The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  They win all arguments on the table. "Well"— ahhh!— "yes, it's true"— argh! —"that maybe a little clearcut now and then"— ohhh! —"might not"— aiee! —"be too ... bad"— ahhh!

  They give instead of taking. It's incredible, the shared common ground the community has, just from the invisible braids of healing that are shared between us, from those of us who have visited them. They heal our physical imbalances, sculpt us back into who and what we should be, as I wish we could do—overnight, or in an afternoon—to the imbalances of the valley, and to the frictions that sometimes come up within the community.

  The dark woods just up the road from their shop: the valley of big timber, valley of mystery, lying just over the summit.

  There is this thing they do to your spine near the end of your session: they place their hand on a certain spot on your back and hold it there. Your senses fill. Oxygen roars into your ravaged muscles, though there is no sound. You can't hear a thing, not even your heart. You shut your eyes and you levitate, float there for a minute, maybe longer. Peace fills you.

  Afterward, you walk outside, healed, ready to hurl yourself at the world again. Ready to forget the lessons of peace their hands have kneaded and woven back into you.

  The crispness of the air, the smell of the mountains. The cry of a Stellar's jay—a flash of bright blue, flash of sun, and the sound of the creek. The drum of a pileated woodpecker working on a twisted, rotting snag. These mountains.

  Fires

  IT IS A WINDY DAY in mid-August 1994, and nearly all the inhabitants of Yaak have gathered in the log church that doubles as our community center. We've had bake sales in this place and we've voted here. Today an army officer, heavyset and dressed in camouflage, is here to tell us how to keep from burning to death. Outside, copper-colored smoke and sunlight blend into a fog that won't go away. The air feels as heavy around us as the lead apron that you used to wear during X-rays. The last really good fire that came through this valley was in 1910, and it burned from Spokane to Kalispell, an area of three million acres. The smoke was visible in Chicago.

  Because of the lack of phone service in most of this valley, we are cut off from news of the outside world—which is usually how we like it—but today we're anxious to hear the weather report. We get one: high winds, possibly thirty-to-forty-mile-per-hour winds from the west, dry lightning and no precipitation.

  Already the flames are sawing their way up the logged-over slopes of the Mt. Henry/McIntire country, chewing their way through dead lodgepole pine that the timber companies said they would log but didn't. (Instead they took the big green trees, spruce and larch.)

  Closer to home, the flames move up the side of Lost Horse Mountain, leaping from clearcut to clearcut. The fires are on the south side of the river—a function of the spectacular lightning storms that moved down the valley late in July, and again on the fourteenth and fifteenth of this month, lighting certain trees in the forest like candles—tongues of lightning flickering and splitting the heavens open with white light, each one searching for the one tree, the one dry dead tree, with the itch, the specific itch, to be born again. During two nights in mid-August, more than 160 fires were reported on the Kootenai National Forest, and from that point, it was up to the wind to see if the fires would run (they almost always climb, rather than descend) and leave new life in their wake—or whether the order of rot and decay would be preserved for at least another year.

  At night some of us drive to the top of Hensley Face, on the other side of the river—for now the "safe" side—and from there we look down at the valley and see the fires blinking yellow through the bed of smoke; fires blinking like a thousand flashbulbs, seeming sometimes strangely synchronized as breezes blow across them. It is like a vision of the underworld.

  In the meeting, the army sergeant, who has fought fires before, though never in this valley, talks to us about the Fowler and Turner and Fish Fry fires, all of which are less than a mile from my home and, in his words, really rocking.

  The firefighters have it down to a science, which is both reassuring and terrifying. They measure the humidities in combustible materials— wood —in advance of the fire, and they measure the per-acre volume of fuel. These measurements are then broken down into size categories: is the fuel comprised of twigs and branches, or limbs, or entire downed trees? It all matters.

