The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  Finally the fawn looked up and saw us, and bolted, frightened, off into the woods. The doe flagged her tail and trotted off in the other direction. The fawn whirled, ran back across the road after its mother. We started the engine again and drove on home.

  There was still some light left. There was something different in the air—Gail had alerted us all to it, but I could feel it now—and it reminded me that I needed to get the woodshed built, to keep the snow off the firewood. I had been thinking about it for a while, and had set out buckets to gather rainwater with which to mix the concrete, for when I would pour the pads, the pillars, which would hold the bottom course of logs up off the ground and keep them from rotting.

  Mary Katherine and I went up into the woods and dug holes for the sonotubes—the shells or molds into which we would pour the concrete. We measured and spaced them, leveled them. She pretended to take measurements with the builder's square and the level and called out numbers to me in the dusk: "One, seven, thirteen, eight, one hundred."

  We mixed the bags of concrete in the wheelbarrow, stirred them with the shovel, poured them into the tubes. Carved our initials into the wet cement, after smoothing it with a trowel. A light rain was beginning to fall—a mist, as dusk went into darkness. We could barely see, but I wanted to get them all done at once, to harden evenly. After a while it was past Mary Katherine's bedtime but we kept working, the way you sometimes do: not to meet any deadline, but because you are loving the work—if it can be called that. I kept asking Mary Katherine if she wanted to go inside but she said no, please no. We were damp from the rain but it was a warm rain and we were warm from working. By the time we were on the last pier she knew when the concrete was too rough and when it needed another shot of water. She would pour; I stirred.

  She leaned in against my shoulder, watching me pour it down the tube, and she kept falling asleep standing up, leaning in against me. I carried her in when we were through and she woke up and changed into dry pajamas. I showered.

  We got under the covers and I read to her, an old book about Theodore Turtle, as we do every night. It was a feeling like having gathered berries or firewood—having filled the day so full, full to the brim. It was still raining outside—a steady rain, now, and cooler, but warm inside. Mary Katherine was proud of how much help she'd been and was anxious to do more work tomorrow. She wanted to know what our chores would entail the next day.

  I had already measured and cut and drilled the bottom course of logs. There was a pile of sawdust from where I had been working, so I told her that tomorrow we would pick up that sawdust, and maybe also, if there was time, climb a tree. I told her it would be another sunny day and that we might pick more berries, too. I went down the long list of things that needed doing before autumn, and in the autumn, all the things that needed to be gathered up, but she had already fallen asleep, after I'd told her about the sawdust and climbing a tree. She was smiling, and I know that those two things were more than enough.

  Gail had had the store up for sale. She had said it was bad for her heart: the stress of running it.

  I used to marvel at how many hours she put into it, just sitting there, waiting to provide us with whatever we needed, whatever we desired. She liked hunting season best, I think, when all the hunters came through, though she was fond of summer, too. It was a damn good day, and she had missed it, as we missed her—and the seasons kept moving on, and us in the world, as if riding on the back of something.

  Cores

  AS SHY AS ONE of the dark-eyed owls, I never meant to get into it this deep. I never planned to shift my life from that of a self-sufficient hermit into one where, like some insatiable glutton, I was always asking for something: and never getting enough. And worse—never getting anything. Zero.

  I'd seen such people, we all have—the soapboxers—and they were never attractive.

  I should have been able to see it coming: my deep fall.

  Running crookedly into the woods, hopping over logs and ascending some brushy slope, breathing hard, with tiger stripings of light filtering down through the canopy—I love to go into the woods—a ramble, an all-day hurling, out to some new place I've never been before, and back -—sometimes getting lost, almost always getting lost. I should have seen how easy it would be to slide from a simple love for this valley into the full flame of obsession.

  There is a new pseudo-science being touted by the Forest Service. They're conducting a big public relations campaign—always a bad sign—called Ecosystem Management (EM), which professes to be a new way of doing things—more selective cutting of the trees, for example, rather than clear-cutting them. EM will leave the superior trees standing, the Forest Service says, so that those trees' genetic vigor will be passed on. Strangely enough, there is no talk of the most basic tenet of conservation biology: the necessity of protecting wild, healthy, untouched cores of wilderness.

  Such cores or anchor points can be viewed as reservoirs of health, which provide healing and nurturing to the surrounding places in a managed forest. Sadly, I have to conclude that EM is merely a ploy to gain access into these last roadless public lands—a way to let the fox into the henhouse. The Forest Service, under the directive of Congress, uses millions of taxpayers' dollars to build roads into these last wildlands, and then offers those forests' subsidized timber to the international timber companies. The Forest Service leverages money for this roadbuilding from the country's general revenue, but gets to keep a percentage of the gross profits—so the more timber that gets cut, the more Forest Service jobs that can be "created."

  Big timber companies then pay off (in the form of PAC contributions) the senators they need, who in turn gridlock or obstruct the passage of any proposed wilderness bills.

  And these senators then lean on the Forest Service to continue getting the high volume out—"getting the cut out," it is called.

