The Wild Marsh (28 page)

Somehow, it seems a part ofJuly.

The days are getting shorter, though we will have not yet really noticed it. If anything—as we become more and more accustomed to, and comfortable with, the rhythms of summer—it will even seem to us that they are still lengthening.

A bath, brush your teeth, and then story time, alternating between Mary Katherine's room and Lowry's.
Old Teller, Savage Sam, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Treasure Island.

Day after day there is a sameness, a suspension, that comes in July.

I was wrong about saying those rock walls we're building—rock walls leading nowhere, neither containing nor restricting anything—serve no purpose. And likewise, I think the July summer days have purpose, even if in untraditional or unquantifiable ways. Even if their purpose is to have no purpose.

Beauty, and rest, alone.

The irony is that it's not entirely restful, for Elizabeth and me. Mentally, its reinvigorating, but physically, under a northern summer's heightened and ambitious pace, it can become exhausting. Cook late, after getting in from the lake, clean dishes, get the girls to bed, read for a few minutes—suddenly it's midnight. Up early, then, with the world growing light again so soon (the girls sleep on, until nine, sometimes ten o'clock in the morning), and do it all over again.

The course of the invisible rock walls of childhood continues to extend itself, on through the seasons—and the seasons in the landscape itself act as the mason at least as much as do our hopes and dreams.

 

What is the name for this unspoken, elegant fittedness, possessing not the invisible joints of the stone wall or any noticeable mesh of cog to gear but instead an utter seamlessness? In July, as the fields and meadows begin to bloom with the white blossoms of yarrow, and clusters of pearly everlasting, and even oxeye daisies, the deer fawns, similarly spotted, lie in these fields, camouflaged within the season, calibrated almost to the day, even to the hour.

To cant our entire world, our weather and our seasons, by ten or fifteen degrees, as if striving to tip the world over on its side, leveraging it with some huge pry bar—how will that listing, that destruction, affect all the invisible angles and hard-gotten, beautiful negotiations of the world?

This astounding unity that we live in and amid, this community of order and elegance so blatant, so powerful and just beneath our nose that often we do not even see it—will we notice it only as it begins to fall apart, the running joints finally beginning to present themselves, widening and wobbling?

And again, there must be some word for it: the fittedness, and this overarching sameness of pattern and even desire. In July, the orange checkerspot butterflies whirl around the orange poppy coal-bright blazes of orange hawkweed, while the yellow sulfurs, also like sparks, dance and skitter across the fields from one butter yellow dandelion to the next, or from the similarly yellow blossoms of one heartleaf arnica to the next. The blue sulfurs, of course, pass from one bellflower to the next—watching them stir, you think at first the bellflower blossom itself has suddenly unfolded and taken flight, and it all seems like a kind of inaudible music, their movements and fitted order like the score and composition for some beautiful sheet music that in life we cannot hear, can instead only see; though sometimes I wonder, were any observer to watch and listen long enough, and deeply enough, if some faint and distant orchestral stirring might somehow be heard, like the preliminary
warming-up noises underlying preparations for some even vaster symphony playing always, and always just beyond our notice, no matter how careful the listener, or the observer.

(I think that hawks, red-tails and peregrines, kestrels and sharp-shinned hawks and harriers, with their high drifts selected, can hear better this music, and all the sounds between that music; and that wolves and bears following almost constantly the shifting, dissolving, unraveling scent trails of their prey can also smell such orchestral fullness. Where we as our own lately arrived species fit into this orchestra, I'm not sure, unless as I suspect it is in the audience: that we came here last and latest, or were put here last and latest, to observe, and celebrate, and perhaps be the caretakers...)

