The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass

elegance of fit. What is community? I submit that it is not people of similar intent and goals, or even values, but rather, a far rarer thing, a place and time where against the scattering forces of the world people can stand together in the midst of their differences, sometimes the most intense differences, and still feel an affection for, and a commitment to, one another.
    Am I dreaming? Perhaps. But January is as fine a time for dreaming as any.
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    I sense that January is getting overlong, in this narrative, this testimony, this witnessing. I want to close it, for the reader's sake: there is almost an entire year left to experience. But I want it to be understood also, fully, that even though wonderful, it is one long damn month for almost everyone and everything but the wolves and the ravens.
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    January is the isolate month, and January is the social month. We go skiing with other adults, our friends, regularly (like almost everyone else in the world, it seems we're too busy in the other months of the year—that even here time hurtles past and neither cunning trapper nor stalwart engineer can figure out a way to slow it here, either—not even here). After dropping the children off at school or having secured a babysitter for the younger ones, we'll set off on an adult ski, starting right behind the school, striking off up a snow-covered logging road in a long safari-like train, brightly clad, cheery, vigorous, living. We move through the dark woods sometimes in silence, other times garrulous, and gawk hungrily skyward whenever the sun appears briefly through the clouds. On one such occasion, a friend of ours, Joanne, is so thrilled to see the sun that without irony she whips out her pocket camera and takes a photo of it, of the sun amid the clouds only, with no foreground or background, and no human characters in it—photographing the rare and elusive sun the same way one might hurry to snap a picture of an elk or a moose crossing the road in front of her.
    I love the pace and rhythm that's involved in skiing through the woods. I love how slowly your thoughts reveal themselves to you, and I love, in the loneliness of January, the blurring of the lines between the animate and the inanimate. On this one ski, for instance, the one I am thinking of, it seemed that everywhere I looked in the forest I saw a snag, a dead tree, that had been carved and sanded and sculpted into the same shapes as the animals that lived in these same woods, that the same winds and rains and snows and fires that sculpt and influence the animals' shape also even the outline of inanimate materials such as stone and deadwood.
    I think there might be more to this idea, this coincidence or observation, than meets the eye—some vast law of physics existing far beyond coincidence, though on a scale so immense as to be beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to grasp and measure and count. In a month like January, one is free to ski along at a leisurely pace, hypnotized by the landscape of snow, and hold such a thought, or any other, comfortably in one's mind for long moments, if not hours, and to savor and contemplate the ultimate solitary essence that resides somehow in the core of each of us.
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    One night late in the month—that big moon on the wane, though still huge and swollen in its misshapenness, blue-silver washing out all the stars, filling the forest with its breathless, eerie, metallic light—I step out into the garage to get a piece of venison from the deep freezer, to take inside to begin thawing out for the next evening's meal. It's dark inside the garage, though the world beyond is alit in that blue fire. It's frigid. All sounds have a clarity and density to them not noticed at warmer temperatures, or in the daytime. I hear a scuffling sound out on the ice and look out into the bright moonlight to see a herd of deer standing by the dogs' kennels, nibbling at the tufts of loose hay that are sticking out