The Wild Marsh (11 page)

 

On the seventh of March, my birthday, the woods are all but silent. The laugh-out-loud sound has not yet returned: the sound of water running through the forest in sheets, water dripping from every branch, water dripping from the roof, a laughing, awakening sound. There is still only the nighttime hooting of owls, which begin their nesting so much earlier than any other bird. The bears are still sleeping, and all the forest's other creatures have not yet returned from their southward migrations, or have not been born yet—though it's very close now, with those first bare branches of the willows beginning to glow gold, like the upraised wands of so many orchestral conductors: the last moment of deep silence that builds and swells before the conductors stir their wands and summon that music.

The golden orange wands are lifted and poised along every creek and river and beside every marsh, and at night, back in the forests, the owls are calling to an audience not yet arrived. I like to think that in the bellies of their mothers, the elk calves and deer fawns can hear these first summons and can understand too from the all-else stillness that surrounds them, the last of the stillness, that their time is coming soon, and that a world, a whole new world of song and movement and color and warmth, is being made for them; and that in their mind's eye, perhaps, or their other ways of knowing, they can already somehow see those uplifted bare branches, burning in the falling snow and spring rain like beautiful candles seen across a great distance.

 

Who knows how these things work, or where the dream begins? My grandfather, father, and one of my brother's sons all have the same birth date, October sixteenth. My oldest daughter came into this world only six days after my birthday. Is there a fraternity and sorority of time—of the days, seasons, years? The birth dates for me and my best friend are but two days apart. It goes on and on, such accountings, far beyond random coincidence. There are patterns all around us, above and below us—of that there can be no dispute. The only real question that seems to me worth wrestling over is whether they are designed or not.

How could they not be?

And here, perhaps, is blasphemy, though it is not intended as such. In the genius of the design, perhaps the beauty and elegance of the initial or developing organic system is what gave rise to the designer—demanded a partnership, a designer, for such beauty and elegance of fit to continue, and be carried further. Perhaps the world's beauty and intricate desire for order produced a god, or a God, through all of that relentless fit, relentless adjustment and readjustment: a god or God being formed from the very clattering of rocks and rivers, the swelling and sanding down of mountains, like the terminus of such a process, such a long and wondrous and breathtaking work; and that that god, that God, then produced us.

It has to begin somewhere. Perhaps it is linear rather than circular, and there was nothing—no order, no design, not even any dream or dreamer. Or maybe the dreamer dreamed the rocks and rivers, the forests sweeping in the wind; dreamed the near silence of winter, and the awakening sounds, beyond that. We're here. It's wonderful. And from it, who could possibly
not
dream a dream, then, of this or another life eternal?

 

Soon enough, the laughing dream returns. Often, in this country, it comes in the form of rain, rain on top of snow, weakening the snow so that as you walk across it, it opens up to bare ground with each step. You can hear the water running just beneath the skin or crust of snow, the water warmed by the awakening earth, even as the snow above is still chilled by the wintry nights. The rain falling through the trees makes a hissing sound as it lands on the slushy ice. There will be more snow, but this is the first sign of weakness, if one chooses to look at it that way.

Through it all—the silence, and the waiting—the deer are trudging down the icy latticework of the trails they've been making all winter long, their hoofs compressing the snow into dense, hard-packed ice that will remain long after all the rest of the surrounding looser snow has melted away, the remaining latticework of their passage as white as bones cast randomly across the dark floor of the forest. The rain drenches the hanging black moss, the lichen,
Bryoria,
that they feed on whenever they can reach it. The lichen absorbs the March rain until it looks like a woman's long black hair after she has just stepped out of the shower; and becoming heavier still, the super-wet lichen pulls free of the branches and lands on top of the fading-away snow, to where the deer hurry over to eat it, so that it is as if the deer are being nourished directly by the rain, like a crop rising from the earth, even though they have always been here, loyal to this place through hardships as well as the rewards of the softer seasons.

When Mary Katherine was born (I can barely remember the days and years before, as if they were in some ways their own form of sleep), she emerged stone-faced, as we all seem to—stone-faced, or snarling—and though we had been up all night, it seemed to me that she was bathed in a strange sheen, strange light. Then immediately upon her full arrival, her face relaxed, and she smiled this wide, beautiful smile and slowly brought her hands together—it seemed to be occurring in slow motion—and clasped her fingers together, interlocking-style, without a single hitch. I knew nothing about babies, but knew enough to be astounded.

It was an early spring that year, and when we came home with her, the ice in the pond beside the cabin we were renting had already opened up, and though the mornings were still below freezing, the Canada geese had already returned. There was a big wide plate-glass window looking out onto the pond, and when we walked into the cabin with her that first time, bright early morning, the sun was just clearing Waper Ridge and coming up the valley.

It was a blue-sky day, and the new gold sun was coming right through the window, lighting nearly everything in the cabin. A flock of geese came flying up the narrow river valley, honking loudly, and we stood there with her in our arms, watching and listening as the geese kept coming closer, descending, their braying honks growing ridiculously loud until it seemed they were in the room with us, or we with them.

It looked as if they were going to keep on coming, right on through the big window, but they set their wings into a glide and landed on the pond's surface and coasted all the way in, right up to the window's edge, clucking and grunting and braying, and the ripples from their splashing cast shimmering disks of bronze and yellow that reflected in wavers across the cabin walls and ceiling, bathing the three of us in that rippling pond light, and Mary Katherine just watched and listened to it, as if it were all the most normal and regular thing in the world.

