The Wild Marsh (55 page)

For a long time now, we have been bringing back a perfect Christmas tree, one that even Elizabeth will acknowledge is perfect, with every branch, every needle, balanced and symmetrical—a tree with a beauty that is somehow magnified in looking at it, compounded by each tier of branches until surely its beauty exceeds any possible summation of its parts—and though the girls are not aware of any sort of pressure, are unable, I'm sure, to imagine anything other than success, simply because that is all they've ever known, in this one tradition, I'm less secure; and as the dusk deepens, we travel farther, looking hard.

We pass over the stippled, methodical trails of deer, and the seemingly aimless tracks of snowshoe hares; across the tracks of a mountain lion, one that has probably not eaten in a while, and is probably hungry, because we do not hear any ravens squabbling over the remains of a kill nearby, and so I keep the girls close to me.

We're all three beginning to grow chilled, and so we duck down into a little ravine, a windbreak, and huddle beneath the shelter of a big spruce tree, as if in a little fort or clubhouse, and share another cup of hot chocolate. I bundle them further, putting my heavy overcoats on over their own, and make sure their mufflers are snug; and warmed now, they're ready to play again, and climb back up out of the ravine, herringboning on their skis, only to ski right back down, again and again.

They're laughing, shrieking, and I do not want to caution them to conserve their energy, to not tire themselves out; I do not want to counsel moderation to their joy, though I am concerned that we're so far from the truck, and with the hour so late, and the evening so cold.

Carefully, cautiously, trying hard not to disrupt the spirit of their play, I begin to ease and urge them back toward the truck—not following our old tracks, but triangulating. They're still looking up from time to time, evaluating various trees, but in their happiness, and in the fast-fading light, their evaluating skills seem also to be diminishing, and a couple of times they urge me to take a tree that,
in my opinion, is less than perfect: recommending one because it is "cute," and another because it is "stately."

We drift on, buoyed by happiness, floating above the snow on our skis, our snowshoes.

We find the perfect tree right at dark. I spy it initially, and at first hardly daring to believe our luck, snowshoe over to it without saying anything, wanting to be sure. I call the girls over, ask them to check it out and see what they think—wanting unanimity—and even though I think they are taking our eventual success for granted, they're very excited by the beauty of the tree, and after double-checking to be sure they're sure this is the one they want, I take my saw out of the pack, tell the tree and the forest thank you, out loud, like a pagan, and then saw through the sweet green bark and sap, and the tree leans over slowly, softly, lightly, and settles into the snow.

We head back to the truck, taking turns pulling it. It's surprisingly hard work, and the tree's needles leave a beautiful wandering feathery trail behind us, completely erasing our tracks.

Unprompted, as darkness settles, the girls begin singing "Jingle Bells," and then, right after that, with no prior sort of communication save that unspoken kind that exists between sisters, they break inexplicably into the chant of a street-side political rally, a protest, really, that we witnessed (all right, participated in) a few years ago: "What do we want? De-moc-racy! When do we want it?
Now!
" And in a strange and silly singsong way, the chant seems to make perfect sense, out in the middle of the unpeopled forest, in the deep cold, beneath the gathering night, unseen and unheard by anyone other than our own selves. It is a catchy chant, fitting perfectly, it seems, the cadence of our progress through the snow, so that it could be the mantra for boot camp marching Marines, or Arctic explorers seeking to make a certain destination just before a storm hits.

By the time we reach the truck, we're all three cold again, and after loading the tree into the back—it fills the bed, and even lying on its side, looks perfect—I warm the truck up and we sit there in the cab, vapor breathing and clouding the windshield, and drink more hot chocolate before turning around and driving the short distance home, where, upon our arrival, Elizabeth comes out onto the porch to inspect that which we have brought home to her.

She looks it over carefully.

"It's perfect," she says, finally.

Long after the tree is gone, and the year, I will remember that afternoon.

