The Book of Yaak (2 page)

There had to be some point, though—some moment, some place, where something in me reached saturation—where I could not accept the sight of it anymore, and the knowledge of what the roads and clearcuts were doing to the ecology of the valley as well as to the economy of man. Undoubtedly this feeling of pain, of saturation, came at some point after 1 had gone through a full cycle of the four seasons; perhaps after I had gone through them a couple of times. I moved through the woods on hikes and hunts, open-minded—I had heard that the clearcuts were sometimes beneficial for the production of summer browse for deer (never mind that the deer populations might then rise beyond the limitations of their winter range). There still seemed to be plenty of diversity in the forest types I saw, and the roadless cores—the sanctuaries—still seemed intact.

That was just over a decade ago. I'm not sure when I began to realize that they—the timber industry—wanted it all: or if not all of it immediately, then access to all of it, forever. Or as the occasional bumper sticker declared, "Wilderness = Land of No Use."

Each season, I picked up the feel and taste of cycles. My blood began to learn new rhythms. My body became increasingly fluent in the language of cycles: splitting wood on cold mornings, cleaning a grouse in the evening—the solace, and ceremony, of plucking the feathers. Noticing where elk foraged in summer and where they foraged in winter. Noticing where the bears fed and what they ate. Watching the pulse of different creeks and the Yaak River itself—skinny in autumn, icy but poised in winter—wild, joyful and enormous in spring, then steady and clear on into summer, with caddis flies and mayflies rising from it every evening, and the giant spruce and fir trees shadowing it, keeping it cool and alive....

Small cycles radiated into larger ones. I kept following them—noticing different ones each day—and continue to. I became more comfortable moving through the woods—slipping between alder, climbing under and over the latticework of lodgepole blowdown, crossing streams on slippery cedar logs, climbing the rock cliffs, descending the avalanche chutes into the parklike stands of old-growth larch, their needles brilliant gold in the autumn, and brilliant gold underfoot, as if moving across a land padded with gold, and an inch of black soil atop the rocky rubble-traces of glaciers; some times two inches of soil, sometimes three, but then rock, with the soil so thin underfoot that you did not have to be a scientist to understand that one shot was all most of this place was ever going to have at grace—that it had taken some of these trees, these forests, five hundred years to achieve climax, five hundred years and three inches, and that once you swept them clean, the soil would go with them, and for a long time there would be only emptiness, rather than grace—that then there would be only the echo of grace.

I hiked around, just watching and listening. Making up my own mind. Noticing the differences between logged and unlogged areas. Not all logged areas had that confusion of spirit or loss of grace; some of them retained, or reshaped, the grace of the woods (or rather, the grace of the woods altered itself and still flowed around and through those areas that had been logged with care and respect).

But even those areas compared in no way with the untouched areas—the incredible vitality of cycles still ongoing in the deep places of the valley—the last untouched corners.

I realize that the point at which what was being done to the valley began to hurt me deeply was the time I first began to feel that I was starting to fit: that the landscape and I were engaged in a relationship. That I was being reshaped and refashioned, to better fit it in spirit and desire. That I was neither fighting this nor resisting it. As it became my home, the wounds that were being inflicted upon it—the insults—became my own.

No one can say for sure when a place becomes your home, or when a fit is achieved, or peace, any more than one can say when a river best fits the valley through which it cuts. It flows and changes, shifts—cuts deep in some places, fills in in others. It transports sediment, logs and lives. It makes music in the day and in the night. Animals come down out of the mountains at dusk to stand at the river's edge and drink. In the dimness, as light fails, the animals sometimes cross the river, wading or swimming.

Even the valley itself is moving—shifting slightly, the mountains like the slowest yet most powerful pistons in the world, some rising and others falling—the valley sinking and tilting toward the ocean—and as it sinks, it carries within it, as if in a bowl or a nest, all the surprises, secrets and cycles—all the miracles—anyone could ever ask for: more miracles than even the most uncompromising glutton could desire. We are all born with an appreciation of, a love and a need for beauty and grace.

