricity.

The girls sing going up the mountain—traditional childhood songs that I can't remember now, and songs too of their own making. Soon Wendy's feet are crisscrossed with blood scratches, as well as charcoal, and our arms and faces are smudged from where we've slipped off logs and fallen into the maw below—but eventually we gain the bald hill above, the berry fields, and begin picking, rewarded with a bounty that was previously simply unimaginable.