The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  Hope and I don’t talk about art anymore. We talk about getting our firewood in for winter, or about the deer we saw that day. We talk about the wildflowers, or the colors of the leaves—that’s the closest we come to discussing the shadow or memory of her work—and we do not come close to discussing mine, either, or the memory or buried shadow of it. We talk about things, instead, and hand things to each other, for us to touch: a stone found on the mountain that day, or an irregular piece of driftwood. A butterfly, wind-plastered and dried, pinned to the grille of the truck, looking remarkably like the silk scarves and blouses she used to paint. We step carefully, desiring to travel further into this fourth life, being pulled into it by unknown or rather unseen rhythms. Walking quietly, carefully, as if believing that perhaps we can sneak away from those old lives and be completely free of them, and in pace—once more—with the land.

  The logs that get you are almost always late in the day. You overextend, in your love, your passion for the work, the delicious physicality of it—the freedom of being able to work without acknowledging either a past or a future.

  You spy a perfect fallen tree just a little bit out of your reach, at the bottom of a steep slope. You have to cross a tangle of blowdown to get to it. It’s a little larger than you should be carrying and a little too far from the truck—you’ve already hauled a day’s worth—but all of these things conspire within you, as you stare at the log, to create a strange transformation or alteration: they reassemble into the reasons, the precise reasons, that you should go get that log.

  And, always, you do, so that you will not have to go to bed that night thinking about that log and how you turned away from it.

  III.

  There are seventy-six species of rare and endangered plants in this forest—Mingan Island moonwort, kidney-leaved violet, fringed onion, maidenhair spleenwort—and I know them all, each in both its flowering and dormant states. Most of them prefer the damp dark depths of the last corners of old growth up here, though others prefer the ashes of a new fire and appear only every two hundred years or so.

  Still others seek the highest, windiest, most precarious existences possible, curled up in tiny clefts at the spartan tops of mountains, seeking brief moisture from the slow, sun-glistening trickle of glaciers. I know all of them, and I watch carefully as I walk with the log across my back, across both shoulders like a yoke. Again it is like a kind of slow and deliberate, plodding music—the music of humans—choosing and selecting which step to place so as to avoid those seventy-six species, whenever I am fortunate enough to find any of them in the woods where I am working. They say the list is growing by a dozen or so each year. They say before it’s all over there won’t be anything but fire ants and dandelions. They say...

  That is my old life. This is my new one. My newest one. This one feels different—more permanent.

  Still, the old one, or old ones, try to return. My right side’s stronger than my left, so I use it more. By the end of the day it’s more fatigued than the left, and it feels sometimes as if I’m being turned into a corkscrew; and because of this slight imbalance, accumulated and manifested over time, my steps take on a torque that threatens to screw me down deeper and deeper into the ground, like the diamond drill bits I’d fasten to the end of the pipe string when I worked in the oil fields. And late in the day I find myself once again daydreaming about those buried landscapes, and other hidden and invisible things.

  A midnight run to town with four gleaming, sweet-smelling larch logs—hundred-inch lengths, of course, and each one weighing several hundred pounds. A cold night: occasional star showers, pulsing of northern lights, sky electricity. Coyote yappings on the outskirts of town. A tarp thrown over the back of my truck, to hide the logs. One in one logger’s truck, another in his neighbor’s truck. So silent. They will think it is a strange dream when they look out in the morning and see the gift trees, the massive logs, but when they go out to touch them they will be unable to deny the reality.

  The third log into the back of yet another sleeping logger’s truck, and the fourth one in the front yard of the mill itself, standing on end, as if it grew there overnight.

  Home, then, to my wife and children and the pursuit of peace, and balance. In the winter, Hope and I sleep beneath the skins, the hides, of deer and elk from this valley.

  There is an older lady in town who works on plow horses—gives them rubdowns, massages, hoists their hips and shoulders back into place when they pop out—she says they’re easy to work with, that a horse won’t tense up and resist you when you press or lean against its muscles—and when my back gets way out of line, I go visit her and she works on it. I lie on her table by the wood stove while she grinds her elbow and knee into certain pressure points, and she pulls and twists, trying to smooth it all back into place, and she uses a machine she calls “Sparky,” too, which I have never seen, as she uses it only on my back. It sends jolts of electricity deep into my muscles—which, she says, are but electrical fibers, like cables, conduits for electricity—and the sound that Sparky makes as she fires round after round of electricity into me (my legs and arms twitching like some laboratory frog’s) is like that of a staple gun.

  And sometimes I imagine that it is: that she is piecing me back together, that she is pausing, choosing and selecting which treatments to use on me that day, so that I can go back out into the woods to choose and select which wood to take out and send to the far-away mills, who will then send the logs to...

  We are all still connected, up here. Some of the connections are in threads and tatters, tenuous, but there is still a net of connectivity through which magic passes.

  Whenever a new car or truck enters the valley, I run and hide. I scramble to the top of a hill and watch through the trees as it passes. They can never get me. They would have to get the land itself.

