The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  But I got hung up in this grade-school semantics debate, right from the get go.

  "The wild things still live there," I said. "Any basic conservation biology textbook will tell you that 100,000 acres is the minimum required for the preservation of a core population of large carnivores. We've still got about 150,000 acres in the Yaak if you keep them all linked together." 1 showed him the archipelago, the doughnut-around-the-hole; like the rings around Saturn, the roadless areas in Yaak are still connected. They may look like a heart shot through with a lifetime of adrenaline—a thing riddled with pockmarks—but they are still nonetheless tenuously connected, still pumping the wild.

  I had one last question for him, before I left. It came as only an afterthought: some whisper, some spirit from the woods, roused rne to ask it.

  "Have you ever seen the Yaak?" I asked.

  "No," he said, "I never have."

  I reeled out, feeling kidney-kicked. Feeling the eyes of the wolverines, up in the autumn mountains; feeling the elk pause, as they drifted as a herd down into lower country, anticipating the snows of November. Thinking, perhaps, Well, he tried. We all have to make it 011 our own—that's a rule of nature. But I'm trying to buck it—I'm trying to believe that anyone who hears about this valley, and the complete disregard with which its wilderness has been treated in the past—the scandal of this omission, and the continued taking-without-giving—will be moved to help. I absolutely believe it, and can see it as clearly as a caudle flame.

  1 can see letters raining down on members of Congress, the Forest Service, and big timber companies—enough to change, enough to stir them. I can see the letters coming like coal oil poured down the chimney, exploding into flames when they hit the embers, scattering the cabin's occupants; I can see Congress running out into the night, into the snow, trying to get out from under the flaming letters.

  I reeled out onto the concrete streets. My world of gravel roads, and dirt roads, with the canopy of trees high above—roads like shady tunnels, with the gold larch needles blanketing them like a carpet, like the golden roads of heaven—seemed very far away.

  Of course we know what happened. Pat Williams stood up for the Yaak—passed his bill through the House, about two million acres of protection to begin with, statewide—over 150,000 acres in the Yaak, including a McIntire/Mt. Henry Conservation Reserve, which would have been dedicated exclusively to small loggers—and to planting trees that would, one day far into the future, finally grow tall and obliterate that heinous H-A-C above the McIntires' meadow—and the bill passed (though Pat had to fight off Don Young of Alaska like a bulldog; Young proposed amendments that would have specifically gutted acreage from the Yaak....)

  But of course even after that bill passed the House, they killed it in the Senate: they let it expire, unexamined....

  We must get back up.

  The system's broken—or not broken, because it never really worked in the first place. There are good folks in the Forest Service—great people—but up high, where the gears turn, the power benefits only a few. The counties, receiving a 25 percent commission on all timber cut from the federal lands in their county, all but encourage the multinational companies to come in, cut the forests, and then get out as fast as possible, without doing any value-added work that would employ more laborers. In fact, it's in the counties' short-term interest to get the raw logs out as quick as possible—just cut 'em and get 'em out and cut more.

  You could employ far more workers in a chair-making business, using the same amount of wood required for one worker to simply cut that tree; you could make that tree last for days, rather than seconds. You could help ease unemployment on a long-term basis, and you could save these last magical forests of Yaak and still provide the county with a base of support, out of all the revenues saved from unnecessary road construction into these last forests.

  Why can't we have that? Why can't we have a business in Libby or Troy, in which the workers build bookcases and kitchen cabinets out of Yaak Valley bug-killed lodgepole? I do not believe that the truck drivers and sawyers cannot be taught to run a planer, to rout wood. To sand, screw, nail and finish. To sustain.

  We'd still need truck drivers, and we'd still need sawyers.

  But a value-added industry—to learn a craft—would employ more, and pay better. And you can't log forever—even if the woods stretched to eternity. It's like playing in the NFL—you only have so many good years before injuries do you in.

