The Wild Marsh (6 page)

Soon enough—in perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, though it seems like only some tiny fraction of that time—the moon reappears, emerging from the other side of its shy darkness, and when it does, we experience a feeling very much like warmth. I'm surprised at how good it feels to have the moon back in our sight again, if only through the ragtag portal: clouds hurtling past, so that it seems we are all moving at great speed, as if summoned perhaps to some challenging or noble or simply necessary endeavor.

The curtains close once more.

An hour later, a new storm system moves in, dropping more snow, and the moon and stars are hidden from us again for three more days, blanketing the world in whiteness and silence. We saw it though, and will remember it, for as long as we are in this world, and—who knows?—perhaps longer.

 

The girls and I wander out onto the marsh to go for a ski not too many evenings later, while the moon is still fullish; and because the clouds are gone, the night is cold. Due to some inexplicable and doubtlessly entirely random sequence of the frost-thaw cycles—warming snow, followed by repeated nights of intense cold and perhaps even influenced by the solstice, the eclipse, and other rare phenomena—the snow out on the marsh has rearranged itself into a flat skiff of broad plates, each snowflake recrystallizing into a perfectly planar structure so that the entire snowscape before us appears to have been converted to a land of fish scales, three feet deep of fish scales, and each of them silver-blue in the light of the big and aching moon.

The re-formed flakes are tilted in all directions, brittle in the cold, leached of all moisture—dry as fossil fish scales—and though most of them are lying one micron thick, parallel to the ground and the pull of gravity, enough of them have tilted upward too, as if in strange geological yearning, so that they sparkle and glint like huge sequins in that blue light. The entire world, or rather, our world, is ablaze and asparkle with the strange shimmering coronas and prisms cast by these new fish-scale flakes.

As we ski and skate through them, they make a delightful, musical tinkling. They are as loose as dry sand. Our skis cut them, these fish scales, making a music that sounds like glass wind chimes.

We ski into and through the blue light. I hold my breath, hoping that the girls will remember the strange sight—though, perhaps better still, the conscious part of them might forget it, might take it for granted, assuming such wonder to be a daily occurrence in the landscape up here. That would be all right: would be more than all right. Nonchalance and wonder, right next to each other.

On the way home, Mary Katherine stoops and picks up a handful of that strange micro-flaked snow and tosses it up at the moon, and we watch as the large metallic-looking flakes come sifting back down in sprinkling silver shining columns, flashing and fluttering, swirling like shafts and beams of blue electricity, thrown by our hands, by our hearts.
Yes,
I think.
Take it for granted, please.

 

Such is the silence of January, on later into the month, that we grow excited, several nights afterward, at the sound of the neighbor's snowplow truck coming down our driveway, audible long before it's visible, coming with a thundering that sets the dogs to howling even before we humans can hear it, or know it consciously: the ice-skimming blade drumming and skittering across the frozen earth, with sparks flying through the night, rooster tails of bright cinders and ingots flying up from either side of the blade, and our deep pleasure in knowing that in the morning when we drive out to school we'll have a crisp new-cut path through the snow, that we will not have to earn ours, step by labored step, red muscle by muscle, as do the deer and other forest creatures, but waking instead to a simple, silent grace. Sometimes amid such beauty you can't help but wonder who gave each of this life, and perhaps more important, why?

January is the social month. On Tuesdays, after school, the children from the little school (nine students this year, covering grades kindergarten through eight; one teacher; and one teacher's aide position, shared among three different aides) bring their sleds to the big hill outside town, and the adults join them. For a couple of hours, until the dimming blue dusk sinks down from the tops of the trees, we skitter down the hill on big inner tubes and plastic-slickened sleds, shouting and whooping in the forest, trudging back up, then, only to slide down again, leaving, across the course of the afternoon, as dense a skein of tracks as if an immense elk herd had been wintering on that slope, cutting with their hoofs the myriad trails of their daily comings and goings. All in a day, however; and again, what would be survival for them is merely play for us.

