The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  But even those areas compared in no way with the untouched areas—the incredible vitality of cycles still ongoing in the deep places of the valley—the last untouched corners.

  I realize that the point at which what was being done to the valley began to hurt me deeply was the time I first began to feel that I was starting to fit: that the landscape and I were engaged in a relationship. That I was being reshaped and refashioned, to better fit it in spirit and desire. That I was neither fighting this nor resisting it. As it became my home, the wounds that were being inflicted upon it—the insults—became my own.

  No one can say for sure when a place becomes your home, or when a fit is achieved, or peace, any more than one can say when a river best fits the valley through which it cuts. It flows and changes, shifts—cuts deep in some places, fills in in others. It transports sediment, logs and lives. It makes music in the day and in the night. Animals come down out of the mountains at dusk to stand at the river's edge and drink. In the dimness, as light fails, the animals sometimes cross the river, wading or swimming.

  Even the valley itself is moving—shifting slightly, the mountains like the slowest yet most powerful pistons in the world, some rising and others falling—the valley sinking and tilting toward the ocean—and as it sinks, it carries within it, as if in a bowl or a nest, all the surprises, secrets and cycles—all the miracles—anyone could ever ask for: more miracles than even the most uncompromising glutton could desire. We are all born with an appreciation of, a love and a need for beauty and grace.

  But as if frightened of it, we carve, prod and poke at it. We view mystery as the enemy of knowledge, and in trying to find knowledge we end up attempting to harm the sheath of mystery which encases that knowledge—cutting or attacking that mystery, in either fear or anger—and in so doing, harming or altering the knowledge that lies beneath that mystery.

  We take in a manner that does not replenish. We search out the last corners to do injury to them as if we have become confused—as if forgetting that we cannot live, cannot survive, without grace and magic.

  What I was hungry for when we first wandered into the valley, early in the fall—snow flurries already sifting through the high country—was wood. I needed firewood by the ton—more wood, it felt like, than the most ravenous timber beast. I desired wood, dreamed of wood—we had none and needed cords and cords of it, to heat the hunting lodge where we'd be staying. We'd fallen in love with the valley around one o'clock in the afternoon, that first afternoon that we saw it, and by two-thirty we had been asked to caretake this massive old hunting lodge in the valley's center—there were no phones or electricity in it, and for heat the forty-room lodge—all the rooms were empty—had just two wood stoves. We never could keep the pipes from freezing.

  Forty rooms. A room for each story we intended to tell; a room for each painting.

  Our old raggedy Mississippi truck broke. Then my chain saw broke. For some now-unremembered reason, I still had the moving van in which we'd moved West, so we prowled the back roads, going from clearcut to clearcut, walking up into those steep savaged lands to pick up stove-sized pieces of wood, scraps and chips and residues. Sometimes, we'd drag whole trees out of the slash piles, where they had been bulldozed and abandoned—and we attempted to fill the moving van with these odds and ends—carrying whole logs down the steep muddy hills like crucifixes before shoving them into the maw of the van, like lunatic, lost tourists searching for some kind of authentic souvenir. Our big yellow top-heavy moving van swayed along the back roads, moving slowly through the autumn rains and mist. There is a certain undeniable raggedness of spirit—a newness, a roughness—to the place. It is not a place for anything slick and smooth. It is not a place filled with easy certainties.

  After we got the moving van unloaded and swept out the wood chips and turned it in, I raced down to Mississippi and got my old Ford Falcon, which I knew was too old for the trip, but which was all I had. The radiator was clogged in some places and leaky in others, so I patched the leaks with duct tape and, as per the advice of a mechanic at a truck stop in Louisiana—such a long second journey home!—I bought a box of Tide laundry detergent and dumped it into the radiator. The mechanic had said that the detergent would slosh around in the hot waters of the radiator as if it were inside a washing machine, and would get all sudsy, which would cleanse the rust-clods; and that was in fact how it worked, and I made it back across the plains and up over the mountains a second time, driving days and nights without stopping: except that some of my duct tape patches began to leak, and soap bubbles then filtered through those leaks, so that a steady, wistful stream of bubbles trailed me the last several hundred miles. And that was how I rode back into the valley, the car looking like some renegade escapee from The Lawrence Welk Show.

