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If the snipe survived, they would be among the first to see it. Perhaps they believed that the pack of dogs, and Gray Owl’s and Ann’s advancing torches, had only been one of winter’s dreams. Even with the proof—the scribings—of grace’s passage before them—the vent-holes still steaming— perhaps they believed it was only one of winter’s dreams.
It would be curious to tally how many times any or all of us reject, or fail to observe, moments of grace. Another way in which I think Susan and I differ from most of the anarchists and militia members up here is that we believe there is still green fire in the hearts of our citizens, beneath this long snowy winter—beneath the chitin of the insipid. That there is still something beneath the surface: that our souls and spirits are still of more worth, more value, than the glassine, latticed ice-structures visible only now at the surface of things. We still believe there’s something down there beneath us, as a country. Not that we’re better than other countries, by any means—but that we’re luckier. That ribbons of grace are still passing through and around us—even now, and for whatever reasons, certainly unbeknownst to us, and certainly undeserved, unearned.
the perspective shift is quite startling in a way that i really liked
Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?
Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things —the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.
She told me that we had too many roads already; that the mountains and all wilderness were disappearing beneath con- crete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.
It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries- old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.
But it’s not like I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminist curriculum. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January), I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life, while she lived one.
This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were; as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences — the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in —these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.
Martha loves, like so many of us, the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with — the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase and all of the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself?” And then she’ll think I’m making fun of her.
Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science, and more tolerant of mystery.
She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.
And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end? What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.
I remember the year Martha said she didn’t love me any more. The baby was seven. The baby is a genius, we think. We knew it even then. She learned to read by the time she was three, and could also tell the difference between a buck track and a doe track. She’s an utter joy to be around. She, as much as the landscape around us, and in which we live, reminds us to love one another. But that year that Martha flat out told me she didn’t love me anymore—that was a tough one. I suppose in their own way, each year is tough, just as each of them is beautiful, but we didn’t know what to do about that one.
You can’t manufacture love: you can’t build it back up like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters and the assault of time. And it changes; it fluctuates —it either gets stronger or weaker. And sometimes all of the center can just go out. That core, that base, can just get cold, and stay cold, for too long. It’s one of the dangers.
It got right down to the very end. I was going to leave. It was as if my guts were open: as if ravens and eagles were already feeding on my heart. Still, I was going to let her— them —go. Off to that new direction in life that would not include me any more.
But we muscled through it; somehow we got back into love, or were perhaps carried back into it, unconscious, on a sled, as if pulled through the night by some higher being. The spring came, and we were still alive, and when the woods and meadows turned green again, we started to love each other again.
A harsh winter like that one never came back. Or has not, yet.
We had to cross the river naked, holding our clothes over our head to keep them dry, and then build a warming fire on the other side of the river. It was madness and euphoria.
It was so beautiful. The salmon sky, snow clouds between us and the sun, cast a pearly reddish-goldish light on the whole day, as if we were in some new stage of heaven. All day long, there was a light on our faces almost like firelight. The snow was frozen hard in places, so that we could walk across it like concrete for two or three steps, but then we’d hit a soft or weak spot that our feet would punch through, and we’d collapse up to our waists. It was exhausting work. But we were so in love: so in love.