The Wild Marsh (10 page)

 

And another new bird! My God, a ruby-crowned kinglet perching cold upon a bare alder branch outside my cabin, on the twentieth of February, peering in at me through the frosted window and cheeping quietly, while in the spruce thicket behind the kinglet the chickadees are foraging this bright morning, with the sun higher than it has been all year. Even the owls are calling, courting, midmorning, and it doesn't matter that it's eight degrees today: the sun is higher than it's been yet, the light upon the world is fuller and richer than we have yet seen it, and all the birds are more active than they've been all year.

Watching that kinglet watch me through the thick frost of cabin glass is proof again that spring's coming soon now. The first of February is far too soon to lean forward in your traces, as is even the seventh, or even the fourteenth—but I would estimate, based on my own experience, that if you want to get really reckless about it, you can begin to dream of spring on this date, the twentieth of February. There's still a good three to four weeks of rutted ice and snow cover remaining, but if you're tough enough, you can go ahead and begin dreaming now.

Three to four weeks is still a long time—especially after so long a trek—and like the deer back in the forest, you'll want to conserve yourself, and your strength—don't sprint for the finish line yet, and, in fact, don't sprint at all—but on or around the twentieth of February, it's all right to begin to dream.

 

I was skiing again yesterday, noting the new angles of light upon the forest, and found myself thinking again about the cant of this valley. You would think that for neatness' sake, and symmetry and balance, February light would have the exact qualities of August light, that each would be balanced against the earth evenly, cleaved six months apart from each other, half a year, like the severed halves of a pear, an apple, or some other round and balanced fruit. But again, because of the valley's cant—this one sweet and specific place on earth—it's not that way at all. Neither is April light like October light.

Instead, early March is more like early October; April, more like late September.

Somewhere in between these two parts—their variance from the perfectly cleaved half—lies a rough outline of this valley's formula of cant, based on angles of and amounts of light alone. The formula—the secret—could be further studied and refined by examining temperatures, wind directions, and innumerable other physical or biological processes, but to begin with learning about this place, the sheer tilt of the earth-meeting-the-sun could first help derive that formula, even if crudely: enough of a working model, perhaps, to begin noticing and understanding other patterns falling under the same governance of the laws established for the territories within the shadows and rhythms of this one place, or any one place.

And isn't it an error right from the beginning to desire or even expect an easy-to-understand, perfect bipolar cleave of symmetry—the apple, the avocado, the strawberry, the orange, halved so cleanly? The mistake in such a wish, it seems to me, is to assume that there cannot be balance in asymmetry. Who knows? Perhaps it is even that slight tipping, that subtle leaning of the specifically asymmetric—and the slight tension and effort required to compensate and balance that tilt—that provides, in some way, the generative forces and rhythms that attend to any one certain place, and which are nothing less than the driving force of life for this or any place: a thousand or ten thousand such cants then braiding, elliptically, asymmetrically, and in that convergence, the world easing forward with its peculiar and powerful surges and pulses.

 

Chickadees swarming now as the blood within all of us begins to thin and stir beneath the returning light, tree and bird and man alike—the chickadees singing and swarming and chittering, buzzing and tweeting, calling and squabbling, some singing their sweet two-note courting song, singing it so relentlessly that I can't work, can't concentrate, after so long a winter's silence.

The dull sunlight bouncing off the marsh's snow, a glare pushing through the woods-fog, is nonetheless intense enough to throw shadows from my hand and the pen across the page as I write, further distracting me, as do the flitting shadows of the birds themselves, passing back and forth before my window.

I can't work today; I'm edgy, pacey, antsy. I'll get up and go for a walk, a ski. These are not the things a writer does, normally—usually a writer writes—but I can't help it. It's as if I'm trapped on a raft or island of ice that is breaking free from all the other ice, and the cold black current is pulling it, spinning now, down the river, and if I sit here any longer I'll get so dizzy, I'll fall off. I have to get up and go for a walk.