  I took the back seat out of the Falcon and used it in that manner as a mini-pickup. I got the saw fixed and was back in business, cruising those back roads in the low rider, muffler and frame sometimes dragging in the back, such was the weight of the wood. Our friend Nancy, who has an eye for the woods, says that that was when she first made the guess that we would stay—that we would find a fit with this place—when she saw us driving back and forth with a sedan stuffed full of firewood, sparks roostertailing behind us in the dusk, hurrying to get our wood in before winter. Before the world disappeared beneath snow, before Canada slipped down over us like an avalanche; like the curve of a breaking wave, a typhoon of snow.

  Those first couple of years were days of heaven—wandering around taking from the grace of the woods, and just watching things and listening: not yet sensing or understanding that the wildness that nourished this place—and us—was slipping away.

  Two years—maybe a little longer—of free grace. It was as though those days were days of harvest: art. Paintings and drawings stacked everywhere. And stories, too, all of them fiction—all of them trying to give something to the reader. (It was as if the stories came from the woods and flowed through me out to the reader, rather than the contrary, which I would later attempt, wherein I would try to take from the reader: reversing that electrical current in an effort to get the reader to give something, which would then pass through me and back out into the woods. The kind of charge-reversal that happens sometimes when lightning strikes a transformer and sends the power surging back in the direction from which it came—often frying the transformer....)

  Slowly fitting myself to the new cycles I was learning—deeper cycles, more subtle cycles. Fiction, nonfiction; literature, advocacy. Letters to friends, letters to Congress. Adjust ing the mix of them gradually, and hopefully in concert with all the other rhythms around. Slowly waking up to the rudeness and quickness of what was going on around me—the carving away into the last corners of untouched country.

  Sometimes panic would spike up deep within me—electrical charges of fear registering off the scale—and I would want to abandon all art and spend all my time in advocacy. I still believed in art, but art seemed utterly extravagant in the face of what was happening. If your home were burning, for instance, would you grab a bucket of water to pour on it, or would you step back and write a poem about it?

  A great work of fiction can become a cornerstone in the literature of a place, and a cornerstone or foundation for all manners of ideas, such as the importance of wildness and wilderness, or concepts of grace, freedom, liberty. A great novel can reach thirty, fifty, even a hundred years into the future, across history, with such an idea, whereas a magazine article or newspaper editorial might have a shelf life of about two or three weeks.

  And yet, what good does it do that great novel to extend so far into the future—forty years, say—if the place about which it was written vanished, oh, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven years ago?

  Art is incredibly important to me—fiction, especially. But there are thousands of fiction writers in the world, and only one Yaak. It would certainly not cause the earth to pause on its axis if I never wrote another story again. I don't think the
re was ever any writer about whom that could not be said.

  On the other hand, if a thing like the wilderness of Yaak were to be lost—I do believe that would cause a hesitation on the axis, an imbalance—a friction and an injury whose loss—like the cumulative effect of so many others which have already occurred—we would be hard-pressed to re-cover from. It's possible art could protect the last roadless areas of Yaak Valley. But I just don't think there's time for it.

  Cycles and rhythms—an extravagance of cycles still operating in the Yaak's roadless areas, a wildness of cycles, still connected to one another and weaving together to make grace—still making order, every day and every season, out of disorder. This is of course what art does—takes characters' actions and emotions, in fiction, or colors and shapes, in painting, and weaves them to make order, as nature selects carbon and hydrogen to braid and weave the magic of life. And as order and logic become increasingly lost to our societies, I'm certain that these things—art, and the wilderness—are critical to stabilizing the troubling tilt, the world's uneasiness, that we can all feel with every nerve of our senses, but which we still cannot name.