  Evacuation orders and alternate plans are discussed; we take inventory of who isn't among us. If the roads are aflame we'll meet in Gail's wide meadow along the river and hope helicopters can get through. I have doubts about that, as it seems smoke would pool in those places. It's the smoke that usually kills you, not the flames. We are instructed, if trapped, to lie down in the Yaak River or in a creek with a wet towel over our face.

  The lecture is drowned out by the sometime sound of choppers and bombers cruising low over the woods. The helicopters pour onto the flames thousand-gallon buckets of water dipped from the river and lakes, and the bombers spray water or smoking trails of fire retardant. I wonder idly if the retardant is good for the soil—good for the watershed. More wind is coming, the sergeant says. There is a good chance the whole place could go, and go quick. We'll know within twenty-four hours. He wants us to be ready to leave in under five minutes' notice.

  Despite dangers, most of us have stayed. It's an incredible pull—the bond to home, the bond to your place.

  That afternoon I go to the mercantile to get extra gas, but it's closed. That would be a real bummer, I think, to be evacuating and run out of gas. Murphy's Law to the nth. A friend is sitting on the porch of the tavern drinking beer, a lot of it, and watching the hypnotic sight of a mountain on fire—the mountain right across the river,

  "If we burn, we burn," he says.

  I go home and head into the woods behind our house—up to the top of Zimmerman Hill, to peer down at the Okaga Lake fire, but I can't see anything for all the smoke. My wife is pregnant with our second child, and it occurs to me that this would be an even less opportune time than usual to get myself killed—to do something dumb—and so I turn and go down the safe, unburned side of the hill. On my way I encounter a curious thing: a covey of blue grouse ground-roosting, mid-slope, with a covey of ruffed grouse. I've never seen or heard of such a thing, and I consider whether the blue grouse have moved off their usual roosts up on the ridge because they know the fire will come over it. I wonder if they can feel it coming, like a tingle or an itch, through the soil and the rocks beneath their feet.

  Down low, the deer have been moving at all times of the day, looking dazed and confused; many of them stand midstream in the little creek.

  I decide to begin moving some things out of the cabin—books, and family pictures. And as the road is still open, I decide to take my old Ford Falcon to the nearest town, Libby, before the road becomes crisscrossed with burning timbers and transformed into a hot-air wind tunnel of flame.

  In Libby I'm stopped and given a citation because the car has a brake light out. I verbally abuse the arresting officer. Ash floats down on us onto our heads and shoulders, down onto the car itself, as we argue. He lives in the city, where its safe.

  The fires go out as they always do. The weight of their own smoke—the lack of oxygen, once they've used so much of it—the ennui of their own existence—often puts them out. Firefighters abetted the process, as did the rains that always come on Labor Day. By the time it was over, only 2 percent of the forest had burned, in varying degrees of intensity. I would have liked to have seen everyone go home right away—two thousand national guardsmen came to this shy valley from as far away as Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana—a twentyfold increase in the social and cultural stress on the valley—but I have to say that for a couple of days I was glad that they were there.

  All over the West, scientists as well as residents are trying to figure out how to apply this most basic truth: the forests have to burn. Suppression only makes forests lean more toward this truth. Many parts of the Yaak have changed from a once stable, fire-
resistant system comprised largely of cedar-hemlock and larch to a more combustible mix of fir and lodgepole pine. In the past, the thick bark of older larch trees and the cedar's affinity for swamps have protected these two species. But now, the fir and lodgepole, without fires to keep them in balance, are encroaching into new territory, displacing these slower-growing, more fire-resistant species. Further stresses on the forest, beyond the cumulative stress of complete fire suppression, include insect infestations of forests adjacent to gaping clearcuts, diseased blister-rusting white pine, and acid rain-weakened firs. All this adds up to what's called, ominously and accurately, fuel loading.

  In the last three decades of fire suppression on the nearby Lolo National Forest, for instance, approximately one-tenth the volume of wood has burned than used to. Additionally, most fires in the past burned "cooler" because excess fuel was kept from loading up by the frequency of fires. Cooler fires spared many trees and left behind a diverse mosaic of burned and unburned species and age classes: different for each fire. The forests must have been seething with diversity, with suppleness—with health.

