The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  * The Forest Service survey of 1993 showing 70 percent of Montana and Idaho residents oppose any further entrance to the last roadless areas in their states; and,

  * Despite the influx of cheap Canadian timber—the results of the obscene forest liquidation going on up there, which rivals Brazil's deforestation rates—the timber companies working on public lands in the West continue to post record quarterly profits for their stockholders. By the end of 1994, despite a drop in timber prices, Plum Creek posted a record profit of $112 million; Georgia Pacific, based in Newt Gingrich's home state, had a 1,000 percent increase in profit....

  This nonsense about the last wilderness areas putting timber workers out of work, this big fat greed-suck lie about the last tiny wedge of remaining unroaded public lands being all that keeps sawyers and millworkers from reaching the eternal Big Rock Candy Mountain of secure futures and high finance—that myth (sold and packaged to workers by the timber products industry) runs counter to the Washington Post—compiled data that found that 80 percent of downsizing corporations neglect to pass on the savings to their workers in the forms of higher wages or more jobs. Instead, if all goes to the stockholders—and 45 percent of those companies use the savings from downsizing to buy more labor-saving machinery, which then triggers a second round of layoffs within twelve months.

  More numbers.

  Not a single acre of the valley where I live—the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana—is protected by our government as wilderness for our future. It's the wildest place I've ever seen in the Lower Forty-eight. We all have special places that nourish our spirits, that ignite the sparks of our imaginations, that help make life more tolerable by sharpening the sacred edge that human lives can still hold. We all wonder daily how we should go about saving these places.

  I'll go for long stretches at a time asking men and women and children to write letters to Congress and to the Clinton administration, as well as to the Forest Service, pleading the case of the unprotected Yaak, believing that if enough people write letters, the roadless areas that remain there—the wilderness—can be saved; that an invisible thing like passion can hold a physical thing that is fragmenting.

  But then, almost as if in response to some seasonal change, I'll succumb to the weariness of the activist—the brittleness, the humorlessness of the activist, the wearing down of one's passion and effectiveness—and I'll go for a long period (two or three months, sometimes) during which I believe that art helps achieve cultural change more effectively than does activism and the statistical rantings of fact. I'll believe that the bright primary colors as well as the pastel tones of art can carry more power than the black-and-white polarizations of activism. For a while, I'll think that that's the way to save a place—to write a pretty story about it, a pretty book—and so I'll change to fit that rhythm and belief, as if I'm in some cycle I do not understand but am nonetheless attentive to.

  Later on in the year—for three or four months—I will then find myself trying to do both: art in the morning, and hard-core activism in the afternoons and evenings.

  And then I'll wonder why my eyes drift crookedly; why I sometimes find myself staring at the sun, or why I feel off-balance.

  Beginning in September, I disappear into the grace of hunting season for three months with my bird dogs. We chase grouse and pheasant; I hunt deer and elk, too, by myself, while the dogs stay home. It is like a submergence—like being in a cocoon or hibernation. I take from the land, in both meat and spirit—in what I believe is a sustainable manner—and I rest myself during that time for another year, another round in this fight to try and save the last parts of a place that has not yet been saved, in which and for which I am asking your help.

  I don't mean to be insulting—traveling beyond my valley to ask your help. I know you have similar stories—identical stories—about places there: about every place that's loved.

  What would you do?

  How can the Yaak be saved—the last unprotected roadless areas in it?

  I meant to use numbers throughout this essay—I had a bunch of them lined up, all of them perverse and horrible—but I got tired of them right away.

  Writing—like the other arts—is not a hobby, but a way of living—a way, in the words of nature writing scholar Scott Slovic, of "being in the world." There is a rhythm that we must all find, in loving and fighting for a place—the integration of advocacy into your "other," peaceful life. I do not think it will always seem like a balanced or even pleasant rhythm. There will probably be long summer days of peace with only short stretches of darkness, in which you might be able to go a couple of weeks without panic and despair at the impending loss of the loved place—but there will also be long winters where advocacy and its inherent brittleness lasts for months at a time—times when the sun barely, if ever, gets above the horizon.

  Even if you're not doing your art (or living your "other," peaceful life during this period), reading a great novel or viewing a great painting can be necessary solace during this dark time: and you continue your advocacy as intensely and passionately as you can, daring to take it all the way to the edge of brittleness—like a starving deer in winter. In the cycle, you begin, or your body begins, to create space within you for the return of art, or peace—order constructed out of disorder; a return to suppleness; sometimes you even warn, or mention to your fellow advocates, that you feel this internal space growing within you, and that because of it you may be stepping aside for a brief time; so that in this manner those just entering the crest of their advocacy cycle can help pick up the slack and continue forward as you rest (hopefully in peace) before you return to the advocacy at a later point, strengthened and invigorated....

  The writer, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams is fond of the D. H. Lawrence quote "Blood knowledge.... Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots."

