The Book of Yaak (3 page)

In spring, summer and fall, the deer occupy nearly every square foot of the valley; it would be difficult for you to go anywhere here during those seasons where you could not find deer, or the signs of deer. But then as winter's snows cover most of their available forage, and as thermal regulation—south slopes, and heavy overstories and canopies—- become critical, as temperatures drop, the places where the valley will allow deer to survive become extremely narrow. As the winter deepens, you can see almost all of the deer in the valley, and the elk too, being squeezed into a small fraction of the whole: the parameters tightening daily, so that each day, if you are deep into the rhythm of your place, you can feel the deer coming down off the mountains in the night, moving lower and lower into the valley and rotating toward those south slopes—crowding into spaces one-tenth, or one one-hundredth, of that which they previously occupied. You can feel the energy shifts, the lone deer and does with fawns combining and joining into huge herds, which then move like braids or ribbons, weaving their way along the same few ice trails, cutting paths deeper and deeper, browsing the limited winter food, and waiting for the release of spring....

It becomes a pulse, winter like the contraction of a heart squeezing blood through the vessels of an organism—and you can feel the waiting for backwash, the waiting for the moment between beats, when the blood can wash back into the heart's chambers and take a brief rest—six months' worth— before being constricted, squeezed tight again: the deer flowing up and then down the mountains, focusing and then spreading, concentrating then sprawling, and it too is like art, like breathing.

For so long, the story of the West has been that blood-scribing, that heartbeat of lighting out for "the territory"—the continental drift, westward toward freedom and liberty, as if some great magnetic store of it lies somewhere west of the Great Plains. But I sense that pulse may be—of necessity—finally changing and slowing, even reversing itself. I see more and more the human stories in the West becoming those not of passing through and drifting on, but of settling in and making a stand; and I think that there is a hunger for this kind of rhythm in towns, neighborhoods, and cities throughout the country—not just in rural areas, and not just in the West, but all over: that the blood-rhythms of wilderness which remain in us (as the old seas and oceans remain in us) are declaring, in response to the increasing instability of the outside forces that are working against us, the need for reconnection to rhythms that are stable and natural. And no matter whether those rhythms are found in a city, or in a garden, or in a relationship, or in the wilderness—it is the need and desire for them that we are recognizing and searching for, and I can feel it, the notion that settling-in and stand-making is the way to achieve or rediscover these rhythms. I can sense a turning-away from the idea, once pulsing in our own blood, that drifting or running is the answer, perhaps because the rhythms we need are becoming so hard to find, out in the fragmented worlds of both nature and man.

We can find these rhythms within ourselves.

I know we can all sense this blood turning; this incredible, increasing uncertainty in the world, and the instability of things—whether in the city or in the woods. What holds things together, and what tears them apart?

What is the value of art?

What is the value of a place?

I
LIVE IN THE WOODS.
It's about as remote as you can get, in the Lower Forty-eight. There's no phone or electricity throughout much of this valley in northwestern Montana—the Yaak Valley. Much of it has been logged savagely—almost exclusively with large clearcuts—but there are still some dark coves, dark forests left. That's where we like to spend our time—my wife, Elizabeth, and I, and our daughters, Mary Katherine and Lowry. Mary Katherine was born four springs ago; Lowry, last spring. When it was time for Mary Katherine to be born, we drove down to the nearest town—Libby—an hour and a half away. We stopped on the summit leading out of the valley and took a picture of Elizabeth, with the snowy top of Flatiron Mountain behind her, because it would be the last day we would be able to take such a picture. Then we got back in the truck and drove slowly, carefully, to town.

It's different, up here. We live at the edge of the United States-Canada border and at the edge of the Idaho-Montana border as well. Animals from the Pacific Northwest overlap here and live together with those from the northern Rockies: wolves, grizzlies, woodland caribou, sturgeon and giant owls and eagles. Trees from both regions occur here—cedars, hemlock, spruce, fir, pine, aspen, ash, alder, tamarack. I spend great swaths of time mailing out cards and letters to members of Congress, asking them to protect this valley. It's almost all federal land, yet there's not a single acre of protected wilderness in the whole valley. Sometimes I mail out forty or fifty letters in a day.

