The Wild Marsh (16 page)

But those aspen will also still retain the indomitable refrain from the last score: the echo of color and leaf-rattle again a kind of music that sings of how those sixty- to eighty-year-old towering aspen eluded, if not outwitted, brute fate and hunger—a music, an echo, that speaks to once-upon-a-time hard times, and spindly saplings, and knock-kneed, starving deer wandering the snowy, barren woods, and ferocious, ravening lions stalking silent and big-footed those starving, wandering deer, and overhead no brilliant blue sky amid gold leaf-flutter but instead the purple and gunmetal flat slatiness of January, February, with huge coal black ravens winging through the dense firs and spruce and calling out like sentinels the occasional details of the slow, slow dramatic progression ongoing below...

Consider again, please, the notion of sight, odor, taste, and touch as a kind of music: as all lesser complements to this astounding movement of April. It is like nothing if not a symphony out there, certain notes falling in order that others may rise. In the life cycle of the lodgepole pine—a species not much longer-lived than our own—the trees tend to outgrow their shallow root system in their quick race for the sun somewhere between the age of eighty and one hundred twenty years, entire stands of lodgepole being susceptible to insects at that point and blowing over during some fierce windstorm, after which the lodgepole will then rot, re-enriching the soil, or burn, likewise enriching the soil (and in the heat of the fire, the lodgepole cones scattered about the forest floor are mechanically activated to release, in their destruction, the seeds for their renewal; lodgepole cones have evolved to require intense heat to release their tight-gripped seeds).

It is often the supportive nature of the entire forest, and in particular, the other surrounding lodgepoles, that helps keep the individual lodgepole aloft, more than any tenacious root system. More than a hundred feet tall, skinny and limber, in high winds, they sway and bend into nearly U-shaped arcs, these tremendously tall trees bending like nothing more than tall grass in the wind, bending but rarely snapping, each unable to withstand the force of the storm by itself, but resistant and successful as a group, blocking and diffusing the fierce winds, just barely.

Once a lodgepole or two tip over, however, that group dynamic is quickly lost. Sometimes a fast-growing spruce or cedar will leap into the new vacancy and grow tall enough, quickly enough, to help plug sufficiently the gap of that sudden aerodynamic flaw or failing, but more commonly the entire aging stand will begin to fall apart once the initial tunnel of wind and light has found its way into the aging lodgepole forest; and in the next storm, five or six or ten or twelve more lodgepoles might lose their hold on the thin soil, and in the storm after that, twenty or forty, and in the storm beyond that one—the stand falling like dominoes now—seventy or a hundred, or the whole shittaree, the end of one story concurrent now with the beginning of another...

Waste, waste,
the timber man thinks at night as the windstorm howls and the lodgepoles snap and topple, filling the forest the next sunlit day with the sweet scent of their broken boughs.

But the grid-worked ladder-sticking of those fallen long pines provides, overnight and magically, like dice thrown by God's hand, or, who can say, some other master plan designed and executed, a sudden system of fences, corrals, and walls that will protect the next wave of emerging aspen and cedar that find root within the center of that tangled maw of spilled logs, a chaos, or seeming chaos, too dense and gnarly for even the hungriest deer to travel into, to reach the aspen's and cedar's tender shoots. And in that manner, the collapse of the old lodgepole forest, and the setting of boundaries in its collapse, provide, in that abstinence, the very thing the deer herds need to survive—the protective canopy of mature cedar in winter, when the weakened deer need shelter from the deep snow and bitter cold, and the green leaves of aspen, when the summer's fawns are first learning to be yearlings, and hungry for the world.

By the time the grid of blowdown has crumbled to ferny rot, as happens soon up here in this Pacific Northwest jungle, the aspen and cedar have ascended to a height well beyond the reach of the deer's teeth...

Everywhere you look, in April, you see music, and movement; and after such a long white stillness, even infinitesimal movement is noticeable, and praiseworthy confirmation of life's astounding grand design.

In the midst of such seemingly languorous, extravagant leisureliness—the glory of spring unfolding, leaf by leaf, with each day edging slowly but steadily back toward a return to the world of color—I must nonetheless confess to a certain edginess, that in the midst of such leisure, there is no leisure; that in the midst of such eternal grace, there is now, both suddenly and cumulatively, a jarring dissonance.