  This is how I try to help protect the last roadless areas in the Yaak: with both brittleness and suppleness. It's been said that 10 percent of the world wants the world dammed, 10 percent wants it healthy, and the other 80 percent just doesn't care. I can rarely decide upon a fixed strategy—do I try and motivate further the 10 percent already committed to a healthy world, with brittle, angry urgings? Or do I try and coax the other 80 percent into the camp of the wild by writing as hard and as well—as pretty, as peacefully—as I can?

  Again, it blurs. It becomes a weave, a braid, of rhythms; I do both, and I try and stay in touch with what Lawrence called "the blood root of things"; I try to make the right choices based on invisible feelings and rhythms, which are anchored in the realities of rock, trees, ice.

  I think in large part the brittleness we feel when fighting—when advocating—for a place (versus the suppleness one feels when deep in art) comes from the almost totally dependent nature of the relationship: the relative lack of reciprocity. We receive far more nourishment from the grace of the woods, or the spirit of a place, than we are ever able to return. We can only learn to mimic the rhythms of the place we love—joining more lightly, in some small manner, in that larger weave before we extinguish ourselves: before brittleness wins out over suppleness.

  Thomas Merton wrote of this fragmentation, this too-much brittleness, in one's passions for justice:

  " There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. 'The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

  "To allow one's self to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit one's self to too many projects, to want to help eve
ryone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."

  A little art can go a long way. T his phenomenon is again a measure of the unevenness of the relationship between man's love-of-place and a place itself—the differential in that equation equaling, perhaps, the definition of grace. A love of place can fuel art, can fuel the imagination—can give nourishment to the supple, questioning, creative spirit in excess of whatever that place might receive back from the taker.

  Art can be its own sort of advocacy for place; can advocacy—on the other hand—be art? Some say yes. I don't know. I'm not sure.

  I had, once again, meant for this whole essay to be numbers: a landslide of numbers, like brittle talus. But I cannot tolerate them, at present. There is a space in me, this short winter day, that cries out for words.

  I just read that when the freshman United States Representative from Idaho, Helen Chenoweth, addressed a Wise Use-Endangered Species Conference, she told the audience that the Yaak Valley was in northern Idaho, not northern Montana, and that it was so dead and sterile that there weren't even any bugs there.

  I wish to differ with the representative. I live in this vanishing valley and it is still in Montana. Many of the logs from this valley, it is true, are trucked over to mills in Idaho (did you know that the recently developed single-grip tree fellers now require only two men to run them, whereas it used to take sixteen sawyers to fell a comparable number of trees?), but the Yaak is still in Montana.

  Words.

  Here is a list of some of the species still found in this place.

  Bull trout, gray wolf, woodland caribou, grizzly bear, wolverine, lynx, fisher, harlequin duck, golden eagle, bald eagle, torrent sculpin, sturgeon, Coeur d'Alene salamander, great gray owl, Westslope cutthroat trout, flammulated owl, short-head sculpin, northern goshawk, boreal owl, peregrine falcon, wavy moonwort, Mingan Island moonwort, Townsend's big-eared bat, small lady's slipper, common loon, sparrow's egg lady's slipper, kidney-leaved violet, maidenhair spleenwort, black-backed woodpecker, round-leaved orchid, green-keeled cottongrass, bog birch, crested shield-fern, Spalding's catchfly, linear-leaved sundew, northern golden-carpet, northern bog lemming, water howellia....

  There are more, of course—a Noah's ark of diversity in this magical, totally unprotected wilderness—lions, moose, elk, bobcats, black bears, geese, grouse. The thing the earlier names all have in common is that they are on the threatened, endangered or sensitive species watch list: all imperiled, but still here, still hanging on—numbers be damned—as is my love for this place, and my hopes, in all seasons.

  The Storekeeper

  IT INTERESTS ME, the variations in flow and rhythm that conspire to make change. I used to picture the changes of seasons and events as the result of some incremental movement at earth's center: some perceptible straining against tension until the gearing of some cogwheel moved forward one click. And there are times when I still hold that opinion—the somewhat mechanized, simplified view, which makes it a little easier for us to believe things are under control. But more and more now I find myself wondering also if it—change—is more fluid than we can ever realize: that it is more fluid than even a river or the wind—that it is fluid and erratic, like some invisible animal that moves gracefully through the world for a while, then lies down to nap or rest, then gets up to feed and begins moving again—pacing and prowling through its home territory—its place.

  I'm not sure when the harvest starts, up here; when the lightheadedness of summer ends and the hurry-up sweetness of autumn first begins to stir. We tend to hold these compartments in our minds, sectioning the months off into halves, the first and fifteenth of each month, and the seasons into quarters, like fruit, by solstice.

  We had huge thunder and rainstorms last night, and today, the eleventh of August, did not in any way seem to me to be either a significant gear-tooth of change nor even have to it the feel of the motion of an animal or invisible thing getting up and moving from one place to another: but that is what happened.