  I never meant to get into it this deep. I meant only to live in these quiet green woods and live a life of poetry—to take hikes, to read books, to lie in meadows with a bit of gold straw in my mouth and watch the clouds, and my life, go by.

  Item: The Forest Service, required to provide Congress with a ten-year plan of operations every decade for the Kootenai National Forest, proposes in 1987 to cut 90 million board feet (most of it coming from the Yaak). The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service biologists, with whom the Forest Service consulted, have determined that this is the maximum volume of forest that can be cut without harming the largest endangered species in the forest, the grizzly bear.

  The timber companies wig out. A meeting is arranged between certain Republican senators, Forest Service officials and biologists.

  The biologists change their opinion. They increase the cut by 50 percent, saying that they made a mistake.

  Item: 1990. The chief of the Forest Service at that time, John Mumma, is forced to resign because he did not cut enough timber—because he refused, he says, to "violate the law."

  And so we push on. Different Montana wilderness bills rise and fall; different congresspeople come and go. In the autumn of 1992,1 was in Washington, D.C., judging stories and essays for the National Endowment for the Arts, a program that seemed by then perpetually under fire. My representative—now the sole representative for Montana due to our low population—Pat Williams, was fighting hard for reauthorization of the NEA program that had been so good to his state as well as to the country, the means by which artists, dancers and writers were brought in to teach and perform at meeting halls and rural schools. Pat Williams was battling Jesse Helms in the East, while back home, the Republicans were calling him Porno Pat.

  I was big into letter writing by that time—I'd been pounding away for Yaak wilderness with dozens of letters each week, letters intended not only for the principals involved, but also for the most faraway and obscure persons as well. I sent letters to representatives from Guam, to the whole important seething mass of representatives from California—to all. I was hoping with this scattershot approach to blanket Co
ngress with the odd name they would not forget, Yaak, so that when discussion came up of the public wildlands in Montana, even the most distanced participant could query one of the Montana delegation and say, "The Yaak is in Montana, right?" and feel that he or she was somewhat versed on the subject—and conversely, I believed in the power of the cumulative effect that this could have: the accruing psychological awareness that every person in Washington knew that there was a place called Yaak.

  And if they knew it existed, then perhaps too they knew of the scandal—knew of the specifics.

  I was willing, and am, to work at it forever. To wear them down, like the ocean against a granite jetty or a stone breakfront. I increased my mailing list hungrily; I didn't care how much I spent on photocopying and postage. I would spend everything I had. To do otherwise would be to let them—the last wilderness-takers—proceed unfettered into and through the valley. And then they would leave the county, with the hills bare and the jobs gone.

  In the autumn of 1992 1 tried to improve my tightrope-walking skills: the crossing back and forth between art and activism. In the NEA sessions, I would read and discuss the works of literature we had before us, and then on my free time, on lunch breaks, I would hurry over to the Hill and knock on doors. Some of the doors would open to me.

  There are 435 members in the House of Representatives; 100 members in the Senate. First I went to Pat Williams's office, carrying those rolled-up maps under my arm.

  I dressed neatly, but beyond that—politically—I was a slob. I'd called only the day before to make an appointment, but had graciously been granted one.

  It was a nice little office, warm and well-lit and well-used; it had the feel to it of a busy newsroom. Files and files of books and papers; papers spread across desks and such; all kinds of activity.

  The receptionist was friendly. She was from Montana.

  I went back in the main workroom and got to talk with Art Noonan, Williams's chief aide, first. Art pulled up a card-table chair for rne, and sat in one himself—a big overworked cheery man, sleeves rolled up, black-coffee drinking, but still bright and fresh, not yet burned out with idealism's failure—all these things you could tell just from the air in the room, as you can tell the condition of a forest when you are walking through it—and Artie and I spoke for about half an hour. He talked a lot about his home town of Butte, and how it was recovering, after having been devastated by the exodus of mining interests after they'd taken everything there was to take. He talked about how government had been able to help the town to recover, phoenix-like, from that depression. He wasn't talking about wilderness—he was talking about communities—and we never did get to talk about Yaak, but that was all right, because I enjoyed listening to him. After a while the receptionist peered around the corner and said that Pat could see me now.

  In the end all we can ever rely on, at base, are our instincts, our gut impressions. And the one I got from seeing Pat Williams (I'd met him once before, in Libby) was that he was honest and strong. I liked his handshake. His sleeves were rolled up, and he looked tired. I liked him.

  I wasn't there to like him, though. The bears and wolves had sent me to this office. I was speaking for them. After placing the maps on the coffee table I sat in the armchair while Art stood near the doorway, listening, and Pat walked over to the window in a manner that the unfeeling cynic might have accused as being dramatic or practiced, but which I accepted as honest.

  "This town," he said. "Every year, I wonder why I come back." He gestured to the gray sky, the concrete out his window. "Look at it. It's not home, is it? God, it's no place for a family. You come in wanting to do all this good, and you see what's necessary to get it done, and you see good people get trampled, and bad people, really bad people, ascend...."

