The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  On his own time and at his own expense during an Environmental Impact Statement review, Chip prepared his own alternative to present to the Forest Service, a plan that would have allowed them to cut even more timber than their own plan but that would have been comprised of mostly dead and dying lodgepole. Chip used his computers and extensive on-the-ground knowledge to meticulously catalogue, standby-stand, which volumes could have been cut from which area, and when and how. Chip's plan would have provided more wood and, ultimately, more jobs.

  No matter. The agencies refused to even consider his work—the citizen's alternative, the conservationist's plan. They went ahead with their plan, which called for more road building into roadless areas.

  Chip is in Costa Rica now, starting a new life.

  I do not want to add up the hours.

  Up to a quarter of a million loaded log trucks are scheduled to roll out of the Yaak in the next couple of years. I've been watching them roll, one after the other. The trucks all have Idaho plates, not Montana plates, and if any of them have any burned logs on them, I haven't seen them yet.

  Still, we continue to attend meetings whenever they spring up. We stake out our common ground, loggers and environmentalists, in-betweens and crossovers. The meetings don't mean a damn thing to Congress, or to the Forest Service, or to the multinationals, but we keep going to them. They have all the durability of spider webs. But hopes and dreams will not go away. We pour ourselves into the mold of them, even if only in our imagination. "In dreams begins responsibility," Delmore Schwartz wrote.

  The Forest Service official himself has mentioned the Goethe quote, about dreams having magic and boldness in them.

  Where is the wilderness going? What happens to us when it is gone? Are we richer, when this happens—are we more secure?

  Will we know more joy, more peace?

  The Totem Pole

  IT'S SPRING, and I've been edged into occasional depressions. The assault on the environment—all the taking, instead of giving, near this, the end of our century of taking—has pushed me in the way that earth is sometimes pushed by bulldozers. I've given it—the letter-writing, the scheming and strategizing, the campaigning—my all. And it's taken it, my all, and changed nothing, it seems. It has cost me peace.

  The greed of various politicians has led them to exuberantly court corporate lobbyists, and in 1994 these groups spent millions in public relations against the environment. It surprises me in the way it would surprise me to suddenly slip on ice. I didn't know so many of us could be this wrong.

  I circle back, though, always, to my original thought, which is, People just don't know. The fight, after all, is going on in the backcountry. Nobody would vote for these things if they knew about them.

  Given the short period of time we have here, how can anyone want to do anything other than good?

  The geese out my cabin window have been spending great stretches of time sitting idly, or so it seems, in the open parts of the marsh. Floating but not moving, as if anchored, they seem to be watching and waiting—evaluating something. They've been sitting still for days, looking south.

  ***

  This morning my neighbor from seventeen miles away came by so we could go look for a tree that he can carve and whittle and sand into a totem pole. It has to be just the right tree, taken early from the cycle of rot, regeneration and growth, and from a place where there are other felled trees. We didn't find one but we'll keep looking.

  We went over the design of the creatures my wife and I want on the totem pole, and where we intend to place it: at the edge of the marsh in a forest so thick that tree branches will help hold it up. An almost secret place, where it would be helpful to know it was there in order to see it: a place where soft morning light will strike it, a place of dampness and shadow. A place of extraordinary lushness, where the totem pole itself can stand, slowly rotting and in that manner lowering itself back into the soil from which it came: but standing, like art, for a few years—for fifty or even a hundred years.

  We sketched out several animals: the creatures that use the marsh, of course—the citizens of this place. Moose, geese, ducks, deer. A lone wolf. A bear near the base of the pole, while bears still exist in the world. A raven, an owl and, curiously, a heron, though there are no herons in this marsh, as there are no fish. It's a higher-elevation marsh up above the river, perched at the edge of a fault block, sitting one hundred feet above the river. It used to be a lake and I'm certain that when it was, fish were in it, and that there were herons too. And what would someone think, were they to find the rotting remains of the cabin and the totem pole: that this cabin was once by a lake where there were fish and herons? Or that the totem-maker did not understand the world around him, did not pay attention?

  The paired-up ducks stay close to the geese, as if for protection, but perhaps only companionship. Sometimes I think the geese are just resting—both from the exhaustion of the long trip here, and in preparation for the one that lies ahead, only five or six months away. I try to drink in the beauty, the grace, of the mere and miraculous sight of them—as if they are a thing that is here only for the moment— only this moment —and that if I do not see it now, drink it all in and feel it now, it will be gone, taken away.

  I have to make peace with my art and my anger, with our lives and their brevity—and yet, for me, it still involves fighting, and I will never give any of this up willingly, nor do I understand how any of us can.

  I keep staring at the sunlit throats of the geese: the black eye masks, the elegant hoods.

  Now comes the part I like: the south winds of April waving the shadows of bare branches across the yellow wood of the cabin, the dried catkins from last fall waving on the ends of the alder branches, the loyal creak and tick of the stove, and the muscles of my young bird dog shining chocolate as he prowls the straw-colored edges of the marsh, sniffing the dead, scent-filled grasses of last autumn. The songs of wood thrushes and black-capped chickadees, first back in the spring. I want to be a bird dog, a father, a stone man; a carved log back in the shadows, in the embrace of trees. 1 want that kind of strength—that kind of strength-in-decay. I dare not mourn so much that I forget why and how to live.

