The Book of Yaak

by Rick Bass

  Later in the day we're still along the Canadian border, up by the Yaak cemetery, looking at more larch. The trees in the immediate area are almost-for-sure-safe: not from any written legislation, but from the simple and unspoken decency that it's not nice to run amok with chain saws in a cemetery; not nice to fell trees on the headstones.

  The afternoon wind lifts and stirs the highest branches far above us. "I like that," Rosalind says, smiling, looking down at the little cemetery. "People fertilizing the trees, when they're through living."

  These are big trees; we see several all around us that would measure at least forty inches DBH. She mentions that she's asked the Forest Service to include categories in their old-growth surveys for how many trees per acre (and what kind) measure more than thirty-inch DBH, but they're not interested in measuring forty-inch trees. "They say, 'Oh we hardly ever find trees like that anyway,'" she adds sadly. "All they want to do is confirm whether or not the tree meets the seventeen-to-twenty-one-inch minimum."

  Rosalind pokes around the base of a larch tree. Big larches typically accumulate great mounds of detritus at their base—detritus that is home for all kinds of mycorrhizae and bacteria, the kind of stuff that only the rest of nature (and scientists like Rosalind) can understand and appreciate.

  I notice she's going slower and slower again. It's so unlike our nature, I think, to move that slow; when I get into open woods my tendency is to hurry along....

  She begins pointing out old-growth components once again. "Conchs," she says—"tree ears." Just above us, in one of the lower branches, there's some Alectoria —the lime-green caribou lichen that woodland caribou would utilize were there any caribou left to feed on it. (Rosalind found caribou hair over near Glacier National Park in 1985; she suspected that's what it was, sent it in to the state lab, and sure enough, one had been through there.)

  There's a big larch tree not too far ahead of us, down in a shady ravine, and I head toward it eagerly, like some kind of hunter, anxious to measure it: as if to lay claim to it. But Rosalind's entering micro-creep, and thinking about it now, I wonder what it must be like for her, in the woods, to be able to see so much—to see almost everything?

  I would like to learn more, but understand that I'm going to have to move slower.

  "Come back here and look at these lichens," she says.

  I turn and go back to where she's crouched, looking at the underside of a fallen tree that leans down the hill. "It looks at first like there's just one lichen growing here, but you can see that there's two," she says.

  I feel like nodding and saying Yes, Yes, now let's go measure that rascal over there (before he gets away?), but Rosalind's definitely in micro-creep—she's touching the two lichens, which are similarly colored and textured—only their patterns are different—one ornate, even baroque, and the other more clustered symmetrically—and so I, too, touch the lichens.

  Now we're ready to go, I think. I touched the damn lichens.

  I want to see old growth.

  She gazes down the length of the tree.

  "Even the way a tree dies adds to the diversity of the forest," she says. "If it breaks off high"—if it snaps, so that it sags to the ground like a lean-to—as opposed to 'pit-and-mound', where the root system comes up with the tree, creating more soil perturbation—"or if it breaks off too low." Something like that affects, I realize, all that will follow, forever after.

  How the tree dies matters too in that if it falls pointing downslope, it'll be elevated only a little bit off the ground, providing for quicker nutrient fixing back into the soil. But if it falls across-slope, it will provide access for animals to walk across, above the deep winter snows.

  "It makes a difference if it falls parallel to or opposite the slope," Rosalind says, her gaze still focused on the slender dead tree, "because it will cast different shadows on the ground, which then creates different growth patterns....

  "It bothers me," she says, turning toward me as though I would have the answer. "How can we do better than nature?"

  We take one step away from the fallen tree, one of a dozen fallen trees around us. She stoops to examine a dark, pretty, waxy-leafed plant, Pipsissewa —prince's pine. "They need the larches' mycorrhizal fungus too," Rosalind says. Suddenly, I see, there's Pipsissewa all around us.

  The woods are very quiet, as if agreeing.

  We take another step toward the enormous tree I've had my eye on. "Orchids," Rosalind says, pointing, and then, "Queen's Cup—the one with the blue berry. It's an indicator plant of an old-growth forest, too."

