The Wild Marsh (54 page)

While we adults, likewise—as we come increasingly to understand how impermanent everything is, or almost everything—are similarly helped to focus on the same message, the same understanding, even if coming to that understanding from the other end of the spectrum.

Shyly, Lowry breaks off a piece of her candy bar and hands it to me—and whether as reward or communion, I cannot be sure. I know only that it is delicious, and I remember, for a few moments all over again, what it was like, to be in that cocoon of grace: immersed in the world not just of luck and chance but also of the concern and assistance of my neighbors.

Everything.

D
RAMA! ON THE DAY
of the school Christmas play, Wendy, who is to play the lead actress, is sick, throwing-up-and-fever sick. Her part in
Santa Claus and the Wicked Wazoo
is that of none other than the Wazoo herself, and as an eighth-grader, it's her last year to be in the play before she graduates and heads on to high school down in Troy. Her classmate, Karen, can't take her part, because Karen is Mrs. Claus, who is often in the same scene as the Wicked Wazoo (whose goal it is, of course, to spoil Christmas).

If Wendy doesn't rally, it'll be up to Mary Katherine to learn the part—not just the forty lines, but the timing, blocking, entrances and exits, the whole structure—in addition to keeping her part as "Martha, a peasant girl." (There are only five girls in the Yaak school this year—the eighth-graders, Wendy and Karen; Mary Katherine in fourth grade; Lowry in first grade; and Cheina in kindergarten.)

Mary Katherine doesn't find out about this until midmorning on the day of the play, but takes right to the task; she and Karen spend the day practicing, and when Mary Katherine comes home that afternoon, she's cool as a cucumber, casual and confident: not arrogant, just confident. If anything, she's subdued, because it's Wendy's last year. But about her lines, and their delivery, she's confident, with neither stage fright nor overconfidence: just another day in paradise.

Either Elizabeth or I would be jittery; and I can't help but think that this low-key nonchalance on Mary Katherine's part—a native durable confidence rather than the affected confidence of bravado—is one of the products of place, one of the myriad benefits of a small school, the two-room log school, in which all the different grades sit together, and interact every day, year in and year out, like family—learning lessons such as responsibility and friendship and loyalty in addition to all the prescribed traditional curricula.

She's not nervous, I think, because she has everyone's support.
And no one else is nervous because there's so much trust and teamwork. The two teachers, Jeannette and Bill, have been working with the students for almost a month, and so accustomed have I become to the easy familiarity of the little school—the older students helping to teach and take care of the younger ones, and the younger ones benefiting from all that "extra" instruction (and learning the model of leadership that they'll grow into, as the older ones graduate)—that it's easy for me to forget that it's not necessarily like this in other schools. I try not to ever take it for granted, how wonderful this opportunity is for the girls, for all the students, and how much strength it will give them as citizens of the twenty-first century, to have had this log-cabin experience—but still, I've become accustomed to it, even if I don't take it for granted, and it is moments like Mary Katherine's and the other students' poise that remind me again of the fuller value of that rarity. Her response, and their response—taking confident pleasure in the arrival of a challenge rather than melting down into the jitters—is probably the normal or "natural" one, whereas the self-induced nervousness that Elizabeth or I would encounter, though common, a less natural response...

It's a big deal, this Christmas play. Every year, the whole community shows up, hermits and all. The plays are always wonderful, and there are cookies and cakes, and after the play, the kids and community sing Christmas carols, there in the log cabin community center, up near the Canadian line, in the middle of the forest, more than forty miles from the nearest town, and it's just nothing but sweet. Some years there's a hayride afterward.

And this year, like all the other years, goes off perfectly. It's the strangest thing, hearing Mary Katherine's deep, maniacal laugh booming from behind the curtain, preceding the Wazoo's villainous entrance. It's like,
Okay, if she's determined to grow up, I can still be proud of her;
and though I knew already how proud of her I am, how proud of both girls, it is a revelation, and a growing-up on my part, to see her come swashbuckling out from behind the curtain, still booming that laugh of the great Wazoo, determined to spoil Christmas. It's so strange to see her giving the community, the audience of adults, a gift.

