The Wild Marsh (41 page)

On the distant road below, I can see a few trucks traveling, pulling horse trailers behind them—some filled with household items,
I suspect, while others have the real item, horses, being transferred to other, safer pastures.

It seems strange to me, to be trying to carry on in my same old routine—berry picking in August—even as so much unraveling and reordering is taking place below, and in the woods beyond.

By late afternoon I've filled two empty water bottles full of berries—I'd like to have a few more, but if the season has to end today, which it appears it must, I think we'll have enough to last us—and in the dimming light, I hike the rest of the way up the mountain, thinking about freedom, considering the presence of it, this day, and its impending absence, in the coming days, as well as looking over the other side of the mountain and the great forests beyond, stretching all the way over and into Idaho and Canada.

Once up top, I sit there on the knife-edge blade of the divide and look over at the two sides of the valley, the burning side and the nonburning side, and even as I am watching one of the unburned stands, a forest that seems to have no fire in it, a single tree silhouetted on the next ridgeline over bursts into sudden light, shrouded by a tall and tapered yellow flame. Nothing else around it seems to be burning, just that one tree among so many others, up on the skyline, and as blue dusk comes sliding in over the day, and then true night, the distant candle of it keeps burning, mysterious and isolate, and I continue watching it until finally the flame grows subdued, is no larger than the glimmering beacon of a faraway lighthouse; and then it extinguishes altogether, with no others springing up around it. And in the darkness, with my pack full of berries, I start down the mountain, with the forest closing itself off to me and the slopes before me shimmering with all their little fires, looking strangely festive.

 

By the eighteenth of August, the big fire has climbed on up out of the valley floor, up into the safety of the farther, stonier mountains, and my family has moved back in with me, though the devil couch and china hutch and chairs remain stored in Bill and Sue's barn for safety. The mornings are much colder, and it seems that the fires are settling down, are being worn down, with each day's run becoming a little less vigorous, as if they are being sapped by the vitality of each cold morning.

I'm in my cabin, trying to close out the novel I've been working on for years—trying to keep, or find again, its rhythm—and am staring out at the sunlight on the bent grass of the marsh, the sunlight filtering through the smoke, with that blue haze not just pressing against the dusty windowpanes of my cabin but seeping in even through the chinks between the logs, blue haze floating in small clouds between my eyes and the page.

Helicopters are still coming and going, trying to snuff out the fires in the mountains above town, and I can hear the sawyers buzzing away on the steep slopes of the twin humps of Roderick Buttes, cutting fire lines designed to stop that fire's slow, damp downhill creep.

I'm staring at my blank page through the blue smoke, trying to dive deeper into the novel: trying to find a silence, and another reality, within. Trying to hear other music as beautiful as this is, and as the sights are, in the land above.

 

We grow antsy, impatient, irritable, for all the various reasons: the steady presence of helicopters, the ever-present smoke, the astonishing heat, and the slight feeling of imprisonment—of not being able to wander off into the forest. We consider, with perhaps some degree of paranoia, a changed and warmer earth in which many months of the year are like this one, decades hence, rather than these few weeks.

Summer itself seems to be burning like a chunk of coal, or a fire laid of dry sticks, and autumn seems to be on the other side of a high mountain wall, on the other side of a divide that despite our endurance grows no closer. And at night, as the stars continue their march, it seems as if we are being left behind, even betrayed.

 

We are awakened one morning at dawn to a sky the color of smoke, or fog—at first I think there is another, newer fire nearby—and to the sound of our dogs barking the way they do when a stranger comes down the driveway.

