The Wild Marsh (21 page)

 

The green wave of May moves so fast, and with so much power, that it only seems disorderly and rambunctious to you. What is really occurring is that May's leap is laying the foundation for all the coming intricacies of the growing year—the foundation itself a complex and elegant assembly of preparations, but moving so boisterously and in so many directions at once as to seem random, reckless and unconsidered, to our eyes. We are too used, I think, to gauging the final constructed edifice rather than the glorious biological roilings and writhings of the work in progress, the living thing being created. I suspect that too often, to the detriment of our imaginations, we prefer result and destination over process and journey.

Even for a free or willing spirit, however, the challenge of following May's lead can be daunting and disorienting. As if rushing pell-mell over April's long list of firsts, here comes May now with its own frantic, surging, savage list of firsts. First hard rain, first scent of cottonwood. First fringed bud of aspen leaf, the tapered green swollen bud-flame opening slightly to reveal the unfolding miracle of true leaf rather than engorged bud: and a thing of beauty in its own right, that sight of the first pair of unfolded leaves, as well as the foundation for all of the summer and then autumnal music of clattering leaves, quaking and rattling in the wind, each aspen grove its own sighing symphony, and each symphony's first score and movement harking all the way back to those silent first days of May, when the first bud swelled in the earth's new warmth until it could finally swell no further, and spread apart to make the first two leaves of spring—silent, and yet part of the music.

In addition to the disorder and youthful, exuberant, greedy rush, alternating with the last adolescent moments of indecision—rain, or sun? Neither mood lasts for long; they wash across the landscape in alternating tiger-striped bands of darkness and light—there is intense sogginess, mirthful muck and jelly-swamp, as the last of the snow and ice departs, and as the sweet-scented rains drum down on the thaw-softened, sodden, buckling thin soil.

The last bridges and cornices of ice cave in alongside the river, floating downstream like rafts or leisure boats, sometimes stacking up at the bend in the river or against a logjam: piling up quickly into a hastily constructed but impressive piece of jumbled architecture. The little rushing river piles up higher behind that ice jam, swelling and rising and broadening across the floodplain until the river appears, over the course of only a couple of days, to be as wide and brown and ambitious as the Missouri or the Mississippi, a giant sprawling through our little valley; and in those shallow, spreading floodwaters there is a shimmering glitter of silt and all kinds of other organic matter—bear dung and rotting log mulch and deer pellets and dead trout and winter-killed elk and everything else within the river's hungry reach—sparkling suspended, distributed far and wide into the forest and across the brown and sullen floodplain.

The river will keep rising, choosing at first those myriad paths of lesser resistance and carrying the richness of its spreading breadth into all the places that are so hungry for that distribution of wealth.

But beneath the easygoing demeanor—beneath the gentle, sleepy, wandering flood—a desire is quivering, and an anxiousness. The river is running late now, on its path to the great curve of the Kootenai, which receives this straight-running river (notched with the many feathery fletchings of side tributaries) as the arc of a bow receives and cradles an arrow drawn. The Kootenai flows into the greatest American river of the Pacific, the Columbia, which follows, as much as the dams will allow it, its mandate to the ocean, and the salmon, and the sturgeon and the cedars...

For a while, then, before its release, the be-jammed river meanders, seemingly confused, and spreads nutrients and richness into the most unlikely places, or so it seems; appearing to ignore—even avoid—the pressure that continues to build and strain against that thickened bridge of milk-colored ice.

The river wanders chocolate-covered off into the woods, seeming lost, moving away from the ice bridge—just wandering, and even in a fashion seeming to retreat or draw away from the ice bridge.

One day, though, the ice begins to tremble. Not noticeably, at first, but faintly. Trembling, then stilling itself, trembling, then stilling. It might be only one's imagination. Perhaps nothing of consequence is occurring.

A few days later, however, the trembling is more pronounced, and noticeable—audible all the time, as a shuddering. And at night, as the day's surge of high-mountain meltwater only now, twelve hours later, makes it all the way down to the ice bridge on the valley floor below, all the way down from the tops of the mountains that had been bathed in May sun a dozen hours earlier, the first melodies of cracking or straining ice can be heard, sounding at first like the perfunctory stroke of a fiddler's bow drawn but once or twice across the quivering taut strings of the instrument: the warming-up, the preparation for the real thing.