We live in a tiny log cabin by the side of a pond. The pond is actually the oxbow of a river, formed by a beaver dam. There's just a single wood stove to heat the drafty one-bedroom cabin. It's the oldest cabin in the valley—built in 1903, when whites first drifted up here, looking for gold. They didn't find any, and drifted back south, out of this strange snowy valley of giant trees. The cabin has a large plate glass window that looks out at the pond. The pond comes to within twenty feet of the window. There's always something to see out that window. Blue herons stalk along the cattails, spearing with their bills frogs and small trout. The beaver brings her babies to the pond every spring. Bald eagles fly low across it, especially in winter—an extraordinarily beautiful sight, as they fly through the falling snow. The cow moose and her calf like to stand out there on hot days. Sometimes I take my canoe out on the pond and fish for a trout or two for supper, or else I catch them for fun and throw them back. In winter, otters play on the ice, and dive through holes in the ice, are gone for a minute, and then come back up with a fish, which they share with their whole family, not seeming to mind the twenty-below weather. One winter a deer fell through the ice, and I had to creep out and lasso her to help pull her out.

In the spring, when the geese and ducks come sailing in, their wings spread and feet dropped for landing, set on a long glide, it seems they are going to come sailing right on in through that big window. And in long summer twilight bats swarm the pond dipping insects from the water's surface.

It's a window to the world—or to the one we know and love. We used to live in cities, and then moved to small towns, but now finally I think we have found our level, somewhere way down near the bottom of things. About a hundred people live in this valley. A hundred people probably doesn't sound like a lot of people to someone who lives in a city of five or six million, but it seems like a lot of people to me. Think of what it would be like if you had them all over for dinner at once. One family up here has a pig roast every Fourth of July, and we all gather at their place, but they've got a big yard. There are two churches and two bars in the valley. We play cards in the winter—pinochle—with each other, if the loneliness gets too bad. But it hardly ever does.

We're ecstatic, where we are. Solitude is a thing we crave. We're clumsy, in cities—when we get in a rush; when we find our hearts racing to make a deadline, to get to some place before the jam occurs. Mistakes get made.

But out here—it feels like we fit the cycles of things better. As if the world still makes sense—as if it is still intact, in places. It feels like less wear and tear, less heart-tattering adrenaline. Except for the paper struggle to try and protect the valley—to keep the last few uncut mountains up here uncut—I hardly ever get upset any more. I practice going slow, at a pace that can be sustained. I practice looking around at things.

You can see cycles in almost everything, out here. New things make sense and strange logic. We're learning things we never dreamed we'd learn—things we never dreamed we'd notice: the way snow covering a rotting log is the last to melt, which means it's well insulated, a good place for creatures to hibernate or stay warm; the way deer drop their fawns around the second week of June when the grass is lush and at its absolute highest, giving the fawns maximum concealment.

It feels like some weight of humanity has been lightened, if not actually jettisoned. No—definitely not jettisoned. Just put way out there, at arm's length. We don't get any radio stations -—the mountain walls ringing the valley are too high—and there's no television reception, either. A few people, the two bars included, have satellite dishes that they can run off of gas generators, but we choose not to have one; if there's a football or basketball game we want to see, we'll drive the seven miles to the bar.

There's no telephone in our homes—just one pay phone outside the mercantile, also seven miles away—the world's coldest pay phone, with a stump for a seat.

The only thing that really keeps us connected whatsoever to the world we left—the only thing, the invisible thread, thinner than spider's silk—is the mail.

I've made it sound pretty, and it
is
pretty—it's breathtaking, with a new sight every day—but in winter, even for those of us who love solitude, we're glad to see the mail. It's how we shop, how we speak, and how we listen to the outside world. And in winter, that which we have previously turned our back upon becomes once more appealing, even vital. Like sailors who would take along a supply of limes and other citrus fruits on a long ocean journey, the mail in winter becomes a thing that comes back into our lives, and which we want, once again:
human contact.
After going to so much trouble to distance ourselves from the bulk of it, it seems strange to now have this December-January-February hunger for contact: not a lot, but definitely some, and every day. Just a little; like a pinch of cinnamon, but without which the rest of the day would grow darker and colder.

