The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  They were twice as large as my dogs; they were wolf-sized and could have easily polished them off. But they had been merely loping —sending the dogs home. We had crossed a little too far over the line.

  It is an honor to live in their woods. Each day, I try to behave accordingly.

  The Fringe

  THE SECRETS THAT COME IN from out of the woods: the health that the grace of the woods has to offer a community. You can't measure this health or this grace but you can know it and feel it—as long as you are of a place and alive in the world, you can feel whether a place—a town, a home, a forest—still has this grace, or is lacking in it—has forfeited it.

  I think that art is one of the spillover effects, one of the indicators of the richness of a place. You can't measure or capture quantitatively that richness or health, but I think that sometimes art—like a wolf or grizzly or caribou—can be an indicator of the health and diversity of a place. I know that great art can arise out of great turmoil—our innate imperative to make order out of chaos—to make stories of order out of elements of disorder—but I believe that great art can arise out of great peace and security and stability, as well—that powerful art can come from powerful emotions.

  Art is a response to a time and a place -—what might be called an excess of emotions and, in the richest examples, a diversity of emotions. It is not a numbing or diminishing of the senses—it is not a homogenization of the world.

  A place is healthy if it has cores of wildness in it.

  The spirit—and the community—the human community—of Lincoln County, is still healthy, I believe, because of the roadless cores, the sanctuaries, in the hills and mountains above the towns of Libby, Troy, Eureka and Yaak.

  Art comes sliding down off the mountains, every night. Art follows the creeks and streams and rivers.

  In the way that the bears are said to be able to live in two worlds—belonging to this world as well as to the spirit world, because of their disappearance underground for up to six months of each year—I believe that art, though immeasurable, lies somewhere between the world of science, facts and math, and the world of the spirit: that it can be a transition—as when a bear comes out of hibernation in April, or enters it, in October or November.

  You can measure the diameter-breast-height, of a tree; but you cannot measure the magic of a forest, or the effect a healthy, growing wild place has on your spirit.

  One of the powers of art is that it travels back and forth between these two worlds.

  Where art exists, the spirit of a place still exists.

  Way upvalley there is an old woman who swims in the frigid Yaak River. I use the phrase "old woman" with nothing but the utmost respect. She doesn't live up there year round any more—only from about April to September—she leaves with the first snows, as the larch needles are still flying gold through the air—but she used to live up here year-round; she and her husband moved here over sixty years ago.

  Her name is Jeannette Nolan McIntire. She and her husband, John, were artists right from the very beginning. She was born in San Francisco, and studied acting and opera; he was born in Hog Heaven, Montana—the next valley over—and studied, well, loving the woods.

  They were actor and actress before television, before motion pictures. They were Shakespearean actors in New York and London, and then, still in their twenties, hooked up with Orson Welles in New York to produce the weekly radio show "The March of Time," which dramatized the week's news and attracted millions of listeners in the way that only art can—crossing the country democratically, diversely, without re gard to income, race, rural or urban settings—no limitations, no borders: only the artists' talents.

  She and Mr. McIntire saved some money. He wanted to go to Alaska, but it would have been tough to keep up their careers. They settled on this valley, which, back in the 1930s was, people said, just like Alaska, if not wilder. They bought a big old homestead—the northernmost ranch in the valley—and, between trips to Paris, Japan, London and New York, settled in. They had two children—a son and a daughter—who became, respectively, a musician and a photographer— art —and for a long, long time they lived happily ever after.

  She lives in the same cabin, still. Hides and pelts hang from the walls. John rebuilt an old barn and turned it into the polished log cabin that became their home. It smells deliciously of woodsmoke and hand-tanned leather and fur, antlers and roasting venison; candle wax and flowers. She's one of those rare and most comforting of things: a physically beautiful person whose graciousness nonetheless exceeds even her beauty. You like to be around her. She is like the woods in that manner.

  Art was their world, right from the beginning. The sound of the children playing the piano; the sound of the river outside; the sound of geese returning in the spring—and heading south, too, in the fall. Movies were being made by this time, and over the years, they were in hundreds of them. Mr. McIntire was particularly fond of westerns.

  Sometimes I think that art is like a wolf, traveling great distances around the edges of its wide territory, and chasing and hunting down objects of its desire: a deer in the deep snow. Traveling laterally, across the land, like thunder rolling.

  Other times I think art is like a grizzly, burrowing deep into the earth, traveling vertically like lightning: mining the underground soil, the emotions of magic—the unseen, the unnameable. That art—or a bear—comes in contact with things that have always been there from the very beginning: the magic and meaning and grace in the rocks and soil beneath our feet—the plan of life that is coded into those rocks, waiting to blossom.

  Mrs. McIntire tells a story of how there was art buried even beneath the foundation of one of the old outbuildings on their property, when they first moved up here. There was a trappers cabin next to their barn, built right after the turn of the century, and it had a little earthen basement. The trapper had used this basement for storage—a desk, a chair, and some wooden crates—and over the years, some of the dirt walls had crumbled in over these things. One day the McIntires were down there, excavating, and they opened those wooden crates and found that while the trapper had been living up there by himself through those long winters, he had been writing plays—reams and reams of plays.