But as if frightened of it, we carve, prod and poke at it. We view mystery as the enemy of knowledge, and in trying to find knowledge we end up attempting to harm the sheath of mystery which encases that knowledge—cutting or attacking that mystery, in either fear or anger—and in so doing, harming or altering the knowledge that lies beneath that mystery.

We take in a manner that does not replenish. We search out the last corners to do injury to them as if we have become confused—as if forgetting that we cannot live, cannot survive, without grace and magic.

What I was hungry for when we first wandered into the valley, early in the fall—snow flurries already sifting through the high country—was wood. I needed firewood by the ton—more wood, it felt like, than the most ravenous timber beast. I desired wood, dreamed of wood—we had none and needed cords and cords of it, to heat the hunting lodge where we'd be staying. We'd fallen in love with the valley around one o'clock in the afternoon, that first afternoon that we saw it, and by two-thirty we had been asked to caretake this massive old hunting lodge in the valley's center—there were no phones or electricity in it, and for heat the forty-room lodge—all the rooms were empty—had just two wood stoves. We never could keep the pipes from freezing.

Forty rooms. A room for each story we intended to tell; a room for each painting.

Our old raggedy Mississippi truck broke. Then my chain saw broke. For some now-unremembered reason, I still had the moving van in which we'd moved West, so we prowled the back roads, going from clearcut to clearcut, walking up into those steep savaged lands to pick up stove-sized pieces of wood, scraps and chips and residues. Sometimes, we'd drag whole trees out of the slash piles, where they had been bulldozed and abandoned—and we attempted to fill the moving van with these odds and ends—carrying whole logs down the steep muddy hills like crucifixes before shoving them into the maw of the van, like lunatic, lost tourists searching for some kind of authentic souvenir. Our big yellow top-heavy moving van swayed along the back roads, moving slowly through the autumn rains and mist. There is a certain undeniable raggedness of spirit—a newness, a roughness—to the place. It is not a place for anything slick and smooth. It is not a place filled with easy certainties.

After we got the moving van unloaded and swept out the wood chips and turned it in, I raced down to Mississippi and got my old Ford Falcon, which I knew was too old for the trip, but which was all I had. The radiator was clogged in some places and leaky in others, so I patched the leaks with duct tape and, as per the advice of a mechanic at a truck stop in Louisiana—such a long second journey home!—I bought a box of Tide laundry detergent and dumped it into the radiator. The mechanic had said that the detergent would slosh around in the hot waters of the radiator as if it were inside a washing machine, and would get all sudsy, which would cleanse the rust-clods; and that was in fact how it worked, and I made it back across the plains and up over the mountains a second time, driving days and nights without stopping: except that some of my duct tape patches began to leak, and soap bubbles then filtered through those leaks, so that a steady, wistful stream of bubbles trailed me the last several hundred miles. And that was how I rode back into the valley, the car looking like some renegade escapee from
The Lawrence Welk Show.

I took the back seat out of the Falcon and used it in that manner as a mini-pickup. I got the saw fixed and was back in business, cruising those back roads in the low rider, muffler and frame sometimes dragging in the back, such was the weight of the wood. Our friend Nancy, who has an eye for the woods, says that that was when she first made the guess that we would stay—that we would find a fit with this place—when she saw us driving back and forth with a sedan stuffed full of firewood, sparks roostertailing behind us in the dusk, hurrying to get our wood in before winter. Before the world disappeared beneath snow, before Canada slipped down over us like an avalanche; like the curve of a breaking wave, a typhoon of snow.

Those first couple of years were days of heaven—wandering around taking from the grace of the woods, and just watching things and listening: not yet sensing or understanding that the wildness that nourished this place—and us—was slipping away.

Two years—maybe a little longer—of free grace. It was as though those days were days of harvest: art. Paintings and drawings stacked everywhere. And stories, too, all of them fiction—all of them trying to give something to the reader. (It was as if the stories came from the woods and flowed through me out to the reader, rather than the contrary, which I would later attempt, wherein I would try to take from the reader: reversing that electrical current in an effort to get the reader to give something, which would then pass through me and back out into the woods. The kind of charge-reversal that happens sometimes when lightning strikes a transformer and sends the power surging back in the direction from which it came—often frying the transformer....)