  The cycle of dying trees giving birth to living ones—we're all familiar with this, familiar with the necessity of rot, and diversity, in an ecosystem: the way that the richness, or tithing, of rot, and the flexibility, the suppleness, of diversity, guarantees that an ecosystem, or any other kind of system, will have a future. I like to walk—and sometimes crawl—through the jungle up here, examining the world on my hands and knees—watching the pistonlike rise and fall of individual trees—noticing the ways they block light from some places and funnel or focus light into other places—watching the way, when the weaker trees fall, that they sometimes help prop up and brace those around them. Other times the fallen trees crash all the way to the ground to become fern-beds, soil-mulch, lichen-pads. It's not a thing we can measure yet, but I like to imagine that each different tree, after it has fallen, gives off a different quality of rot—a diversity even in the manner in which nutrients are released to the soil. The slow rot of a giant larch having a taste to the soil, perhaps, of bread; the faster disintegration of ice-snapped saplings tasting like sugar, or honey. The forest feasting on its own diversity, with grace and mystery lying thick everywhere.

  ***

  Like the manner in which nutrients are recycled through the forest, so too are the movements of the animals through it like a cycle, or a pulse—a rhythm of blood, chlorophyll and magic: especially the migratory patterns. There are a lot of deer in the valley—an overabundance, or sign of imbalance, some would say—against which, of course, a correction will always occur, as long as the earth corrects itself to the sun; for as long as there is gravity. It—the rhythm of the increasing deer herds—becomes more pronounced, more visible—more strongly felt—each winter.

  In spring, summer and fall, the deer occupy nearly every square foot of the valley; it would be difficult for you to go anywhere here during those seasons where you could not find deer, or the signs of deer. But then as winter's snows cover most of their available forage, and as thermal regulation—south slopes, and heavy overstories and canopies—- become critical, as temperatures drop, the places where the valley will allow deer to survive become extremely narrow. As the winter deepens, you can see almost all of the deer in the valley, and the elk too, being squeezed into a small fraction of the whole: the parameters tightening daily, so that each day, if you are deep into the rhythm of your place, you can feel the deer coming down off the mountains in the night, moving lower and lower into the valley and rotating toward those south slopes—crowding into spaces one-tenth, or one one-hundredth, of that which they previously occupied. You can feel the energy shifts, the lone deer and does with fawns combining and joining into huge herds, which then move like braids or ribbons, weaving their way along the same few ice trails, cutting paths deeper and deeper, browsing the limited winter food, and waiting for the release of spring....

  It becomes a pulse, winter like the contraction of a heart squeezing blood through the vessels of an organism—and you can feel the waiting for backwash, the waiting for the moment between beats, when the blood can wash back into the heart's chambers and take a brief rest—six months' worth— before being constricted, squeezed tight again: the deer flowing up and then down the mountains, focusing and then spreading, concentrating then sprawling, and it too is like art, like breathing.

  For so long, the story of the West has been that blood-scribing, that heartbeat of lighting out for "the territory"—the continental drift, westward toward freedom and liberty, as if some great magnetic store of it lies somewhere west of the Great Plains. But I sense that pulse may be—of necessity—finally changing and slowing, even reversing itself. I see more and more the human stories in the West becoming those not of passing through and drifting on, but of settling in and making a stand; and I think that there is a hunger for this kind of rhythm in towns, neighborhoods, and cities throughout the country—not just in rural areas, and not just in the West, but all over: that the blood-rhythms of wilderness which remain in us (as the old seas and oceans remain in us) are declaring, in response to the increasing instability of the outside forces that are working against us, the need for reconnection to rhythms that are stable and natural. And no matter whether those rhythms are found in a city, or in a garden, or in a relationship, or in the wilderness—it is the need and desire for them that we are recognizing and searching for, and I can feel it, the notion that settling-in and stand-making is the way to achieve or rediscover these rhythms. I can sense a turning-away from the idea, once pulsing in our own blood, that drifting or running is the answer, perhaps because the rhythms we need are becoming so hard to find, out in the fragmented worlds of both nature and man.