This fine-tuned sameness, this tendency, predisposition, even yearning, for one thing to follow the lead of another, like the wheeling of an entire flock of birds that gives itself over surely to no considered forethought but that instead pivots on some invisible point in the sky with not even whisper or rustling of wings, deflecting the flight of a hundred individuals as one being for no apparent reason, like water flowing around a boulder placed midstream ... What is the name for it, the way the deer and elk and antlers, designed for battle, look nonetheless exactly like the limbs and branches of the same forest thicket in which they take refuge? Or for the way you can walk far up a mountain, here in the Yaak, and find a little hand-dug pit where a miner picked at a quartz vein a hundred years ago, and then, traveling only another few yards upslope, but nearly a hundred years in time, you can notice the freshly overturned slabs of rock (perhaps thrust there by the miner himself) where a grizzly has been hunting for ants and digging for
Eriogonium
bulbs in that mountain soil, and chewing on blossoms of glacier lilies, bright as gold itself, two miners digging in the same place, only a century apart?

We do not have a name for it, in our language; perhaps we need to make up a name for it, to help draw more attention to it, in order that we might be more respectful of it—this fittedness, this elegance in which we rarely participate, but with which we have been entrusted to notice, and safeguard.

What would the word be? Would it be different, in different
seasons, different weather, different landscapes? Would an adult have a different word for it than a child, and a man a different term than a woman?

 

Certainly, the birders of the world are not shy about making up a new language to help fill all the cracks and joints of our own brute and limited existing vocabulary. Gradually, I've come to learn the names of many of the plants of this valley, though infinitely more elusive have been the names of the tiny birds flitting through the high forest, and their calls. The task is not made easier by my red-green colorblindness, but slowly, I'm learning a few, the easiest ones first; and if I live long enough and learn even one or two a year, then at some point in the distant future I'll have a much better grasp of those cheeps and trills and chirps that are always rustling above me, and farther into the thickets, in the summer. (I've tried listening to one of those birding tapes but have had difficulty pretending I'm in the woods—no matter how accurately the calls are recorded, I have trouble making myself believe it's a real bird making that call when there is no other accompanying stimuli of the natural world: no odor of marsh or spruce, no slant of sunlight or dimming of dusk; no breeze, no grass rustle, no sky, no earth, and I have to confess also to becoming frustrated with the pace of the narrative on those tapes. I'm a glacially slow learner, cautious to a fault about accepting or processing almost anything that anyone says, and when the brisk narrators on those birding tapes barge right in over the top of the last bird's call and inform me, "As you can so clearly hear, the call of a blanky-blank nut-dobbler is characterized by its reedy timber..." Well, it's too much too soon for me; the truth is, it seems to me that nearly all of them have some kind of reedy timber, or a throaty buzz, if you listen deeply enough.)

My durable old
Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds
pleases me, however, in a way the tapes don't; and I am delighted by the phonetic spelling of the birdcalls, which so far in my limited experience I have found to be unerringly accurate.

The evening grosbeak "calls incessantly to maintain contact with the flock. In flight,
tchew tchew tchew
or a shrill
p-teer.
Also a cleared, downslurred
tew
." Clearly, this description is the inspired
labor of love of an obsessive, for up until this point, surely, there has never been in our language either the word
tchew
or
p-teer.
Even
tew
I find remarkable, although I think the guide might be coauthored, for some of the birdcalls—too many of them, in my frustrated beginner's opinion—are described merely as a "chip" or sometimes "a soft chip," or even, if that second coauthor is feeling particularly descriptive, "a rapid series of chips." (The yellow-rumped warbler, on the other hand, when wintering in the desert Southwest, sometimes utters a sharp
chep
).

The bobolink's alarm call is a deep
wenk,
and the Townsend's warbler—such as the one that summers in the big alder tree just outside my cabin window, and which is accustomed to the sight of me (How long do they live? Is it the same one that returns to this same branch, every year?)—gives a "distinctive
weazy weazy weazy weazy twee,
or
dee dee dee-de de.
" I don't know about the
dee dee dee
part, but the
weazy weazy
part is dead on, and not on my most ambitious day as a writer could I ever have hoped to capture the sound, and the dialect, with that linguistic accuracy, and I am indebted to Author Number One.

