The Wild Marsh (45 page)

 

How can any of it be accident—must not all of it be some design? The larch needles, expelled from the larch trees, cast themselves down onto the forest floor, returning nutrients to the soil, but perhaps even more important, in areas that might have burned earlier in the summer or fall, they provide a woven net that helps to stabilize the tender burned soil, minimizing the loss and damage from erosion. The larch needles drape themselves perfectly, democratically, over every aspect of the topography below, and in the manner with which spider webs were once placed over wounds to aid in coagulation, they stabilize the blacked soil, and just in time, as the rains continue. It's the last window of opportunity to lay down such a stabilizing blanket before the snow arrives: snow which, later the next spring, in melt-off, might otherwise carve destructive tunnels and gullies, were it not for the protective mat of gold.

(Some years it is not perfect, or appears to be imperfect, and slightly off-balance, ill timed by a day, or a week. The snow might arrive early one year, so that the larch needles are cast down on top of the snow—a doubly breathtaking sight—though it is still perfect, for those early snows often melt in the subsequent days, are absorbed into the soil, lowering the net, the weave, of needles gently, inch by inch, onto that burned soil.)

It's hard to imagine a species more fitted to and desirous of its place. Those same wildfires that have selected the larch—burning up the weedy competitors but not the larch, with its thicker, fire-resistant bark—also aid the propagation of the larch. Studies at the
state experimental forest in Coram, Montana, have shown that larch seedlings regenerating in a newly burned area outcompete other species for the uptake of nutrients in a burned landscape by a factor of
three,
so that it is as if the metaphor of larch as a vibrant, leaping, living flame has become transformed to the real. Surely this is one of the definitions of magic.

The larch trees, with their autumn gold needles blazing, do not just look like candles or flames, birthed long ago of fire, but they have
become
the fire, so enthusiastic in their initial uptake of the soil's fire-rich nutrients that they might as well be burning already, and anyone who will take a walk through the woods in October after the big wind has blown through can see how perfectly they were made for this place, or this place for them—this wet place of fire, this perfect mix and balance of the burning out and the growing old; of rot and char in a duel, a titanic struggle.

How could there not be a tree like the larch?

 

The snow can be here any day now. One year eight inches fell on the sixteenth of October and we didn't see bare ground again until May. Another year, on the opening day of deer season—the twenty-sixth—it was twenty-six degrees below zero.

Usually it comes slowly, though, in the form of valley rain and fog and mist, the blue-sky days ebbing, and with the highest tops of the mountains receiving an inch or two of rain, rain, rain, soaking and then saturating the summer- and autumn-parched soil so that in the spring water will be available to newly emergent plants even before all the snow has melted. Tucking the earth into bed for the long sleep, is how I think of it: taking care of everything.

So frequent are the rains now that it seems almost as if it is the landscape that is moving rather than the seasons, and the cant of light across this land; as if the landscape is traveling by mechanical conveyance, clicking forward a few gears, over into the northern Rockies and those basins of sunlight, but then sliding backwards—again, as if by mechanical gear works—back into the rainy shade of the Pacific Northwest.

Not all of the alder leaves have been knocked loose by the wind and the rain, so that the branches surrounding my cabin still have a few individual leaves left, like lone decorations, weather tattered.

When the steadier, later rains of October beat down on these frost-fatigued, blood brown remainders, it knocks them loose, finally, but as they fall, they descend much more slowly than the steady rain that is drumming now on my tin roof. And in my cabin, hunkered next to the stove, listening to the sleepy sound of that hard rain against the roof, it seems to me that there's a dissonance, a disparity, between what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing. If the rain's coming down so hard, how can the leaves be falling so slowly, so gently?

In my morning trance, and perhaps my winter-coming-on trance, it seems somehow that the physical distance between those two senses—the sound of the fast rain, and the sight of the slow-falling leaves—contains the same space, the territory, in which lies the short story, the fiction I am pursuing—that there is a crack, a niche in which the story is hiding—but that I cannot quite figure out how to work or earn my way into that space but can instead only see it, as if across the lateral distance of the rainy marsh, on the other, farther side of the marsh.

I think that to achieve that place in fiction, which seems to be some lateral distance, you really have to descend: that this perception of a farther, lateral shore is an illusion, and is a vertical distance, really; that you have to go down a set of damp stair steps, into another place, as if lying down to sleep in winter, for all the rest of winter, perhaps.

A turning away from the sun, with the days and nights chilling slowly, gradually, half a degree at a time, and the snow line creeping down out of the mountains a few hundred feet each night, is how it goes most years, until one morning, finally, the snow is down in town, and we feel a joy and relief that the waiting is finally over, though a bit of regret too, at the loss of the lovely autumn, and at the responsibility of winter. How much easier it would be to sleep, or leave, than to stay.

 

One sunny morning I'm sitting at the picnic table, in the fading alder bower, writing, when I feel the barometer dropping. The sky is blue and unchanging, and there's no wind, but I feel nonetheless an onrush of invisible pressure, like the breath of something, a pressure so dense that brown and red and yellow leaves begin falling
from the alders and aspen despite being unbidden by any stirring of breeze—
leaping
from the branches, it seems, and tumbling straight to the dank and rotting black earth, obeying autumn.

Or perhaps the moisture in the air has so saturated them that they are now too heavy to retain their tenuous, lingering hold on the branches. Whatever the reason, they are all falling, melting, with no breeze, just falling, and it is like watching snow fall in a silent, windless storm, this same motion a preface to the coming months: as if there is always only one story, one pattern, in all of nature, but that it is too vast and complex for us to ever see anything but glimpses and edges of that penultimate answer, or knowledge.

Answer
is not quite the right word, for that implies there is a question, which there isn't. There is only one beautiful day after another. One awakens, draws breath, and moves forward into each new day like a deer venturing into the tall waving marsh grass.