Slowly fitting myself to the new cycles I was learning—deeper cycles, more subtle cycles. Fiction, nonfiction; literature, advocacy. Letters to friends, letters to Congress. Adjust ing the mix of them gradually, and hopefully in concert with all the other rhythms around. Slowly waking up to the rudeness and quickness of what was going on around me—the carving away into the last corners of untouched country.

Sometimes panic would spike up deep within me—electrical charges of fear registering off the scale—and I would want to abandon all art and spend all my time in advocacy. I still believed in art, but art seemed utterly extravagant in the face of what was happening. If your home were burning, for instance, would you grab a bucket of water to pour on it, or would you step back and write a poem about it?

A great work of fiction can become a cornerstone in the literature of a place, and a cornerstone or foundation for all manners of ideas, such as the importance of wildness and wilderness, or concepts of grace, freedom, liberty. A great novel can reach thirty, fifty, even a hundred years into the future, across history, with such an idea, whereas a magazine article or newspaper editorial might have a shelf life of about two or three weeks.

And yet, what good does it do that great novel to extend so far into the future—forty years, say—if the place about which it was written vanished, oh, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven years ago?

Art is incredibly important to me—fiction, especially. But there are thousands of fiction writers in the world, and only one Yaak. It would certainly not cause the earth to pause on its axis if I never wrote another story again. I don't think there was ever any writer about whom that could not be said.

On the other hand, if a thing like the wilderness of Yaak were to be lost—I do believe that would cause a hesitation on the axis, an imbalance—a friction and an injury whose loss—like the cumulative effect of so many others which have already occurred—we would be hard-pressed to re-cover from. It's possible art could protect the last roadless areas of Yaak Valley. But I just don't think there's time for it.

Cycles and rhythms—an extravagance of cycles still operating in the Yaak's roadless areas, a wildness of cycles, still connected to one another and weaving together to make grace—still making order, every day and every season, out of disorder. This is of course what art does—takes characters' actions and emotions, in fiction, or colors and shapes, in painting, and weaves them to make order, as nature selects carbon and hydrogen to braid and weave the magic of life. And as order and logic become increasingly lost to our societies, I'm certain that these things—art, and the wilderness—are critical to stabilizing the troubling tilt, the world's uneasiness, that we can all feel with every nerve of our senses, but which we still cannot name.

The cycle of dying trees giving birth to living ones—we're all familiar with this, familiar with the necessity of rot, and diversity, in an ecosystem: the way that the richness, or tithing, of rot, and the flexibility, the suppleness, of diversity, guarantees that an ecosystem, or any other kind of system, will have a future. I like to walk—and sometimes crawl—through the jungle up here, examining the world on my hands and knees—watching the pistonlike rise and fall of individual trees—noticing the ways they block light from some places and funnel or focus light into other places—watching the way, when the weaker trees fall, that they sometimes help prop up and brace those around them. Other times the fallen trees crash all the way to the ground to become fern-beds, soil-mulch, lichen-pads. It's not a thing we can measure yet, but I like to imagine that each different tree, after it has fallen, gives off a different quality of rot—a diversity even in the manner in which nutrients are released to the soil. The slow rot of a giant larch having a taste to the soil, perhaps, of bread; the faster disintegration of ice-snapped saplings tasting like sugar, or honey. The forest
feasting
on its own diversity, with grace and mystery lying thick everywhere.

***

Like the manner in which nutrients are recycled through the forest, so too are the movements of the animals through it like a cycle, or a pulse—a rhythm of blood, chlorophyll and magic: especially the migratory patterns. There are a lot of deer in the valley—an overabundance, or sign of imbalance, some would say—against which, of course, a correction will always occur, as long as the earth corrects itself to the sun; for as long as there is gravity. It—the rhythm of the increasing deer herds—becomes more pronounced, more visible—more strongly felt—each winter.