  1 all but dash the last twenty yards to the tree, stopping, though, en route to look briefly at black bear scat. When I pick it up to ask what she thinks it is, Rosalind is horrified, not realizing I meant, Did she know whether it was black bear or grizzly scat. She seems to think that I consider it an old-growth delicacy. I know scat and muscle, she knows orchids and slippery clean meiosis....

  The tree I've all this time wanted to look at has a fifty-four-inch diameter at breast height. We spend a long time circling it, examining the thick great scales and ridges of bark. Forty or more feet above us, the trunk branches into three trunks, like a god.

  "There's a little bird called the brown creeper," she says quietly, "that nests in the bark of giant larch trees like this one"—laying its eggs where one of the fist-sized scales of bark has half-exfoliated, a peeled-back place that allows the bird to wedge itself between the trunk and the flakey bark.

  "It makes a hammock for the bird," Rosalind says, pointing to one such piece of bark where a small bird could lay one or two small eggs. "They live there and feed only by going up the tree with their curved bill, feeding all the way up, probing the bark for insects."

  She looks around and I have the thought that, for the second, she's looking at the forest not through the eyes of a research scientist, or woods-walker, or anything like that, but through the eyes of a brown creeper: a bird.

  "We need to save the best of what's left," she says. "You have to look at the landscape. If there's nothing else out there but lodgepole—then this, a diverse forest, becomes of immense value." She's talking about not just diversity of age, but of species. Even a young forest is rare these days, if it has diverse species within it. She blinks, pauses as if switching languages, and tries to explain it more clearly.

  "Rather than being black-and-white about it, I've tried to encourage the Forest Service to come up with some sort of relative ranking system for what's left"—a system, says Rosalind, "based not just on numbers, but on what we have left; on what's rare."

  At our third stop, at dusk, up in the Spread Creek drainage—the great divide that has provided not only for the vast majority of Montana's historic (and present-day) caribou sightings, but which has been of historic importance as a grizzly corridor—we stand below a dark cedar jungle watching a red sunset over the northwest peaks. For just how long will this view remain? And Spread Creek?

  "How can we do better than nature?" Rosalind had asked.

  Down below an owl begins to hoot. The woods are still except for the peace that seems to be sliding off the ridges as evening cools.

  "Nobody listens to the importance of dead trees," she says.

  When the owl hoots again, Rosalind smiles and says, "Maybe a barred owl—one of the dark-eyed owls." She smiles wider, listening to what is left of the forest.

  This Savage Land

  YOU CAN SEE THE GUYS from the city getting a bit funny-eyed, when Tim and I walk down to the put-in carrying a chain saw. It's raining hard, pouring off the brims of our caps, and they think it's a practical joke—the four-weight fly rod in one hand and the Stihl 034 Super (with extended bar) chain saw in the other. They're so polite, these guys from the East—famous writers, famous fishermen and world travelers—that they don't know whether they're being had or not, but they don't want to risk hurting our feelings, so they just huddle in the rain and puff cheerily on their cigars and stare through the drizzle at the damp woods pressing i
n from that riverside wall of green. Mist is rising from the river. Even the name itself sounds somehow terrible and sharp, Yaak, like the sound a hatchet might make, cleaving flesh and then bone, and perhaps they think, well, why not a chain saw?

  I am not a fisherman, but the guide, Tim, my friend, has invited me along. The fishermen are dressed elegantly, ready for a bit of sport. I am wearing my old, stained overalls, ragged steel-toed boots, and I'm acutely aware of being half a foot shorter than any of these lanky, graceful gents—Tim, Tom, Charles, Dan and Chris. Actually, Chris is from Utah, Dan is from South Dakota, and Tom is from Jackson Hole, Wyoming—but from a Yaak standpoint, this qualifies them as easterners. Charles is from Nova Scotia. We have two drift boats and a raft with us, and when I climb into one of the boats with my chain saw, I think they are also acutely aware of my stumpiness, and with the saw, and climbing in awkwardly—not knowing much about boats—I do not feel like a fellow fly-fisherman, but like a pirate.

