The Book of Yaak (20 page)

One morning in October you wake up and there's a quarter- or half-inch mat of beautiful gold needles, and beautiful gold aspen leaves, spread all across the countryside. This golden blanket helps pin down the charred coals and ashes of August, keeps too much of the ash from blowing away or slumping into creeks: this blanket speeds up the soil-making process—as much as that glacial pace can be helped along.

The interconnectedness of things. I'm all for prudent salvage logging, as long as it's not in roadless areas. But when a given industry asks to be put above or beyond the law, I get frightened, and angry. It is not the fires of autumn I fear. I respect those—but they are nature's way, and can be no more controlled than the wind or the rain. They're part of the weather of the West. To keep clearcutting forests or entering roadless areas under the guise of preventing forest fires (isn't suppression what got us in trouble in the first place?) is like going into the forest with gallon-sized watering cans during a drought. It's just not going to work. What we're dealing with is too big. And ever worse than not working—it makes things worse—more imbalanced, more brittle.

The fire season has taught me a lot, has taught me a new way of looking at the woods. Now when I go for a walk, or climb a forested mountain, I'm very conscious of the mosaic: of the microsites—those spots in the forest that could start a fire, and those that could spread it: and those which would absorb and stop it, too. I look at diversities of vertical structure, and lateral structure, in unlogged country; at species mix. In the Yaak especially, due to its unique diversity, there are amazing bands of change on every mountain. You move through a forest of old lodgepole and then, going fifty or a hundred feet higher, into a forest of fire-buffering cedar, or cedar-hemlock. Then the slope will flex more sharply, will cross to a southern aspect, and you find yourself in a grove of fire-promoting ponderosa pine, and at the top of that ridge, fire-resistant old growth Douglas fir.

I'm learning to look at
nature.

Sometimes I think that it is the wolves who are helping, aiding and abetting, joining the resurrecting fires in the West: or not the wolves, but rather, the absence of them. I noticed it just the other day. I was planting some young cedars and had put up gated slats and screens around them to keep the deer, elk and moose from browsing them in winter. (I keep the enclosures around them until they get tall enough to be above the browse line.)

I began planting the trees a couple of years ago. And it just hit me this spring: the before-and-after of it. I haven't been seeing any young aspens anywhere in the woods—just big ones, thirty and forty and fifty years old—trees born back in the days of predators—and I noticed too that in my enclosures the aspen sprouts are doing great, but only in my enclosures. The deer herds are increasing so steadily and dramatically that they're eating all the young aspen and perhaps cedar. The cedar, especially, are fire resistant, because they help cool the forest, which helps retain moisture—which helps buffer fires.

There are too many deer—or rather, not enough predators. They are perhaps near the edge of stripping the woods bare—changing the composition of the forest over the past fifty years, in ways as subtle as our ways have been offensive and immense. The ways of rot versus the ways of fire.

It is not just the wolves, of course. It is everything; it is all out of balance.

It was a good snow year, this year. By April we were already watching the sky like farmers. But the snow and rain mean little. A greenhouse-hot summer followed by a lightning storm, followed by a windy dry day—everything can change, and will change; if not this year, then next. For this reason, and so many others, we need to keep the untouched wilderness cores—the untouched roadless areas in each national forest. They act as buffers, absorbing and diffusing the spread of huge hot fires throughout the West. They're better at putting out fires, or diluting them, than ten thousand or one hundred thousand Marines—better than a billion-dollar-a-year effort. Every forest needs a big wilderness area—a chain of dedicated roadless areas, in perpetuity—come hell or high water, come war or peace, come world's end or world's beginning.

Call it a place to run to when things go wrong. When the whole rest of the world goes up in conflagration.

We're just now learning new things in the West. We're always learning new things: things known by people before us, old civilizations, but now forgotten.

We scan the hot western skies in August for signs of approaching storms and try to detect the feel of electricity in the air. Any breeze at all can feel ominous. We are remembering another of nature's rules: Payback is hell.

T
HE SUMMERS ARE SO BRIEF
and the winters so long up here. I love it.

In the first week of 1996—another reelection year—Pat Williams surprised everyone by announcing that, like so many other congressmen and congresswomen, he would not seek reelection.

For a long time he had spoken of how rough and unrewarding the work had gotten, how futile. The gridlockers and obstructionists working at the corporations' beck and call could stop anything good, anything noble. That was wearying to him, he said, plus there was this: he missed Montana. The last time I saw him (at a rally for his '94 reelection) he and his wife, Carol, talked about their simple dream of one day having a garden like the one they used to have before they went to Washington.

Whether parrying or thrusting or counterpunching, he was a champion. He fought for the arts, for education, for the environment, and for the rights of women and workers. In this respect, you could call him a liberal: he was for the freedom of things, not the enslavement of them. There are several individuals in Washington who accumulated the kind of power he had there, but unlike many of them, Williams did not lose his compassion as he gained that power.

We hear so much raging about the government. I wonder how many other citizens will ever have the bittersweet, mixed good fortune to lament so deeply the retirement of one of their senators or representatives. You don't hear much about that kind of thing any more.

He and his family were in Washington for roughly a fifth of a century. Hell yes, they deserve a garden back in Montana. Hell yes, they deserve to once more observe the cycles of their home. And a thank-you letter, too, if you don't mind.

I don't know who, if anyone, will step up to take his place. And we need to be spending our postage and passion, our letters and envelopes, on those who still pull the levers. But he was such an honest and square force, such a one-man counterbalance to the excesses and greed of industry, that there is no way I can pass up the opportunity to say thank you. And any protection that in the future will come to the Yaak—any protection of the wilderness—will be laid on the cornerstone of his work, his sweat, his values. He stood up for the Yaak when no one else would. I don't know how long it will be before we see his kind again, if ever.

