The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  Call it a place to run to when things go wrong. When the whole rest of the world goes up in conflagration.

  We're just now learning new things in the West. We're always learning new things: things known by people before us, old civilizations, but now forgotten.

  We scan the hot western skies in August for signs of approaching storms and try to detect the feel of electricity in the air. Any breeze at all can feel ominous. We are remembering another of nature's rules: Payback is hell.

  My Congressman

  THE SUMMERS ARE SO BRIEF and the winters so long up here. I love it.

  In the first week of 1996—another reelection year—Pat Williams surprised everyone by announcing that, like so many other congressmen and congresswomen, he would not seek reelection.

  For a long time he had spoken of how rough and unrewarding the work had gotten, how futile. The gridlockers and obstructionists working at the corporations' beck and call could stop anything good, anything noble. That was wearying to him, he said, plus there was this: he missed Montana. The last time I saw him (at a rally for his '94 reelection) he and his wife, Carol, talked about their simple dream of one day having a garden like the one they used to have before they went to Washington.

  Whether parrying or thrusting or counterpunching, he was a champion. He fought for the arts, for education, for the environment, and for the rights of women and workers. In this respect, you could call him a liberal: he was for the freedom of things, not the enslavement of them. There are several individuals in Washington who accumulated the kind of power he had there, but unlike many of them, Williams did not lose his compassion as he gained that power.

  We hear so much raging about the government. I wonder how many other citizens will ever have the bittersweet, mixed good fortune to lament so deeply the retirement of one of their senators or representatives. You don't hear much about that kind of thing any more.

  He and his family were in Washington for roughly a fifth of a century. Hell yes, they deserve a garden back in Montana. Hell yes, they deserve to once more observe the cycles of their home. And a thank-you letter, too, if you don't mind.

  I don't know who, if anyone, will step up to take his place. And we need to be spending our postage and passion, our letters and envelopes, on those who still pull the levers. But he was such an honest and square force, such a one-man counterbalance to the excesses and greed of industry, that there is no way I can pass up the opportunity to say thank you. And any protection that in the future will come to the Yaak—any protection of the wilderness—will be laid on the cornerstone of his work, his sweat, his values. He stood up for the Yaak when no one else would. I don't know how long it will be before we see his kind again, if ever.

  Hot Lead

  THE CANDLE BURNS at both ends. There are small groups of environmentalists and loggers throughout the West, and even down in Libby, who in recent years, bloodied by battles of the heart, have begun trying to get together in order to come up with solutions. There are very few people, if any, out there who work in the woods—sawyers, log-truck drivers, timber cruisers, tree planters—who want to see injury done to the land.

  In the Yaak, it is getting harder and harder to ignore what has been done to the land—and what is still being done.

  The shareholders of the big corporations—the ones who never see the land—are the only ones who do not care. Sometimes I wake up in the morning not with the peace-of-mind with which I like to begin a days work, but with anger—with the image of men and women opening their morning papers to check the daily stock quotes on these corporations of whom they own shares. They do not care.

  So we've been having these meetings, these dialogues, where we discuss dreams, desires and hopes, right next to the context of next week's mortgage payment—or last month's past-due one.

  Part of the problem in attitudes—in the tenseness of hearts between those who fight for the last wilderness, and those who fight to erase it—is one, as I perceive it, of a strange mixture of guilt and pride, on both sides of the argument.

  Few people want to accept at a conscious level the notion that what their employers have done is wrong. How can it be wrong if such serious good has come from it—if it has helped put food on the plate, has helped raise a family? This notion of wrongness, by unfair and unfortunate association, could easily imply, across a short leap of logic, that the workers were being judged as being wrong-hearted. The workers might badmouth their employer in private, but will almost always set up a wall of defense against criticism from the outside.

  Along these lines, comments that often come out of our meetings (which are sometimes heated, but not as much as you'd think—we're neighbors, after all; we all know by this point each other's quirks and stances—we know which buttons not to push, and know also when the bullshits getting a little deep) include the complaint by resource-extraction folks ("loggers") that while they realize there have been abuses in the Yaak in the past, they feel like the environmentalists take pleasure in "rubbing our noses in it."

  Of course we think that this is a misperception on the loggers' part. What the environmentalists would really like to be doing is what anyone else would like to be doing—working a garden, spending time with family, hunting, fishing, reading a book, watching a show....

  But what's encouraging about comments like these is that, even only a few years ago, rather than complaining about the nose-rubbing, there would instead have been complete and total denial that the wilderness, and surrounding forest, was in any state of disrepair whatsoever.

  It's hard—nearly impossible—when your identity has been wedded (sometimes across generations) to the timber industry. The line can be so fine between one's employer and one's self that criticism of the company becomes criticism of your own values and identity. It's been one of the recipes for war, throughout history. Of course it must feel to the loggers as if we—the environmentalists, and even the public-at-large, won't ever let up: that we're always going to be criticizing the past, and that we are unwilling to accept the hope that big timber can ever do anything right.

