The Book of Yaak (12 page)

I am so much like the creatures in this endangered valley, and in all of the Rockies. All I want is a place to hole up and riot be seen. It is late in the day, and I am in some old-growth cedars at about five thousand feet, when I hear the sound of frogs. I have been looking for bear sign, but Quammen's essay is on my mind, and I move quietly toward the sound.

I'm tired from hiking all day. I find the little pond from which they're calling. It's not even a pond so much as a rainwater puddle, a snowmelt catchment, about the size of someone's living room. I've been on this mountain a hundred times, but never knew it was here, ephemeral—and the frogs grow silent, even at my stealthy approach.

How long will this little high-elevation marsh last? In what brief period of springtime must the frogs find it, lay their eggs, and then hatch? And from that point, where do they go? What kind of frogs
are
these? I don't even know their damn name. They're not leopard frogs, or green frogs; they're kind of
funky-looking
, tiny, but with big heads, as if for shoveling, burying themselves.

All any wild thing wants is a place to settle in, a sanctuary—some guarantee of security—with the ability, the freedom, to roam if it wants to, or needs to. I take Berry's poem to heart; I curl up there on the hillside and rest, very still, waiting for the frogs to forget about me, and to start up again. I've heard frogs singing so loudly in the desert in southern Utah during breeding season—so many of them jammed into one waterhole—that the din, the roar of it, made me nauseous—but when this little chorus starts back up, it's nowhere near that thunderous. This pond's not that crowded.

Earlier in the afternoon, farther back into the roadless area, I'd heard a grizzly flipping boulders looking for ants; it was right up at snowline, and the boulders were immense. I feel certain it was a grizzly. There was no way I could go higher to see, though; I was afraid it might be a sow with cubs. I turned and went back down lower on the mountain without having seen it—having only heard, instead, the music of those boulders tumbling down the mountain....

I lie in the spring grass like a child, listening to the frogs and thinking about the future: about grizzly music, wolf music, elk music and frog music. I try and feel the old earth stretching beneath me; whispering, or singing.

"I listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting," Thoreau wrote, also in the springtime, in 1856. "Many of those animal migrations and other phenomena by which the Indians marked the season are no longer to be observed.... I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars.

"I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth."

The music of predators and their prey: the kind of music we can hear most easily and clearly, though we are learning to hear the other, subtler harmonics, too, even as they grow fainter in the Rockies: the beetles and the rotting logs, the mosses and the frogs.

I'm still curled up as blue dusk comes sliding in. I'm on the side of the mountain that faces civilization. Two miles away, below me, there is a logging road: someone's been cutting firewood—I just heard his saw shut off. I imagine it's already dark down there. I picture the woodcutter, a neighbor, sitting on a stump and resting from his day's work: mopping his brow, and also listening—to the silence, at first, and then to the sound of the night.

After a while I hear his truck start up, and he drives away; I watch the yellow of his headlights wind far away down into the valley, to the river, as he heads home, where he will sleep, and rest, as will I.

We will not hear anything, as we sleep, but the frogs will keep singing, the elk will keep bugling and the wolves and coyotes will keep howling, until the fire within thern goes out, and there is true silence.

A
T NIGHT IN WINTER I
like the lonely, scary sound of coyotes. I like how it is after a day's work of sawing wood when light leaves and darkness comes, and the coyotes begin to speak.

It's a feeling like falling. Your sweat freezes. It gets colder once the sun is down.

All day long you've been big, sawing wood—or striding mountains—in the bright bold sunlight, and now you're falling. The trees seem taller; their reach extends almost to the stars. At such a time you may discover the true landscape, where you can project yourself only as far as your senses will carry you: a place where you apprehend the idea of size, and of what you are in the world.

L
ET'S DO THE NUMBERS.

In trying to sing the praises of a place, in fighting to earn or draw respect to an endangered place, you can only say pretty things about that place and think pretty thoughts for so long. At some point, you can no longer ignore the sheer brutalities of math, nor the necessity of activism. It's always a tough choice. You have to decide whether to use numbers or images: you have to decide whether the fight requires art or advocacy—and to try to have an awareness of where the one crosses over into the other.

I think it is like a rhythm—deciding when to choose the "soft" or supple approach of writing pretty about a place—writing out of celebration—versus writing about the despair of reality, the enumeration of loss.

The numbers are important, and yet they are not everything. For whatever reasons, images often strike us more powerfully, more deeply than numbers. We seem unable to hold the emotions aroused by numbers for nearly as long as those of images. We grow quickly numb to the facts and the math. Still, the numbers are always out there:

* Logging on the public lands in the Forest Service's Region One (the northern Rockies) cost the government between $100 million and $200 million more than they received for those sales in 1993; and,

* Siltation levels in streams are 750 times higher near logging roads than in undisturbed sites, often contributing to excessive erosion, flooding, scouring, road-slumping, and destroying water quality for sturgeon, trout and salmon, which—tough break!—have evolved to require clear, cool water....

* Forbes
notes that in the Gallatin National Forest—where recreation provides 16 jobs for every one logging job—the unemployment rate is 1.8 percent. Dr. Michael McGarrity writes, "The pristine environment, not logging, is the driving force in the current economic boom"; and,

* The Forest Service ranks as the world's largest road-building company in the world. Almost half a million miles of logging roads exist in this country—more miles than the federal interstate system—and another quarter million miles of logging roads are planned, paid for by taxpayers, for use by international timber companies; and,

* The Forest Service survey of 1993 showing 70 percent of Montana and Idaho residents oppose any further entrance to the last roadless areas in their states; and,

* Despite the influx of cheap Canadian timber—the results of the obscene forest liquidation going on up there, which rivals Brazil's deforestation rates—the timber companies working on public lands in the West continue to post record quarterly profits for their stockholders. By the end of 1994, despite a drop in timber prices, Plum Creek posted a record profit of $112 million; Georgia Pacific, based in Newt Gingrich's home state, had a 1,000 percent increase in profit....

