The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass Page B

capable of recognizing beauty, but that such recognition almost makes the depression even worse, for they can no longer take pleasure in the recognition. As if there is a disconnect, some error in internal wiring, separating beauty from joy, or, worse yet—or so they say—connecting beauty to sadness.
    The scientists say it's all really only about sunlight: a function of the shortening and then lengthening days. As if we are but machines in that regard, or solar cells, fueled by the sun.
    Can you imagine what it must be like for those folks, year in and year out—entering each year the dark tunnel of winter, knowing that it is going to knock them down, pick them up, knock them down, pick them up—stretching and pulling then compressing and darkening them, making them a little wearier, a little more brittle, every year?
    What I think it must be like for these people is as it is when you are walking along a river and encounter a submerged piece of driftwood, so water-soaked that it no longer floats. The years and miles drifted have hollowed out intricate seams of weakness, have scoured out all the knots and replaced those pores with river sediment, clay and gravel, jamming and packing it in between the pores and then polishing it further, as the club—half wood, half stone, now—tumbles farther downstream.
    You can no longer call it a branch or a stone; it is something in between, something altered, and beautiful and unique, even daring, for that alteration: between two places, two worlds. I would think that a person who had survived winter's almost inevitable depression of spirit—the violent euphorias balanced by the dark, even black, troughs—might hold such a piece of wood in his or her hand and feel a brute, physical kind of connection to the beautiful pattern of it: that once soft wood made all the tougher by the enduring, and by the filling in of erratic loss with a grit of gravel that is both of the world's making, and the branch's.
    I would imagine further too that the hiker might run his or her hand over that time-polished object and in the sameness of it all not quite be able to tell anymore which is stone and which is wood.
    I imagine that this walker would place the stick back down into the icy river, buoyed, if even briefly, by the stick's beauty, and walk on.
    Because it's still January—the latest, last, deepest part of January—that person might be on skis rather than on foot. It might, with luck, be the first sunny day in weeks, brilliant and frigid, the sky cracked open with blue and sunlight, the world breathing in full color again rather than black-and-white. Pushing on into that bright clear winter light that has been missing for so long, the skier might marvel at his or her returned happiness—the happiness coming back upon and within as suddenly as a float, an air-filled ball, released from far beneath the surface and rising quickly, and unencumbered, finally, to the surface, the return of happiness (or—who knows—one day, perhaps, even joy) coming back like a migration of something in his or her blood, some rare and wild and elemental herd or flock of a living, traveling thing that is always in the blood, shimmering, hopeful, even yearning, but which travels in some seasons far away, only to return, always, with force; and the skier might, in the onrushing return of this mysterious migration of happiness (or even joy), marvel at how utterly strange it is that we are here, marveling not even at the
why
of our existence, but at the mere fact that we are.
    An awakening. Not every day such an awakening, or in every moment—but always, hopefully, again and again, and again and again.

FEBRUARY
    S OME YEARS FEBRUARY is the hardest month, and the longest, while other years the traveler clears it with ease, hurdles it with barely a hitch in stride; but always, the traveler respects February, and the cold, dark, somber snowy corridor of its passage, and