  On the other hand—from this side of the battle (and if both sides are losing, then who, might we ask—knowing the answer—is winning?)—the environmentalists feel like if we don't speak up critically against the past, it will become accepted—as it once was when there was plenty of wilderness to go around.

  And where environmentalists are coming from, as well, is a position of distrust so deep-rooted in truth and history that the distrust approaches and sometimes crosses over into panic. The Forest Service, as well as the timber industry, like any political organism caught red-handed, is always saying it's changing, that it's going to get its act together. Their most effective form of attack, they've found out, is to get the public to let its guard down.

  Industry will kick in a hundred bucks, or a thousand, to some community need. Industry will talk about all those little piss-ant seedlings they planted. And they keep making sure, with those profits, that their puppets get elected to office.

  The meetings are good. It's hard enough to dislike someone you don't know—harder still to dislike someone you're having a dialogue with. Our dreams are so fantastic—sometimes more surreal than fiction, lying square in the middle of what seems logical and pragmatic, but is really at the far edge, for the time being—or beyond the far edge—of political reality.

  Still, sipping coffee late into the night, we continue to have these dreams, and talk about them. We talk about what the woods mean to each of us, and are comforted to find that about 80 percent of it is common ground. It's good, after a while, to know where each other stands, and to be able to speak freely about our passions. It feels like bullet-making, these plans—or rather, the precursor to these plans—these dreams of the future. It feels as if we are converting ourselves

  — spending our lives in this battle —to hot lead and then pouring ourselves into the molds of our making, the molds of our dreams. Yes, we need timber. Yes, we must stay o
ut of roadless areas.

  What if the corporations could no longer run amok on the public lands; what if they could no longer milk freely (or with our subsidies, our blessings) the public wildlands? What if they could be driven from the region—and with it, the malarial specter of their legacy, now ingrained into western communities and cultures, of boom and bust?

  For eight, nine, ten million dollars, we could buy one of the old abandoned mills along the railroad tracks and show the forest products industry how it's supposed to be done: certified sawyers working selective cuts—no more clearcuts — and rather than shipping raw logs to distant mills, we could use one-tenth the volume of wood, or one-one-hundredth, in a value-added local industry, rather than hurling ourselves down the steep hill, in these last few remaining years....

  Each year, the bare gullies, the gouges of eroding soil, cut deeper and deeper, up on those high-elevation clearcuts: up at the source of wildness. I cannot look at them without feeling physically—not emotionally, but physically—the sensation of injury. I cannot shut my feelings out to that numbness any more. I have become too much of this place.

  Such is our tiny progress that I can say these things to my logger friends, and they will listen respectfully; as I will listen to them and feel frustration—though not responsibility—when they talk of wood they want to cut but can't bid on or how they can't be competitive against the multinationals. Many of them are struggling monthly to make huge payments on big machines they bought on interest and promise back in the high-volume days of Champion's quick and calculated forest liquidation frenzy. The machines have to be used, to pay for themselves, and some of them run a quarter of a million dollars each, new. But many of these machines could be used in restoration projects, and salvage projects.

  And I keep pointing to the far hills—to the last wall of unroaded blue ridges—Roderick, Saddle, Gunsight, Pink Mountains—and saying, I want to know that in each valley we will set aside untouched cores, untouched places, that will always be managed only by God-as-nature, against which to measure those other areas managed by man-as-God. I do not want to take it all, I want to give back instead to the wilderness some of that with which we have been entrusted and bequeathed.

  We talk late into the night about the things that could be done with the wood, the care that could be given to it—Yaak Valley bookshelves, or specialty beams, or siding; a glue-lam plant, where bark and sawdust and limbs and small, crooked trees could be compressed to make building materials.... Furniture, or cabinet-making; a finger-joint molding plant.... Any of fifty wood-products industries that could be sustainable to both the human community and to the land, rather than pursuing to the bitter, tragic end, the last dying gasps of this century of liquidation that is finally drawing to a close....

  Some of them—the CEOs—want it all. And they don't care what happens to the communities that are left in the wake.

  Champion International's exodus from this area was a good example. They were here in the '70s and '80s; they clearcut almost all of their lands in the Yaak (this served as a double whammy, as they owned mostly riverbottom lands—prime wildlife habitat). They clearcut their inventory to raise cash to defend against corporate raiders, and to hide or erase their capital. This sent an unsustainable, artificially high volume of wood through the local mills, which hired a great deal of short-term help to handle the glut (and depressed prices, spurring demand). Champion quickly ran out of their own timber, of course, and then put the squeeze on the Forest Service (through the industry-elected representa tives and senators) to let Champion cross over onto the national forests and continue to cut at or near the same high rate as on the public lands. One of the rationalizations was that no one wanted to see all those people lose their jobs—and Champion kept saying that right on up until the day they left town and took their operations to the southern United States, where trees grow faster and where, critics said, they had planned to go all along.

