The Wild Marsh (38 page)

The fire crew has been coming through at dawn some days, checking on the fire, stirring the ashes themselves, and Lowry and Mary Katherine have baked a plate of cookies for me to leave for them on a stump there at fire's edge, as if the crew's comings and goings are as mysterious, and appreciated, as those of Santa Claus. When we return the next day, most of the cookies are gone, with only a couple of fragments remaining, with human bites taken out of them, to show us that it was indeed the fire crew and not bears or squirrels or deer or wolves who nibbled at them.

One of the larger cedar trees still has a steady fire burning in its gut—the heartwood has been hollowed out, so that it's like a chimney—and it seems that no amount of water I can pour down into its roots will faze that fire. Every time I return it is burning again, as ceaseless as an Olympic torch—and when I tap on the tree with the end of my shovel, it makes a wonderful tympanic drumming sound; and again, I'm disoriented and nearly mesmerized by the speed with which the landscape, or this portion of it, has changed. I used to be a geologist, and am more accustomed to the pace and rhythms of glaciers, to the scribings of ice and stone rather than this breathless work of fire.

Many people, when they are in love with a landscape, will speak wistfully of their desire to have seen that landscape in an earlier time, before the fragmentation and reduction—before its diminishment to what is indisputably a more human scale. I share that useless wistfulness often, and sometimes find myself trumping it, wondering what the country, this valley, would have looked like when the sheets of glaciers last melted away and retreated: when this most recent reincarnation was completed and the new land lay glistening and just born, sharp-edged and brilliant, awaiting its ecological destiny, or ecological opportunity, as the colonists first began to explore it with fingers and roots and waves and pulses, wind and water and fire and crumbling stone mixing together across the centuries, reassembling as if clay thrown by a potter, and that remixed assemblage blooming, blossoming, with specific life; and
from that life, spirit, and from those accumulated layerings, a certain density of spirit.

I would have liked to see that being born. (Of the time, and the land, before the glaciers came and did their carving, I cannot even imagine: easier, perhaps, to imagine the deserts of Mars, or the ice rings of Saturn.)

It occurs to me, however, that this might be as close as we can come to such a witnessing—to being present at such a birth. To someone who has not lived through a season of fire, it might seem like an odd comparison—speaking of the life that fire brings rather than that which it ushers out—but that is how I perceive it. I like to believe that after the fire has retreated, sinking back beneath the surface to rest for a few more seasons, the newness and cleanliness upon the land—the fields of cooling gray ash, still smoking, and the new architecture of bent and fallen spars, charred and hollow—possesses a new openness, a raw new readiness of spirit, a
tabula rasa,
that is as close to how it was when the glaciers finally retreated as we will ever see; and that the speed with which new life comes rushing back in is how it had first been, ten thousand years ago, when this valley—or rather, the latest reincarnation of this valley—was first born.

I find myself standing for long moments, heel-deep in the cooling coals and ashes, shovel and bucket in hand, delighted by the realization of how infinitesimal I am, how microscopic against both the scale of time and the land itself; and delighted too by my realization that time is not the only thing moving, as organic and alive as a river, or a horse, or a herd of elk, but that even the land beneath us is moving slowly, in similar fashion. That when we were created from the dust, perhaps the rib of man, the image of God, was plucked from a mountainside; that that selfsame image comes originally, initially, from the sleeping-body humped-animal shapes of the new-carved mountains, and that the voice of God is in the wind that once swept, and still sweeps, across those mountains, across these forests.

 

So the forest is burning: little cells and pockets of it, one acre here and a thousand acres there, the weave and fabric of this valley's million acres as punctuated by these fires as are the demographics
of any human population complemented by daily births and daily deaths. The presence of the fire is normal; the absence of it would be abnormal.

And as with a birth—those final contractions, and the expulsion, then, of the living, breathing, bespirited thing into the world—the matter of timing is one of primal, archetypal fascination. At what hour, what moment, will the new life arrive?

And in a reverse sort of conception, which of last winter's snows, which extra bit of moisture, was it that has caused the fires to first be delivered to us on this one date rather than yesterday, or the day before, or the week before?