  Metamorphosis

  DEAR BILL,

  I'm sorry I missed you when I called two days ago, the day of the summer solstice. I left a message saying that I was going to take a hike for you. This may have sounded puzzling or imprecise but I didn't want to leave a long and windy message. Instead, I went up to the mountain that I climb every time I hear a friend is sick. I have been climbing it for eight years now and it has a success rate of 50 percent. I don't know if it was a holy mountain to the Indians or not. It is to me. Let me report to you what I saw on your hike.

  It was a damp, rainy, foggy day. In clear weather you can see Idaho to the west and British Columbia to the north from the mountaintop, but I knew that would not be the case this day. I started up the trail midday. I had not been on the mountain all year—not since early last winter. There had been waist-deep snow, then; now the trail was overgrown with ankle-deep ferns and flowers. Seeps and springs glistened from the sides of the mountain, as if it were leaking, or bleeding, life.

  I wound my way steadily, quickly, up the trail through old cool forest, anxious to get into alpine country—the steep grassy places where the mountain tips sharply skyward. Up there, I'll find the avalanche fields, where most tree seedlings get swept away by each year's snowslides—the mountain sheds the snow, and its trees, like skin, which leaves behind its core and essence: bare gray slickrock that shines in the sun. Clumps of rich soil—and tall grasses—cling wherever they can beneath the bright rock. This is the part of the mountain I am always most anxious to get to: the part where I feel things begin to happen.

  The sky was slate-purple, luscious with rain—the clouds still bulging with storm, though it had been raining steadily for seven days already. It's the greenest I've ever seen the valley.

  I hadn't been hiking
for more than two or three minutes when I heard the chain-saw sound of an approaching plane — a small single-engine plane, such as the biologists use to chase and keep tabs on the grizzly bears they've live-trapped and fitted with radio telemetry collars. There are ten or twelve grizzlies in this valley—and four of them have collars. Ten or twelve doesn't sound like very many, and it isn't—there used to be one hundred thousand of them in the West, or even more. The bears in this valley are generally considered more valuable from a genetic standpoint due to their unaltered wildness than those few hundred bears that are left in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.

  There's a big monster of a bear that hangs out on top of this mountain: a sweetheart, terrified of human beings, but big as a dinosaur. He is a dinosaur, holding on to his world with all four paws. I've seen him but once though I've seen his tracks often. His feet are as big as snowshoes. I was discouraged when I heard the tracking plane, not so much for the disruption of my solitude, but for the bears'. This big bear isn't radio-collared, but there must have been one up here that is — maybe a female. It's about that time of year when they get together.

  A wonderful thing happened, though, before the plane could reach the mountain. The purple, silver-streaked storm clouds that were lingering on the back side of the mountain came drifting— rolling —over its crest, just as the little plane came near, so that it had to turn around before it reached the alpine fields where the grizzly often grazed.

  So I knew he, or he and another one, was up there. But now it was just he and I, or he, his radio-collared paramour and I; we had the mountain to ourselves.

  I don't know what it is about this mountain that makes it special. And I don't want to know.

  The pitch of it, once up into the avalanche section, the swept-clean slopes, demands everything your lungs have got. The slope sets your calves to burning, and after a while turns your upper legs to quivering jelly rather than sound muscle. It's an alchemical transformation. When you stop to rest, your heart feels like thunder. Even on a cold day, you're bathed in sweat by the time you're halfway up.

  It's so damned good to be healthy.

  I've seen almost every species of mammal in the valley up on this mountain, at one time or another. Often I see them in conjunction with each other.

  None of this has a direct bearing on my report to you: this explanation of past trips. This hike for you was taken solely in the context of the present: only the present. I shall try to confine my remarks to what I saw, that day—not to what I didn't see, or had seen in the past.

  I moved up into the clouds. My God, the names of all the flowers—hundreds of species, it seemed, all of them spangled with rain. Each summer I tell myself not to take them for granted; each summer I promise myself that I will learn all of their names.

  But each year, I learn only a few. It's a gradual process. Still, 1 have to believe that it will all add up. That one of these days, I'll know them all. Glacier lily, mariposa lily, penstemmon, bluebell. Bellflower, lupine, paintbrush, aster. Tiger lily, phlox, lady's slipper, balsamroot. Canadian violet. Northern bog rein orchid.

  1 moved carefully into the fog, grateful for the cold mist against my face: grateful it had chased the clattering plane away, and grateful for the steaming beauty it brought to the landscape, the grass- and rock-scape, now that I was out of the forest. It was good to be on a mountain that had a grizzly on it — one of the very few grizzlies living outside a national park — though I worried a little that the plane might have pissed him off, and that the bear might not at the moment be feeling good will toward men.