Later in the day, when I've moved back into the cabin and am working, the wind does return, and it blows more leaves down, swirls them dancing in all directions, with the brief collections and assemblages of leaves taking on in their descent once more the shapes and forms of living creatures, so that it appears as if there are ghosts moving across the marsh. And so many dry leaves are landing on the tin roof of the cabin that it sounds like rain; and even though it is a dry rain, a ghost rain, I hunch up and edge in closer to the wood stove.

Which is greater, joy or peace?

My own peculiar dilemma, I think, is that peace
brings
me joy; that from peace, I soon enough escalate into euphoria. Which is lovely enough. But then, coming back down can be a frightening feeling, this descending from euphoria. It's absolutely a feeling like falling.

Perhaps I should hold on to the one thought, in the descent, a mantra—something like
Only beauty; Only beauty
—and in that manner, slow or relax in my descent, traveling and landing wherever the breeze and my own weight take me, and remembering always that I am but one among billions, that there are as many of us as there are leaves in this forest.

Still, I can't help it. I stare out at the beauty of those swirling
leaves, and the white trunks of the aspen, the gold pastel of their remaining leaves, the butterscotch of larch regal against the coming purple storm sky in the north and the great brooding mountains beyond—the leaves scurrying across the marsh now—and I get too far out there, into joy, too quickly, and then I don't know what to do with that joy, don't know how to process such beauty, and I feel a touch of panic or even sorrow, without having a clue what it's about.

Do you know what I mean? Is it this way for others of us, in the autumn? Why is it this way?

One more year. And one more. And one more. Always, one more.

 

One of the sweetest things about October, finally, I think, is the hush that comes right before the start of hunting season. Some of us will have been out hunting birds in September and early October, and might even have gone out with the bow, hoping to call in an elk. But for most of the state, and most of the culture, hunting season does not begin until late October, with the start of rifle season—the ultimate opportunity for bounty gathering—and I wonder if part of the hush that precedes the season's start—kind of a soft spot in time, in which time seems disinclined, for once, to move forward—might come because almost all of us have finally made our peace with the human decision to push on and reach for more even as most of the rest of the world is lying down and going to sleep.

For the next five weeks, we will be more active, physically, than we have been all year. We'll run ourselves ragged, rising hours before dawn and hauling ourselves up one mountain and down another, traveling always to the deeper, farther reaches, the back sides of places, following tracks and scent and intuition and landscape. And perhaps in this exhaustion, we will reach the dream-state, the descent or immersion that is required of the season after all. Perhaps the hunt is our own migration, and our own fit in the world, and in this rank and bountiful place.

 

I have to say something here that I'd really rather not say. For all of my penchant for navel-gazing, I still think it's easier to walk
your way into a fit with landscape than to think your way into such a fit.

I do not mean to alienate intellectuals, or overly glamorize woodchopping and rock-toting. And I need to remember not to offer my own thoughts as prescription, but rather simply as my own observations and predilections. But for my own volatile, mood-tenuous, drifty self, any assurances or resolutions about the world and my place in it that I have gotten by thinking or pondering—the abstract—have almost always been second rate, compared to the physical, tangible specificity of fit that seems to happen most often when I'm not even aware of searching for such a fit: near the end of a long hike, or at the top of a mountain, leaning winded against a big rock and staring out at the valley below.

Or hunting: following a deer, or an elk, all day long. Adjusting my pace to his, and seeing the landscape—topography, precipitation, substrate, temperature, wind direction,
everything
—with an intensity that matches his. A stepping-up of hunger and its broader, wider, perhaps more interesting cousin, desire.

I love the intellectual world—the life of the mind, which is to me sometimes like a shadow life, the shadows and echoes and memories of other things. Such a landscape seems to possess infinite depth. But what I like about the physical world, the life of the body, is how much the world craves, it seems—despite our strange drifting, and our physical awkwardness—to make a fit with all things.

Every hunt is different, every hunt is special and wonderful: but one that I am remembering right now involved a big bull that I tracked through a mix of rain and falling snow. I followed him all day, into and through a place in the valley where I had never been before, until finally, I think, he himself came to a place he too was unfamiliar with: a gnarly tangle of lodgepole blowdown.

When I caught up with him, near dusk—sneaking as silently as I could, in the soft new snow, and the fog, and the dim blue light, both of us drenched—he was looking back, knowing that I was somewhere out there, and the reason he had paused was that he had boxed himself in: had hopped over a wind-felled girder work of lodgepole and found himself in the equivalent of a small corral.

He could have gotten out; he wasn't entirely trapped. But he
was weary, like me, and was just standing there in the hard rain and blue fog, coat drenched, antlers gleaming, breathing hard.

Of all the thousands of trees that had blown over in this one stretch of forest, he had found the sixteen or so that had toppled four-square into a small corral, a roofless cabin. It seemed to me almost as if he had decided to go no farther; and though he was not ceding any of his wildness—was in no way yielding to domesticity—he was nonetheless, finally, in a sort of wild corral, and I felt that I was meant to find and take this animal.

 

Some days—many days, in this wild blue snowy valley—the world's grace and desire for order (despite what physicists say about the world craving disorder) seems to shout its message, over and over again, until you see it, that order, in every glimpse and glance. Infidel that I am, I do not always want to quite accept the enormity of the idea that some one person, or some one deity, could make all of this, or that it could be so elegant, and I want to instead propose some certain dry mathematical formula, y ' m 1/x X r-1/3 (V-1/m), or something of that nature, by which all things will suddenly fit, evident in all shapes. And all movements—this one formula capturing even the laminar flow of the wind itself, the invisible ribbons of air that might be the pulse and breath of a God, perhaps: nothing less, one thing, only one thing.