 

When we first moved up here, I used to believe that the people I heard complaining about winter's length, and particularly winter's lightlessness, were malingers, nabobs of negativity—chronic lightweights deeply entrenched in the hapless pattern of seeing the cup as being half empty instead of half full. I looked at them as a callow youth looks at an aging person and believes or at least suspects that the physical diminishment of age must surely be due at least in part to some sort of character flaw, so unimaginable is that diminishment to the youth, in his or her full strength, and having known only its increase, day after day and year after year.

All I saw, my first several winters, everywhere I looked, was beauty.

I still see winter's beauty, in every glimpse, but like those old-timers who pined for the sun and lamented its absence, I too miss it deeply, desperately now, in winter, and have come to believe that winters up here can have a debilitating cumulative effect: that they are like concussions, wherein the first one or two seem to have no lasting or even negative effects, until suddenly—or so it seems—you wake up after your eighth or ninth, or tenth or eleventh, and have difficulty remembering your name, and do not always recognize the face in the mirror.

Scientists, of course, are discovering the neurochemical and physiological causes of these traumas, these debilitations—seratonin disruptions, seasonal affective disorder, and so on—and there are drugs and medicines and treatments that can be prescribed now to try to counter the brute force of the phenomenon—sunlamps, vitamins, Prozac, and strategic trips to the Caribbe an.

More and more each winter, however, when I catch myself in the throes of lightlessness—staring slack-jawed out a dusty window at the dim light, unblinking and incognizant of any one coherent thought—I find myself understanding the biological adaptations of not just the species that migrate but the bears, with their
deep sleeps of hibernation. It seems to me often, in winter's midst, that I have entered a quasi hibernation myself—a mental hibernation—and I am reminded yet again of how closely we are all wedded to this landscape, shaped and sculpted by it and always at some level attentive to it, as it in turn is attentive to us.

 

When the sun does come, our spirits surge like those of children, and for the few hours or even minutes that it might be present, we wander out into its beautiful blue embrace, staring up and out at such rare and magnificent illumination, saying things like "Wow!" and "Geezo-peezo!" over and over again; and we can feel deeply, intimately, the puppet-string leap and pull of our bloodstream's chemicals being scrambled and rearranged, bestirred and invigorated, awakening even if only briefly, and become refreshed.

We might invest thirty or forty days in a row of lightlessness in exchange for a few moments of such blue-sky brilliance—sometimes the sun and the blue-sky against the snowy mountains remain visible for a whole afternoon—but it is almost worth it (when the sun's out, it
is
worth it) and I have to wonder if, while slumbering in their ice caves, the bears are aware of that brief appearance: if, even as they sleep, their blood lifts and their spirits surge. I wonder if the sun's appearance somehow makes it down even through the shell of their snow chambers, bathing them in a warmer, golden glow, as opposed to the usual dull blue light of winter. Sometimes the bears will even climb up and out of their snow caves and wander around for a while, like sleepwalkers, even in the dead of winter—no one's really sure why—and I have to wonder if these brief rousings are somehow tied to the infrequent return, or appearance, of the low, cold winter sun.

Daily, like some workaday businessman, I ensconce myself in my own ice cave and attempt to descend into the land of blue dreams, trudging out to my cold cabin at the edge of the marsh, carrying in my arms a stack of papers, a thermos, a coffee cup, and sometimes a load of kindling.

And once in the ice shell of the cabin, and with the cold little fire in the wood stove straining to heat some distance beyond my cold boot, which is propped up on its edge within a foot of the flames, I will find myself staring out at the frozen prairie expanse of
marsh for fifteen or twenty minutes, without ever thinking a single thought, so that again, I might as well be hibernating.

On the sunny days, however, it's torture to be inside—I try to work quickly so that I can go outside and play—and I am made agitated, excited, by that rarest of sights and sounds, the sun-filled icicles gleaming, becoming translucent as they warm. They're nearly incandescent, like the glowing filaments in light bulbs, as the sun strikes them—and then, most amazingly of all,
dripping—
and I have to sit there in my chair, at my table, and watch it rather than go out into it.