  I sat quietly and listened. Again, it could have been just show—a cynic could have accused him of faking the emotion that he pretended to let spill out of him—of being an actor—but that was not the feeling I got.

  Williams turned quickly away from his problems and asked, "Do the wolves use these wilderness areas, Rick?" He seemed so keenly interested in my answer that I thought it was a test of sorts, a way of gauging my honesty—- and I told him what I would have told him anyway, the truth, which was yes and no. The wolves use wilderness areas because there aren't as many people there to shoot them. But the country the wolves would probably prefer if they had their choice is the land along the river bottoms where the towns are—because that's where the deer go in winter—to the lowlands.

  Pat sat right down to look at the maps. We went over each roadless area briefly, and I described them to him. He knew their names, knew where they were on the map, and after I had shown them all to him, and demonstrated how only a few hundred acres would be taken out of the timber base, he pointed to the places on the map that he said he thought he "could do something for."

  It was late in the day. We shook hands again and he said he'd see what he could do: and as later results were to prove, this wasn't the usual dismissive bullshit you hear now and then in life.

  As I was leaving, I added one thing: I told him about the actor and actress who'd homesteaded up in the Yaak sixty years" ago—Mr. and Mrs. McIntire—and about how the proposed wilderness above their homestead had been given away in a political trade. ! told him how the Forest Service hacked the land around her homestead—the giant letters H-A-C formed by the clearcuts—in retaliation for her and her husband's nerve to stand up and fight. I asked if there was something he could do to acknowledge that wrong—if he could put their name on something up there.

  He said that he could. He gave me his word on it.

  It's weird, how a thing sucks you in. We're used to breaking things up into chapters—into labeling periods of our lives, and periods of history, as separate units, with sharp beginnings and ends. And looking back, maybe that's how I saw things at that time. But now it seems as though I had stepped into a lake: and had been ankle-deep in it for a long time, and then knee-deep, and then thigh-deep. For a long while I was in it up to my waist, though everything still seemed all right; I could fight the grass fires of Yaak with one hand, and write fiction with the other.

  But the water level rose to my chest, and it was cold; it rose to my shoulders, to my neck, and by then it was getting dark, too. And then I was swimming by starlight, breast-stroking, both hands completely wet, all of me wet. The moon came up over the mountains and I kept swimming and am still swimming and cannot see the shore, but neither can I let them, Congress and big business, get away with what is happening in the Yaak, and elsewhere in the West: the war on the West.

  Twelve hundred miles of logging roads in my wet green valley! Nearly five hundred thousand miles of logging roads in the United States, built by taxpayers, for the timber companies—eight times the length of the entire United States interstate system! These numbers make me want to run deeper into the woods. Numbers cannot measure what is being lost.

  I do not wish to know a subdued Heaven and Earth, Thoreau wrote one hundred and fifty years ago.

  The receptionist in the senator's office did nothing extra to make me feel at home, as they had in Williams's office. There was no welcome-weary-traveler-from-our-faraway-home greeting. Perhaps this was due to the rolled up maps under my arm.

  I was informed that I could speak with an aide. They did not say whether the senator was indisposed, and I didn't ask—I didn't want to appear ungrateful.

  Lynx, back in the cedar jungles, motionless, with stripes of light swatching their faces. Grizzlies. I had made it into the interior, on their behalf, and now I didn't want to make a fuss?

  What I wanted was irrelevant, I reminded myself as I rose to greet the aide. He was a big man and though I had come in good faith, I sensed in the first few seconds that our electricities were not right.

  Still, I thought, it's a thing we can work through. For the good of the land. For the good of Montana.

  "Well, the prodigious writer of postcards," the aide said,
and perhaps now I should take responsibility for our unfortunate first meeting, for this rankled me—I let it rankle me. I realize now how tense I was, how humorless and intent. It's true I had written a lot of postcards, but I had written a shitload of four- and five-page letters, too, to which they also had not responded.

  I see now that maybe it was my fault—that maybe I took his words the wrong way. Maybe he didn't mean to sound snide or uncaring. Maybe I just heard wrong.

  We got into an argument right away. I began showing him my maps of roadless areas, and overlaid a map showing the movements of radio-collared grizzly bears in the valley. It was a damn-near perfect 100 percent overlay: the bears stayed hemmed in by the roads as if the roads were strung with electric fence. I thought it was a remarkable piece of data: startling testament to the need to keep from further carving up these last sanctuaries for a few more weeks' worth of timber.

  But we hit a philosophical snag right away.

  "The presence of grizzlies is not necessarily indicative of wilderness," the aide said. "A grizzly does not necessarily make a piece of woods wilderness."

  I fell into the trap. "Well, no...." I agreed, "but there's everything else living in those woods too—the whole matrix of it, still linked—the wolverines, elk, fishers, martens, wolves, caribou...."—and on I went, agreeing that wilderness was not any one thing, but the whole of a place.

  But a grizzly in Yaak is wilderness. In the Yaak, like nothing else, they're an indicator species: the first to leave, once an ecosystem is damaged. If the great bear is still living in the Yaak, then so too are all the other species below it.