The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass [Bass, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

July is its own month too, in addition to being a bridge between others—July is the hammock, July is a crowded West, happy people on vacation, crowded gas pumps in town, crowded gas stations, crowded trailheads—and yet July, perhaps more than any other month, seems to me also to be connected, almost like a twin, to the month that will succeed it. Or July is that way with regard to fire, at any rate. Sometimes, in a dry year, July is the month of the first fires, but usually up here it is the last month before the fires—and while it would be concise and neat to partition the twelve months into equal wedges of pie, it's hard to do that because of the incredibly primal, elemental, and dramatic force of fire (the destroyer and creator both). The coming fires are always somewhat on our minds, upon this landscape, in any month, just as those who live in farming country are almost always aware, even if calmly, of the year's running total of precipitation, and in this regard too we are farmers of a sort, though we seek not so much to grow any certain crop as to simply receive the merciful precipitation for its own sake: the snows of winter and the rains of spring sculpting this Pacific Northwest forest, and in that lushness, that excess and rank bounty and splendor, shaping our moods, our culture, our days.

But because we lie in a seam, a borderland—the landform of our twisted geology, glaciated and slip-faulted, is more that of the northern Rockies—we are shaped and sculpted too by the breath of fire, the animal of fire. Ice birthed this country, at the end of the last ice age, but it is fire as much as rain that brings the pulse of life to it, helping select our biggest, healthiest trees, and in particular the thick-barked larch, with its unique beauty and strange and ancient duality—a deciduous conifer!—and while we love the look and fit of what the fires have achieved across the many centuries, we fear them some years, and respect them always.

Usually we get a good rain on or around the Fourth ofJuly And always we get a good rain on Labor Day, without fail—like clockwork. But of the sixty days between those two holidays, we might some years get only one or two thunderstorms; and the trouble with thunderstorms, particularly in parched and heated years, is that they fill the sky with lightning.

It's thrilling, invigorating, terrifying, intoxicating. In a hot year, as the forests begin to dry up and grow snappy-crisp, oven-baked beneath greenhouse temperatures that the vegetation on this landscape never evolved to deal with—fields and forests both dying from the heat as much as the drought—we watch the skies, and the weather reports, in an anxious kind of emotional dance, in July: wanting rain, but not wanting a thunderstorm. Or if wanting a thunderstorm, then a big, violent drenching one, so that the downpour extinguishes the simultaneous lightning strikes from the selfsame storm.

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