This nonsense about the last wilderness areas putting timber workers out of work, this big fat greed-suck lie about the last tiny wedge of remaining unroaded public lands being all that keeps sawyers and millworkers from reaching the eternal Big Rock Candy Mountain of secure futures and high finance—that myth (sold and packaged to workers by the timber products industry) runs counter to the
Washington
Post—compiled data that found that 80 percent of downsizing corporations neglect to pass on the savings to their workers in the forms of higher wages or more jobs. Instead, if all goes to the stockholders—and 45 percent of those companies use the savings from downsizing to buy more labor-saving machinery, which then triggers a second round of layoffs within twelve months.

Not a single acre of the valley where I live—the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana—is protected by our government as wilderness for our future. It's the wildest place I've ever seen in the Lower Forty-eight. We all have special places that nourish our spirits, that ignite the sparks of our imaginations, that help make life more tolerable by sharpening the sacred edge that human lives can still hold. We all wonder daily how we should go about saving these places.

I'll go for long stretches at a time asking men and women and children to write letters to Congress and to the Clinton administration, as well as to the Forest Service, pleading the case of the unprotected Yaak, believing that if enough people write letters, the roadless areas that remain there—the wilderness—can be saved; that an invisible thing like passion can hold a physical thing that is fragmenting.

But then, almost as if in response to some seasonal change, I'll succumb to the weariness of the activist—the brittleness, the humorlessness of the activist, the wearing down of one's passion and effectiveness—and I'll go for a long period (two or three months, sometimes) during which I believe that art helps achieve cultural change more effectively than does activism and the statistical rantings of fact. I'll believe that the bright primary colors as well as the pastel tones of art can carry more power than the black-and-white polarizations of activism. For a while, I'll think that
that's
the way to save a place—to write a pretty story about it, a pretty book—and so I'll change to fit that rhythm and belief, as if I'm in some cycle I do not understand but am nonetheless attentive to.

Later on in the year—for three or four months—I will then find myself trying to do both: art in the morning, and hard-core activism in the afternoons and evenings.

And then I'll wonder why my eyes drift crookedly; why I sometimes find myself staring at the sun, or why I feel off-balance.

Beginning in September, I disappear into the grace of hunting season for three months with my bird dogs. We chase grouse and pheasant; I hunt deer and elk, too, by myself, while the dogs stay home. It is like a submergence—like being in a cocoon or hibernation. I take from the land, in both meat and spirit—in what I believe is a sustainable manner—and I rest myself during that time for another year, another round in this fight to try and save the last parts of a place that has not yet been saved, in which and for which I am asking your help.

I don't mean to be insulting—traveling beyond my valley to ask your help. I know you have similar stories—identical stories—about places there: about every place that's loved.

What would you do?

How can the Yaak be saved—the last unprotected roadless areas in it?

I meant to use numbers throughout this essay—I had a bunch of them lined up, all of them perverse and horrible—but I got tired of them right away.

Writing—like the other arts—is not a hobby, but a way of living—a way, in the words of nature writing scholar Scott Slovic, of "being in the world." There is a rhythm that we must all find, in loving and fighting for a place—the integration of advocacy into your "other," peaceful life. I do not think it will always seem like a balanced or even pleasant rhythm. There will probably be long summer days of peace with only short stretches of darkness, in which you might be able to go a couple of weeks without panic and despair at the impending loss of the loved place—but there will also be long winters where advocacy and its inherent brittleness lasts for months at a time—times when the sun barely, if ever, gets above the horizon.

Even if you're not doing your art (or living your "other," peaceful life during this period), reading a great novel or viewing a great painting can be necessary solace during this dark time: and you continue your advocacy as intensely and passionately as you can, daring to take it all the way to the edge of brittleness—like a starving deer in winter. In the cycle, you begin, or your body begins, to create space within you for the return of art, or peace—order constructed out of disorder; a return to suppleness; sometimes you even warn, or mention to your fellow advocates, that you feel this internal space growing within you, and that because of it you may be stepping aside for a brief time; so that in this manner those just entering the crest of their advocacy cycle can help pick up the slack and continue forward as you rest (hopefully in peace) before you return to the advocacy at a later point, strengthened and invigorated....

The writer, naturalist and activist Terry Tempest Williams is fond of the D. H. Lawrence quote "Blood knowledge.... Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots."

This is how I try to help protect the last roadless areas in the Yaak: with both brittleness and suppleness. It's been said that 10 percent of the world wants the world dammed, 10 percent wants it healthy, and the other 80 percent just doesn't care. I can rarely decide upon a fixed strategy—do I try and motivate further the 10 percent already committed to a healthy world, with brittle, angry urgings? Or do I try and coax the other 80 percent into the camp of the wild by writing as hard and as well—as pretty, as peacefully—as I can?

Again, it blurs. It becomes a weave, a braid, of rhythms; I do both, and I try and stay in touch with what Lawrence called "the blood root of things"; I try to make the right choices based on invisible feelings and rhythms, which are anchored in the realities of rock, trees, ice.