  And on their way out of town, they divided up all their clearcut lands into ten- and twenty-acre ranchettes—a couple thousand acres' worth in a single year—the social and biological equivalent of a firebombing. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Ruffed Grouse Society, Land and Water Conservation Fund, Nature Conservancy and other similar organizations never had a chance. Cash flow; one-time quarterly profits. The sad thing is, if they'd tried, they could have gotten as much money, or more tax credits, by selling the land in larger biological units rather than the mass fragmentation.

  In the old days, our arguments would now take this tack: Well, Mr. Environmentalist, sounds like you get yours, but you don't think anyone else should get theirs.

  It's true that I put my life in hock for the next twenty years to buy the land I'm living on—that I outbid a man who intended to clearcut it and then resell it, for subdivision—and that it is a lot of land, to my way of thinking. It is land that I intend to take care of, to log selectively and be passionately respectful of. And it is not the people moving onto the ranchettes that alarm me, for I have no right to judge them. It is the volatile manner in which all the land was dumped on the market that I judge. The shock to the system. The disrespect of the corporation to both the human and biological community in which it had been operating (and profiting) those many years.

  A supple, healthy system can absorb dramatic fluctuations—can withstand volatility. But an injured or fragmented one is less supple, and takes longer to heal—and must be treated more respectfully. I think it's going to take a long time to protect the last wilderness of the Yaak, and that by the time people finally agree that those last corners need protecting, those areas will be gone.

  In the meantime, we can try to build, or recover, respect for the place. I believe that is the first and most important step. We'll start small. Small and true.

  We dream on, in these meetings. What if we could set up a local corporation that would be comprised of the community's loggers and environmentalists—not that the two are necessarily different, or have to be—and could have project areas on the National Forest (outside of the last roadless areas) that would be dedicated to selective harvest; what if bids on salvage sales—dead and dying lodgepole and other species, rather than live green sales—could be weighted competitively toward those operators, those sawyers, who rated the highest on performance evaluations made by their peers?

  What if, instead of subsidizing, to the tune of one to two billion dollars per decade, entry into these fast-diminishing roadless areas, some small fraction of that monstrosity could go toward job creation geared at reclaiming, for fish and wildlife and forest health, those lands injured in the past—and the lands which are being injured, even at this moment?

  In 1992, on the Kootenai (Yaak's) National Forest, timber harvest lost taxpayers approximately $20 million; in 1993, $2 million; and in 1994, $1.4 million. (Harvest levels went down each year, too; it doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that the less timber that was cut, the less money was lost.)

  There are jobs in the woods, jobs left in the forest; and we can make there be even more of them, if we don't blow it. But they will be there only as long as the forest is there—only as long as the forest is healthy and supple, relatively unfragmented. The rancher and writer Ralph Beer tells of a funny (at the time) line uttered to him by A. B. Guthrie, author of the classic The Big Sky, concerning the exodus of people coming to Montana to get a glimpse of nature, and who had a blood-craving to see real and healthy cycles once again—in their communities, and out on the land itself. "They're all headed this way," Guthrie warned, "and every one of 'em's wearin' perfume." And, it might be added—if they have any backbone—registering to vote.

  Kathleen Norris hits on this same emotion of insiders-versus-outsiders in her excellent book Dakota, when she comments on how in many rural communities there is the joke that an "expert" is someone who's fifty miles from home. Again, it's funny. But such sayings, while offering the comfort of humor, also run the risk of nourishing a brittle smugness.

 
We'd better save these lands that mean something to us—those of us who live on them and know them—before someone who doesn't know them comes along and does it for us.

  The system is no longer supple. Nothing "locks up" a wilderness more than a two-thousand-acre clearcut on a sixty-degree slope.

  I've spent most of my time in these essays trying to celebrate the wild, rather than running down or disparaging the enemies of the wild: those who would tame and kill and sell and regulate everything, from art to grizzlies, poems to rivers. But sometimes snarls of dismay or outrage have arisen, in these essays—criticisms both direct and indirect. Big business-owned congressmen seem, in my mind anyway, to be most often in the line of fire, but so too, allowing the theft of wildness of the national forests, is the bureaucracy known as the United States Forest Service.

  The paradox of these criticisms is like the one involved in criticizing big business: the system sucks, but not the individuals, the workers, within the flow (or suckhole) of the system. Almost to the one, they are men and women who love the woods and who are caught in a bad situation. And doubtless, after years and years, they're getting a little tired of my squawling and bellyaching—of me scratching words on the paper gotten from trees, asking, begging, pleading, shouting that we save the last special places for all time.

  There are time clocks to be punched. After a while, you get so weary—and the system seems so immovable, so static—that you'd really rather just tune it out and look ahead to five o'clock and wonder What's for supper? and Give it a break; give us a break.