Free The Wild Marsh by Rick Bass

the heat straight back up into the blue sky and the eagles riding, as if on waves, the pulses of that one pillar of marsh updraft, spinning and soaring nearly a mile above the marsh, tracing the perimeters of it with their wingtips.
    And while splitting wood one evening with the girls, loading the wheelbarrow to ferry the wood up to the porch, it comes, winter cracking open like a perfect gem being tapped by just the right blow. The sound of it hurtles past us, the whistle of duck wings near overhead at blue dusk, ducks headed hard and fast for the opening upriver just beyond, flying so hard and fast that it gives one the impression they're late for spring, rather than early—and I stop mid-swing with the maul and look up into the dusk, in the direction of that already-gone-by sound, and cry out to the girls, "
Listen!
"
    Â 
    Four little patterns that I notice, every February, as familiar and in their own way as methodical as the turning of the pages of a calendar:
    First, the incredible compressed cobalt-mercury color the snow takes on as the warming days melt it and freeze it, melt it and freeze it, compressing and then supercompressing it, and sculpting the snowy hills with that clutching, body-draping, new tighter fit, the tightening body cast of dense ice contracting tighter and tighter upon the land, and the curves and shapes of flowing water halted midmoment everywhere, each cold starry night, before beginning to soften and loosen and flow again, the snow a little bluer each time, each next day of freezing and thawing—
stop, start, stop, start,
like some ecological rumba and rhythm, and the promise of the things to come—the accruing strangeness of that mercury color is invigorating...
    Second, the delicate filigree of black lichens, old-man's-beard,
Bryoria,
embossed within the curves of that so distinctly February snow. The returning breezes, and, some days and nights, true winds (both southerly and northerly, and all the earth warming, beneath that dying death grip of the blue-blackening snow, the ice cap of winter now in fierce rigor mortis) toss the black lichen down onto the snow, where, absorbing more warmth, the lichen-moss sinks slightly into the colder snow, then is further ensealed each night beneath the refreezing. It is a February sight, a mosaic that speaks to the coming end of winter.
    About those winds: the old-timers—both of them (by and large, this is a valley of newcomers, ten-year and twenty-year men and women being the oldsters; seed-drift colonists come and go here, as it's a hard place to make a living, and in many respects it's a new place, and a young place, as if itself only recently emerging from beneath the snow)—claim that the valley is a lot windier now, since the Libby Dam was built in the early seventies, creating the giant reservoir of Lake Koocanusa, bounding the valley on its entire eastern edge and effectively cutting it off from the rest of the world, including the Glacier and Whitefish Ranges, just as the town of Troy as well as Libby along the arc of the Kootenai River cut it off to the south, and the Purcell Trench, a great chasm running along the Idaho border, cuts it off from the rest of the world to the west
    Though it's never been measured or monitored or proven locally, I believe them, that the new lake has created what scientists call "lake effect" and that the spring and autumn wind shiftings, particularly, possess greater turmoil, and that the valley, the forest, is still adapting to this new aerodynamic turmoil...
    In any event, the winds of February and the returning sunny days—sometimes, in February, miraculously, we'll have two, even three days in a row, of sun and blue sky—create a distinct embossing, wherein the tendrils of old-man's-beard are blown onto the new snow, black upon white, landing in what can only be called random drift.
    And the next day, the return of the winter-long-exiled sun heats the black lichen with differential