T
HE CANDLE BURNS
at both ends. There are small groups of environmentalists and loggers throughout the West, and even down in Libby, who in recent years, bloodied by battles of the heart, have begun trying to get together in order to come up with solutions. There are very few people, if any, out there who work in the woods—sawyers, log-truck drivers, timber cruisers, tree planters—who want to see injury done to the land.

In the Yaak, it is getting harder and harder to ignore what has been done to the land—and what is still being done.

The shareholders of the big corporations—the ones who never see the land—are the only ones who do not care. Sometimes I wake up in the morning not with the peace-of-mind with which I like to begin a days work, but with anger—with the image of men and women opening their morning papers to check the daily stock quotes on these corporations of whom they own shares.
They do not care.

So we've been having these meetings, these dialogues, where we discuss dreams, desires and hopes, right next to the context of next week's mortgage payment—or last month's past-due one.

Part of the problem in attitudes—in the tenseness of hearts between those who fight for the last wilderness, and those who fight to erase it—is one, as I perceive it, of a strange mixture of guilt and pride, on both sides of the argument.

Few people want to accept at a conscious level the notion that what their employers have done is wrong. How can it be wrong if such serious good has come from it—if it has helped put food on the plate, has helped raise a family? This notion of wrongness, by unfair and unfortunate association, could easily imply, across a short leap of logic, that the workers were being judged as being wrong-hearted. The workers might badmouth their employer in private, but will almost always set up a wall of defense against criticism from the outside.

Along these lines, comments that often come out of our meetings (which are sometimes heated, but not as much as you'd think—we're neighbors, after all; we all know by this point each other's quirks and stances—we know which buttons not to push, and know also when the bullshits getting a little deep) include the complaint by resource-extraction folks ("loggers") that while they realize there have been abuses in the Yaak in the past, they feel like the environmentalists take pleasure in "rubbing our noses in it."

Of course we think that this is a misperception on the loggers' part. What the environmentalists would
really
like to be doing is what anyone else would like to be doing—working a garden, spending time with family, hunting, fishing, reading a book, watching a show....

But what's encouraging about comments like these is that, even only a few years ago, rather than complaining about the nose-rubbing, there would instead have been complete and total denial that the wilderness, and surrounding forest, was in any state of disrepair whatsoever.

It's hard—nearly impossible—when your identity has been wedded (sometimes across generations) to the timber industry. The line can be so fine between one's employer and one's self that criticism of the company becomes criticism of your own values and identity. It's been one of the recipes for war, throughout history. Of course it must feel to the loggers as if we—the environmentalists, and even the public-at-large, won't ever let up: that we're always going to be criticizing the past, and that we are unwilling to accept the hope that big timber can ever do anything right.

On the other hand—from this side of the battle (and if both sides are losing, then who, might we ask—knowing the answer—is winning?)—the environmentalists feel like if we don't speak up critically against the past, it will become accepted—as it once was when there was plenty of wilderness to go around.

And where environmentalists are coming from, as well, is a position of distrust so deep-rooted in truth and history that the distrust approaches and sometimes crosses over into panic. The Forest Service, as well as the timber industry, like any political organism caught red-handed, is
always
saying it's changing, that it's going to get its act together. Their most effective form of attack, they've found out, is to get the public to let its guard down.

Industry will kick in a hundred bucks, or a thousand, to some community need. Industry will talk about all those little piss-ant seedlings they planted. And they keep making sure, with those profits, that their puppets get elected to office.

The meetings are good. It's hard enough to dislike someone you don't know—harder still to dislike someone you're having a dialogue with. Our dreams are so fantastic—sometimes more surreal than fiction, lying square in the middle of what seems logical and pragmatic, but is really at the far edge, for the time being—or beyond the far edge—of political reality.

Still, sipping coffee late into the night, we continue to have these dreams, and talk about them. We talk about what the woods mean to each of us, and are comforted to find that about 80 percent of it is common ground. It's good, after a while, to know where each other stands, and to be able to speak freely about our passions. It feels like bullet-making, these plans—or rather, the precursor to these plans—these dreams of the future. It feels as if we are converting ourselves

— spending our lives in this battle
—to hot lead and then pouring ourselves into the molds of our making, the molds of our dreams.
Yes, we need timber. Yes, we must stay out of roadless areas.

What if the corporations could no longer run amok on the public lands; what if they could no longer milk freely (or with our subsidies, our blessings) the public wildlands? What if they could be driven from the region—and with it, the malarial specter of their legacy, now ingrained into western communities and cultures, of boom and bust?

For eight, nine, ten million dollars, we could buy one of the old abandoned mills along the railroad tracks and show the forest products industry how it's supposed to be done: certified sawyers working selective cuts—no more clearcuts — and rather than shipping raw logs to distant mills, we could use one-tenth the volume of wood, or one-one-hundredth, in a value-added local industry, rather than hurling ourselves down the steep hill, in these last few remaining years....

Each year, the bare gullies, the gouges of eroding soil, cut deeper and deeper, up on those high-elevation clearcuts: up at the source of wildness. I cannot look at them without feeling physically—not emotionally, but physically—the sensation of injury. I cannot shut my feelings out to that numbness any more. I have become too much of this place.

Such is our tiny progress that I can say these things to my logger friends, and they will listen respectfully; as I will listen to them and feel frustration—though not responsibility—when they talk of wood they want to cut but can't bid on or how they can't be competitive against the multinationals. Many of them are struggling monthly to make huge payments on big machines they bought on interest and promise back in the high-volume days of Champion's quick and calculated forest liquidation frenzy. The machines have to be used, to pay for themselves, and some of them run a quarter of a million dollars each, new. But many of these machines could be used in restoration projects, and salvage projects.