The Book of Yaak (7 page)

It was too cold to work on it outside, so he disassembled the whole motor, brought it inside, laid the parts all out on the floor by the stove, cleaned and examined each one, then put the engine back together again, there by the fire. He kept trying it, experimenting, replacing parts. It took him all winter, but by springtime he had the engine running again. He disassembled it one last time, took it back outside, reassembled it, and had it working once more.

She swims in the river daily at dawn, her morning constitutional: beautiful as ever. She tells stories of when she was young, and first in love. She tells stories of when she first loved this place, too, and what it was like, then.

I
USED TO BE A SCIENTIST
—a geologist. I find myself thinking more and more about the turning-away-from, the divergence, where I left the trail of science and turned down the path of art. They're both about invisible or buried things, but in art you don't name them—you just chase them, then let them go.

For a long time I didn't recognize that I had turned down a new path: it all seemed the same. Brushy, remote, lush—mysterious and shifting—something new every day—and yet with some reassuring constancy, some background, bedrock, unchanging basic-ness, always at depth, just beneath me and just beyond me. It was like being a child. Nothing was ever identical—every day, every observation, was new: and yet there was the security of constancy, of stability.

The world appeared that way to me—stable, secure, knowable—and 1 know in my heart that that is its true nature—for thirty-five years.

But now it is as if the trail has opened into a meadow, a small clearing—and as if I must go across that clearing; and I am hesitant to do so. Every cell in my body is fighting that change. Everything in me fears that on the other side of that clearing, when I pick back up on the trail, things will be different; that they will be lesser. Less orderly—perhaps even chaotic.

Scientists like to say that nature is in constant decay, constant disorder, but that notion comes from the laboratories and the Petri-dish equations, and it is not what I see in the field.

Instead I see nature taking all the loose elements, the chaos of that disintegration, and weaving everything back into life. This is what art does as well—makes order out of chaos, makes two or more disparate elements alike—weaves back the unraveling around it—and so I am not surprised that for a long time I did not realize I'd branched off of one path and onto the other: did not even recognize the fork in the trail.

And I am not sure how far down the other path I have gone—only that it seems I have come to the first clearing, at which I am pausing, unnerved.

If I could do it again—if I could go back, if I had stayed on the other path—(and what chance or hidden urging leans one left or right; what pull of gravity or metronome within?)—I would like to perhaps have continued fooling with microscopes, filter titration, and seismology; I would have perhaps liked to have bushwhacked in even deeper, trying to figure out a way to quantify, to measure, things that are presently immeasurable.

Instead, I find myself trying to name them, and be in their company—rather than trying to tame and corner them, hem them in.

I think that art is wild, in this regard. Which is why I am chagrined, again, to be at this clearing—fooling with letters to Congress, to be believing in politics—to be counting and measuring, defending and explaining the woods, the wilderness: to be advocating for a voiceless thing.

I feel distracted from the hunt; and as if the headwind I've been leaping into, catching my prey's full scent, has suddenly spun, quartered away from me, so that I can smell nothing; and yet I also feel as if I need to pause and make a stand, pause and fight, if I am to survive—if I am to have any hope of surviving and going on, at a later date—to continue in art.

I feel as if there's too much change going on: not enough constancy.

Too much chaos. Too much for humans to make art or order of; though if we, like so much else, leave, then after we are gone, I know that nature will keep weaving, and that it will be beautiful, whether cast in fire or ice.

I was up on one of the mountains I'm fighting to protect, when I saw the tracks-in the new snow. It was a miraculous week in October, one I mistakenly entered thinking would be a week like any other first week of October—aspens and larch, cottonwoods and ash trees stunned with gold, blue skies, and the huckleberry fields burnt red, blood red, and geese flying south, south, with the music of their leaving....

So in that regard I knew the week would be miraculous, as it has been for me every year, every October, but I did not have any idea that it would be beyond that. I was already in love with these woods; I did not understand there could be a thing deeper than love.

The thing in our blood that makes us love beauty—and beauty's depth, beauty's electrical charge—who would even consider that such a thing can be measured?

At what point should we set down our microscopes and tape measures, with respect to the woods, and say,
All right, enough; this thing—nature—is larger than we can understand. We are only a part of it, at the tail end of it—nothing but a curious fat little comma, near the end of a very long sentence.

I was carrying my shotgun. I was hiking up high, hoping to jump grouse. I had started down low, hoping for a shot at a ruffed grouse, and then, as if drawn by some call, I got it in my mind to begin moving up the mountain at the edge of the roadless area.

I started climbing the steep slope, through lush rotting cedars, through aspen and lodgepole—going up into spruce grouse habitat. But I didn't see any spruce grouse.

So I decided to go higher—to go to the top—to see if I could jump a big juicy blue grouse.

It had snowed the night before, I thought it would be fun to track the grouse in the new snow, if they were up there—to hunt the grouse as one might hunt a deer or an elk.

I worked my way to the top, through an absence of grouse. It was one of those days so beautiful that it did not matter. Even before I reached the top, I had all but forgotten about grouse.

I reached the ridge and looked over into the maw, the velvet green bowl of uncut valley on the other side—the largest roadless area in the valley. I don't think I can keep the roads out of it much longer, as either an artist or a scientist. I think as a general rule slow forces (like art, or continental drift) have more power than quick forces (like lightning or road building), but that the quick forces can cut more deeply.

Sometimes.

It was windy up there, and cold. Just looking at that modest sweep of green, that sanctuary, soothed something inside me, suffered and relaxed so many tensions stored up: as when you, or someone else, places their hands and fingertips over your face, covering your eyes, and then runs their fingertips slowly down and over your face, drawing out all the worry lines. That's what it felt like, over my heart, and I felt happiness.

