Why Rick Bass Came West – and what it cost him

August 1, 2008 at 12:58 pm (Book review, books, Nature) (Rick Bass, Yaak Valley)

What an elemental cry of pain is contained in the pages of this beautiful book! Montana’s Yaak Valley, located in the northwestern corner of the state hard by the Canadian border, has no legally binding protection as wilderness. Along with the Yaak Valley Forest Council, Rick Bass has been ceaselessly advocating on behalf of this region for over twenty years. Let him tell you:

“For a long time now I’ve been an environmental activist up here, working hard for two basic causes: to promote local and sustainable small-scale selective logging practices rather than the industrial clearcuts of the past, and to seek permanent wilderness designation for the last fourteen little roadless up here, the last fourteen little wild gardens where we have not yet built logging roads into the furthest and farthest heart of the forest. Fourteen little gardens, ranging in size from 1000 to 38,000 acres. Fragments and crumbs.

And where has this passionate and principled advocacy got him? Cheerful product of the suburbs of Houston that he was, “I had no inkling or imagination whatsoever that I would grow up to be hated, or that my name would be reviled not just among my neighbors but by those who’d never met me, who’d never sat down to ask about my goals or values, and worst of all, who did not know the creeks, ridges, and drainages in question.”

All he ever wanted to do, Bass asserts repeatedly and plaintively, is to write fiction and poetry while living in a beautiful place. Instead, he has become embroiled in an intractable battle that appears to have drained much of the joy from his life. He wants desperately to withdraw from the fray. But he cannot. The Yaak is too beautiful and too fragile. The stakes are too high. The loss would be too great.

Bass is clearly in awe of his surroundings:

“In this dark, low, forested swampy jungle of a mountain valley, the shadows of things seems as real and distinct as the ‘things’ themselves, so that sometimes you can’t really say which is shadow and which is shadow caster. It’s not just the way the mountains blend in to the fog and clouds of the Pacific Northwest, but something less noticeable, and less definable.

This is a sentence I particularly cherish (the “Cabinets” referred to are a mountain range):

“During the retreat of the last glaciers, while the Cabinets were stealing the show – grinding, rearing, shouting, creaking, rasping, squeaking amid the thinning islands of going-away ice – the Yaak country…lay sleeping beneath several thousand feet of blue ice, like some mythic princess.

Why I Came West surprised me. I was expecting lots of lyrical, effusive description – abundant passages like the above. But mostly, this is a book about a war being fought to protect a pearl of great price. The Yaak Valley teems with wildlife: elk, moose, wolverine, and severely endangered grizzly bears (and will I ever forget the thrill of coming so unexpectedly upon a mother and her two cubs in Yellowstone this past June?) It still possesses pristine forests, rivers, and lakes. And those mountains! But the Yaak remains vulnerable to depredation and despoliation: by developers, by the extractive industries, by fun seekers on ATV’s and snowmobiles. There is only one way to save it permanently for posterity: obtain wilderness designation as provided by the Wilderness Act of 1964.

Toward the end of the book, Rick Bass holds out a ray of hope. He and his colleagues on the Forest Council were finally able to meet with their erstwhile opponents and hammer out an agreement that covers conservation practice, forestry management – including judicious logging in certain specific situations – and recreational use. They have crafted a proposal that they hope will be looked upon favorably by the U.S. Congress.

What hard, grinding work this must have been! Bass admits that his immersion in what sometimes felt like “an tedious argument of insidious intent” nearly drove him around the bend. And he still doesn’t believe that the agreement offers sufficient protection for his beloved Yaak Valley. But he also acknowledges that it will have to suffice for the time being.

Bass suggests ways that the rest of us can help. One is by writing in support of the protection of Yaak Valley to Montana’s representatives: Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester and Rep. Dennis Rehberg. You can also write to the representatives of your own state. Bass reminds us that we are within our rights to take up this cause no matter where we ourselves reside: these are public lands, owned in common by all Americans. (Also included here is a pitch for the Yaak Valley Forest Council, which is ” a tax-exempt, 501-(C)-nonprofit community service organization.”)

Rick Bass ends this book with an apology “to the reader who might have picked up this book hoping, perhaps, for lyrical descriptions of a fantastic and mythic landscape, only to find a disproportinate amount of caterwauling.” To that I respond, No need to apologize. I salute you, and thank you for your efforts on behalf of all of us. And thanks too for this moving, superbly written testament.

I would like the author to have the last word:

“For me, wilderenss areas are a place to walk into, while I am still able, and to rest — a place where the ever-dramatic and ever-increasing problems of the world are always, gently and miraculously, placed back in their divine and proper scale — and upon my reemergence, i always feel better equipped to deal with them.

They are a place that absorbs and tempers my own fear and anger, a place for restabilization. If I go into them joyous, I return joyous. If I go into them fretful or angry, I return becalmed. What magnificent alchemy, magnificent grace, is this? Given that each of us is here for onlly a very short time, what huge value is this? Surely it is immeasurable.

[Rick Bass]