And I feel the same sensation when Lowry, in her pink glittering ballerina suit, comes twirling out center stage, hands poised over her head in graceful, elegant ballerina pose—the Dancing Doll—and cries out, "Help, help!"

Every parent feels it, and every audience member, this most excellent gift by the children to the community that supports them—but for me, with my hermit- or recluse-like tendencies, it's a profound witnessing to see that I don't necessarily have to pass on all of my less-than-wonderful attributes to my children, and that they will likely be better in the world for it; and that already, they have something to give to the world, and are giving it.

All the children are giving it, breathing the breath of Christmas more fully into the community: Mike (whom, as an eighth-grader, and having killed his first deer this year, a monster whitetail buck, we can no longer call "Mikey") as a great Santa Claus; Karen as the calm and confident Mrs. Claus; Jed as the boisterous singing leprechaun, the true star of the show; Kilby, Luke, Levi, and Noah as sly trolls, dressed in camouflage, out to steal Christmas; Kyle as a happy elf; Lowry as the Dancing Doll; Zachary and Cheina as fairies.

Outside, it's snowing hard. The pew benches in the community center are packed shoulder to shoulder, and the wood stoves are popping. Over the course of the coming year, as with every year in small western towns, there will be disagreements among the adults, fears and accusations and misunderstandings, and sometimes the plain old-fashioned chemical imbalances of humanity—disagreements between individuals, between neighbors—but this evening, at least, the beauty and purity of the children fills the cabin with a love so sweet and dense that after the play is over we linger, not wanting it to end; and when we open the door finally and step outside into the falling snow, that love is adhering to us. Some of it goes sliding out the door like warmth spilled, and off into the night, and into the woods, but a lot of it stays with us, I think, and travels home with us, and stays in us for a good long while, I hope. Peace on earth and goodwill to men.

 

Such are the cycles of our lives—the regularity and repetitions of rhythms, here in this place-that-is-still-a-place, this forested island that still seems to be governed somewhat by its own system of time
rather than always mankind's—that the end of one thing can feel also like the beginning. December is that way, as the last of the deer or elk is cut and wrapped and frozen, if a hunter was fortunate enough to receive one: the coming year's meat stored away safely. The snow is always down to the valley floor by December—another beginning—and while the rest of the world, including our relatives in the more civilized places, enter into the full frenzy of the Christmas season, things are so much quieter up here, amid a complete absence of malls, though in that quietness, emotions are no less deeply or passionately felt. It's just quiet and slow, is all—like walking in soft new snow at dusk.

The days are shorter, but with the hunting season behind us and the pressure of making meat lifted, we can sleep later. We can spend any free time we might have skiing too instead of hunting. It's the beginning of rest, of sleep, of play; the beginning of being able to spend even more time with family. We begin wrapping jars of huckleberry jam, for gifts, and take the girls out into the snow for the annual Christmas card picture. Elizabeth gathers boughs of cedar and pine with which to make beautiful wreaths—she and half a dozen other women in the valley gather to spend the days making these wreaths, and then mailing them, fresh-scented, to friends and family in the outside world—and though the days are shorter than ever, and still usually sunless, they feel also brighter and newer, with all the clean white snow.

The children, having warmed up on Halloween, and then Thanksgiving, are fully into the dreaming (Lowry's still a true believer, but Mary Katherine's dubious about Santa—though as the days progress, I notice that Mary Katherine comes back across the line, if even for only one more year, and it is a sweet and wonderful thing to see, made all the more special by the knowledge that surely this is the last year), and their Christmas lists are posted on the refrigerator. I suspect that they're as cutthroat and mercenary as any children anywhere—it's not like they'd be thrilled with but an orange in their stocking and in a good year maybe a candy cane—but I have to laugh at Lowry's list: a pencil and pencil sharpener, a Barbie (I know, I know), and, most curiously, a bottle of whiteout. And even Mary Katherine's list is somewhat of a relief: books and CDs, a new pair of snow boots, and a pair of ski goggles.