Was it that extra foot and a half that fell on New Year's Eve? Was it the last big wet snow of April that helped to shape and foretell the timing of this fire's arrival in this one time, this one place, with me standing deep in the ashes, as if once more amid snow?

History;
cause and effect, connectedness. Which impressions of childhood, I wonder, act similarly as anchors, as foundations, for the subsequent timed release of awe for the natural world—precursors for the birth of conscious reverence for the grace of our last remaining truly wild places?

Which slant of light, which odor of fir boughs, which cry of wild geese laid itself into the subconscious mind and then grew slowly, like character forming?

How does landscape braid itself into, and form and reinforce, our memories, our character, and our reactions and responses to things—our compassions, our understandings, our patience or impatience? Surely there can be no formula for this question, or any answer, but what does it mean for a child, or a population, to be bereft or unknowing of any significant or unique landscape? What emptiness, what gap or hollowness, loneliness or impoverishment, might exist within that place of absence?

 

Day by day, I become increasingly familiar, and then comfortable with, the wildfire that continues to pace and gallop in its dirt corral just beyond my home. Night is one of the calmest times to visit the fire, with only the hottest spots burning actively, and all else either a dull glow of orange or complete darkness. It's beautiful, moving
through the woods at night toward the fire, and even the burning mountain walls beyond are beautiful in the distance, on the cooler nights when the smoke grows heavier and damper and sinks and the mountains are visible.

On those mountain walls, the flickers and flares look like the glimmerings of countless jack-o'-lanterns, or even as if the night sky has been lowered and filled with more stars; and no one is being injured, nothing is being hurt, the mountains are merely breathing.

It's like the rest between rounds for a boxer, late in a fight. In the daytime, when the temperatures rise again and the humidities drop and the animal of the wind begins to stir and yawn once more, things will become dangerous again and fire commanders will worry incessantly and justifiably about the vagaries and unpredictabilities of fire and weather and fuel, and about luck, and chance; about new or inexperienced firefighters, particularly, and about the dangers of getting upslope of a fire, or upwind; about violent shifts in wind direction, about falling trees, about helicopter malfunctions, about water supplies and fuel logistics and food and shelter and medicine for the firefighters, about communications between squadron leaders, about the homes and property of people living in the valley—but at night, when the fires are calmer, the fires are beautiful, and I cannot help but stare at them and feel that deep-seated lure and attachment one gets while staring at a campfire, or even a lone and wavering candle.

And as the fires wander through the forest, August visitors, like some vast herd of migratory animals—caribou, perhaps, down from the north, braiding their way through the forest, unraveling one thing and yet weaving another—people in the valley will sometimes drive up into the mountains at night to look down upon the bowl of distant winking, glimmering light that is the valley afire, while those whose homes seem to be more directly in the path of one of those wandering herds of fire will stay at home packing, to be ready, should the time for leaving approach. They cut the grass around their houses extra short, and sweep the larch needles from the roofs of all structures, and water the ground around their houses.

The sheriff's department visits each house, tells them that
things look fine now, but to always be prepared, in August, for a quick evacuation. Each house is assigned a number, so that the fire teams can locate it on their maps and respond if the need arises. And in every pulse and breath of our waking moments as well as our dreams, there is the remembrance of a thing that many of us had forgotten long ago:
we are not in control, we exist as if only because of some strange and wonderful mercy, we are not all powerful, we are not in control
...

 

By the eighth day, my fire is as common to me as a hound or a horse that might need feeding and watering each day, and my usual schedule of work and play is but little disrupted by the tending to it. One morning there are deer tracks in the still warm ashes, as if indeed the fire is a hoofed thing and has passed through and gone on its way; and some of the needles from the hemlock trees that were scorched are already falling, sometimes landing on the cooler ashes and resting there like a fabric of gauze bandages laid across a wound, though other times landing on a hot spot and igniting, flaring up one by one in quick, tiny winkings of fire that burn cleanly, purely, leaving no trace, not even smoke.