  How gentlemanly are they? Dan hunts gyrfalcons in Saudi Arabia with princes. Charles and Tom and Chris own more bird dogs than I have empty aluminum cans in the plastic bag behind my barn. They hunt red deer in Mongolia, wild boar in Europe, and now they've come to the Yaak to fish in the rain for tadpole-sized brook trout while some troll rides along with them scouting for firewood.

  "Got enough gas?" Tim asks me. "Got your saw tool?"

  I nod. Tim goes over to the fishermen and asks them what kind of flies they have, and what size. Charles, Dan and Chris answer him dutifully; only Tom thinks to question authority. "Does it really matter?" he asks, and Tim looks surprised, then says, "No, they'll probably hit anything."

  There is so much about fly-fishing that I do not understand, but I know enough to recognize that Tim is a great guide, so great that he does not have to be a snob. The river doesn't get too much traffic, due to the multitude of tiny unsophisticated fish that will never be anything other than tiny. Then there's the matter of the long winding flat stretches of river, and, as the gentlemen visitors are beginning to see, there is throughout the valley the vague and uncomfortable sense that the locals—us—may be watching from behind the bushes. The locals have some other-ness that is not easily defined, and which is not relaxing to visitors.

  We didn't move up here to be around crowds, which may bring up the question of why I am then mentioning this river in the first place, this slow-moving water of dull-witted fingerlings. (I am tempted to tell you that Yaak is the Kootenai word for carp, or leech, or "place of certain diarrhea." It truthfully means arrow, but could also double to mean rain.)

  Tim and I spend a good amount of time at other periods of the year hiking in the mountains, looking for antlers, looking for bear dens, looking for huckleberries, and in the winter, rattling deer and chasing elk—and then after that, grouse again, in the snow, in December, with our beautiful, talented dogs, and after that, ducks....

  On these trips, year in and year out, Tim and I go round and round in our anguish: do we keep silent about this hard-logged valley, or do we pipe up plaintively, make little cheepings, like killdeer skittering along the shore? We really don't care for the tourist hordes to come gawk at the clearcuts, or come feel the blue wet winds—to eat a cheeseburger at either of the local bars, to stand in the parking lot and marvel at the menagerie of woods-hermits-come-to-town-on-Saturday, as if a circus is parading past: gentle hippies, savage government-loathers, angry misanthropes, romantic anarchists, and a few normal people who in their normalcy appear somehow odd. Surely they are masking some great aberration. And those are the ones who come to town—who venture out into the light of day! The rest of us like to hide.

  There is a certain duct-tape mentality that pervades this place. I'm not sure why, unless it's simply that things break a lot. It hasn't infected Tim yet and I guess after seven years if it were going to, it would have. He's neat and precise and does his job, finding fish and wild game, in an orderly, calculated fashion. But many of the rest of us tie socks over our broken windshield wipers, for instance, rather than venturing into town to get new wiper blades. We try to keep three of everything: one that runs, one for parts and one for a backup, if there's not time to switch our parts. But usually there's time.

  We get our food, our meat and berries, from the land, and our produce from our gardens: root crops, which can stand the eternal cold. Blue smoke rises from chimneys year-round. The scent carries far in the humidity, in the drizzle.

  The grizzlies aren't any problem up here; what will get you are the leeches, blackflies, mosquito hordes, and eight species of horseflies (including one the size of the head of a railroad spike, whose bite is like being nipped by a fencing tool.)

  I don't mean to be falling over myself so much, rolling out the welcome mat. The logging trucks keep coming and going. They drive hard and fast, and they will run your tourist-ass off the cliffs in a minute, then laugh about it.

  Tim's livelihood depends, more or less, on bringing people into the valley. But like most of us, he thinks it would be nice to keep Yaak the way it is, or even better, to have it somehow reappear as it was five or ten or twenty years ago. (Twenty-eight years ago, there was only one road through the valley. Now there are over a thousand miles of road, and counting. And still not one acre of protected wilderness.)