Like a cliché of a cliché, or as if in a dream of a dream, the holiday season begins for us, I think, on the day that we go to get the Christmas tree.

For as long as the girls have been able to walk, they've gone into the woods with me each year to find a tree—always a young Doug fir, a species that is overabundant in many of our fire-suppressed forests, and in need of thinning, literally by the millions—but finding the perfect one is never easy. Any tree is beautiful in the forest, but we only had to bring one home one year, pleased with it ourselves, only to hear Elizabeth's considerably more subdued reaction, to vow never again to settle for anything less than perfect.

What once sometimes took us half an hour now takes us an hour, sometimes an hour and a half: and though the pleasure is in the hunt, there is pleasure also each day and night thereafter in admiring the tree all throughout the holidays.

I prepare the girls for it, the cutting, as I would were we to be going on a real hunt; on Sunday night, before they get ready for bed, I tell them that when I pick them up after school on Monday I'll bring their cross-country skis and we'll go out and look for the tree. And the fact that they're as thrilled with this news as if it were Christmas itself pleases me greatly, and though I know they love having regular markers of tradition and security in their lives, I know also that I love it as much as they do, and perhaps more.

It's bitterly cold when I pick them up, about fifteen degrees, but with a rare breeze that makes it feel closer to zero, and the sky is its usual beautiful ragtag mix of purple and gray clouds, with more snow coming any minute. I've brought a thermos of hot chocolate, and on the way home we share a cup of it, drinking it out of the screw-on top like duck hunters, and then we turn into the little road where we always turn, and get out where we always get out.

We engage in a brief snowball fight, and then I buckle on my snowshoes, and they put on their skis, and we start up the rocky ridge, which is now covered with snow.

The skies are beautiful—the color of plums, the color of the back of a seagull, the color of sharks, the color of oyster shells—and we take turns breaking trail through the new snow like explorers, and it pleases me that the girls remember where we are going from all the other years. They're bundled up with as many clothes and
coats as they can wear, and I have more of my own larger coats in my backpack, along with the thermos.

It pleases me to see what natural backcountry skiers they are, having grown up on them—such a strange difference from my own south Texas upbringing—and those beautiful skies hanging dense above the somber blue-green mountain, and amid the stark winter forest through which we're skiing, also elevate my spirits, even at a time when biologists or physicians might tell us that they should not be elevated as we enter more fully now the depths of winter and its at times extreme lightlessness—and I can't tell who is happier, me or the girls.

As we move on through the woods, seemingly the only living creatures out and about in this vast snowscape and sleeping forest, there is a spirit that accompanies us, that emanates from the three of us—a
happiness,
to use an old and worn word—that braids together to form a larger whole; and in accompanying my daughters up the ridge, I can sense and at times taste the flavor not just of that new-made happiness but even of their own elemental happiness, which I remember, dimly now, from my own childhood thirty-five years ago.

I fear that I'm not saying it clearly. In my experience, it's rare for an adult to experience, ever again, the happiness of a child. There are a million different sorts of adult happiness, mixed in with perhaps a million different nuances—satisfaction, pride, relief, euphoria—but what I feel, moving up that hill with my daughters in the soon-approaching winter dusk, self-sufficient, for the time being, on our skis and snowshoes, and moving deeper into the woods, is a child's happiness, and I cannot remember having felt that in a long, long time.

Once we reach the ridge, we begin to encounter the young Doug firs growing in between older lodgepoles and larch, and again, the girls are old enough this year to be good judges of physical character: bypassing weaker or asymmetrical trees and judging also which trees are too large and which are too small. Making guesses, and mental notes, about certain trees that we might be able to come back and examine in years hence. But searching, still, for this year's.

We look for a long time. The wind blurs our eyes and sometimes
makes far-off trees look better than they really are; we'll ski and snowshoe down into a bowl or ravine and up the other side to some such tree, only to discover upon reaching it that it's not even remotely like what we're after.