  The scent of sweat, of fern, of hot saw blade, boot leather, damp bark; I suck these things in like some starving creature. All the books in my house now sit motionless and unexamined on their shelves, like the photos of dead relatives, dearly loved and deeply missed. Sometimes I pull them down, touch the spines, even say their names aloud, as one would the name of one’s mother, “Mom,” or one’s grandmother, “Grandma.”

  But then I go back out into the woods.

  Once, carrying a log across a frozen pond, I punched through the ice and fell in up to my chest—the cold water such a shock to my lungs that I could barely breathe—and I had to drop the log and skitter out, then build a quick fire to warm up. (The heater in my old truck doesn’t work.) Some days, many days, it feels like two steps forward and two steps back, as the land continues to carve and scribe us at its own pace, not ours.

  And now when I take my pickup truck to the mill and off load my logs next to the millions of board feet that are streaming through it like diarrhea through a bloated pig’s butt in the feedlot—what difference do I think it will make? How does my fantasy stand up then, under the broad examination of reality?

  In protest, I haul the logs more slowly than ever. In protest, I take more time with them. I touch them, smell them. I tithe the best ones to strangers. Sometimes I sit down and read the cross section of each log, counting the growth rings. Here is where one seedling grew fast, seeking light, struggling for co-dominance. Here is where it reached the canopy and was then able to put more of its energy into girth and width rather than height—stability. Here—this growth ring—is the drought year; then the succession of warm, wet growing years. Here—the next band of rings—is where the low-intensity fire crept through around the forest, scorching the edges of but not consuming the tree.

  I read each of the logs in this manner, as if reading the pages of some book. Maybe someday I will go back to books. Maybe someday I will be drawn to submerge back into the vanished or invisible world and will live and breathe theory, and maybe Hope will start painting again.

  But right now I am hauling logs, and she is gardening, raking the loose earth with tools, though other t
imes with her bare hands, and it feels as though we are falling, and as if we are starving, and as if I must keep protesting, must keep hauling logs.

  We try not to buy anything, anymore—especially nothing made of wood. It’s all such utter, flimsy shit. One touch, one stress upon it, and it all splinters to hell—a hammer or ax handle, a wooden stepladder, a chest of drawers... It is all such hollow shit, and we are starving.

  Before I burned out in that third life, I was asizzle. I remember awakening each morning to some burning smell within me—scorched metal against metal. Manatees, ivory-billed woodpeckers, whales, wolves, bears, bison—I burned for it all, and did so gladly. The forest loves its fires.

  The reason I think I left the second life—left art, left storytelling—was because it had become so safe, so submerged. It wasn’t radical enough. They say most people start out being radical when they are young and then gravitate toward moderation in middle age, and then beyond moderation, to the excesses of the right—but for me it has been the opposite—as if the land itself up here is inverted, mysterious, even magical—turning humans, and all else, inside out, in constant turmoil, constant revolution.

  We—all painters and writers—don’t want to be political. We want to be pure, and artistic. But we all know, too, I think, that we’re not up to the task. What story, what painting, does one offer up to refute Bosnia, Somalia, the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan, or Washington, D.C.? What story or painting does one offer up to counterbalance the ever-increasing sum of our destructions? How does one keep up with the pace? Not even the best among us is up to this task, though each tries; like weak and mortal wood under stress, we splinter, and try to act, create, heal. Some of us fall out and write letters to Congress, not novels; others of us write songs, but they are frayed by stress and the imbalance of the fight. Some of us raise children, others raise gardens. Some of us hide deep in the woods and learn the names of the vanishing things, in silent, stubborn protest.

  I want to shock and offend. Hauling logs? My moderation seems obscene in the face of what is going on on this landscape, and in this country—the things, the misery, for which this country is so much the source rather than a source of healing or compassion.

  Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful as other things in the world today are terrible. If such stories and paintings are out there, I’m not seeing them.

  I do not fault our artists for failing to keep up with, or hold in check, the world’s terrors. These terrors are only a phase, like a fire sweeping across the land. Rampant beauty will return.

  In the meantime, activists blink on and off like fireflies made drowsy over pesticide-sodden meadows. Activism is becoming the shell, the husk, where art once was. You may see one of them chained to a gate, protesting yet another Senate-spawned clear-out, and think the activist is against something, but the activist is for something, as artists used to be. The activist is for a real and physical thing as the artist was once for the metaphorical; the activist, or brittle husk-of-artist, is for life, for sensations, for senses deeply touched: not in the imagination, but in reality.

  The activist is the emergency room doctor trying to perform critical surgery on the artist. The activist is the artist’s ashes.

  And what awaits the activist’s ashes: peace?

  IV.

  There is, of course, no story: no broken law back in Louisiana—no warrant, no fairy logs. I am no fugitive, other than from myself. Here, the story falls away.

  It—storytelling—has gotten so damn weak and safe. I say this not to attack from within, only to call a spade a spade: a leftover lesson from art. I read such shit, and see such shit paintings, that I want to gag; one could spray one’s vomit across the canvas and more deeply affect or touch the senses—what remains of them—than the things that are spewing out into the culture now.

