A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  If this is so, then everything is story and therefore for a writer or storyteller, there could never be a dearth of stories, only a dearth of time in which to tell them.

  These tiles beneath my bare feet, my bare feet in January, for instance—I aim not to spend but a sentence or two on them, though even as I sit here watching our girls play out in the cow pasture (sitting on beach towels in lawn chairs out in the bright sun in caps and sunglasses and swimsuits), I am reminded, spark-like, of the story, the saga, of how these tiles beneath my feet got here.

  My parents and my youngest brother B. J. had crossed the border and driven down into Mexico to buy the tiles more cheaply at the factory, choosing from the culls that had never been shipped to various ports—tiles of varying shades of salmon, tangerine, and sandstone red; tiles with little cat and dog and rooster tracks on them, from where various domestic pets had scampered across the damp clay of the still-drying tiles, after they were poured but before they were baked in the kiln. A penny a tile, or some-such.

  All right, five or six or seven sentences.

  They’d taken their old manure-speckled, slick-tired cattle truck across, rather than renting a flatbed, and had stacked it full-to-groaning with tiles. In the summer heat, and on the ragged roads, they’d encountered various flat tires, so that they kept having to off-load all those tiles, one by one, to change each flat tire.

  When they finally got to customs, my father was in a vile mood. Understandably, his trailer was pulled over to go through the special inspection line, where, after an hour or two of inching forward in the long line, it was finally examined, and he was told that it did not have proper papers: the trailer would need to be quarantined, and the manure he had brought into the country would have to be sprayed off, and the trailer disinfected. He’d have to wait until Monday or maybe even Thursday of next week to get a permit—it was a Friday afternoon—unless my father could produce some form of documentation.

  The sagging trailer, with all its tonnage, was blocking the only lane through the customs-search line. One of the old bald-patched tires was hissing, as was the radiator. Another tile off-loading was imminent. The cars and trucks in line behind my father seemed to stretch to the horizon, like the scales of some glittering and unending reptile. Horns were honking.

  “All right,” my father said, handing the customs agent the keys. “You can have it. It’s yours. I’ve had enough. Come on,” he said to his family, “we’ll walk across. I’m tired of it. I don’t want the tiles anymore, or the truck, or the trailer. We’ll just leave it all here.”

  Steam was spewing from beneath the hood now, and the radiator was singing like a tea kettle.

  “Wait,” the agent said, panicking now, refusing the keys. “Just go on.”

  They proceeded. It took another eight hours, and four more flat tires, but they finally got back home and eventually built their home and laid their tiles—and now, B. J., who accompanied them on that sojourn, at the tender age of seven, is twenty-nine, and a stonemason, comfortable and accomplished in the patient and rigorous discipline of stacking and unstacking, sorting and choosing and weighing and measuring, but that is another story; there can never be an end of stories, they travel in all directions, for all distances . . .

  Which ones become the quarrystone below? Who knows what moments—what combinations of landscape and story—conspire to ignite the sparks of enduring memory?

  What is the nature, the effect, of various landscapes upon such memories?

  I believe, as do others, that there are lightning-spark transformative moments in our lives, epiphanies, in which the milieu of all of one’s previous experience is illuminated into an experience more profound somehow than even memory itself, so that the event seems to have somehow always been within you, waiting only to occur, predestined, miraculous, and splendidly unique and yet in retrospect completely unavoidable.

  Perhaps there are a handful of such deep upwelling moments in every life—and yet (as if with the patience of a stonemason), I want to believe deeply that the general background dailiness of one’s life is as important, in the long run, as any of those key handful of defining moments that occasionally come from the reservoir of one’s life to provide that sudden jolt of deeper awareness or even understanding.

