The Wild Marsh (25 page)

People who know about the deeply specific things of the world—yellow-cheeked warblers, and grizzly bears—say that those things, and hundreds of others of fine-tuned species like them, are not long for this world. I'm committed to becoming more involved and relentless of an activist than ever, which I think is nothing less than the obligation of each of us, in the face of such a terror, and such a theft—such a waste. And yet I'm increasingly aware too as I get older of another obligation I have to the future, in the face of such terror—a world without warblers, or wolverines!—which is to inhabit the present fully, forcefully, joyfully, as would those coming inhabitants of the world themselves, given the opportunity: inhabiting it with a spirit of greenness, a spirit of leaping and reckless, flamboyant life.

 

I squint my eyes almost to closing, staring out at the sunlit marsh. The ancient buzzing, clattering dragonflies could be pterodactyls far in the distance, doing battle. Already these pages, and this place and time, are but an echo, as are any of our lives when measured against the mountains or against anything other than the abstraction of a calendar.

Still, the marsh grass waves in the wind like a woman's wild hair—no less beautiful than it was a hundred years ago, or a thousand. As it may still be a thousand hence, or for as long as there is sun and rain and snow, and heat and cold, and the color green, and the movement of wind, bathing these things.

I sit hypnotized before my one bright window again, listening to the laughlike trilling of a lone sora rail, and to the faint and distant sound in that wind of last winter's dead alder branches clacking together like bones.

Which matters most, the serenader, or the serenaded?

 

The grass out in front of the house is a richer and deeper green now than even I, with the paintbrushes of the matches, could have imagined. "Remember how terrible it looked just a couple of weeks ago?" I tell the girls. "Remember how it was nothing but char and scorch?"

They nod, impressed but not overly amazed, and again I have to marvel at, and be grateful for, a life so filled with miracles, visible miracles, which, while such miracles are not quite taken for granted, are not viewed as anything too far beyond the extraordinary, or beyond one's due.

 

I take off one afternoon to run up on one of the mountains above my home to look for the false morels that sometimes grow in the burned forests up there. It's one of the mountains that feed my family, one of the mountains on which we are fortunate enough some years to take a deer or an elk, and this one day, strolling through the maze of standing fire-gutted black spars, and also among the living trees that survived the fire, I'm fortunate enough to find a patch of morels, which will be delicious when cooked in the same skillet as the elk itself, which also came from this mountain: the decomposing rock, the soil itself, bringing to springing life both the elk and the morel, as well as me, so that if we are not mountains ourselves, moving and gifted briefly with life, we are always a part of those mountains, the arms and legs of those mountains, wandering here and there though returning always to the base of these mountains, which feed our bodies and our imaginations...

There is a certain recipe for preparing an elk, when one is fortunate enough to take not just an elk in autumn, but later, in May, morels. You lay the slice of elk meat in the heated iron skillet, with some melted butter and a little salt and pepper, and slice in those morels, sauteing them with the elk meat; and after only a short while, you shut the flame off and let the elk's muscle, warmed in that skillet as if back into life, continue cooking on its own.

Because there's no fat in the meat, the elk-meat muscle conducts heat quickly, as copper wire conducts the galvanic twitchings and shudderings and pulsings of electricity; and the flavor of the morels is absorbed into that warming meat, as the elk in life once browsed on the same terrain, the same soil, upon which those morels were growing, yesterday. And in that manner, once again the meat is suffused with the flavor of the mountain, so that you are eating the mountain, eating the mountain straight from the black skillet, so delicious is it; and timing this last wave of skillet heat, knowing when to turn the flame off and simply let the heat of the meat cook itself, is like catching a wave, a surge, and riding it on in to shore; and the deliciousness of such a meal is no less a miracle than a blackened field turning to green life almost overnight.

The elk roaming through our chests and arms, the elk galloping in our legs, the mountain sleeping in our hearts, present always, whether we are waking or sleeping: rhythms within rhythms within rhythms, which we will never know but can always honor.

