The Book of Yaak (25 page)

Here is a feather from these woods. Here is an antler. Here is a stone, still light years away from becoming soil.

The ranger I talked to last year, when I went down to the Forest Service office to protest a road being built into this last forest, said, in response to a direct question by me, that No, he didn't consider this mountain any different from any other. They'd tried to come in here and cut last year, but a court appeal ruled against them.

Didn't matter. They came right back and proposed the same thing this year, only bigger.

The ranger said that no, he wasn't aware of any particular magic hiding out in this little valley, that it was no different from any other mountain in the valley.

He was full of shit.

"I'll put it into the record that your comments were considered," he said curtly, glancing at his watch.

Here is the creek, then: you emerge into a glowing green place—holly, maple, water-drip, moth-dance. The scent of roses. Mayflies rise from the virgin creek. Cedar trees two hundred feet tall shade the still waters of a beaver pond, drinking the clear water with their almost-ageless roots. A giant cow moose and her calf, seemingly no larger than a small dog, stand in the bright healthy lime-green of the marsh grass farther downstream. Sunshine illuminates them.

The creek is narrow; in some places you could vault across it. And across the creek lies more unroaded country, and the beginning of another mountain.

I dip my hands in the creek and splash its water on my face. I turn and start back in the direction from which I have come.

If you make it—if you pull out and turn this thing around — you and I will have to take this hike next year, or the next.

If you don't, I will send the map—the rough sketch of it — to your family, so that your children might someday see it.

This is the thing I wanted most to share with you.

The moose and her calf—frightened by my presence—splash across the creek and go into the forest on the other side. I start the climb back into the rainclouds.

The swatch of gold shining on the marsh remains, waiting, like the light of hope itself. Not like anything come down from the sky, photosynthetic life from the sun, but like something deeper and more permanent: like hope from the center of the earth, hope from the soil.

The hope of fallen, rotting trees.

I
HAVE LEFT OUT
too much description in this book. Fact has replaced poetry, and—despite my knowing better—desire has been allowed to become so taut as to become brittle, and even to snap—risking the result of numbness. In art, it has often been said, what you leave out is more important than what you put in—but here I didn't dare leave much out. I wanted to bear witness to the facts. I wanted to lay out my heart, forgoing art's great schemes. There's 110 cleverness to be found here, only rawness: like the roar of a saw, with wood chips flying.

I am not afraid of failing at a short story—at a work of fiction. But I am afraid of failing the valley; and I am afraid of failing my neighbors, my friends and my community.

I believe the simplest and yet most inflammatory belief of all: that we can have wilderness and logging both in the Yaak Valley.

It would cease to be the place it is without any more logging; but it will cease to be the place it is, as well, if the wilderness is lost. There is not a day that goes by that I don't worry about it, and wrestle with the solutions, the issues.

I am not afraid of the wilderness, and I am not afraid to dream and hope and work.

I
OWE MANY THANKS
for the help received in the telling of this story. Thanks, as always, to my editors—Camille Hykes, Harry Foster, and Dorothy Henderson—and to Melodie Wertelet for the book's design, to my agent, Bob Dattila, and to Russell Chatham for the cover's painting.

Thanks also for the support of other conservationists, too numerous to name, who have listened sympathetically and observed with their own eyes the story of Yaak, and to the Forest Service personnel who have offered not resistance but quiet encouragement for the protection of Yaak's roadless areas.

I am in deep debt to and hold much appreciation for Steve Thompson, formerly the Northwest field representative for the Montana Wilderness Association (P.O. Box 635, Helena, MT 59624—please join) for his tireless efforts to keep abreast of goings-on in the Yaak, and for his expertise and unceasing activism.

Much mention is made in this book of letter writing. A fine place to begin lobbying for the Yaak's unprotected wilderness is with your own senators and representatives. Other key judges determining Yaak's future include the chief of the Forest Service (P.O. Box 96090, Washington, D.C. 20090), the secretary of agriculture (14th St. and Independence Ave., Washington, D.C. 20250), the regional forester (P.O. Box 7669, Missoula, MT 59807), the Kootenai National Forest supervisor (506 Highway 2 West, Libby, MT 59923), Gover nor Mark Racicot (State Capitol, Helena, MT 59620), and Montana's senators, Max Baucus and Conrad Burns (U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510). These people would, I'm sure, enjoy hearing from you, as would the president (The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C. 20500) and the vice president (Old Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20501).

A copy of this book has been delivered to each member of Congress and to the administration of the president.