  "And they were beautiful," Mrs. McIntire says. "We sat there and read those plays, and thought about him living here so long ago, just writing these beautiful plays, and we just cried...."

  There was, in those days, a 100,000-acre wilderness at the edge of their property. That roadless area has been whittled down (in only the last twenty-five years) to 13,000 acres—and, of course, even that small core is threatened with further fragmentation: yet another planned road should cut that 13,000 acres in half. Mt. Henry—the tallest mountain in the valley, over 7,500 feet tall—rose snowy above their homestead, snowy above their consciousness. It guarded their dreams.

  There was—and still is—a fire lookout tower up at the top of Mt. Henry. The McIntires were friends with the fire lookout rangers, and each spring when the ranger rode through with his packstring, ready to check in for his six months' duty on the mountain, he would stay overnight with the McIntires: his last touch of civilization before going into the wilderness—but boy, would they send him out in style. Elk roasts, garden potatoes, a bit of wine and maybe more; opera music on the hand-cranked Victrola, and maybe a dramatic reading or two....

  Art overflowing from the bounty of life; the river running clear and cold and fast, right outside the door. Stars, and goose-music....

  In the morning, the ranger would ride up to the Mt. Henry lookout. He'd communicate with semaphores, or by cranking electrical charges into the magnetos that were attached to a single thin steel wire that ran down from his lookout, through the forest (buried beneath the duff, over the years), all the way to the next tower, maybe ten or twenty miles away. These steel cables (you can still occasionally come across part of one) ran through the woods like veins or nerves, and when the guy on one end turned the crank, a little bell
would ring in the next lookout tower, so far away, and that ranger—say, on Lost Horse Mountain—would know that a fire was out there. The ranger on Lost Horse could then turn his crank and send the message scurrying down his steel line, through the soil, over to the lookout on Grizzly Peak, who could then send his to the ranger on Roderick, and so on.

  They didn't just send messages of science from the mountaintops; the Mt. Henry lookout would send messages of magic down to the McIntire children each night—they'd signal goodnight to each other.

  Each night, in the summer, the McIntires would go out onto their porch at the edge of their meadow, the edge of the river, and would look toward the top of that lonely, windy mountain. They'd see the lantern burning there—one tiny light at the top of the mountain—and would imagine the ranger reading, or writing letters. The children would light their own lantern, would hold it up for him to see theirs, and then would extinguish it.

  And they'd watch, as up on the mountain the light in the lookout tower dimmed, then flickered, then disappeared, only to come back on again: once, twice, goodnight.

  ***

  The business about the Montana Wilderness Association and Pat Williams proposing a McIntire/Mt. Henry Conservation Reserve, to recover the damaged areas, to protect the last (much reduced) interior core of roadlessness, and provide jobs exclusively for small-scale, local salvage logging—that idea, unlike the plays and all the other art, did not just rise up out of the soil like some crocus bulb. It was a thought-out and crafted response to an act of devastation and disorder.

  In the 1970s, Congress was deciding which of the public wildlands should be protected as wilderness. The lands that they could decide upon, back then, were mostly rock and ice. A vast low-elevation sea of timber, such as that which surrounded the McIntires and Mt. Henry, really had no chance. But the McIntires tried. They flew back and forth to Washington, D.C., to testify to Senate subcommittees. They wrote letters, filed appeals—they gave it their all. But in the end (though it was not really the end, for still the fight continues), the Mt. Henry area was released for clearcuts and roads, and another wilderness area, farther south—with much less timber—received the designation instead.

  The Forest Service and local mill wasted no time. Some dead spruce had been cut out of there in the past, and now there was a lot of dead lodgepole, but for the most part—some estimates say 60 percent of the time—the mills went after the big green live timber: massive clearcuts, leaving nothing behind. (Sometimes even the soil washed away. Subsequent lawsuits arguing that there had been extensive water quality damages were successful, of course, but too late—the damage was done.)

  In a cruel taunt, designed, I believe, to mimic the giant letters "HOLLYWOOD" that stand in the hills above that town, the clearcuts on the mountain across from their homestead, clearcuts which are still bald a quarter-century later—visible from space—were shaped and carved into the mountain and the soil so that they appear to spell out the giant letters H and A and C. (A popular slogan aimed at stopping clearcuts was Don't hack the Yaak.) It seems that the timber industry, or the Forest Service—who should bear ultimate responsibility—ran out of room to carve out the last letter, a K.

  What congressman—what congresswoman—will dare to step forward to heal and repair this kind of savagery and excess?

  Healing. They were of a place, of a community, even if their opinions on grace and art and the forest didn't always match those of some of the townspeople—especially those who believed the liquidation of the forest could go on forever, and who were employed by J. Neils (later St. Regis, later Champion, later Stimson, as a succession of corporations cut and then fled town, downsizing at every opportunity).