  Today's fires—- and we really haven't seen a truly big one—are burning hotter.

  The timber industry has an answer, of course, and it isn't shy about touting it. All that autumn, ads blared over the radio saying that if the industry had been allowed to do more logging, the fires wouldn't have happened.

  Never mind that about 70 percent of the fires on the Kootenai were in logged areas. Cut down all the trees, the timber industry seems to be saying, before they catch 011 fire.

  Except: it is our past and present logging practices that have helped contribute to the very problem. Since in most logged-over areas there are not enough big dead trees left behind to rot slowly on site—to live out their cycle of rebirth—the soils on these public lands are becoming impoverished at rates so startling they often cannot even be measured. Sometimes soil is washed away following the clearcuts, while at other times it sprouts knapweed, hawkweed and thistles—grass-replacing noxious exotic weeds that are (indigestible by big game.

  The forest isn't always coming back on its own—not the forest type that the land has fostered naturally, has created. When trees are planted by man, at great expense, and using different species than the original, they are often weaker, more prone to disease and sun and wind. This can result in early deaths and greater volumes of tree death—fuel loading—which can make a stand more susceptible to hot fires, rather than cool fires. The hot fires do further damage to the soil: and the remaining ashes from these hot fires often slump into the nearby streams and creeks, causing severe sedimentation.

  It is out of balance. We need to reestablish order—and certainly, to keep our hands off the roadless areas, which are the true sources of and models for forest health. But the current Congress, greedy for all of the burned sticks, won't hear of it. They've declared an emergency, and to make sure industry can go in and cut all that wood before any of it returns to the soil, the way wood has been doing for roughly four billion years, Congress has passed a bill—written by timber companies—outlawing any environmental restrictions or regulations on salvage harvests.

  Salvage in theory refers to dead trees, but it is defined in this bill as anything with the potential to burn, which basically covers any tree in the world. President Clinton vetoed this bill—it was a rider tacked on to the Budget Rescissions Bill—the first veto of his presidency. The Yaak—and the West—was granted one more year of life. Then, a month later, Clinton changed his mind, and the Yaak was again in danger.

  The aerial photos of the aftermath of forest fires on the Kootenai tell an interesting story. The blackest areas—the fires' origins, in many instances, and places where they burned hottest—radiate from the edges of the big clearcuts and into the weakened, diminished forests. A favorite saying in the timber industry is "Clearcuts don't burn," but they do. The sun at the clearcut/forest interface scorches that area exceedingly, making it unnaturally dry, as do the strong winds now sweeping across the clearcuts lunar surfaces. These winds blow down excessive snarls of weakened timber around all edges of a clearcut, and pathogens and insects flood the woods through these new avenues.

  Well, maybe, says industry, but the clearcuts hold their snowpack longer since they release most of their radiant heat back to space each night, without that pesky heat-trapping overstory. And it's true, they do. And then along about the first of June, about the time the streams and rivers have finally started to clear up from normal spring runoff, all the remaining snowmelt (and sediment) goes at once, in slumps and muddy gushes, rather than trickling slowly out of the old cool cedar woods, like a tap being slowly opened: the way nature, and springtime in the Rockies, is designed to work.

  Old growth forests are simple in a way that a child can understand. The forests create their own healthy stable world, and maintain it. The thick bark of the oldest trees, and the way they shed their branches, almost coyly—almost tempting little grass fires to catch in those brush-tangles and limb-tangles, helps to keep the forest cool and clean and nutrient-rich, below.

  All those old lichens hanging down from the oldest trees, hard-earned, are not just for show: if floating sparks land in them, the lichens flare up like a torch and then extinguish themselves, having used up all the surrounding available oxygen in that quick flush—leaving the tree almost totally unscathed.