It will sometimes take a full week beyond that first draw of the bowstring before the entire opera is engaged; before the gates of ice crash open and the river is born or resurrected again and goes hurtling down its old waiting stone canyons, carrying along in its roar a winter's worth of driftwood, entire forests bobbing and surging along in significant—for now—disarray.

The sun returns and dries out the coat of mud slime that was deposited in the floodplain, these rich gardens of river dirt speaking in a mosaic to where the ice bridge, or bridges, were that year; and in subsequent years, rich willow and meadow encroach upon, and are nourished by, those flood gardens; and in late May, and on into the calm of summer, moose and deer and elk wander out into those wild and seemingly random gardens to graze and browse on the fruits leaping up out of the legacy of that random richness, with the same story told over and over again, the same story in only slightly different places, up and down the length of the wild river, each year...

 

There are other kinds of gardens too. And what is grown is not easily if at all replaceable, and cannot be measured by any scale other than that which acknowledges depthlessness, timelessness.

From such gardens a harvest is possible, though not in the traditional sense of any of the hard commodities of the world—oil, gas, timber, hay, livestock, electricity, gold, copper, silver: the detritus of industry—but rather, a harvest of spirit, though perhaps it is not even a harvest, for perhaps no more is taken from the mountains or the forest than that with which the traveler already arrives. Perhaps the mountain, the forest, is only the catalyst, so that these wild gardens merely summon or elicit the reverence, or potential for reverence, or joy, or potential for joy, that already exists within the traveler.

In our valley, we have but fifteen such gardens of any significant size left. They require a minimum size of one thousand acres to be classified as potential candidates for wilderness designation—formal, permanent protection by Congress—and in order to qualify must not ever have had any roads built into them.

Such has been the frenzy of extraction on this forest, the subsidized liquidation of the biggest and best of the timber—well over a million loaded logging trucks have rolled out of this forest, out of this valley, and out of this impoverished county (Where did all the money go? Was there ever any money, or was it all simply given or traded away?)—that in the million or so acres lying between the Canadian border and the curve, the bow, of the Kootenai River, east of Idaho and west of Lake Koocanusa, these fifteen gardens are now scattered in a gasping strand of one wild archipelago, and are refuge not only to the last threatened and endangered species such as wolves and grizzlies and caribou and wolverines but also to those reservoirs of spirit.

Fifteen gardens: and worse yet, not a single one of them has any form of permanent protection whatsoever. Despite the living, pulsing, breathtaking wildness of this landscape (a biological wildness, rather than a recreational wildness—perhaps the wildest valley in the Lower Forty-eight, in that regard), there's still not a single acre of designated wilderness protected on the public wildlands of this valley.

It's a big injustice. I hate the flavor, the taste, of that injustice.

I love the scent, the taste, the feeling—and certainly, the ecological justice—back in the farthest hearts of those fifteen gardens.

I've said it before: This isn't a place to come to. It's a place to dream of. It's a biological wilderness, full of frog roar and swamp muck and tangled blowdown and mosquitoes and deeply angry, suspicious people, none of whom would be pleased to see your happy, vacationing face.

This is a place of mud and muck, a celebration of the rank and the fecund, the cold and the uncomfortable, the frayed and the wild. This is a place whose last wild gardens should be protected for its own sake, not yours or mine.

They are gardens. While much or most of the world in May is puttering about in the warming black earth, coaxing carrot seeds and lettuce sprouts into the bright new world, the gardens I am most interested in have not been planted by the hand of man or woman but are instead bulging, swelling, shifting, on the verge of delivering kicking spotted elk calves back into the world, and are delivering bears back into the world, tumbling once more to the surface from their earthen burrows like astronauts returning from the strangest of journeys; mountains delivering torrents of rushing water, recharging the buried aquifers between immense slabs of tilted stone. The fossils of ancient sea creatures tumbling with the season's new talus down into the bed of bright glacier lilies below: trilobites, fenestellids, cephalopods, and ostracods on the prowl once more, and the earth itself stretching and yawning like a wildcat, supple and hungry, awakened, youthful, vibrant.

A garden of dragonflies rising from the waving marsh fronds like sunlit jewels summoned by no gardener we will ever meet in this life, and one whose careful and calculated, fitted and meaningful work, closely studied, can bring, I am convinced, immeasurable blessings of peacefulness to the student of that work, the careful student who observes and ponders the goals of that precise gardener...