  Where I live now, so close to the Canadian, rather than the Mexican, border still affects my daily life. What world, what values, will we protect here for our daughters, and what inspirations and knowledge will come from the fabric of the elements we have chosen to make available to them, here in Montana? How will their lives and interiors be shaped by their seeing, in all the days of their childhood, these mountains and their storms, these moose and wolves and eagles and bears? By helping me hunt and take and then give thanks for, and then clean and prepare our own meals from the forest—deer and elk and fish and mushrooms and berries?

  How will it all add up for them—the day the wolf was in the yard, the day the mountain lion followed us, the day the golden eagle caught the goose in the marsh?

  What is the sum of this daily appreciating, and even becoming accustomed to these things: not taking-them-for-granted, but being accustomed to them, until you become so comfortable with the shape of things that their presence in your life fits you like your own skin?

  And further, in such a life of woodsy immersion, do the occasional childhood upwellings of grace—characterized chiefly by a sudden sense of profound belonging—manifest themselves differently for woods-children already accustomed to being surrounded by such beauty? Do moments of deep nature-epiphany really arrive only for children of the suburbs and the inner cities?

  I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a slow and steady braid of beauty is every bit as durable and powerful as any tiny cluster or bouquet of crucible-forged revelations. Perhaps in the end it’s all the same, and there’s little difference, in this regard, between a Houston suburb and a Montana wilderness.

  I don’t believe that, however. I believe it is more a testament to the strength and purity of the hearts of children that the epiphanies of the natural world’s beauty can and will come almost anywhere, at any time, rising as if from below, and unsummoned.

  I think also that such a phenomenon makes the presence of wilderness all the more important, not less.

  If semi-urban or domesticated nature can deliver such profound change and power to us, then what mystery must reside and flourish in the seething woods and swamps and mountains that lie beyond the reach of our roads?

  And if glimpses of grace can be seen by children in even the narrowest, vanishing wedges of semi-domesticated nature, then what store must lie at the source—available in such free and undiluted state as to perhaps be readily observed and deeply felt by even the jaded eyes and hardening hearts of adults?

  “Of what avail are forty freedoms,” Aldo Leopold wrote, “without a blank spot on the map? I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.” It was more than sixty years ago, and if he were still alive, I’m curious as to which he would marvel at more: the fact that so much wild country has been lost, even as he noted the rampant pace and breadth of its leave-taking three generations ago, or the speed of time’s passage. As if surprised, ultimately, not at the quantity of loss, but by the brute law of how damned fast time passes.

  In Houston, in my childhood, there was a farthermost place I could get to by riding my bike down sandy trails for a mile or so, beyond the last road and beyond the last house, and then by traveling farther on foot, through greenbriar and cane and willow and dewberry, along the game trails that followed the high cutbank bluffs of the serpentine bayou: traveling several miles of bayou-bend oxbow in order to traverse a single mile on the map. It was a style of physical discourse or engagement that perhaps impressed itself upon my way of thinking, even my way of sentence-making, and is still where I am most comfortable.

  There was always something to see, and I didn’t want to miss anything. Leopard frogs leaping from bluffs out in
to the muddy current below; giant softshelled turtles floating camouflaged in sun-dappled patches of bayou, their dinosaur necks seeming as long as those of snakes; primitive alligator gars longer than I was tall and as thick around as my waist, cruising on the surface like mysterious submarines; armadillos, again seeming as strange as dinosaurs, and more beautiful than any bronze or golden jewelry, hopping across the trail, alarmed by my approach; box turtles wandering through the forest; and flying squirrels, fox squirrels, gray squirrels, raccoons, and opossums scurrying up the trees . . . . Nine-lined skinks scampered across and beneath the dry leaves of oak and hickory, their tiny scrabbly sounds distinctive, sounding like the first few faint drops of rain upon those same leaves.

  There were sometimes even deer, there on the edge of the bayou—what a shock it was, to encounter an animal larger than myself—and often, while I was running down one of those trails, running only for the joy of being alive, I would sometimes surprise any deer coming down those same trails, and in their fright, they would sometimes crash through the brush and hurtle down those steep banks and dive out into the bayou and begin swimming for the other side.