  Relax. I'm not going to lay the enviro-eco-rap on you. Or will try not to. I'm trying to kind of place you in Tim's position.

  In order to keep living here he needs people to ride in his boat and cast flies, just as some must keep building roads, or cutting trees, to keep living here. But when there are no fish, and no more trees, and when every last mountain has a road onto it ... then what? Do we learn semiconductor manufacturing in the evenings?

  Tim has, among other guides, a funny reputation in some respects, as he doesn't always seem like he wants to be a guide. There's very little telephone service or electricity in the Yaak, and it's a long damn way to any airport—more than three hours to Kalispell, four to Spokane, five to Missoula. Phone service and electricity are erratic up here. Tim's answering machine has some electronic glitch—some pulse of the wild, perhaps, that it has picked up from the soil itself, as the coils and cables snake just beneath the skin of the earth—which causes it to shut off on the incoming message after your first six words, so you'd better choose them well.

  Other guides joke (though I get the sense they really believe it, too) that it's something Tim does on purpose—that not so deep down, he doesn't want new clients. Or that maybe he wants them, but then feels guilty about wanting them. The way I feel guilty, about writing about this wet buggy valley.

  So Tim gambles that the people he introduces to the slow snag-infested water will fall in love with the valley and work to keep it from being further abused, and I make the same gamble, continuing to write about it

  We intend on this trip to use the chain saw for snags. It's a little river, and trees fall across it regularly, blocking your passage. In other places, the deep river suddenly splits into four braids, each only a few inches deep, so that you may have to portage if you don't pick the right one. Also, there is a guy up here who lives along the river and hunts with a blowgun. He likes to hide in the bushes and shoot tourists. At first you think it's just another horsefly. But then you develop a headache, and then you grow sleepy. You put the oars down and lie back in the boat for a minute, just to nap, you think....

  If you did come all the way up to this last tiny river, it could be deadly to not use Tim for a guide. And if you did come, there'd be that vow of undying commitment we'd ask you to sign: to fight forever, hard and passionately for this wet people-less place, on behalf of all wildness—to fight to keep it as it is, at least.

  Of course, we're asking you to take that vow anyway, whether you come or not. For the grizzlies, wolves, woodland caribou, elk, and wolverines that live back in what remains of the wet jungle, and which you would never see anyway, if you were to come up here, as they've all become almost totally nocturnal. And for thos
e eight species of horseflies, which have not.

  I guess you're waiting to hear about the river, and about fish, and here I am yowling about the wilderness. But it seems so simple. We have only three congressmen for the whole state. There is no designated, protected wilderness in the valley. If everyone who liked or favored clean water and the notion of a dark secret place, with feisty little fish and moose and great blue heron rookeries and dense spruce jungles—if everyone who liked these things would begin a correspondence with the three congressmen concerning the Yaak, I think they would finally come to understand that, timber budget or not, the remaining roadless acres in the Yaak should be protected.

  Back to the gents. It's an honor to be in their company. T hey don't care if they catch fish or not. They just enjoy being out-of-doors, and in a new land. Since childhood they've probably caught seven million fish, cumulatively. Every fish mouth in the world is sore from their hooks. Today they're enjoying just being alive. They're standing in the rain.

  When we set off, I'm in Tom's raft. Dan and Charles are in their own boat, and Tim's ranging ahead of them in his boat, with Chris, like a bird dog. The guys stop at the first gravel bar and get out and wade near the line where some fast water meets some slow water, and begin casting pretty casts into the line.

  But nothing. Tim rows on, as if knowing there aren't any fish there. Tom watches Tim disappear around the bend arid starts to say something, but doesn't. We lean back and watch Charles and Dan cast. If they catch something, maybe we'll rig up. Charles, Dan, Chris and Tom have been on a road trip across Montana—they've fished nine rivers in nine days. This is the tenth, and Charles (from Nova Scotia, and formerly, New England, and before that, the South) is raving about what a beautiful, perfect little trout stream it is: how it reminds him of when he was a child, and was first learning to fish on brook trout rivers.