  I did my work in the morning, oblivious. It was a cold morning, after the front blew through, and damp and foggy; I had a fire in the woodstove at dawn, but still it seemed no different from the day before, or the day before. The coyotes had been crying all morning, even into midday, crying loud—so much so that I marked it down in my journal—but I had assumed it was for a reason that could be understood or explained or measured, and decided they had gotten drenched all night in the storms and had not been able to go hunting. It was an exotic sound, hearing them carry on in the middle of the day like that. I should have pondered it, should have paused and paid attention, but I just kept on working.

  Later in the day I had to drive up to the pay phone to make some calls. The generator's been down for a month—no one can figure out why, not even the factory reps—and the backup is down, too, now. Because it's late summer, the solar panel's able to provide the energy we need; we pump water into the holding tanks on sunny days, and at night read by gas lantern, or flashlight. It's no big deal, really, but I was letting it get to me anyway. It was starting to bother me—going on into the second month of no one being able to fix it—and as I drove toward town, down the winding road through sun and shadow, and across the lazy river, my annoyance built, until that generator was pretty much all that was in my head.

  I was already seated at the stump at the pay phone, punching in my first call, when Grandma Helen came up and gave me a hug and told me that Gail, the owner of the mercantile, had died that morning: she'd had a massive heart attack, seemingly from out of nowhere.

  I put the phone down and said what everyone else had been saying, and would keep saying, through the day, slowly — "Unbelievable. I can't believe it."

  She had smoked like a chimney, but hadn't been that old — fifty-eight. She still had all her energy and vigor; too much so, on some days, truth be told. If she didn't agree with something, she'd let you know real quick. She'd tell you how the cow ate cabbage.

  Now I could feel it—the stillness over the town. The mercantile's the fulcrum of the valley: the place people come to hang out, to buy gas, to make calls; to rent a VCR movie in winter's stillness, or drink a beer, or to put a message on the bulletin board—the weight and birthdate of Sue Jantzen's or Lisa Mountain's baby, or the date of a bake sale, or anything—and Gail had been the one who had run this center-station. None of us up here like cities or crowds, but we liked the mercantile, and we liked and loved Gail. She, and the mere, was all of town we could take: the outer limits.

  Now I knew why the coyotes had been singing and carrying on all day. 1 didn't know what they were saying, but I knew they knew.

  Later in the afternoon I took my daughter, Mary ¡Catherine, and my two hounds up the mountain to pick huckleberries. It was that time of year, suddenly upon us, as it always is: some shifting fault line or fracture between summer and fall. It's the first year she's been old enough to really enjoy and understand it, and after an initial period of eating every berry she picked—both of us stained purple—we settled into a bucket-filling rhythm. It was a little alarming to see how easily, how naturally, she fell into the pattern of acquisition, of hunting and gathering, laying in store for winter: how much it pleased her for the bucket to be filling. We are born with the capacity to look ahead, and plan for the future; I believe it is in us. I believe we do know how to look beyond the moment.

  And so for most of the afternoon, crouched among waist-high bushes, we picked berries—picking the biggest, juiciest ones. The incredible simplicity of the act: the simple pleasure of the entranced rhythm—hunt, seek, gather; the simple, simple despair, say, at dropping a big berry, having picked one but then lost it in the transfer from bush to bucket, clumsy-handed.

  The sun slipped lower, the late s
ummer light grew softer, and that's all there was in the world, our soft, steady breathing, and the sound of berries going in the buckets, and the rustling of the dogs behind us, browsing the berries straight from the bush, their muzzles stained purple.

  Driving home, we saw another young coyote, smoke-gray with a black tip for a tail, trotting boldly through a fresh-cut summer green hay field. The sunlight was lowering itself, turning into that brief kind of bronze lighting that happens for a while, late in the day, and yet the field itself was luminous and green, fresh from all the summer's rains. It's been a good lush year. Some of the hay had been cut, but there was an island of it in the center of the green field that had not been cut, which was tall and wind-waving—and when the coyote saw that we were watching it, it headed for that island of tall grass and disappeared into it, just disappeared.

  We stopped off at the mailbox to check the mail. Nothing much: catalogues and flyers and such. I was thinking how if Gail had hung in there one more day—if she had lasted one more day (she hadn't even been sick!) she might have been able to see that coyote in the sun field, less than a mile from her store.

  Turning onto our road, we saw a doe standing in the center of the road with a big spotted fawn nursing, tucked in under her hip. The fawn was really nursing hard, sometimes butting its mother with such force that it shifted the doe's hindquarters around at nearly a right angle, and the doe would shift and reposition herself, all the while watching us carefully. We had stopped the truck and were just watching, not wanting to disturb anything.

  We watched them for almost twenty minutes. The fawn didn't dream there was a thing in the world beyond milk. And it seemed that the doe understood we would let the fawn finish: that we were in no hurry.