The Wild Marsh Read Online Free PDF Page A

sometimes for two hours, sweating like horses, in order to gain a ten-minute ride down—but what a beautiful climb it is. And though the ten minutes whiz past on our way down, such is the amount of beauty and joy that's compressed into that little wedge of time that it almost doesn't seem to matter how ridiculously short it was.
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    Your mind slows way down, in winter, up here, in January. You find yourself thinking at great length about useless or insignificant little things. Memories from far away and long ago seem to ascend to the surface unbidden, as if in a dream. One such memory I have, while skiing one day—total silence, save for the creak and rasp of my wooden skis, or "boards" as Bill calls them, across the tight skin of the frozen snow—is from my childhood in Texas. I find myself remembering what a big deal it was back then—thirty-five years ago—to put on long underwear. How strange the sensation was, to be wearing one set of clothes beneath another, and how exciting, almost dangerous, for it meant that dire weather was coming—a norther, with raw sleet and ice, and temperatures that might drop into the teens, or even, once every ten years or so, into single digits.
Drama.
Once or twice a year, we'd need to pull on those long white thermal tops and bottoms, to brace ourselves against nature's rawness.
    How quickly we adapt! Now I cannot imagine not wearing long underwear, in every day of the heart of winter, and a much warmer material than those heavy old white cotton suits. It's almost as if I've been given the opportunity to live two lives. As a boy, pulling on the novelty of that long underwear once or maybe twice a year, I would never have dreamed that one day I'd be wearing it every day, that wearing it would become as common as lacing up shoes or boots.
    Such are the kinds of thoughts you find yourself dwelling on, contentedly, mindlessly, as you ski your way up the mountain through the hypnosis of falling snow, curtains of it everywhere, and the whisper of your blood not like the waves of some gentle ocean but like the sound and rhythm of that steady-falling snow, hushed and quiet and calm and ceaseless.
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    I love driving the girls to school each morning; I love traveling the same route through the snowy woods, watching the days grow incrementally longer, and seeing the same stretches of woods each day.
    Anything's possible. We've seen mountain lions bound across the road in front of us, and elk, and coyotes; once, a weasel. Always, deer.
    Always, crossing the river in town and looking upriver, we seek out the snowy mass of Mt. Henry, with the line of its 1994 burn traveling halfway up it, neat as the faint scar from some old surgery.
    The river is almost always frozen by January, and glancing at it as we cross over the bridge, we can see, and are almost momentarily mesmerized by (in the manner that one can be hypnotized by a fire), the strange lunar patterns in the whorls of ice: stress fractures and rifts that have sealed back in over themselves like broken bones knitting themselves together again, the frozen skin that is a blanket for the sleeping river stretching and contracting, cracking, splitting, yawning. The script that remains behind after each night's flexions exists either in long, sweeping arcs stretching in radii across the entire river, as perfectly carved as if transcribed by some giant compass, or as an odd assemblage of perfectly straight lines, like those in a game of ticktacktoe; or as if a pile of spindles has been spilled onto the ice in a game of pick-up sticks.
    In either instance, whether arced curves or straight lines, the impression you get—the impression you cannot shake from your mind—is that each riverine marking in the ice, remnant and residue of the previous day's and night's thermal variation, is not random but exists in this world under the auspices of some mathematical formula, some reason for being: not yet known by us, and as