  They were of a place, more than the people who worked in the mill, more than the people who came and cut the trees, and certainly more than the various stockholders; and Mrs. McIntire is still of the place, more than any of us—more than all save a tiny handful of the sons and daughters of the original homesteaders, who still reside, here and there, in the Yaak.

  One of Mrs. McIntire's favorite stories about Mr. McIntire involves some trouble he was having with a little tractor—a D-7, perhaps—that he sometimes used for skidding bug-killed lodgepole out of the woods. It seems that one winter it quit running—something was wrong with one of the parts, but he wasn't sure which part it was.

  It was too cold to work on it outside, so he disassembled the whole motor, brought it inside, laid the parts all out on the floor by the stove, cleaned and examined each one, then put the engine back together again, there by the fire. He kept trying it, experimenting, replacing parts. It took him all winter, but by springtime he had the engine running again. He disassembled it one last time, took it back outside, reassembled it, and had it working once more.

  She swims in the river daily at dawn, her morning constitutional: beautiful as ever. She tells stories of when she was young, and first in love. She tells stories of when she first loved this place, too, and what it was like, then.

  My Grizzly Story

  I USED TO BE A SCIENTIST —a geologist. I find myself thinking more and more about the turning-away-from, the divergence, where I left the trail of science and turned down the path of art. They're both about invisible or buried things, but in art you don't name them—you just chase them, then let them go.

  For a long time I didn't recognize that I had turned down a new path: it all seemed the same. Brushy, remote, lush—mysterious and shifting—something new every day—and yet with some reassuring constancy, some background, bedrock, unchanging basic-ness, always at depth, just beneath me and just beyond me. It was like being a child. Nothing was ever identical—every day, every observation, was new: and yet there was the security of constancy, of stability.

  The world appeared that way to me—stable, secure, knowable—and 1 know in my heart that that is its true nature—for thirty-five years.

  But now it is as if the trail has opened into a meadow, a small clearing—and as if I must go across that clearing; and I am hesitant to do so. Every cell in my body is fighting that change. Everything in me fears that on the other side of that clearing, when I pick back up on the trail, things will be different; that they will be lesser. Less orderly—perhaps even chaotic.

  Scientists like to say that nature is in constant decay, constant disorder, but that notion comes from the laboratories and the Petri-dish equations, and it is not what I see in the field.

  Instead I see nature taking all the loose elements, the chaos of that disintegration, and weaving everything back into life. This is what art does as well—makes order out of chaos, makes two or more disparate elements alike—weaves back the unraveling around it—and so I am not surprised that for a long time I did not realize I'd branched off of one path and onto the other: did not even recognize the fork in the trail.

  And I am not sure how far down the other path I have gone—only that it seems I have come to the first clearing, at which I am pausing, unnerved.

  If I could do it again—if I could go back, if I had stayed on the other path—(and what chance or hidden urging leans one left or right; what pull of gravity or metronome within?)—I would like to perhaps have continued fooling with microscopes, filter titration, and seismology; I would have perhaps liked to have bushwhacked in even deeper, trying to figure out a way to quantify, to measure, things that are presently immeasurable.

  Instead, I find myself trying to name them, and be in their company—rather than trying to tame and corner them, hem them in.

  I think that art is wild, in this regard. Which is why I am chagrined, again, to be at this clearing—fooling with letters to Congress, to be believing in politics—to be counting and measuring, defending and explaining the woods, the wilderness: to be advocating for a voiceless thing.

  I feel distracted from the hunt; and as if the headwind I've been leaping into, catching my prey's full scent, has suddenly spun, quartered away from me, so that I can smell nothing; and yet I also feel as if I n
eed to pause and make a stand, pause and fight, if I am to survive—if I am to have any hope of surviving and going on, at a later date—to continue in art.

  I feel as if there's too much change going on: not enough constancy.

  Too much chaos. Too much for humans to make art or order of; though if we, like so much else, leave, then after we are gone, I know that nature will keep weaving, and that it will be beautiful, whether cast in fire or ice.

  I was up on one of the mountains I'm fighting to protect, when I saw the tracks-in the new snow. It was a miraculous week in October, one I mistakenly entered thinking would be a week like any other first week of October—aspens and larch, cottonwoods and ash trees stunned with gold, blue skies, and the huckleberry fields burnt red, blood red, and geese flying south, south, with the music of their leaving....

  So in that regard I knew the week would be miraculous, as it has been for me every year, every October, but I did not have any idea that it would be beyond that. I was already in love with these woods; I did not understand there could be a thing deeper than love.

  The thing in our blood that makes us love beauty—and beauty's depth, beauty's electrical charge—who would even consider that such a thing can be measured?

  At what point should we set down our microscopes and tape measures, with respect to the woods, and say, All right, enough; this thing—nature—is larger than we can understand. We are only a part of it, at the tail end of it—nothing but a curious fat little comma, near the end of a very long sentence.

  I was carrying my shotgun. I was hiking up high, hoping to jump grouse. I had started down low, hoping for a shot at a ruffed grouse, and then, as if drawn by some call, I got it in my mind to begin moving up the mountain at the edge of the roadless area.