This fire, at least, is running out of things to eat, but I keep pouring water down those root chambers and listening to that underground, gurgling music of hiss and belch—as if some great stable of circus animals, or wild animals, still resides uncertainly below, animals that might finally be considering moving on—gathering to migrate, perhaps, or to sleep, to hibernate, beneath their blanket of cooling ashes.

Other times, the fading fire seems to me to be now like a drowning or sinking swimmer, trying to rise for one more breath, looking for air and looking for fuel but finding neither, and sinking lower and lower under the weight, finally, of the residue, the ash, made by its own exuberant burning.

 

You think you know the world; you think you have seen it all. Then you wake up one night and look out your window and see that smoke lies dense over the marsh, again like a blanket of fog—and that the moon is shining on that silvery smoke, as luminous as metal, and that there is a rainbow in the night sky, that the intense
light of the moon is filtering through smoke particles in the air and making a prism of colored light, even in the middle of the night, right out over the center of the marsh.

The smoke shifts and the rainbow dissipates, like prisms of colored glass disassembling themselves—but it was there for a few moments, and, who knows, might yet one day be again.

 

During the days, as the August sun and the summer wind and the fire itself dries the forest out even further—how much drier than dry can we get?—it's possible sometimes to notice the odor of the smoke that stacks up over the valley, and even the smoke coming from the fire nearest the house, changing with the subtlety of a different kind of wine: creeping its way through kinnikkinnick, then ground cedar, then into an old decadent forest, then back into a flashy young green stand of lodgepole. The odors of burning alder are significantly different from those of cedar, or spruce, or larch. The intense sappy scent of Doug fir is its own thing.

In the mix like that—the whole forest burning—you can rarely be quite sure of any one scent, but they keep swirling, mixing throughout the course of the day, as the fire creeps and crawls, runs and leaps, stretches and gallops, reaching for some things and avoiding others, pushed by the wind, and sometimes rendering the essence of a thing all the way back down to dusty ash.

 

In the heat of the days too, there is the odor of life as well. Not new-beginning life, coming in after the fires—not that, quite yet—but the old regular hanging-on life, sweeter than ever. The hotter the days get, the more intense the odor of the shiny-leafed ceanothus becomes, until it seems you can almost see the oils dripping from their waxy green holly-like leaves; and the browner and more desiccated the other vegetation becomes, the greener the ceanothus shines, and the more forcefully it exudes its almost overpoweringly sweet scent, which, like the fires themselves, all but shouts the word
August.

 

My old writing cabin, and the newer house, creak, in August, in the extra degrees of heat that they are experiencing—that the world is experiencing—since they were built: creaking in this drying, windy
weather as they never have before. One can imagine in that sound that the house is turning on its foundation to look in the direction of the fire.

August is supreme leisureliness—it's often too hot to get out and hike in the middle of the day. Instead, the days drift, like haze. And yet it can be a time of supreme focus too, of supreme waiting, not unlike that of the hunting season, in which, while deep in the woods, you strain to hear the sound of one deer's approach, stepping through the snow.

Yellow butterflies drift through the yard, buffeted wildly by the roaring afternoon wind that continues to feed and drive the fires, and for a moment, in that waiting, and in that focus, they look like the sparks flung by an advancing fire.

 

My little fire is almost nothing now, just a few fallen logs burning like the remnants from a party's bonfire, and ash, so much ash, and those simmering root fires, which I am still watering twice daily, again as if tending to some garden. And while contemplating my other garden, the domestic one, four hundred yards distant, it occurs to me that it will be nice, once the ash cools further, to take a few buckets to work into the soil like compost. This entire landscape was once buried with a thin sheet of ash from the Mount St. Helens-like explosion of a volcano known as Mazama, seventy-five hundred years ago—the gray sheet of the ash lies several inches below the ground now, and still serves as a source of nutrients for the trees, the roots of which still suck at that ash, back in the wild forest. And in this manner, while enriching our garden, it will be somewhat as if we are eating the fire itself, distanced only a few months in time—just as the deer themselves, browsing the new forbs next spring and summer, will be eating the fire, just as later in the fall, we the garden fire-eaters will be eating the deer that ate the fire.