  Meetings, meetings, another visit with the senator's aide—the Democratic senator. 1 drive over to Kalispell and bring with me several stacks of mail from people who want the last wilderness in the Yaak protected. There's easily enough to fill a wheelbarrow, so that's what I do: I empty the sacks into a red wheelbarrow, hundreds of letters overflowing, and push it in to the meeting.

  The aide's face flushes. "What's this, a prop?" he demands, and I tell him, "No, it's reality."

  The Republican senator answers one of my letters. He says that he will do nothing that will sacrifice even one timber job in Montana. I write him back and ask him, But what if that one timber job costs eight other jobs somewhere else in the state—or sacrifices twenty-five potential jobs? He does not write back.

  It's not the Forest Service's men and women in the field who are taking the wild away. It is up high, up where the money is leveraged—up where it leverages people's behavior—and we must leverage back our heritage, the woods, with votes, and with anger, if we do not have the dollars.

  I don't believe Congress wants us making bookshelves and cabinets—they don't want us taking our time with the land. The timber industry that contributes to their election campaigns wants the quick cash flow, ship the rough logs to Japan, a dollar-on-the-hundred, and let them make the cabinets, then sell 'em back to us cheap, blowing our deficit even further out of the water—no matter, keep the timber companies' cash flow going, propped up by subsidies into roadless areas.

  Am I explaining it clearly? Is anyone please angry enough to write a letter? To write fifty letters, or five hundred?

  It is a civil war, and if they have no honor for the land, then how can you expect them to have honor or respect for you?

  There must be some permanent wilderness refuges in the Yaak—not a rotating system of open-and-closed roads, but true wilderness. Roderick Mountain, for example—let its name become forever synonymous with the wild. Let the next generation know the wild.

  It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church—this last 1 percent of the West—but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshiping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God—the scent, feel, sight, taste and sound of God—forever fresh upon it.

  One place, untouched by us. The wilderness. The harbor, from which we came. Home.

  The Dark-Eyed Owls

  A COUPLE OF VALLEYS OVER from me, along the north fork of Montana's Flathead River, there lives a wildlife biologist, Rosalind Yanishevsky, whom I see from time to time. Dr. Yanishevsky is full of energy and wonder and strange knowledge—she seems to know everything. She has tangled dark brown hair and travels with a small white dog named Kachina. She has worked as a national park ranger and has taught classes in wildlife management and old-growth forest ecology. She has participated in research on the ecology of mule deer, wolves, woodpeckers and grizzlies. She seems happy in the world: especially when she is in the woods.

  And she's in the woods a lot, these days—and on the road to and fro, working for the National Audubon Society in an effort to map the remaining ancient old-growth forests in Montana. Rosalind's hope is to correct and supplement the Forest Service maps before all that she intends to map is gone.

  Foresters and biologists do not always agree, but they recognize that for a forested ecosystem to be healthy, old-growth stands should comprise a minimum of 10 percent of the forest's whole. But on my Kooten
ai National Forest, and adjacent to that, on Rosalind's Flathead National Forest (and I use the terms of possession as I believe any creature should, deer or owl or bear or man, who goes in and out of those forests), old growth comprises only 4 or 5 percent of the whole.

  One of the reasons I like to be around Rosalind is that she doesn't despair. She doesn't panic when the environmental movement in this part of the world suffers loss after loss; she just keeps working harder, and offers an odd little smile, an incredulous, "Can you believe this?" laugh.

  In the woods she stops to look around: raises her binoculars to the flash of wings through the trees, or looks down with an I've-never-seen-this-before interest at the smallest mushroom. Standing in the complexity of a towering old forest, Rosalind looks; and she wants the Forest Service to look, too, before it is too late. But she doesn't just want the Forest Service to save the remaining fraction of old growth—which will be gone in ten or twenty years, if it's not protected—she also wants "associated forests" set aside. These are mature stretches of woods that contain the components which will in turn, in twenty or fifty years, become old-growth forests. Historically, she suspects, some valleys in northwest Montana have had high percentages of old growth, and in any case forest managers would do well to provide themselves with a buffer beyond that 10 percent minimum.

