The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass Page A

of spring, or some strange and dreamy land between the two, wherein some of the world awaken and rise while others in the world remain suspended—summoned, perhaps, but not quite awakened. And even for those fully awakened, in March—Pisces, and the fish beneath the ice, unblinking—perhaps the world is still half dream. And in that half-dream, then, surely the yellow glow of the willow is a beacon in the storm, a signpost and candelabra lit, or a conductor's baton, encouraging all to rise—to dare to rise, reshaped by another year's passage—and to move forward toward that curtain of falling snow, and through that curtain, with faith and confidence that a bright and joyful, explosive world of color and life lies waiting just on the other side.
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    Some years—not every year, but some—the snow will begin to finally grow lower, in March, or will lower for a while, only to fill back up in April, which is another matter entirely. (It amazes me, the way each month has such a separate identity. We think of time as a river, and know intuitively that it is. But if one pauses to look back almost any distance, the months might seem as discrete blocks, chunks of stone, all stoved up and jagged against one another, like the spines and teeth of glaciers, gnashing at the sky and both devouring and yet creating the mountains and, in the mountains' dissolution, creating the dusty plains below.)
    And perhaps it is this way, with the months not any ethereal river braid but rather devourers and creators of time—the individual months gnawing away at some bedrock of time.
    And as these stone blocks of the months exist sometimes jagged, other times smoother, above the bedrock form of a God-made landscape, a Creator-made core of the irreducible, then so too might there exist a third and higher level, something more graceful and seamless—something truly more riverlike—flowing just above those jagged blocks, jagged devourers. Though I suppose it's just as possible, if not more so, that this is all there is, the months above and the bedrock below, and that we, and our lives, our little histories, are the glacier dust, ground fine and sifted as flour, caught eternally between the two.
    And in those years when the snow melts a bit, in March—regardless of whether it fills back up in April or not—only as the snow level begins to drop a little bit, finally melting slightly on the rare and warming sunny day, do you start to really understand how deep the snow has been. The tops of fences and rock walls begin to emerge from beneath you (even as you still are walking above them, looking down upon their emergent shapes as they begin to crown, popping up through the snow—just a dark shape beneath the translucent thinning at first, but then, barely, the real thing, like the heads of crocus bulbs), and you understand how, for a few months, you might already have been up in that higher, even celestial level, up in the more graceful place where the laminar flow of time moves with less friction—moving around in your winter life at some significant distance above, elevated several feet above the "true" world; though if that is the case, why has it still been so damned hard, at times, so gray-blue leaden, sludge-blood hard?
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    And yet, whether trudging five feet above, or down on terra firma, navigating one's way through the rocks—whether asleep and dreaming, or wide awake and fully sensate—it is all still always pretty much the same world, regardless of the gnawing blocks of months, or centuries, or millennia, or eons; and in the close examination of a single month, I often feel a kinship with all who have ever lived before me.
    Are we still sleeping, or are we awakening? Change is dramatically imminent, eternally poised for its grand entrance, and yet there are still, particularly in March, I think, these long moments when
it is all the same.
The frilled and braided lace of wax forming