 

The thought occurs to me again how strange and perhaps hopeless this chronicle is, destined to disappear like melting snow, with regard to its calendrical observations, beneath the rude and quick-charging climatic alterations that a warming earth is fast bringing: the tilting of the lovely cant, the wobbling of that fine-tuned cant. That these days will never again have compare; that not only is time rushing past, but so too is the four-seasoned, temperate nature of this place. As if it is all finally, after so many centuries, becoming only as if but a dream.

But my God, what beauty.

I
F I MAY BEGIN
with one of the most ancient of clichés,
it's been a long winter,
you will hopefully forgive me. I live on a million-acre island in northern Montana. A cold, wide, deep mountain river bounds me to the south, as do Idaho's castles of mountains to the west and Canada's clearcuts to the north. I am bounded on the east by a vast lake, like a moat. My valley is an island, and within the cold and snowy year, here in Canada's shadow, June is its own island within the island. It's not quite as if you've been sleeping in all the previous months—neither after June passes so quickly, like a flame, will you immediately close down your year and begin preparing for hibernation—but it is not until June arrives that you realize, without having understood it earlier, that this is what some relatively huge part of the winter-ravaged husk of your body and soul has been waiting for: the long reach of days, the barefootedness, and the extravagance of warmth in the north country. Every cell in your body drinks in, absorbs, that new long light, clamors for it, as if you are sipping champagne from some tall fluted glass.

Each year it is as if you have never felt warmth before.

There have been cycles going on all along, an infinitude of cycles—sheets and braids and overlays and intertwinings of cycles: rise and fall, birth and death, motion and stasis—but in June, so illuminated and heightened are the dramas of these cycles that they are visible even to our often benumbed senses.

They are more than noticeable. In June, they are dominant.

Beyond the new warmth, and the tongues of gold light, tongues of green flame, the thing that most announces itself in the drama of these heightened cycles is the deer. At first they too are as luxuriant as any of us; like us, they too pass through the new light with seeming wonderment. Hugely pregnant, the does wander through the standing water in the marsh, pausing to browse the newly emergent subaquatic vegetation that might carry four hundred times as much calcium as do the dry-land plants.

So rich is their diet at this time of year—the first ofJune—that the deer will be shitting a stream of clearish fluid into the marsh even as they are feeding on that new growth there, so that you realize it is as if the slack-water marsh has been given a current by the sun's energy and is flowing now like a stream, passing straight through the deer as if through an empty vessel, though at least that calcium is transferred to the deer, calcium deposited as if scorched into the deer, while all else rushes past. Calcium is the one thing the deer most need at this one time of year, this one week—and it is not the marsh that is moving like a current, but rather, the deer moving through the marsh that is the current.

I think that deer are to this valley as salmon are to the Northwest: they have their own lives and passages, but they are also immensely, dramatically, a key part of the larger picture, the larger pulse, of this place. Just as the salmon gather nutrients from far out at sea, packing those nutrients into the slabs of their flesh in the form of rich, dense protein and then ferrying that protein inland, upriver during the spawn, where the bears and eagles and ravens and lions and every other carnivore capture and eat that protein and then carry it in their bodies farther inland, up into the mountains, depositing in that manner, in their spoor, deep-sea salmon atop an inland mountaintop—so too are this valley's white-tailed deer the bearers of dense protein, slabs of nutrients moving muscularly from one improbable place to the next, in ribbons of grace: from a marsh plant drunk on sunlight, to a deep cedar forest, to a lion's belly, to a sunny ridge in the mountains—a passage, a narrative, for which there is never any end, only new beginnings, always all over again, for as long as there is sunlight in June, and deer.

 

Early into June, hiking down the trail to the waterfall—flailing at the mosquitoes that form their own sheath around this north country—I am trailed by the season's first hummingbird, following my red shirt through the old forest, down by the rushing creek.