  There was a lake back in those woods—a deep swamp, really, already in the first stages of eutrophication, but all the richer for it—that I called “Hidden Lake” due to the fact that I never encountered anyone else there, nor even a sign of anyone’s presence—no stumps, no litter, not even any footprints—as well as for the manner in which one came to the lake: passing through an old-growth forest of pine and hardwoods, with no indication that the lake lay before you, until you stumbled right onto it, with the many gray-spar rotting hulks of dead trees that surrounded its black water reflection forming roosts for an aviary that was nothing less than astounding.

  Great blue herons would croak their ancient cries and leap into the sky—sometimes in their haste the old rotten limb they’d been perching on would fall into the lake with a large splash—and wood ducks, which back then had been hunted almost to extinction, would leap from those same black waters in a spray and blur, squeaking their whistling alarm cries.

  Best of all were the egrets—snowy egrets, as well as the cattle egrets: ghostly birds rising and flying through the forest, as brilliant white as was the water beneath them black, and with those birds’ slow graceful departure mirrored perfectly in the still waters beneath them.

  I went there almost every day after I got home from school—this would have been forty years ago now—until the roads began being built into it, bulldozers and chain saws and concrete trucks, and fluttering ribbons tied to trees that I knew individually. And just like that, over the course of only a season or two, the woods were filled with noise, and then they vanished.

  I was moving into adolescence by that time, and probably would have had my attention diverted anyway, for a while—and in that regard, I never really had to grieve that loss, as I had begun to supplant it, even as the forest was being leveled and the swamp being drained. It could have been a lot more painful than it was.

  And perhaps an even larger blessing was my failure to realize, for a long time, that I was part-and-parcel of that taking: that my weight upon the earth, which was and is more or less the equal to any of us in this country, was part of the very thing that was flushing those copperheads and box turtles from hiding and sending those deer crashing into the bayou, swimming for the other side, to the brief safety of the wilder country beyond.

  It is the unoriginal and damning realization of the fact of my complicity—of all of our complicity—that has helped lead me into activism, I think: a response fueled really by nothing more complex then an awestruck love of, and reverence for, wild creation, mixed with what remains perhaps a child’s naive and deeply felt sense of justice and injustice.

  Those days, I believe, were for me the braid, rather than the epiphany: the slow accruing weave that helped form a medium out of which future lightning-bolt moments could occur, once struck, once ignited. Days in which I became more fluent in the language of that which would speak to me, and had already been speaking to me, and would speak to me again and again.

  I don’t think any sort of woods-fluency is necessarily requisite for defining moments to occur. I think these illuminations of beauty are a far more universal phenomenon, one in which the order of the natural world, and the grace of our inclusion in it, is shown to us as surely as if drapes or curtains have been peeled back.

  Instead of our requiring any sort of earned woods-fluency, I suspect that there are periods in our lives when we are susceptible—or sufficiently un-distracted—to refocus upon the world and see deeper into its beauty. And whether such moments result from some cellular activity within us, some maturation, or some shifting hormonal processes, some new-forming variance in the profile of our blood chemistry, or whether these shining moments are dispensed to us from above, dispensed every few years as if from some great and largely impersonal cog-and-gear revolution of stars and time and chance and fate, I have no idea: I know only that they exist.

  Why? Almost anything can be explained through the lens of natural selection. Even love can be diced and parsed into terms of evolutionary advantage. But not these shining moments. Are they flaws in the system? What possible reason can there be for these occasional moments in which we are shown, as if through a rent in the clouds, or a slot-crevice in the cliffs, or even a tear in the curtain, such fuller magnitude of the beauty in which we are immersed?

  I can’t begin to guess what the reason might be for such epiphanies. But I’m glad and grateful that they exist in domesticated nature, and in the rawer, farther wilderness, too.