 

It's the shortest month, and yet in many ways the most convulsive. It's too soon to begin leaning forward, sometimes too soon to even begin moving at all, and yet even in the midst of all that stillness, things are falling away. At dusk on the last day of February, while I'm walking up the icy driveway, a band of seven elk crosses in front of me, six cows and a one-antlered bull, like golden horses in the blue foggy gloom and mist. They pass from right to left, heading down farther into the woods, and I turn to the right and begin backtracking them, trying to find where the bull might have shed his mahogany-colored antler, like some great burdensome sword or scimitar laid down in the snow, with the war finally over.

A
T NO POINT
of the year are we more incorporated into the seasons, more completely owned by the world, and the woods. Summer and autumn, and even the first holidays of winter, are traditionally the seasons we think of as most easily summoning the joy of the human condition; and yet in February, March, and April, the Slog-O-Matic mud season, the long brown night of the soul, never are we quite so owned by the beautiful world. Beaten down, made malleable as if by the accruing weight of the ivory snow itself, we become tempered to the very shape of the land itself, and by its rhythms and processes, as surely as if we were buried by that snow and lay pressed flat against the darkened ground, our bellies spooned against each curve and hummock of soil, each swell of stone, and the snow above pressing down, kneading and pressing and sculpting us physically, while at the same time impressing upon us somehow some deeper, unspoken counsel of rhythm and pace.

On the surface, there's very little difference; in fact, the sameness seems to be spreading, as the snow—which initially mimicked the sleeping shapes of every humped and curved and buried thing—becomes deeper, smoother, more homogenous.

But down below, things are moving, being reshaped by the mounting pressure, even if only a tiny bit each day. The bears and frogs are sleeping, letting the season pass on by, largely undisturbed by its slow but powerful dynamics, and the songbirds, and so many others, have fled south, likewise disengaged from the snow's incremental but forceful grip. But for those of us who remain, whether buried by the snow or shrugging off each day's mantle, we are always emerging, changed and sculpted a little more each day. The valley owns us as surely as it owns any of its rocks or rivers, forests or fields, or any of its other animals.

Everything still seems the same, in March. But beneath the snow, and within our blood, there are stirrings that tell us that the land too is stirring.

The stems and branches of the willows have begun to glow yellow—seeming incandescent, particularly in the falling snow, with the willows the only color on the landscape, so that the eye is drawn to them, mesmerized, almost with the intensity or focus of one in need of rescue or salvation, physical or otherwise. They burn there, at the far edge of the snowy marsh, glowing and waiting, unchanging, it seems, against the same joyless gray sky: a dendritic spread of color looking like our own veins and arteries, which—we can only hope—are filling likewise with that same gold light.

Nothing else is different, and yet for (perhaps) the first time, you sense the movements. Change—dramatic change, the kind our species is better at noticing, and paying brief attention to—seems closer now, if even only through the gap or difference between the two words
February
and
March,
one long and backward-moving, the other shorter, brisker, and more forward-moving: as if the force of our nouns can be almost enough to help nudge a thing into motion—as is said to be the case, sometimes, with even our dreams, and their bold summons of a thing much wished for, much desired.

Our little nouns,
February
and
March,
as plaintive against the gray sky as the faint cries of the birds that are no longer here, and yet their own part of the world, helping—along with all else—to ease along and urge along the chain of the seasons.

In March, it would be hard to say whether one is witnessing the end of winter, the beginning of spring, or some strange and dreamy land between the two, wherein some of the world awaken and rise while others in the world remain suspended—summoned, perhaps, but not quite awakened. And even for those fully awakened, in March—Pisces, and the fish beneath the ice, unblinking—perhaps the world is still half dream. And in that half-dream, then, surely the yellow glow of the willow is a beacon in the storm, a signpost and candelabra lit, or a conductor's baton, encouraging all to rise—to dare to rise, reshaped by another year's passage—and to move forward toward that curtain of falling snow, and through that curtain, with faith and confidence that a bright and joyful, explosive world of color and life lies waiting just on the other side.