(The olive-sided flycatcher is another easy one, and hence a favorite. Found in the mountains, it is often encountered by me while I'm hiking late in the afternoon, hot and tired, and its inarguable call of
Quick! Three beers!
was, I feel certain, described also by the first author, rather than the chipping author.)

There's so much to know, and so many ways of knowing; and again, while I prefer to find things out the slow way—across the years, if necessary, and at close range—by touch, by sight, by scent, by sound, by dreams, if possible, and by the constancy or reassurance of repetition, as with the seasons' cyclings themselves, I also love getting information from the miracle of the printed page.

I'm forty-two years old—suddenly, looking back, that seems like a lot of years, a lot of seasons, a lot of opportunities—and yet I think there's a pretty fair chance that even if I lived to be five hundred and forty-two, I might never know or discover that based on analyses of the stomachs of olive-sided flycatchers (from the family
Tyrannidae
—the tyrant flycatchers), it has been revealed that everything
Nutallornis borealis
eats is winged, that it eats no caterpillars, spiders, or other larvae.

Perhaps an engineer would see it differently, or perhaps not, but it seems, from a poetic perspective, that such specialization—such fit—speaks at least as much to a notion of gentle cooperation and gracefulness in nature as it does to the old hammer-and-tong model of scrabbling competition. This is not to suggest that nature is anything less than fiercely clamant, with every individual scrambling hourly for tooth-and-claw survival, and for the sustenance and continuance of each individual's genes and genomes, but upon closer examination, it might seem that there are always two worlds, like one overlaid on the other—two worlds at right angles to each other, perhaps—the savage, competitive world, and the gentle, cooperative world, and that it is not just God's, or the gods', desire to fill the world with beauty and order, with a full elegance of fit, so that every niche is miraculously and intricately occupied, but that it is wild nature's gentle and cooperative desire also.

What else are we to make of the knowledge, for instance, that as the olive-sided flycatcher perches high in the branches of conifers, waiting to catch the wind-stirred vertical tide of winged summer insects, the insects' lacy wings glittering and whirling diaphanous as the day's warming currents carry those insects in plumes up toward the waiting flycatcher (as a stream carries tumbling nymphs and caddis flies to a trout waiting in the eddy behind a boulder), the water pipits hop along on the ground just below those
three-beer
whistling flycatchers, gleaning from snowmelt puddles and patches of ice the next day's leavings of those insects that perished overnight in the alpine chill—those insects which, having evaded the acrobatic swoops and pursuits of the olive-sided flycatcher, found themselves stranded nonetheless, and stippling the ice the next morning in dark flecks and nuggets on the snow?

There's no need for the flycatchers to hog the ice; there's no need for the pipits to try to compete, up in the stronger, loftier currents of wind. An agreement has been struck—if not between the pipits and the flycatchers, then by someone, or something.

Is there something wrong with me for finding landscape, more than mankind, such a marvelous invention, such a marvelous palette for whatever force, or forces, created this world, and set it into
motion, halved in hemispheres and quartered into seasons, as neat and tidy and efficient and complex and unknowable as a single cell, or a single melting second in time?

 

Bounty.
I can do both, in July: can wander out to the cabin in the cool morning and sit there for a few hours, writing or not writing but instead simply watching the sunlight walk across the marsh, and with the deer slipping back into the forest as the sunlight warms the green grassy sea of the marsh, and with the insects and, simultaneously, the birds, beginning to stir and rise like smoke, as the marsh temperature begins to warm—and not long after that, the wind, too, begins to move—and yet I can still have the second part of the day to hang out with the girls. The four of us can go down to the river, or out to the swing set, or on a hike or a bike ride. Or if Elizabeth wants some time alone, the three of us can go. The panic of summer's rushing-past quality has faded, and if anything, there is sometimes a midsummer lull, almost a weariness, that sets in, for there will have been a tendency in the previous month to fill the long days of light with as many fun things as possible, so that the revelers now want, and need, to take a breath, and rest.