 

A garden of loosened fur, a garden of fire, a garden of recovered earrings, or the dream of recovered earrings. One May our friend Tracy, while roughhousing with Lowry, particularly around the slide and swing set, lost her earrings, and searched for them to no avail. It was late May, almost into June, so that the grass and clover were high enough already (and the earrings were small ones) that we were unable to locate them, though we looked until dusk.

"Don't worry," Tracy said. "They'll show up."

Except they haven't. Every year, in early May, before the green-up—once the old dirty snow has pulled away and the earth has warmed to sodden mud, dappled with glinting puddles and the shortened silvery stubble of the winter-dead grass—we go out and search, again and again, for those earrings, combing the yard in all directions, though never to any avail.

How can they just disappear? Year in and year out we search, confident that there will be some accrual of luck, some cumulative tally or summation that will eventually transcend failure, and that no matter how secretively they might be slipped into the ground—two little silver leaves hidden beneath a flake of bark, or a bent matting of grass—our diligence will be rewarded and we will find them; that each early May spent searching is not a new beginning, isolate and unconnected to all the other years, but is rather an extension, a continuum of all that has come before, and if our efforts and luck in previous years have not been quite sufficient, well, never fear: all those years' labor plus one more,
this
one added to all the others, will surely turn the tide.

But nothing. Each year, nothing.

We'll find them. There's plenty of time. If not this year, then next, or the next. Sometimes I feel a wonderful urgency, while down on my hands and knees searching, in knowing that the green grass is onrushing, growing higher each day, like tongues of green flame rising higher and higher, diminishing my chances of finding the earrings with each passing day, though most days the green fire doesn't bother me.

Instead, I put in my hours—the days, then the years. If not this year, then next. The earrings will be found—they cannot have traveled anywhere—when they are meant to be found, and it will be like a little miracle when they are. The important thing in the meantime is to keep showing up, to keep putting in the hours.

 

All through the winter, the deer have traveled the same paths over and over, packing the deep snow, their sharp hoofs cutting down to form lanes, and then nearly tunnels, through the soft hills of snow. They keep these trails so packed down that the snow in them gets compressed to some kind of superdense cobalt- or galena-colored substance, more slippery than mercury, denser than lead—and, paradoxically, or so it seems at first, these trails, which once marked where the snow had been worn down to its thinnest margins, is now the last to leave, the last remaining thread of winter: fifteen feet of snow supercompressed to a height of only a few inches so that even in the returning warmth of May, these luminous dense ice trails linger long after all the other, fluffier snow has long since melted; and having no need to use these trails now, which are slippery, the deer avoid them.

Instead, the deer step carefully across the spongy dark duff—surely they must feel sprightly, unencumbered, at long last—and in this yin-and-yang inversion, old snow to black earth, they shed their winter coats, leaving their hollow hair in tufts and clumps all over the woods, the braided, winding rivers of it running now at cross angles to the old paths of hoof-matted ice.

The hair glints in the newer, sharper light of springtime, looking like spilled straw, or silver needles—trails of it leading all through the woods—and this shift in the riverine sentences that echo the deer's passages, a shift even more pronounced than the reversal of a tide, are for me, as with the coming of the first trillium, one of the most visual markers of the season, the true and irreconcilable end of winter. Though the mud and forest puddles will dry out, and the winds will soon enough scatter those tufts and concentrated rivers of hair to a more democratic and widespread distribution, in May it is still all clumps and patches, the deer shedding great wads of hair against any rough surface: the bark of a hemlock, the stub of branch on a fallen lodgepole, the branches of a wind-tipped fir tree. Appearing all throughout the forest too are the whitened, ribby spars of winter-killed deer, appearing like so many ships stranded by the white tide's great withdrawal, and in caves and hollows too, beneath the fronds of great cedar trees, entire mattress-nests of deer hair can be found, in places where a mountain lion has fed all winter long: dragging one deer after another to his or her favorite cache and gnawing on it, almost always in the same place, until the bones stack up on one another like a little corral and the disintegrating hides shed their fur. After the end of winter, in such places, the ground may be half a foot deep in white belly hair, belly hair as white as snow—the tide pulling back, retreating horizontally, with new life,
springtime,
poised now at the leaping edge of vertical green roar...