There are days in this narrative when I have to work to keep my head down and believe in, and marvel at, the timelessness of this dream that is my life, and work to block out the creeping suspicion, if not the knowledge, that these days, these seasons, and all days, all seasons, are now changing so rapidly as to render obsolete even the most mundane observations of natural history even before the ink is dry upon the page.

Out of this awareness I'm trying hard to focus on the nonhuman flora and fauna of this relatively unpeopled valley, seeking to chronicle, for the most part, the nonhuman parts of this natural world. Certainly there are fascinating tales to tell—personal histories in the cracks and crevices of this landscape every bit as symphonic and dramatic as the rise and fall by the seasons. But the majority of the handful of residents here (there are perhaps 150 of us living year-round in the half-million acres that compose the upper part of the valley) have not been here for very long; as a resident of twenty years, it's surprising to suddenly realize, one day, that I've been here longer than most in the valley. Almost everyone here, with the exception of three or four families, came here from somewhere else, and even the most ancient of residents have not been here more than the short sum of the days of their lives, and neither their families here for yet a full century, so that again in that regard we are all newcomers, still awkward in this land and seeking our fit, our accommodations and graces within it, whereas the intricately fitted connections of one-day-to-the-next and the sophisticated, sinuous, elegant negotiations that the other resident flora and fauna have struck with the variables of temperature, nutrients, light, moisture, and each other are a music that frankly I find more interesting, over the long run. Their lessons of patience, endurance, resiliency, and tolerance comfort me by observation, if not practice.

It is the landscape, at a single point in time, that I wish to "capture" in this narrative, to celebrate, in so doing, the order and meaning that exist in the turn of every elegant gear and cog.

Yet again, despite my desire for leisure in such observations, it is too easy now to witness how quickly things are changing, from an ecological perspective. Often I realize that I want to lay down on paper, at the very least, for the future, what it is like at this splendid point in time, tucked away back in one of the last corners of wild green health, up on the Canadian line, hiding out still beneath the echo of the last century, before it all quite possibly begins to fall apart—this blessing, this bounty, to which I and others are so undeservedly privy.

The old-timers here say that even twenty and thirty years ago it was even more wonderful. Some of them damn the Republicans, who have prevented for thirty-plus years and counting, any of it, not even one tree, from ever being protected. They say you should have seen it then. They say...

Every morning when I awaken, particularly in the first beginnings of spring, when birdsong starts to fill the day, it is all so new and wonderful to me, even after twenty years, that I sometimes have trouble envisioning anything that could possibly be more idyllic than the present moment, despite my foreknowledge of both its evanescence and imperilment, and the cautions of all old-timers everywhere who croon their same refrain about the good old days.

Perhaps these observations too, then, are, in addition to a celebration, a way of trying to reassure myself that this patient, resilient, enduring system of fitted green grace will be able to survive almost anything we can throw at it, ranging from mild inattentiveness to blatant disrespect, all the way to indefatigable governmental fear and mean-spiritedness.

Only time, of course, will tell, as it always does, as it always has.

It has spoken to the buffalo, the condor, the red wolf, and the jaguar, in this country. It has admonished the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the prairie chicken, the woodland caribou, and the desert pupfish. It is speaking harshly to the lynx and the wolverine, is summoning with death-rattling whispers the sturgeon and the bull trout, the grizzly and the golden-cheeked warbler, the cave salamander and the desert tortoise, the black-footed ferret and the ocelot...

Forgive me, future readers, for my being alive at such a glorious moment. I promise that if I cannot help protect such wild places—though I will try—I will at least try to take full pleasure in the bright-burning, beautiful wick of them...

 

The theory of my little plan, my little idea for an enclosure in the shape of a pack of wolves—or rather, an enclosure in the shape of running wolves, keeping the deer out on one side of the fence—would have resulted in a colony of fluttering aspen out in the middle of the meadow some four to five years after I'd staked the wire out; and to someone flying overhead, or to the eye of a raven, the meadow could have been cause for a second look.