I go to the window and look out to see who might be here at this hour of the morning and realize that the dogs are looking straight up at the sky, their heads tilted back, and are barking at the rain itself, which they have not seen in so long, and which has disturbed their sleep. And it seems to me that I feel another clicking of the gears, of cogs entwined and intermeshed, rotating the valley, and our lives, back into a pace and pattern with which we are more familiar—as if the stars have paused just long enough for us to catch back up—and I go over to the other window and look down at the garden, which is glistening, and at the water dripping from the eaves of the roof, and there are no helicopters flying this morning, only my hounds barking their fool heads off, and I am filled with the strangest sensation, the strangest image of domesticity: I am like a commuter waiting outside of a subway, about to step on a subway to travel to work—call it the 6:45—and once again the world is filled with predictability and punctuality, and all of the quick uproar of the past few weeks was as if but a dream, no more real than smoke or fog.

It's a nice, steady, gentle rain that lasts for two days. It bathes our hearts.

I think we enjoy fires, are drawn to and even mesmerized by fires—that our lives, and our spirits, can often possess the characteristics of wildfires—but it feels right too for this settling rain to be falling, as if it came just in time; as if everything is working exactly the way it is supposed to—in step, and on time.

T
HE RAINS COME
every Labor Day, as if reading a calendar, as if they have an engagement, an appointment, not with the gear works of effect and recompense but with the more arbitrary, even frivolous ideas of man: as if we have succeeded in our petitions for rains to fall by the first Monday of September, as if we have negotiated with some deity, saying,
All right, bring the fire in late July and August, if you must, but we demand rain by the first or second of September. Or by the third or fourth, at the very latest. Otherwise
...

Otherwise, what?

Regardless, the rains always return. Perhaps the heat and smoke seed the clouds sufficiently that once the cooler, longer nights of September return, rain cannot be avoided—just as in a long, hot, dry summer, fire cannot be avoided. Whatever the reason—a negotiated settlement with God, or the unavoidable mechanical clockwork of a tilted, cooling earth, with the days foreshortening in an ever-steeper plunge now—the rain comes.

It extinguishes the fires and finally begins to mute the politicians' brayings, and their patrons, the multinational millionaire or billionaire CEOs, who have been assuring the American public that, despite half a century of clear cutting, if only we would allow them to clear cut it all, there would be no more fires...

Peace. Always, I am stalking peace. Some days it gallops away from me, other days I seem to be very close to its presence, and still other days it almost seems to be searching for me, as I am for it; and occasionally peace and I will find ourselves in each other's company. And with the heat and haze and smoke beginning to be vanquished, September is as likely a month to find it as any, and perhaps even more likely.

 

You can never have enough firewood; you can never have enough berries. In September we'll begin gathering a little bit of firewood (not until the autumn breath of October, however, will we really
kick up into production gear), and in the first few days of September, there are still, amazingly, sometimes a few more huckleberries to be found up in the high country, where summer is only just now arriving, as if squeezing in through a barely open window, where it will then visit for but a few days, or a week or two at most, before departing again, sliding back through that window crack and on down the mountain, with autumn coming in over the mountaintop, then, like a blanket drawn.

Another pint, another quart, sometimes another half-gallon. Each day could be the last, the berries shriveling in the sun or withering finally from a fierce frost; and as we sit there in the huckleberry fields (the bushes lower to the ground, up at that wind-scoured elevation), our fingers and faces stained purple, while it would seem that our thoughts would be on the coming months and all the different ways we'll use these berries throughout the year—jams, jellies, syrups, pies, cobblers, cheesecakes, in pancakes, on ice cream, in smoothies—what's really on our minds is nothing, only the somnolent peace of the moment.

We sit there in the high mountain wind and the thin sun, lost in the hunter-gatherer trance of provision, connecting and reconnecting to a deeper, older place with each berry chosen, each berry plucked, so that already, it is as if the mountain is feeding us, and the berries are nurturing us, even before we have eaten the first serving.

The haze of the sun-heated mountains, haze seeming to rise in shimmers from the rocks themselves, will waver before us, and the unending blue waves of mountain ridges will likewise span before us to the horizon, and beyond.

Is there a gene within me that so fills me with love for this wild landscape and makes me so willing to fight for its defense, and to guard so fiercely against the going-away of any of this landscape's other inhabitants, be they grizzly or wolf or sturgeon or rare water lily?

