(journal)

Flights of Spring

On a marsh in northwestern Montana, the season of rebirth arrives on the wings of a Canada goose.

By Rick Bass

Here in northwest Montana's Yaak Valley, up on the Canadian line, the Canada geese are the first ones back, preceding, by a few days, the arrival of the ducks. It's about as spiritual a moment as the year possesses, when we hear that first solitary and joyous honking, the first incoming, the first returnee. It is as rare as anything else in and of the year; there can, after all, be but one and only one first wild-goose call of each year—and it usually comes at dusk. Not backyard, yearlong golf course geese, but the wild migrators, tested one more year against the crucible of time and distance.

Even though we will have been waiting and watching and listening, it always catches us by surprise. I think the goose (I do not know if it is the same one, year after year) flies first above the tops of the trees, flying silently, flying north toward the river. And whether it is an old familiar traveler who cries out his or her joy upon first sighting the marsh, or a newcomer who, intent perhaps on the more northerly and open river or Canada beyond, happens accidentally upon the marsh—a clearing, a perfect circle, appearing suddenly below him or her in this otherwise dense forest—it cries out his or her joy and surprise both, at that sudden revelation. Either way, that first wild call comes from a dusk bird appearing silently and seemingly from out of nowhere, the stentorian bray unleashing itself right over the roof of the house, or the front porch, with no earlier, more distant pronouncements. By the time we run outside or to the windows, the goose is circling, seeming to us, after so long an absence, as large as a small plane, banking and wheeling. And perhaps that is when spring begins, when the first goose first splashes down into the thawing marsh, landing so perfectly into the place that lies between the end of winter and the beginning of spring that there are only channels of open water in the marsh; the bulk of it is still milky-colored, aerated chunks of sunlit ice, a frigid soup of discolored ice and glistening open water.

Perhaps that is when spring begins, when the first goose first splashes down into the thawing marsh, landing so perfectly into the place that lies between the end of winter and the beginning of spring.

Standing on the front porch, we can hear it all: the splash the goose's outstretched, blackened feet make upon landing; the sloshing of the waves from that heavy arrival, lapping over the marsh ice—wake up, marsh. Best of all, we hear, in the failing light by a dead and dying winter—a winter that is sinking back down into the earth to sleep for another six months or so—the calmer, contented, muted clucks and mutterings of that first-arriving goose, in the vanishing blue light, as he or she returns home yet again. And I believe, parochial bias aside, we are justified in using any animal's northerly range as the definition of its home, at least as much as its southerly range.

The Gulf Coast rice fields, or even farther south, might be where the great creature winters, or vacations. But it is in the north country, and on marshes and bogs such as these, where the animal goes about the serious work of raising its young.

For several days the goose will paddle the open channels like an icebreaker, laying claim not just to the opening marsh but to the new season itself. Other geese will be drawn in to that bowl of light. The marsh is caught in a delicate balance between frost and thaw. Nights are frigid, and the marsh freezes back up with a skim of ice that glints in the moonlight. But each day's sunlight opens it back up again, as does the leisurely wandering goose, paddling back and forth, singing.

Other geese arrive, drawn by the first one, and the marsh opens a little more. It is the stretch of the season doing it, far more than the ice-breaking channels made by the swimming geese. But several days later, when the faster, smaller ducks come hurrying in, that is the impression one gets: That the geese have, like snowplows, opened the lanes up sufficiently for those smaller ducks—mallards mostly, though also goldeneyes and wood ducks. It is an impression that is heightened by the way the newly arriving ducks often seem to seek out the larger geese, and hang out in their company—whether for protection or companionship or merely a coincidental shared preference for similar microhabitats, I cannot say—though in all my years of marsh watching, I have never once seen a single goose or mated pair of geese display even the faintest degree of aggression toward any duck or ducks that floated among them.

Perhaps there is some utterly boring and fully explicable scientific reason of selective advantage for this to be so—the geese and ducks existing side by side as matter-of-factly as cattle egrets and cattle. But such a thought generally arises only when considering the mystery as written on paper or in the abstract. Each morning, when I walk down to the cabin and first come in sight of the marsh's opening, and see the immense and graceful geese sitting serene and gigantic on the open water, and the smaller ducks—tiny in comparison, hunched up next to and amid them—the first and only feeling and impression I get is one of an overwhelming calmness. And in those first mornings I believe my instincts, every time. I believe what the world is telling me: that the geese and the ducks are calm, and are made calmer by each other's company and, if I dare may say it, each other's beauty, and the beauty of the morning, and the season—and that no other reason is needed.

I stop along the wooded path and stare out at them, mesmerized by the returning of life to the marsh after so long an absence; and they stare back at me, through the forest, and quack quietly and mutter—sometimes one of the geese will announce himself or herself with a single frosty-morning bray. But beyond that, there is nothing but beauty, and reverence among all of us—I can feel this—for the space of the marsh and the beginning of the season of life.

Everywhere, early in the morning like that, the woods are dense with the humility of living things who have made it through another winter, and who have been vested yet again with the privilege of life.

As soon as the snow is gone, it returns. With maddening duplicity, it comes and goes. The black-earth ovals that have been slowly opening up beneath each tree's canopy, encircling each tree's trunk—patches of open earth—disappear again in a single evening while you sleep: in an hour's time, or less, they are covered again by the silence of falling snow.

It's a deception, of course—it is generally but a mild, wet snow that blankets the woods, and whether with an inch or a foot, it is temporal. The earth's skin is warming beneath the increased light of the longer days, and the snow will be shed, like an overcoat—the river sound of trickling, gurgling, running water singing all throughout the woods, as the soil temps rise. Within days the same patches will reappear, as if their previous sudden disappearance beneath the returning snow was but a tasteless magic trick, a joke or a prank. But even in the full knowledge of this—the insubstantiality of the opponent—it's very hard to take for a species as visual as we are.

It doesn't matter that some deep and logical part of us knows that this is really no setback whatsoever; the visual part of us thinks, Ah, damn, it looks like January again. But that can't be. The geese are here; the geese are back. The year must move forward, regardless of our perceptions of slipping backward: The year gearing forward, relentlessly, as if by their demand alone.

Rick Bass is the author of 18 books, including an anthology, The Roadless Yaak, about his home in northwestern Montana's Yaak Valley.

© 2004  NASI