Afterward, with the children soaking wet from their exertions as well as their snow tumbling, we picnic; we stand around a crackling campfire as dusk thickens into true night and sort through all the loose and extra scattered jackets, caps, gloves, and mufflers as we visit. Parents have brought cookies and cakes, crackers and cheese and lunch meats, and, always, hot chocolate.

We visit about the most mundane and trivial things, and in the ease, the safety, of that mundaneness—against all odds and logic—we grow slowly closer—awkward at first, but then gradually across the winter, into a deeper elegance of fit. What is community? I submit that it is not people of similar intent and goals, or even values, but rather, a far rarer thing, a place and time where against the scattering forces of the world people can stand together in the midst of their differences, sometimes the most intense differences, and still feel an affection for, and a commitment to, one another.

Am I dreaming? Perhaps. But January is as fine a time for dreaming as any.

 

I sense that January is getting overlong, in this narrative, this testimony, this witnessing. I want to close it, for the reader's sake: there is almost an entire year left to experience. But I want it to be understood also, fully, that even though wonderful, it is one long damn month for almost everyone and everything but the wolves and the ravens.

 

January is the isolate month, and January is the social month. We go skiing with other adults, our friends, regularly (like almost everyone else in the world, it seems we're too busy in the other months of the year—that even here time hurtles past and neither cunning trapper nor stalwart engineer can figure out a way to slow it here, either—not even here). After dropping the children off at school or having secured a babysitter for the younger ones, we'll set off on an adult ski, starting right behind the school, striking off up a snow-covered logging road in a long safari-like train, brightly clad, cheery, vigorous, living. We move through the dark woods sometimes in silence, other times garrulous, and gawk hungrily skyward whenever the sun appears briefly through the clouds. On one such occasion, a friend of ours, Joanne, is so thrilled to see the sun that without irony she whips out her pocket camera and takes a photo of it, of the sun amid the clouds only, with no foreground or background, and no human characters in it—photographing the rare and elusive sun the same way one might hurry to snap a picture of an elk or a moose crossing the road in front of her.

I love the pace and rhythm that's involved in skiing through the woods. I love how slowly your thoughts reveal themselves to you, and I love, in the loneliness of January, the blurring of the lines between the animate and the inanimate. On this one ski, for instance, the one I am thinking of, it seemed that everywhere I looked in the forest I saw a snag, a dead tree, that had been carved and sanded and sculpted into the same shapes as the animals that lived in these same woods, that the same winds and rains and snows and fires that sculpt and influence the animals' shape also even the outline of inanimate materials such as stone and deadwood.

I think there might be more to this idea, this coincidence or observation, than meets the eye—some vast law of physics existing far beyond coincidence, though on a scale so immense as to be beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to grasp and measure and count. In a month like January, one is free to ski along at a leisurely pace, hypnotized by the landscape of snow, and hold such a thought, or any other, comfortably in one's mind for long moments, if not hours, and to savor and contemplate the ultimate solitary essence that resides somehow in the core of each of us.

 

One night late in the month—that big moon on the wane, though still huge and swollen in its misshapenness, blue-silver washing out all the stars, filling the forest with its breathless, eerie, metallic light—I step out into the garage to get a piece of venison from the deep freezer, to take inside to begin thawing out for the next evening's meal. It's dark inside the garage, though the world beyond is alit in that blue fire. It's frigid. All sounds have a clarity and density to them not noticed at warmer temperatures, or in the daytime. I hear a scuffling sound out on the ice and look out into the bright moonlight to see a herd of deer standing by the dogs' kennels, nibbling at the tufts of loose hay that are sticking out of the kennels' doors.

The moon is so bright, I can see the gleam of the deers' eyes. I recognize one of them as the doe who lured in the buck for me on the last day of the season; the same buck whose antlers are drying in the garage, between her and me. The same buck whose backstrap I am taking out of the freezer—am holding now in my hand—for tomorrow's dinner. The muscle that had powered the animal that had chased her.