Butterflies drift past us, colorful wings paper thin, sometimes translucent, rallying for their autumn migrations: sucking down the last of the blossoms' nectar, drying yarrow, still pristine white, and blazing blue aster, and the incredible other-planet-seeming magenta of the last of the summer's fireweed.

The ravens have been fairly silent for much of the summer (with the exception of earlyJune, when they feed so lustily on the scraps of lion- and coyote- and wolf- and bear-killed fawns)—but in September they begin to grow more vocal again, often audible as only a single taut-screw croak, like the winding up of the last of summer: a one-syllable, one-note guttural sound of cinching up and battening down.

And whether that one note is saying
summer (is over)
or
autumn (is here),
I can never tell. Perhaps the perfect one-note sound is made as the raven flies over the perfect cleft or crevice between these two seasons—as visible to the raven's bright eyes as would be a literal niche or crevice in the cliffs in the physical landscape below, formed only a few hundred million years ago.

And sometimes, if we're up in the berry fields early enough in the morning, or late enough in the day, into the cooling blue light of dusk, we'll be lucky enough to hear the utterly wild, hair-raising flute-and-grunt call of a bull elk, bugling to announce to the world, and the season, his presence on the landscape, and his position, as powerful and focused.

I have crept in on the big bulls when they've been announcing themselves in this manner—have peered through the brush and watched, from a distance of only several yards, as the giants thrash their shining antlers against the trunk of a young sapling, scraping the bark from it in joy or fury or something else before lifting their head (their eyes wide, bulging with life) and bugling again, a sound that resonates in my own chest, so close, and causes tremors of vibrations similar to those experienced when you stand too close to the railroad tracks and a locomotive passes by, roaring its wail-whistle and shaking the ground, causing a tingling in your jaw and your arms and legs, even all the way into your hands and feet.

Sometimes, from the tops of mountains, the girls like to roll big rocks down the mountainside—not down toward any trail or road but down some steep slope, to see how far the rock will go before reaching its angle of repose. This is totally opposite of how I like to be in the world, and particularly in the woods, and yet occasionally I let them roll the thunder-rocks, not so much for the joy and power the act gives them (and I have to say, the sight of a rock cartwheeling down the slope, sometimes bolting twenty feet into the air, is
hypnotic, awe provoking) but rather so that they will at least have a fighting chance of not becoming exactly like me. Not that that's good, bad, or indifferent, but rather, what matters to me is that they at least have a chance, now and again, of taking a different path.

I let them roll these rocks, and then we move on. "This is the bears' home," I say, unable to resist. "We have to remember they live here too, and they probably don't like too much noise."

Still, I tried to let them choose their own way. For about thirty seconds. How unchanging, it seems, are any paths, and instead as foreordained as the runoff of snowmelt down the grooves carved in mountaintops from the claws of the glaciers that scratched their way down these same mountains ten thousand years ago.

Hiking down, we spy a pale, curved stick, a branch, that is the exact size and shape of a deer's rib—so much so that we have to pick it up and examine it more closely to be sure that it is not—and this reminds us, again, of how nearly identical are the shapes of deer and elk antlers, and the branches of the trees and bushes behind which they take shelter, so that without a doubt, as in Genesis, the one thing—the forests, arriving on, say, the third day—has shaped the next thing, the beasts and fowl, arriving on, say, the fourth.

We lie on our backs for a while and watch the astounding clouds, with their animal shapes. Indeed, just this moment, one of the larger ones, drifting up from the south, looks almost precisely like an enormous bull elk—so much so that even the cloud's shadow, projected on the mountain across from us, looks like that same elk.

It's gliding like a schooner, nearly galloping, as graceful in its traverse of that mile or two of distance traveled as would be a real elk, and it calms and soothes us, lying there watching it: not as if it is being presented to us for any message or instruction, but merely beauty, only beauty, and the tight order of a day among the living.