  The left has vanished, has been consumed by the right. On one day the Sierra Club announces it is against all logging in national forests—“zero cut”—and the next day it turns around and endorses for reelection President Clinton, who has just endorsed the industrial liquidation of five billion board feet of timber in one year alone. Hell yes, employment is up this year, but what about after the reelection, when the five billion drops back to zero, because it’s all been cut or washed by erosion? Clinton tosses in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska—old growth coastal rain forest—gives the timber company a one-hundred-year lease on it. And the Sierra Club, bastion of radicalism, endorses him.

  Trying to shore up his base among the environmentalists—a long nasty word for which we should start substituting “human fucking beings”—Clinton designates a couple million acres of Utah desert as a national monument; the year before, he signed a Senate bill protecting California desert. He’s made some moves in the direction of protecting some Pacific Northwest old growth, too, but nothing for the Yaak; whether planned or not, he is making a political trade of rock for timber—trading the currency of Yaak’s wildness for votes and red rock—and this is an alteration, a transformation, which will not bear scrutiny: it is not grounded in reality, it cannot be done, it is surficial, flimsy, it is theft. He is not the environmental president. He is trading rock for timber. Each has its inherent values, but each is different.

  The Yaak, perched up on the Canadian line like some hunch-shouldered griffin high in a snag, looking down on the rest of the American West, can act as a genetic pipeline to funnel its wild creatures and their strange, magical blood down into Yellowstone and the Bitterroot country, and back out toward the prairies, too. It can still resurrect wildness. There is still a different thrumming in the blood of the Yaak’s inhabitants.

  The damn Nature Conservancy won’t even get involved up here. The timber companies owned the land along the river bottoms in the Yaak, and they clear-cut those lands and left town rather than waiting for the trees to grow back as they’re always bragging they’ll do. But before leaving town (shutting down the mill behind them, so that now we have to export our wood, and jobs, to Idaho), the big timber companies subdivided the hell out of those clear-cut lands, turned them into ranchettes like cow turds all up and down the river, and still I couldn’t get the damn Conservancy to become active up here.

  When I wrote to them, they wrote back and told me the valley wasn’t important enough. They hadn’t ever seen the damn place. Now the vice president of the timber company—Plum Creek—that’s selling off these lands in such tiny fragments sits on the board of directors of the Nature Conservancy.

  I don’t mean to speak ill of anyone, and certainly not of a man I’ve never met, but Plum Creek’s got several tens of thousands of acres in the south end of the Yaak, in the Fisher River country, which is the only route by which a wandering grizzly can pass down out of the Yaak and into the rest of the West.

  Plum Creek owns the plug, the cork, to the bottleneck—these lands were given to them by Congress more than a hundred years ago—and so now the situation is that one man—one human, more heroic than any artist or group of artists ever dreamed of being—will do either the right thing and protect that land, or the wrong thing and strangle the last wildness.

  If you think I’m going to say please after what they’ve already done to this landscape, you can think again. It is not about being nice or courteous. It is not even about being radical. It is simply about right versus wrong, and about history: that which has already passed, and that which is now being written and recorded.

  I can hear my echo. I recognize the tinny sound of my voice. I know when an edge is crossed, in art: when a story floats or drifts backward or forward, beyond its natural confines. And I understand that I am a snarling wolverine, snapping illogically at everything in my pain, snapping at everyone—at fellow artists, and at fellow environmentalists.

  I am going to ask for help, after all. I have to ask for help. This valley gives and gives and gives. It has been giving more timber to the country for the last fifty years than any other valley in the Lower Forty-eigh
t; and still not one acre of it is protected as wilderness.

  I load the logs slowly into the back of my ragged truck and drive them to the mill in protest. The valley cannot ask for anything—can only give—and so like a shell or husk of the valley I am doing the asking, and I am the one saying please, at the same time that I am also saying, in my human way, fuck you.

  Somebody help. Please help the Yaak. Put this story in the president’s or vice president’s hands. Or read it aloud to one of them by firelight on a snowy evening with a cup of cider within reach, resting on an old wooden table.

  The firelight on the spines of books on the shelf, flickering as if across the bones or skeletons of things; and outside, on that snowy night, the valley holding tight to the eloquence of a silence I can no longer hear over the roar of my own saw.

  Somebody please do this. Somebody please help.

  —Yack, Montana, 1998

  The Windy Day

  The last day of my life before I knew what I would be the father of—a son or a daughter—was a good one. It was in October, the fourth month, and been high winds flapping the tin on our cabin roof all through the night. We woke up thinking, This is the day we drive to town and find out.

  That morning there was smoke all through the valley, an eerie green fog, and the taste of smoke was everywhere, and ash was falling from the sky like snow.

  We sat around in that strange green light that we had never seen before and waited until it was time to leave for town. The wind was gusting to sixty and then seventy miles an hour. We could hear trees crashing in the forest. I knew there’d be some trees down across the road, but I had no idea how many.

  “Maybe we should wait,” Elizabeth said.

  I think she meant wait another month, or even the remaining five months.