Does she carry his progeny within her? Who will outlast whom?

She, and the others, just stand there looking at me, dark silhouettes in that amazing blue light. It's too cold out for them to run back off into the woods; they're seriously intent on pawing at that hay.

I could take ten, twelve steps and be out among them. They can't see me, back in the darkness, the blackness: they can only sense and scent me.

It's so cold. They're shivering. It's so cold that the dogs aren't even coming out of their kennel to bark at them but are instead remaining inside, shivering also.

After a few moments, the deer lower their heads and go back to eating.

 

I should comment briefly on the strangeness of the phenomenon that occurs in this tight-knit little valley, deep into every winter, every January: a preponderance of extrasensory perceptions among and between all of us. I don't want you to think we're all whacked out and cuckoo, believing overmuch in that kind of thing, but neither can I deny that it exists, late into January. I'm confident that someday far into the future (or perhaps not so far), scientists will have found an easy and credible explanation for it; but in the meantime, we dream it, we live it, it's present.

It comes in waves and spells: rises, surges, crests, then fades away, as if summoned in egress or regress by the moon's tides.

During the last week of January, I am involved in three startling incidents, one right after the other.

All occur in the out-of-doors.

The first one happens while driving home from duck hunting with Tim. It's a sunny afternoon, and I'm tired and weary from paddling, and feeling good because I've got a couple of ducks, mallards, in the back of the truck, and I'm thinking how good they'll taste.

In my fatigue, the unbidden thought occurs to me that I'd very much like to see a flock of wild turkeys crossing the road. I don't know where the thought comes from: the nearest turkeys are over on the Idaho line, more than twenty-five miles away. I've never seen, or heard of, turkeys over by the dam, where I am now. But I have not driven more than a mile than I look up and see, indeed, a flock of wild turkeys pass through a stand of open ponderosa pine.

The second incident occurs the next day. My friend Bill and I are driving up into the mountains to go backcountry skiing. We're just riding along, shooting the shit—way up in the high country, past where any game should be found, at this snowy time of year—and I have the thought—actually, it's almost like a craving—that I'd like to see a lynx or a bobcat.

We round the corner, and a young bobcat is standing in the middle of the road, standing where I have never seen one before. The bobcat stares at us for a moment—is it my imagination, or does it seem to be hesitating, as if to be sure we see it?—and then bounds off the road.

Every day is a gift.

The third incident occurs later that night. I dream, again completely unbidden, that I am writing a letter to a friend of ours, discussing how much she and I love the short stories of Alice Munro.

The next day, in the mail—it's as eerie as if I have written the letter, or read it in its entirety, before its inception—there is a letter from this friend, detailing why and how very much she loves the short stories of Alice Munro.

***

Some people get depressed up here, in the long, lightless winter. I've talked to some of these folks, and they say that it's the strangest thing: that when it, the depression, hits, they're still fully capable of recognizing beauty, but that such recognition almost makes the depression even worse, for they can no longer take pleasure in the recognition. As if there is a disconnect, some error in internal wiring, separating beauty from joy, or, worse yet—or so they say—connecting beauty to sadness.

The scientists say it's all really only about sunlight: a function of the shortening and then lengthening days. As if we are but machines in that regard, or solar cells, fueled by the sun.

Can you imagine what it must be like for those folks, year in and year out—entering each year the dark tunnel of winter, knowing that it is going to knock them down, pick them up, knock them down, pick them up—stretching and pulling then compressing and darkening them, making them a little wearier, a little more brittle, every year?

What I think it must be like for these people is as it is when you are walking along a river and encounter a submerged piece of driftwood, so water-soaked that it no longer floats. The years and miles drifted have hollowed out intricate seams of weakness, have scoured out all the knots and replaced those pores with river sediment, clay and gravel, jamming and packing it in between the pores and then polishing it further, as the club—half wood, half stone, now—tumbles farther downstream.