 

Around this same time—it can happen as early as the first or second day of June—the green cottonwood buds, swollen and turgid with the quick rush of chlorophyll, will begin shedding their heavy, sugar, resinous husks as the leaves emerge, looking like nothing else so much as the green tips of candle flame. Entire trees are alight in this manner, like candelabras, and if you are standing beneath one of these trees late in the afternoon, you can hear the sound all around you of the heavy, sticky bud husks falling to the forest floor, pattering like rain onto the forest's carpet of last autumn's dried yellow-brown leaves. And as you listen, beneath the blue sky, to that rainlike sound of the leaves being born—sticky husks landing on you, bouncing off you like hail—you can scent the exquisite odor of their emergence, and there is no other smell like it in the northern Rockies, no other smell like it in the world, when the cottonwoods begin to breathe and to exhale their sweet green breath into the valley.

(Later into June, not too much later, on an even warmer and windier day, you will be walking along a rushing creek and will stop with amazement as the sky before you fills with swirling white feathers and flakes. The temperature might be eighty degrees, the wind warm and from the south. The cottonwoods have just released their seeds, their cotton—you know this, you remember it from this time last year, and the year before, and the year before, but so ass-whipped are you still from winter's brute and sun-cheap passage that you physically flinch at the sight of what appears to be more damn snow, snow in June, even on a hot, windy afternoon...)

Shortly into June—usually within those first couple of days, as the sticky green pods of cottonwood resin are oozing and pattering to the ground, and as the cries of warblers, vireos, and red-winged blackbirds return (the snipe have been here a long time already, wind winnowing)—the deer disappear, as if they have left the country. They simply vanish, like guests leaving a party much too early—and you know that they have gone off into the most remote places, the safest, shadiest, most hidden places, to begin preparing to give birth to the fawns, which, having been conceived back during the falling snows of November, were then carried across the long perils of the sleeping winter, crossing all the way across the warming spring, finally, safely, into the tumultuous country ofJune.

 

The world knows the fawns are born before you do. Sometimes you'll be fortunate enough to see one newly emerged, knock-legged and groggy, limbs still unfolding from that long sleeping passage—but usually it is not until a day or two later that you know the fawns are being born. You generally don't yet see the fawns themselves but see instead their little button-size hoofs, still black and shiny, undigested in the piles of scat left behind by the bears and wolves and lions and coyotes that have been feasting on them.

(Soon enough, the predators will stop catching so many fawns; soon enough, the fawns will be big enough and strong enough to escape. It is only in those first few days, when most of the fawns are born all at once, that they are so vulnerable. Prey swamping, it's called, an evolutionary mechanism that ensures some fawns will survive by sheer mathematical probability—the lions and coyotes are too busy eating this sudden bounty to catch them all.)

The world tells you of the fawns' arrival too with the sound of the ravens. The sky is much more active with them, their black shapes flying through the dense forests of spruce and fir with greater agitation and purpose, and their raucous cawing, particularly in the heat of the day, when normally they are silent, tells you of the ravens' excitement, and you understand that they are traveling to and from the many kills, hoping to feed on a scrap or two; though rarely is anything left, only the sound of the ravens flying overhead, circling and swarming the lion, or wolf, or bear, or coyote, that is eating that fawn.

 

You can tell too when the fawns are being born, I think, because the same legions of mosquitoes that have been swarming you for the last couple of weeks are one day suddenly bloated. They've been feasting on the defenseless fawns for the last few days, and now when you swat them there's usually a splash of red on your arm—blood from their last meal, deer blood.

(Later that night, on the grill outside, I'll find myself cooking a venison steak taken from a deer the previous autumn. How we struggle to continue to try to believe in the myth that not everything in the world revolves around the consumption of another thing, even as time itself gnaws at the world equally, the animate and the inanimate, the living and the dead. How we labor to believe that, for a moment, or a few moments—as during the high pendulum of solstice or equinox—things can and do exist outside the embattled realm of the utilitarian and the manipulated. How we treasure and cherish the peaceful occasions, too few in number, when we gaze upon something without evaluating its cost or its usefulness, without evaluating it at all, only gazing upon it.)