I try to dive deeply, quickly—to get that day's work done as fast as possible. It's so hard to concentrate, though. Is this how it is for the bears? Do they fight to keep on in their task of hibernating?

Sometimes on such a rare sunny day, I'll have just succeeded in making it to dreamland when the slab of snow that's been resting on either side of my steep-pitched metal roof will suddenly release as the sun warms the top of that metal and the bottommost layer of snow melts. Often I'll be staring out my windows, entranced by both the dream and the lovely gold light, the rare gold light, when that ice sheet suddenly releases above and goes curling past the window, hurtling past the window blocking out the sun, and all light, for an instant, with flashes of gold sunlight shuttering in through the window, piercing little cracks in that tumbling sheet of snow—and then the snow will have all passed and once more there will be a steady stream of gold light shining into my eyes—during this whole event, this whole collapse, I will not have blinked. I feel that gold light, that new gold light, shining somehow deeper into the back of my brain, after having witnessed or been primed by those erratic flash-camera shutterings of only a few seconds ago—and always, when that happens, I will arise as if hypnotized, or rather, as if having awakened, and remembering what really matters, what's really important. I will close my notebook and cap my pen and tamp down the fire and leave my cabin, then, and will step back out into the light.

 

Such clear days usually bring clear nights, which means cold nights, as the day's warmth escapes back to outer space. On these nights, I put new hay in the dogs' insulated kennels, for them to burrow
into, and must knock the ice from their watering bowls. And the next day, if we should be so fortunate for the sun to be out again, it's common to hear sawyers working all around the valley, cutting more firewood in that new winter light, bestirred to action by the previous night's harshness, and by its demands on the woodpile; and yet again, the link, the connection, between landscape and the individual, is immediate and direct, forming a strength of bond between the two that is not so common, anymore, rarer, even, perhaps, than December sunlight, and in a way that I cannot prove or explain, our country, our nation, somehow the poorer and more diminished for that rarity.

I am not arguing against or even criticizing big cities, or cities and towns of any size, when I say such a thing—only reminding myself of that which poets and philosophers have been telling us for several centuries now, that the American wilderness is one of our great and unique treasures, and that it is not renewable. And that if it becomes diminished, then so too must we.

 

Part of me wants to stay home every hour of every day, in every season, but particularly in December, the holiday season—to burrow into the snow, to sink down into the idyll of childhood with the girls—but up here, bird season ends in December too, particularly for pheasants, which are the species that most thrills and jazzes my sweet and big-running pointers, Point and Superman, the former speckled like a pale Appaloosa, strong as a bull, and mischievous, and the latter chocolate-colored, mellow and obedient, and one of the most graceful, athletic dogs I've ever seen work.

It cannot be called work, of course. I love it—perhaps I was made for it, destined the moment my DNA twined the way it did—but the dogs love it too, and for certain, they were made for it: the scents and pursuit of the gallinaceous birds is a breeze that blows oxygen into the glimmering embers of their soul.

The nearest pheasants are half a state away, in eastern Montana, up and over the Continental Divide, out on the plains, and generally I take the boys out there at least two or three times in the autumn for multiday hunts, but then I more or less disappear into the woods myself, deer and elk hunting in November, so that they must wait until December to hunt again.

I want to be both places: hunting pheasants on the east side, and slowly settling into Christmas on the west side, cooking cinnamon rolls, hanging wreaths, reading Dickens, writing Christmas cards.

In typical gluttonous compromise, I attempt both. We get the girls ready for bed, read to them, and then I lie down for a short nap before awakening to the alarm clock at two-thirty. In good weather it's five hours to pheasants; a heavy snow is falling, however, and the roads are icier than ever, so I know it'll take at least eight hours. My plan is to hit pheasant-land by noon, hunt till dusk, then turn around and drive back into the storm that night, getting home within twenty-four hours. One day. There is a sweetness, a tapering knife edge where a season's satisfaction lies on one side and a lament that it is ending on the other side.