  In Texas—in Houston—I milked whatever wildness I could from the faint patterings of creatures beneath the leaves, and from the high-above brayings of the migrating flocks of geese, always synonymous with weather changes, and from little more than the north winds themselves, which, though rare, would clear out most of the petrochemical haze that hung over the city like a glowing dome. I milked wildness as much from the ghosts of wildness gone-by, or from the imagination, as from any remnant essence of the thing.

  I prefer the slow and enduring form of sculpting—a geological sort of pace that allows for rises and falls, mistakes and redemptions both, but with absolution and success in the end; a pace in which any and all clumsiness yields finally to something smoother, as if that clumsiness is finally transformed by time running across and around lives. It doesn’t matter, does it, whether you get your hundred volts one day at a time or all at once?

  So keenly felt is even a single volt of the world’s beauty that often even that single volt feels to me like a hundred. I think I am drawn more toward the daily, understated devotional of staring out at a marsh for long moments at a time, or at a forested mountainside, than any search for high-intensity moments of illumination, simply because I’m not sure the husk of my body could hold up to the rigors of any amped-up intensities.

  My girls are far flashier in the world—far more fitted to it already: bright and beautiful, and certainly deeply loved. What will their moments be? Which will influence them more strongly—the slow daily braid, the continuum of nature, or the curtain-parting moments of supreme revelation? It can’t be controlled, of course, nor perhaps even observed, not even by them. Of my own defining moments in nature, only rarely do I ever remember being aware in-the-moment of thoughts as cliché as I will never forget this, or, Wow, this is a revelation. Even those highly illuminated moments sank deep, as if into a river, and it was only after I had gone on some distance that I understood what had happened: that those moments were foundational images, mid-river boulders that changed somehow the patterns of all the subsequent flow downstream.

  A different braiding, then, as the divided currents merged again.

  The moments cannot be set up in advance. Magic comes when it comes. Perhaps this is another reason I am more comfortable with the accumulated daily sweetness instead of the exalted once- or twice- or thrice-in-a-lifetime euphorias.

&nb
sp; I can help lead the girls to those quieter places. No one can do magic, but any of us can show up for work each day, can lead children to the raw materials that, once braided, conduct the world’s magic. Like apprentice workers pushing a wheelbarrow full of various quarrystones to the place where a master stonemason is working, we can gather and select and then ferry those individual days.

  Beyond that, nothing—only magic. The laborers can only show up for work each day.

  In this vein of what can be controlled, or at least influenced, versus what can’t, I suspect that ritual and tradition are almost like quarrystones, or volt-moments, in themselves and that rituals or traditions undertaken in the out-of-doors can possess the same strengthening power—the same transformative ability, the same integrity—as the stones and antlers and feathers themselves.

  The cross-country ski trip we take each year up the long ridge to cut a Christmas tree, the campout at a mountain lake each summer, the camping trip into the backcountry each October, when the larch are turning gold, and when some years the snow is already falling. . . . These and a hundred other traditions exist for us already, some indoors and some outdoors, and they form a constancy, a security that I feel certain is good for children, and which, in these astoundingly fluid times, is probably pretty healthy for adults, too.

  I don’t mean to compare and contrast indoor and outdoor traditions; constancy is constancy. I don’t mean to pit the minimalist against the maximalist. But I believe there is substantial value to our imagination in having the opportunity to hike up a long ridge in the autumn, through all that quick color, and upon reaching the top—sweating, in the dry October sun—to witness the same scene magnified unending, an uncut larch forest of complete gold, and mountain ranges stretching to the horizon, and—in the imagination—perhaps farther.

  The imagination is a phenomenal thing, a spectacle in its own right; by squinting just so, you can look at a birthday cake until the glimmering candles waver and appear to be the tops of golden trees, swaying in the breeze—but eventually you’ve got to open your eyes again, and see what’s real and what’s not. A cake’s a cake. A mountain range is a mountain range. We can bake cakes. We can’t make mountain ranges.