The Book of Yaak Read Online Free Page A

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?

Almost Like Hibernation
    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