  A system of protection for these "associated forests" needs to be mapped and created. Stands contiguous to old growth can act as a corridor from one old-growth forest to another, thereby helping to prevent the genetic diversity of flora and fauna from becoming even more fragmented and isolated. Some planning is needed, some orderly system of sanity to keep together that which was never meant to be fragmented: and this may be why Dr. Yanishevsky exists in the world, I think; it's her present passion, her calling. To save us—if we will be saved. And if we won't—well, then, she'll at least try to save the owls. Her training starts at the level of the cell and extends all the way up to wolves, bears and giant trees. Man.

  Over on what Rosalind calls the West Side—the Pacific Northwest—the failed Spotted Owl Bill of 1992 would have set aside from the timber industry that critical 10 percent of old-growth forest. (About the logging industry's and pork-barrel politicians' claims, generally unexamined by the media, that such protection will cost thousands of jobs and millions of dollars, Rosalind smiles and looks as if she wishes certain of her species had, if not more hunger for intellect, then at least more imagination. "It could be an opportunity for more jobs," she says—the creation of a new, labor-intensive industry of protective logging—selecting, pruning, trimming, measuring and evaluating the forests— looking at the trees—rather than the old machine culture of running amok, driving the giant Caterpillar up the hill and into the dark forest, erasing it, and erasing jobs for the next generation....)

  Although Rosalind finds herself hoping Oregon and the rest of the Northwest can pass meaningful ancient forests protection bills, she understands that the jaws and eyes of the timber beast will rotate accordingly to gaze across the line to Montana, where there is no protection of ancient forests.

  She tells me they will be looking to Montana to make up for whatever is protected over there.

  Rosalind understands processes: causes and effects. And that's the way it played out. The Clinton administration had their timber summit in the Northwest, and decided to protect some spotted owl habitat over there; but now industry is robbing owl habitat in the Yaak—and elk and grizzly and trout habitat—to make up for Washington and Oregon's protection.

  We drive up to a lovely area on the border called Rat Creek. It's the place through which the Yaak River first runs as it crosses over Canada. Administered by the Forest Service, there are many big larch trees to be found. A private timber company clearcut 160 acres they owned from an area adjacent to Rat Creek—and now, since Champion Realty (previously Champion Timber) doesn't want to wait another two hundred years for the trees to grow back, they have put it (along with all their other Montana lands, which have received similar cut-and-run treatment) up for sale to developers.

  At the edge of Rat Creek there is a section of river bottom land, prime grizzly and elk spring and summer habitat, which the owner has staked with pink ribbons as he, too, gears up to subdivide and to sell. The trees between these two gutted lust pits are immense.

  Wolves inhabit this place, and thousands of deer and elk, great gray owls, pileated woodpeckers, black bears and an occasional grizzly bear. The whole forest shakes, trembles with a magic; 1 know that something's up.

  Tension is alive in this forest; one thing is trying to dominate another.

  I think that it is the old, trying to dominate the new.

  Rosalind and I walk down a game trail for perhaps half a mile, looking up at the trees and down at all the different mushrooms. 1 ask questions—"What kind of tree is this? What kind of tree is that? How old do you think that one is?"—and gradually I notice that Rosalind is going slower and slower.

  We're in what she calls a "subalpine spruce and fir zone," a place where larch, and shaggy, sharp-needled spruce trees grow strong beside flat-needled fir trees (Douglas firs have one needle-pod growth tip at the end of each twig, while the subalpine fir has three growth tips). I begin to see why Rosalind has stopped here. I'd been looking forward to showing her the even bigger larches further up the trail, but it soon becomes apparent that this is a better place for an examiner.