If there were any other animals stirring—ravens drifting overhead, or ground squirrels scurrying—I didn't see them. I walked south on a game trail along the ridge, grouse entirely forgotten now, daydreaming instead about big mule deer, and about elk—and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed footprints in that new snow, fresh human footprints, I thought, and my mind went
Ah, shit—someone's been up here on snowshoes
—and there was that usual momentary loss and confusion I felt when I found I wasn't alone in the woods. The wildness left me like wind leaving a sail.

I was about to turn around and go back down the moun tain the way I'd come, but then I wondered why someone would be up here on snowshoes, when there was only a couple of inches of snow on the ground.

I went over to the tracks and stood over them and froze. They were picturebook grizzly tracks, slabfooted, with the long claws—and so large that for a moment—as when you first awaken from a dream—1 could not make sense of the size of them. I could tell they were grizzly, but the size of them shut down something in my mind.

The little twenty-gauge popgun, the iron stick with the cardboard shells in it, felt like a crooked twig in my hand. I felt as if I were suddenly filled with straw, and existed for no other purpose than to have the stuffing knocked out of me.

The tracks were glistening; the snow crushed and still watery from the heat of the bear's foot. I had moved him out just ahead of me, and by the casualness of the gait, he? (there were 110 cubs' prints) had not been in any kind of hurry.

I stood there a long time. In all my years in the valley, and all the thousands of miles hiked, I'd seen grizzlies twice—both times at close range—but this, the size of this, and the beauty of the location—up on this windy spine, up on my favorite mountain in the valley—
the size of the tracks—
moved me in a way I had not been moved before. I stood there and held onto the feeling of fear and joy mixed, almost hypnotized by the strength of the two emotions. I think that in loving this mountain so deeply, I had begun to view it, even if only subconsciously, as my mountain—up until this point. I knew where the elk bedded down, knew where the berries were best—where the moose lived, and the grouse, the coyotes.

I had to follow the tracks—had to see where they went: what that bear's habits were—even if only for a short distance.

I wanted to see the bear.

There could be no evolutionary advantage to such a long ing. It had to lie in the realm of spillover; the magic, beyond what makes sense or logic, to our short-term goals. It had to be in the realm of art. I moved along the ridge carefully, head down, studying.

The Yaak is a valley of giants—of herons, bald eagles, golden eagles; white sturgeon below the falls, and twenty-five-pound bull trout; lions, wolves, grizzly and black bears, great gray owls, great horned owls, moose, elk—all these
big
animals — but seeing this grizzly would be like seeing an elephant in the woods. Because the dominant, wide-ranging, no-fearing ones are selected against, many of the giant creatures—like the country around them—are becoming smaller with each generation.

I moved carefully, slowly, through the lodgepole. My body told me to turn around and leave, as did my mind—but there was some other sense, some other thing, that drew me

— that overrode those two imperatives. I felt it and trusted it and walked carefully down the trail, being careful not to step in the tracks, and feeling very fortunate, very lucky, to be on the same mountain with this bear, to be in virtually the same point in time and space with him. Walking just to the side, and behind, his footprints.

I felt something filling me, coming from the feet up, some kind of
juice,
some wildness, some elixir. I walked slowly, carefully—expecting to see the giant head and shoulders just ahead of me, at any second, looking back.

But there was nothing: nothing other than cold air, and winter coming. To my right—to the west—lay the beautiful uncut velvet of the roadless area—the wilderness. To my left, below and beyond me, lay the swaths of clearcuts. This was the edge, and it seemed very much to me that the giant grizzly was walking the edge of his territory, checking it out before he went back into the earth to sleep for five or six months. Checking things out—noting the new roads below, and the newly savaged hillsides—the patchwork of them drawing ever closer, and I imagined that it was a ritual he did, every year; and I hoped that his sleep was not as troubled as mine.

But there was no trouble in my soul, in my heart, that afternoon. There was only glory and wonder—only peace and awe.

There are places and moments where we must put away the yardsticks and rulers; and it is the artist's job to convince us of this, not the scientist's job to even attempt to prove it—often with the very use of those same rulers and yardsticks.

Do scientists dream of howling?

I know that they do.

The tracks disappeared as the bear walked out of the thin snow—as the new snow disappeared into the open sunlit places. I thought of his four-inch claws and of how the mild sun must feel on his thick coat.

When I couldn't follow after his tracks any more I felt again a burst of reverence, a mix of fear and euphoria. It was as if I'd made a small new discovery in science—as if one curious piece of data suddenly and gracefully connected with another. It was like writing a sentence that surprises and pleases you, one that carries you from all that has come before into new country. It was about anything but control.

I paused, wanting more. I pushed on in the direction I felt he had gone. But after a while the wild juice inside me, the fizz of it, waned. I was still out in open country; he must have disappeared within the sanctuary of cover. I sat down on a cold rock in the wind, tried to feel the sun on my face, rested for a long while, and thought about what I had seen. I didn't want to leave the mountain, as I had the sense one has when one is in the presence of a great man or woman, someone who's meant a lot to you, and whom you finally get to meet. You want to savor the moment and say the right thing, but also, especially if the day has been long and that person is old and tired, you don't want to be a stone, a thing that weighs them down, and so you quickly savor the encounter and are reassured, almost relieved, to see that yes, there is something special and different about him or her, some force, something indefinable—a thing you can see and hear and feel, taste and smell, but not know or name—and then you say good-bye and leave soon enough.

That was how I left the mountain—grateful, more than grateful, for having seen the tracks—and for the bear having heard me coming and having moved slowly away from me, rather than toward me. I knew it was very important not to overstay.

It was late in the day. There was still about an hour of strong sunlight left, but already the light was turning from yellow to copper. The burned-out, frost-bright berry fields on the hill below me looked as if they might have just had a bear pass through them.