  Even the timing of the fire season in the West is a thing of great beauty and great health. The way the fires come, sometimes in July but usually in August—allowing just enough time to download some fuel and recycle some nutrients, but not so much that things get out of hand; in September, the rains come, turning the fires to smoldering embers, and in October and November the snows come, extinguishing them. Even larch needles carried by the autumn winds seem to be full of purpose.

  One morning in October you wake up and there's a quarter- or half-inch mat of beautiful gold needles, and beautiful gold aspen leaves, spread all across the countryside. This golden blanket helps pin down the charred coals and ashes of August, keeps too much of the ash from blowing away or slumping into creeks: this blanket speeds up the soil-making process—as much as that glacial pace can be helped along.

  The interconnectedness of things. I'm all for prudent salvage logging, as long as it's not in roadless areas. But when a given industry asks to be put above or beyond the law, I get frightened, and angry. It is not the fires of autumn I fear. I respect those—but they are nature's way, and can be no more controlled than the wind or the rain. They're part of the weather of the West. To keep clearcutting forests or entering roadless areas under the guise of preventing forest fires (isn't suppression what got us in trouble in the first place?) is like going into the forest with gallon-sized watering cans during a drought. It's just not going to work. What we're dealing with is too big. And ever worse than not working—it makes things worse—more imbalanced, more brittle.

  The fire season has taught me a lot, has taught me a new way of looking at the woods. Now when I go for a walk, or climb a forested mountain, I'm very conscious of the mosaic: of the microsites—those spots in the forest that could start a fire, and those that could spread it: and those which would absorb and stop it, too. I look at diversities of vertical structure, and lateral structure, in unlogged country; at species mix. In the Yaak especially, due to its unique diversity, there are amazing bands of change on every mountain. You move through a forest of old lodgepole and then, going fifty or a hundred feet higher, into a forest of fire-buffering cedar, or cedar-hemlock. Then the slope will flex more sharply, will cross to a southern aspect, and you find yourself in a grove of fire-promoting ponderosa pine, and at the top of that ridge, fire-resistant old growth Douglas fir.

  I'm learning to look at nature.

  Sometimes I think that it is the wolves who are helping, aiding and abetting, joining the resurrecting fires in the West: or not the wolves, but rather, the absence of them. I noticed it just the other day. I was plan
ting some young cedars and had put up gated slats and screens around them to keep the deer, elk and moose from browsing them in winter. (I keep the enclosures around them until they get tall enough to be above the browse line.)

  I began planting the trees a couple of years ago. And it just hit me this spring: the before-and-after of it. I haven't been seeing any young aspens anywhere in the woods—just big ones, thirty and forty and fifty years old—trees born back in the days of predators—and I noticed too that in my enclosures the aspen sprouts are doing great, but only in my enclosures. The deer herds are increasing so steadily and dramatically that they're eating all the young aspen and perhaps cedar. The cedar, especially, are fire resistant, because they help cool the forest, which helps retain moisture—which helps buffer fires.

  There are too many deer—or rather, not enough predators. They are perhaps near the edge of stripping the woods bare—changing the composition of the forest over the past fifty years, in ways as subtle as our ways have been offensive and immense. The ways of rot versus the ways of fire.

  It is not just the wolves, of course. It is everything; it is all out of balance.

  It was a good snow year, this year. By April we were already watching the sky like farmers. But the snow and rain mean little. A greenhouse-hot summer followed by a lightning storm, followed by a windy dry day—everything can change, and will change; if not this year, then next. For this reason, and so many others, we need to keep the untouched wilderness cores—the untouched roadless areas in each national forest. They act as buffers, absorbing and diffusing the spread of huge hot fires throughout the West. They're better at putting out fires, or diluting them, than ten thousand or one hundred thousand Marines—better than a billion-dollar-a-year effort. Every forest needs a big wilderness area—a chain of dedicated roadless areas, in perpetuity—come hell or high water, come war or peace, come world's end or world's beginning.