  The fog got thicker near the mountain's crest. A spooky white fog—not swirls and whisps of vapors, but a near total whiteout. It was like being in the belly of a cloud, which I suppose I was. Ordinarily it would seem like I was at the edge of danger, pushing beyond the prudent edge of a thing—past respect—but I figured that I had some kind of permission or authority—yours, perhaps—and that, well, whatever happened was meant to happen: was meant to be relayed to you, in this report.

  Still, I have to say, I'm glad I didn't see the bear.

  Not that anything on this earth could remotely compare to what you're facing: you're at the edge of all there may ever be. Maybe your illness will reverse direction, through either reasons known or unknown, like animal tracks across new snow.

  If I were to come upon a grizzly bear, high up in this cloud, walking down the ridge toward me, he or she would probably only stop, squint and sniff at me, from whatever close distance we encountered each other—grizzlies can see about as well as humans, but have a sense of smell that is about a hundred times better than ours—and then he almost certainly would have turned around and gone the other way; as would have I—as would have I.

  Things are far less certain, for you. Things are far more dire.

  So I was relatively unworried; only curious to see what the mountain would show to me to report back to you.

  A ghost-shape galloped past me, moving from right to left, just at the farthest range of vision: a dark young bull elk, his antlers in June velvet, running in a curious, steady, circus-horse canter. A yearling; maybe a two-year-old. An adoles cent. I thought of your son, and your daughters, and pushed on. The elk slipped into the timber below.

  Aside from walking a small circle for luck around the old stone cairn at the crest, I didn't spend much time there. It was my notion to cut a transect from east to west across the whole of this mountain, which runs long and narrow north-south; to dig deep, to reach into it not for all that it had but for all that it was willing to give you through me. I'd started at the headwaters of the creek on its east flank, climbed to the top, and now would drop down to the creek on its west flank—actually a high hanging hidden valley, almost like some place of the imagination; a perfectly green and serene spot. And then I planned to climb back up the steep west side, go over the top again, and down the east side, back to where I had started.

  It would be like going fishing—like trawling with a wide net. I didn't know what I'd find or see for you.

  It was raining lightly on the back side. Wood thrushes were singing. This reminded me of a book your company published, Birds of Texas, and in turn reminded me of another book you published, Back Roads of Texas. I remember us joking about doing Back Roads of Montana, and my horror at such an idea. It makes me laugh to think that now I am sending you a report and a description of my favorite place-without-a-road. An even deeper baring of the soul.

  Descending the western side is especially refreshing because of all the deciduous leaf litter underfoot. There's still the Pacific Northwest coniferous overstory—larch, fir, spruce, lodgepole pine and white pine—the giant cedars lie farther below, where the water accumulates—but on this near-vertical descent there's an incredible abundance of not only ferns and forest flowers, but broad-leafed deciduous trees as well: maple, aspen, buffaloberry, huckleberry, alder, ceanothus, even sasparilla. It's a place where two worlds collide—or if not collide, where they get pressed tightly together right here at this edge, to form a new world.

  The deciduous leaves seem to rot easier—seem, in their broadness, to trap and retain moisture more readily between themselves and the soil—and because of this, the soil is rich, thick and black. This is a young valley, just-sprung-up yesterday from the glacier's retreat; the trees, because of the Pacific Northwest weather systems, are huge, but the soil is thin: you cut the trees once, and they won't come back like they were before. Not until a new bedding of soil forms. Which—if the trees are left alone—might take a few thousand years.

  This is the richest soil I've seen in the valley. The healthiest. Perhaps the way this side of the mountain faces the west-approaching storms causes it to catch more moisture: causes it to even create its own moisture. Perhaps the west-setting sun, warmer than the rising sun, has over time more thoroughly weathered and disintegrated the rock—dissolving it like geological fertilizer, to add to the mystery of the forest below. Perhaps....

 
It is a healing mountain.

  Yellow warblers and yellow tanagers fly past like creatures escaped from a lifetime of imprisonment, singing and swooping. The needles of the coniferous trees do not break down and return to the earth as easily, as quickly, as do the leaves of the deciduous trees. There's a beetle that helps chew up the waxy coating on some of these coniferous needles, however, thereby enabling the rotting process to get started, where otherwise it would not. They're vital to the process of soil formation, these chewing bugs—vital to the forest, vital to the sky, to life. They're one of the rare leaf-eating insects in the forest. I remember a friend telling me how most insects in this forest were predators—that they ate each other—because there were so many billions of them that if they ate plant matter, they would quickly strip the entire forest bare.

  As we are now doing. But that is another story, and is secondary to the story of immediate life—though it is not secondary to the longer view of things.

  It's like looking through binoculars, or a telescope; like looking through them backwards, where everything's tiny, and then looking through them frontwards, where everything — even the moon—is huge.

  What this trip today is about is to just try and look at things the way they are.

  An attempt to make a walk without a thought of tomorrow.

  I make this hike when people are well, too; the beauty of these woods—these untouched woods—has plenty to offer me when all is well. It's not a place I come to only in times of the sickness of friends. But it—the walk, and the woods—takes on, or seems to imbue—as with the pulse of a breathing thing—even more meaning, and deliver more understanding, when experienced in the context of illness, the context of sorrow.