 

I think that when you save someone, you become saved. I think something passes between you and the rescued person, something almost entirely unnoticed, so that it is as if some thin and perhaps artificial barrier that gives each of us a bit of necessary distance from all others, and a place in the world, and a place in time, has been pulled away, as if all along it was nothing more than a curtain of gauze no more substantial than a veil or a dream: as if such distance, believed to exist at the heart of all things, might sometimes really exist only in our imaginations—again, even if only for a few moments at a time.

Mary Katherine stopped breathing the night she was born. Elizabeth had delivered her, and we were in our hospital room, had spent the first night there; she was still in her first twenty-four hours of life. All of her vital signs had been perfect at birth—seven pounds, nine ounces, nineteen and three-quarters inches, etc., etc.—and remained fine. But only a few hours into having moved to our hospital room (there was only one other baby in the entire neonatal wing, several nurses per baby), she just stopped breathing.

She didn't care for it at all. Her face scrunched up and turned red as she gasped and sucked and waved her fists, and then she wasn't getting any air at all and began taking on a bluish tint.

We both knew next to nothing about babies, but we knew immediately what was wrong.

I grabbed her from Elizabeth, who was in bed, and went running down the hall with Mary Katherine. It felt like football days, the narrow unoccupied hallway a path one needed to travel as quickly as possible, with a dire force in close pursuit, and time the most vanishing, valuable thing.

In the meantime, Elizabeth had called down to the front desk, and an elderly nurse, a tiny little old woman, came hurrying around the corner, and I closed the distance to her quickly and handed Mary Katherine—who was still fighting—to her.

Before I even had time to explain anything, the nurse flipped her over so that she was holding Mary Katherine face-down, cradling her little belly in the palm of one hand, and tapped her on the back, then lifted her upright—and just like that, she was breathing the clean, sweet air of life again.

Back in our room, Elizabeth had gotten disentangled from her bed sheets and was now running down the hall in her robe, barefoot, trailing tubes and towels, as well as blood, and by the time she reached us, she was faint, terrified, and it was hard to believe that, already, everything was all right again. I was already amazed at the astounding miracle of life, and to receive now, scant hours later, a second miracle—salvation—was indescribable. I do remember feeling joyous and terrified both, and wondering how other parents did it: if every hour was to be filled with this intensity of emotion, this aliveness and alertness. I remember consciously wanting to preserve that extreme joy, extreme gratitude, forever, and for the most part, I think I have; I think most parents do. It was like entering a second world, a second kingdom.

I wondered why I had not heard much about it. Or maybe plenty of people had been talking about it and I had just not been listening.

They put her in an incubator thing for the rest of the night, with a little wire strapped to her, some kind of sensor taped to her, so that if she stopped breathing again—for longer than ten seconds, I think—a buzzer would go off. The nurse said it wasn't uncommon for newborns to stop breathing, but that usually they started right back up again. She said she thought Mary Katherine must have had some kind of obstruction, milk or phlegm, and had choked briefly on that.

I hated that she couldn't be with us the rest of her first night in the world, but the nurse assured us she'd be asleep all night anyway and would never even know we weren't there.

Still, I stood there on the other side of the glass and watched her for most of the night. If she opened her eyes, I wanted her to see there was still someone there; and if the monitor failed, I wanted to be there to back it up.

I watched her sleep, and breathe; I counted the seconds between inhalations and exhalations. And once, later in the night, she stopped again, in her sleep—I was counting, with increasing concern, eight, nine, ten, as Mary Katherine stirred in her sleep, increasingly uncomfortable, and by eleven I was rushing back to the nurses' station, though by the time we returned, Mary Katherine was breathing easily again.

The nurse unstrapped the monitor, examined it, recalibrated it, and tested it against the side of the bed; when it had been motionless for ten seconds, it began to beep.

I can't remember what the nurse said, or how she explained it, though she did allow that sometimes the monitors weren't always perfect.

Bleary-eyed, I watched Mary Katherine for the rest of the night. She kept breathing, and the monitor never beeped. The nurses were just across the hallway from her—almost within sight of her—but what was one night, and the first night, at that?

What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility that was in a way like a saving of myself: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was now invisible and she was everything.

How such knowledge saves a person I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land in which the self dissolved and another was born. And I still feel that way, too, anytime I look at either of my daughters, and I know that other parents feel that same way—I have heard them speak of it, had in fact heard such things being stated even before I became a parent, though in those earlier days, such discussions, such statements, had held no meaning for me and had the quality of sound of a radio playing faintly in another room, with the language of the radio's music identifiable but the individual words, and their message, indistinguishable.

 

When we finally got her home (because of her breathing stoppage, we stayed in town a couple extra days, just to be safe) and walked into our cabin and saw that sun-gold reflected pond light shimmering across the ceiling, and when the geese came gliding in, gliding almost into our laps, Mary Katherine tensed with excitement, and then laughed. She had smiled the moment she was born, and now, listening to the goose music, she tensed and then laughed. For some reason, some doctors will tell you newborn babies can't laugh; but if a flock of wild geese comes sailing into their life in the first moment they enter their new home, they can.

 

This year, by the marsh, spring (or rather, the first opening in the snow, even if it is only a false opening) is a little later in coming. The marsh is still a mottled slab of snow and ice, but with a few standing puddles, and the sliver-green hues of translucence of more and more patches of thinning ice. The heavier, sturdier birds are returning first—the incredibly powerful ducks and geese, birds flying across the top of the forest each night, returning like rising water levels themselves, hurrying to fill the new spaces created by the snow's departure.

The snow is not yet going away for good: we all know that. But the struggle has begun in earnest, space versus no space—the land rush is on—and as the snow and ice begin to disappear, the ducks and geese are claiming the new water, pothole by pothole, wing splash by wing splash.