  We can find these rhythms within ourselves.

  I know we can all sense this blood turning; this incredible, increasing uncertainty in the world, and the instability of things—whether in the city or in the woods. What holds things together, and what tears them apart?

  What is the value of art?

  What is the value of a place?

  Almost Like Hibernation

  I LIVE IN THE WOODS. It's about as remote as you can get, in the Lower Forty-eight. There's no phone or electricity throughout much of this valley in northwestern Montana—the Yaak Valley. Much of it has been logged savagely—almost exclusively with large clearcuts—but there are still some dark coves, dark forests left. That's where we like to spend our time—my wife, Elizabeth, and I, and our daughters, Mary Katherine and Lowry. Mary Katherine was born four springs ago; Lowry, last spring. When it was time for Mary Katherine to be born, we drove down to the nearest town—Libby—an hour and a half away. We stopped on the summit leading out of the valley and took a picture of Elizabeth, with the snowy top of Flatiron Mountain behind her, because it would be the last day we would be able to take such a picture. Then we got back in the truck and drove slowly, carefully, to town.

  It's different, up here. We live at the edge of the United States-Canada border and at the edge of the Idaho-Montana border as well. Animals from the Pacific Northwest overlap here and live together with those from the northern Rockies: wolves, grizzlies, woodland caribou, sturgeon and giant owls and eagles. Trees from both regions occur here—cedars, hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, aspen, ash, alder, tamarack. I spend great swaths of time mailing out cards and letters to members of Congress, asking them to protect this valley. It's almost all federal land, yet there's not a single acre of protected wilderness in the whole valley. Sometimes I mail out forty or fifty letters in a day.

  We live in a tiny log cabin by the side of a pond. The pond is actually the oxbow of a river, formed by a beaver dam. There's just a single wood stove to heat the drafty one-bedroom cabin. It's the oldest cabin in the valley—built in 1903, when whites first drifted up here, looking for gold. They didn't find any, and drifted back south, out of this strange snowy valley of giant trees. The cabin has a large pla
te glass window that looks out at the pond. The pond comes to within twenty feet of the window. There's always something to see out that window. Blue herons stalk along the cattails, spearing with their bills frogs and small trout. The beaver brings her babies to the pond every spring. Bald eagles fly low across it, especially in winter—an extraordinarily beautiful sight, as they fly through the falling snow. The cow moose and her calf like to stand out there on hot days. Sometimes I take my canoe out on the pond and fish for a trout or two for supper, or else I catch them for fun and throw them back. In winter, otters play on the ice, and dive through holes in the ice, are gone for a minute, and then come back up with a fish, which they share with their whole family, not seeming to mind the twenty-below weather. One winter a deer fell through the ice, and I had to creep out and lasso her to help pull her out.

  In the spring, when the geese and ducks come sailing in, their wings spread and feet dropped for landing, set on a long glide, it seems they are going to come sailing right on in through that big window. And in long summer twilight bats swarm the pond dipping insects from the water's surface.

  It's a window to the world—or to the one we know and love. We used to live in cities, and then moved to small towns, but now finally I think we have found our level, somewhere way down near the bottom of things. About a hundred people live in this valley. A hundred people probably doesn't sound like a lot of people to someone who lives in a city of five or six million, but it seems like a lot of people to me. Think of what it would be like if you had them all over for dinner at once. One family up here has a pig roast every Fourth of July, and we all gather at their place, but they've got a big yard. There are two churches and two bars in the valley. We play cards in the winter—pinochle—with each other, if the loneliness gets too bad. But it hardly ever does.