  "The Forest Service doesn't want trees set aside for biological diversity," she says. She's standing in one spot, looking all around, studying. A big fire came through here she guesses about one hundred years ago, sparing only the larch due to their thick bark. The almost as tall but smaller-diameter lodgepoles shot up after that, and together these two species provided shade for the next successional stage, the fir and the spruce.

  Hardly moving, Rosalind points out hemlock and cedar—the hemlock's needles green on top but shiny-silver beneath, almost aluminum-looking—a feathery look.

  "This is a very diverse forest," she notes, taking three steps to a grand fir. And beyond it, there's juniper; a white pine (five needles to a bunch). She's sure the lodgepole came in after the larch, working its way up between the fire-surviving larches; the lodgepoles have no limbs for a long way up, indicating they had to grow a long way before they could reach the sun.

  "Larch trees can get two to three times this size, if you'll let them," Rosalind says: a dizzying prospect. There is one monster larch tree that is definitely an old-timer, and we step over to measure it. She asks me to guess the diameter first, from a distance. I squint and imagine the great tree cut—I pretend I've lucked onto it in a slash pile while out cutting firewood — and make a guess of forty inches. Rosalind nods. "Pretty close," she says.

  We stretch the tape measure four feet up to "breast height," then wrap the tape measure around the tree's circumference at that height. We're going to calculate the DBH — diameter-at-breast height—and to get the diameter we divide the circumference by pi and come up with 42.3 inches. A good, big tree. This one, Rosalind says, is some kind of veteran—maybe two or three hundred years old.

  Rosalind is a mix of scientist and romantic, an ideal mix of microscope-squinter and world's-wonder wide-eyed gawker. Politician and rebel, she earns her living by numbers, swims through them as a trout through water—and she acknowledges that there are different numerical definitions for old growth (moisture regime, slope aspect, tree species and so on). In a subalpine spruce-fir forest such as the one we're in, she says, a general working definition might be fifteen trees per acre with a diameter greater than twenty inches. But that's the office part of her, the computer grids.

  "There's so much," Rosalind says. "You have to look at everything: light patches through the canopy, amount of nutrients on the ground, soil and logs in terms of decay, nesting trees, snags....

  "It's close to being old growth," she says, looking around. "Maybe in fifty years."

  Larch makes the best nesting cavities for birds
because the outside bark is so resistant to rot, and yet the tops of the biggest larches are prone to breaking off—often intercepting lightning bolts, as they rise so high into the sky. These strikes of lightning allow moisture and fungus to enter the heartwood and rot it from the inside; the end result (before the tree falls, returning to earth) is that there is a nice protective shell around a soft home for hole-dwellers.

  Rosalind is reentering her scientist-state; leaving the qualitative, which is usually where the poets play, and coming back into the realm of the quantitative. She steps over to a patch of grand fir that is growing in a cluster around a lodgepole pine. Researchers have discovered that the yew tree of this region grows in similar clusters. The yew has been very important in testing for anticancer properties -—an ingredient in the yew called Taxol has shown great success. The yew grows in isolated communities, or families—and one stand's Taxol production, Rosalind says, "can vary as much as tenfold. But they're cutting it all, without measuring," she says. "They can wipe out an important genetic strain."

  Rosalind frowns, and then tells of a friend hired by the Forest Service to do "stand exams"—inventorying the diversity and quantity of various species, as required by law. It's a pleasant enough job under normal circumstances—I think of how good it felt to enumerate, record, preserve, even if briefly, that one larch—42.3 inches —but the trouble Rosalind's friend has with the job is that they often do not send him in to do stand exams until after they'd already decided to cut, making his measurements meaningless.

  "It's pretty disgusting," Rosalind says.

  "Strangely enough, the Forest Service has destroyed the records," she adds. "We try to examine the historical timberstand exam database—but after about six years, the Forest Service dumps their files. It's a little like George Orwell, or Lenin—destroying the past, and rewriting the future. They're saying to us, What old growth? What old growth was here? Prove to me there was old growth here."