The mail run comes only five days a week, Monday through Friday, around one in the afternoon; and in the winter, especially near the middle and end of it, that three-day stretch—from Friday's last mail till Monday's next haul—gets kind of long.

In the winter, you can hear the mail coming long before you can see the mail lady. There's something different in the stillness of the air: something that, having spurned, in spring and summer and on through the fall, we're now suddenly hungry for. Elizabeth stands on one side of the wood-stove warming her hands, and I stand on the other side. We look out the window, across the great field of white. Mary Katherine may be reading a book. She'll come to the window, too, and watch the mail lady take our letters-to-protect-the-wilderness, our Congress letters, out of the snow-covered mailbox, and slide new ones in. Some days we can barely see her through the thick-falling snow. Even the dogs sit up, sensing her approach: though they, too, do not venture far from the fireplace.

"Do you want to go get it, or shall I?" Elizabeth asks. We've got a set of binoculars by the window, and we'll watch and try to see just what the mail lady is putting in the box. If it's a fat mail day, we'll be anxious to go check it out. But if it looks like just a few thin circulars, I'll say, "Let it rot"; though we never do.

Always, there could be some small letter, or postcard—from Arizona, perhaps, or the Caribbean—tucked in among the hardware flyers that advertise snow chains.

We'll trudge down to the mailbox, wading through all that snow, pulling a bundled-up Mary Katherine on the sled behind us. One day's like the next. It's wonderful.

There's a thing in us that loves the winter, and a thing in us that is also made a bit uncomfortable by it. Even for hermits, there are limits. Still, we try to push those limits. We try to see how long we can go without having to go into town.

When we do go, the chores are dreadfully mundane, staggeringly predictable, each time: laundry, grocery store, gas station. A cup of coffee from the Hav-A-Java. Always, something from the hardware store. Sometimes, a haircut. Once in a while, a visit to the chiropractor. Elizabeth might swim; I'll take the girls to the park. The same slides, the same swings, over and over. Actually, I love it—that stability. And then the long drive home, to true security. If we can avoid town, we generally do.

You can get just about anything from a catalogue now, and in the winter, that's how we go about a lot of our shopping. It's luxurious, letting the goods come to us, rather than having to go out and get them. Skis, snowshoes, boot oil, gloves, sock liners, food, books—anything, everything. We've got a whole bookshelf of nothing but mail-order catalogues, like the reference books in a mechanic's garage.

When we need something, we sit on the couch and thumb through those well-worn catalogues, comparing prices and trying to gauge, from the photographs alone, just how durable the goods they advertise really are.

Once a choice is made, we have to decide how to get the merchandise delivered. The mail lady is petite, and carries neither chain saw nor ax. She drives a small red Subaru. If a tree splits from the cold or the wind and falls across the road, blocking her way from town to the valley, then no mail arrives that day, and the outside world stays silent. Occasionally, on days when she has not arrived by her usual time, I'll clear my throat and say, "I believe I'm going to run up to the mercantile for a cup of coffee"—and I'll check to make sure my saw's in the back of the truck, just in case I happen to come upon the mail lady, and just in case she needs my help.

Even more anticipatory than wondering if the mail will come that day is awaiting the arrival of the UPS Man. His deliveries are less frequent. He usually brings books, which we open ravenously. He's got a 250-mile route, and our cabin is the last stop. Sometimes he'll stand around in the falling snow and chat, in no great rush to start that long drive back across the snowy pass at dusk.

"I saw a mountain lion today," he might say, or, back when Mr. McIntire was still alive, "Today I delivered a package to the wagonmaster." (Most of the movie people live in other valleys, but we've always had the McIntires, since they came here over sixty years ago, just married. Mr. McIntire was, among other things, the wagonmaster on the 1960s television series
Wagon Train.)