***

Some years—not every year, but some—the snow will begin to finally grow lower, in March, or will lower for a while, only to fill back up in April, which is another matter entirely. (It amazes me, the way each month has such a separate identity. We think of time as a river, and know intuitively that it is. But if one pauses to look back almost any distance, the months might seem as discrete blocks, chunks of stone, all stoved up and jagged against one another, like the spines and teeth of glaciers, gnashing at the sky and both devouring and yet creating the mountains and, in the mountains' dissolution, creating the dusty plains below.)

And perhaps it is this way, with the months not any ethereal river braid but rather devourers and creators of time—the individual months gnawing away at some bedrock of time.

And as these stone blocks of the months exist sometimes jagged, other times smoother, above the bedrock form of a God-made landscape, a Creator-made core of the irreducible, then so too might there exist a third and higher level, something more graceful and seamless—something truly more riverlike—flowing just above those jagged blocks, jagged devourers. Though I suppose it's just as possible, if not more so, that this is all there is, the months above and the bedrock below, and that we, and our lives, our little histories, are the glacier dust, ground fine and sifted as flour, caught eternally between the two.

And in those years when the snow melts a bit, in March—regardless of whether it fills back up in April or not—only as the snow level begins to drop a little bit, finally melting slightly on the rare and warming sunny day, do you start to really understand how deep the snow has been. The tops of fences and rock walls begin to emerge from beneath you (even as you still are walking above them, looking down upon their emergent shapes as they begin to crown, popping up through the snow—just a dark shape beneath the translucent thinning at first, but then, barely, the real thing, like the heads of crocus bulbs), and you understand how, for a few months, you might already have been up in that higher, even celestial level, up in the more graceful place where the laminar flow of time moves with less friction—moving around in your winter life at some significant distance above, elevated several feet above the "true" world; though if that is the case, why has it still been so damned hard, at times, so gray-blue leaden, sludge-blood hard?

 

And yet, whether trudging five feet above, or down on terra firma, navigating one's way through the rocks—whether asleep and dreaming, or wide awake and fully sensate—it is all still always pretty much the same world, regardless of the gnawing blocks of months, or centuries, or millennia, or eons; and in the close examination of a single month, I often feel a kinship with all who have ever lived before me.

Are we still sleeping, or are we awakening? Change is dramatically imminent, eternally poised for its grand entrance, and yet there are still, particularly in March, I think, these long moments when
it is all the same.
The frilled and braided lace of wax forming runnels from the lip of the candles at my writing desk, out in my cabin as I work far into the night, at the edge of the winter-silent marsh, is the same as the crenellations of ice that creep down over the eaves of this same cabin (warmed by those candles, and my breath, and the dim little glow of the wood stove); it's the same translucent, moonstruck filigree of ice, not wax, leaning in past the frost-spangled window.

Everywhere I look, some months, and particularly, it seems, when in the womb of ice, the womb of winter, it is all almost the same, both pattern and image, dream and sensation. As if we are not quite ready for the furor and clamant wonder of the "true" or living world, the green world of living and dying, and must emerge into it slowly, like crocuses ourselves, or chunks of stone in a rock wall, reappearing above the surface and only gradually becoming enspirited, and animated.

What dreamer dreamed us, that we might begin dreaming? Thank goodness that in these moments of our realization of a shimmering background
sameness
in the world there is so much beauty too, or we might all get incredibly bored with so much unity, really, at the heart or core of all things.

Faced with the recognition of such sameness, our souls and spirits might abandon us, no longer needing the specificity of us; might fly right out the window if one day we lost the ability to look around and perceive the individual beauties attendant—like lace or fringes—to all this other sameness—the rest of the world's unchanging core or essence.