In my theory, the shape of each wolf would have been precise, as sharp-edged as the dream of the artist, with the deer herd's ceaseless gnawings and nibblings all the way up to the edge of the wire trimming perfectly the outline of the thing that was absent; as if the very deprivation of the thing summons first the idea of the thing-not-visible, which then, under some chorophyllous or otherwise miraculous exchange, ignites into the physical, tangible presence of that dreamed thing.

The wire can be removed—rolled up and placed in the garage, or unscrolled elsewhere.

Now—in the theory—there is a mature grove of fluttering aspen, their leaves making a specific and ancient kind of music.

Where there are aspen, there will always be deer.

Perhaps a wolf, or wolves, over in Canada, will hear that distant music, or take in that sweet and specific scent, and put it into their minds, to muse on.

Where there are deer, there can be wolves.

In October the leaves will turn dry and gold, and in the wind they will make a louder rattling, and in their maturing decay, a stronger, and more pleasing, pungent scent; and the adolescent wolves of that spring and summer's pack, seeking to disperse and expand their territory, will remember that first new sound and scent of April and will begin to move in that direction.

By January, perhaps, when the snow is belly-deep on the struggling deer, and the colony of aspen stands leafless and silent, the whitened trunks almost invisible against the new-fallen snow—the outline of the aspen-shaped wolf pack seeming to disappear, in that manner—the final act of the synthesis, the dream's exchange, will occur, as the first traveling wolves, drifting down from Canada, filter into the aspens, passing among the young-standing trees.

Moving silently, searching for what has been promised to them, and the thing—the dream—that has summoned them. Eyes as bright as green aspen leaves.

 

In the end, I did not have the nerve for the dream, was made uncomfortable by the heavy-handed showmanship, the grand, manipulative, all-knowing arrogance of it. I will roar my opinions in a public meeting to fellow mankind when I feel the wild woods are threatened, but in the face of the forests themselves, and on those windy mountaintops, I am a voiceless, speechless supplicant, a silent novitiate. It was a reluctance not at all unlike that of my unwillingness to transport even a single painted turtle into my beloved marsh.

I love aspen, I love wolves—I love deer. And I have begun making little enclosures to protect the aspen from the deer—to protect the aspen
for
the deer, and the grouse, and the other wild creatures that utilize them. (Even as later in the fall, elsewhere in the forest, I will hunt, and kill, and eat those creatures. Playing God, I know. Does God, in a manner of speaking, eat or consume us—our spirits—and in so doing keep alive some essence of God? Who knows?)

The wolf shape idea was just too disrespectful, too cocky, too knowing and all-sure. It was not appropriately awestruck. The page—art, and storytelling—is the place for such manipulations and hubris, not on the canvas of the landscape itself, which is surely already someone else's creation, of which we are to be the curators and would-be imitators, but not, surely, the Grand Revisers.

I think that little by little we may be inching closer here to a workable and accurate definition of
pagan.

 

In the end, of course, my abstention or completion of a dream is of no real consequence to the world—only to the self, and sometimes to a handful of others. Again and again we confuse ourselves as individuals as beings of significance. What I was dreaming, with one roll of hog wire—a mere dream, as vaporous as a single breath of lung smoke in the bright sunlight on a frigid day—nature accomplishes on any given mountain in a single windy evening, with one great stroke of a brush, or in the entire state, the entire intermountain West and Pacific Northwest, in a single season, with a huge winter-kill deer die-off, in which a steadily increasing imbalance (too many deer gorging on an excess of summer browse, but with not enough of the thermal protection they need in winter, the closed canopy of the old-growth forest) finally tips all the way over.

Roughly eighty percent of the deer herd vanishes. "Pruned back" is too delicate a term. It is rank starvation, overkill, decimation, carnage; and of those deer that do not starve but manage somehow to struggle through the long winter, many die anyway, in an especially cruel twist, when, after having endured the magnificently brutal winter, they founder on spring's first green-up: eating too much green vegetation too quickly after having lost the digestive bacteria and enzymes in their stomachs during the winter of starvation, and then gorging on the extraordinarily warm and sudden appearance of green spring.