Messages from the Yaak

My recollections of the Yaak go back a few years. I grew up in northwest Montana and the Yaak was that mystic place to the West of our town: a place where John McIntire and Jeannette Nolan established their ranch, fleeing the Hollywood scene. The Yaak was where the fishing sounded great, but I never quite got there to verify the assertions; where woodland caribou roomed in old growth forests -- wildernesses actually, but I never visited in time to see the shy animals with my own eyes.

I guess my first strong impression of the Yaak came when John McIntire wandered into my father's Whitefish retail hardware and lumberyard looking for something -- I think it might have been a draw knife for peeling logs -- and I, probably a youth of thirteen or fourteen, waited on him, not recognizing him, for he appeared just an old brush hopping rancher from the sticks. I guess, in a sense that is what he intended to look like, all he wanted to be that day, and acted the role perfectly.

As I recall, my older brother was behind the sales counter in the store. I said, "Sorry," for we didn't have the item, and recommended a couple of other places for him to check, then thanked him for trying our store (the appreciation for thinking of us which my father insisted all the employees part from customers with, especially, when we didn't have the item they needed). I turned to see big brother grinning from ear-to-ear. "What's so funny?" I most likely asked. He just shook his head for a minute and then said, "You don't even know who you were waiting on do you?" He offered a pause, then struck, "That was John McIntire from your favorite TV show, Wagon Train." I recall I ran to the door and looked up the street, but McIntire had disappeared and so too my brush with television's famous. It was the early 1960s. It was then I, most likely, learned the McIntire's owned a ranch in the Yaak River Valley. John McIntire had attended school with old (at least in my mind, "old") DeWitt O'Neil, who owned a retail lumber yard in Kalispell. O'Neil was a good friend of my dad's. And Dad later shared he'd had coffee with O'Neil and McIntire somewhere along the line, while visiting O'Neil Lumber Company in Kalispell.

Anyway, after my meeting with the actor, I knew the Yaak's location: that didn't mean a great deal to me, except that I often thought I'd make a point to turn up the road off US Highway 2, just west of Troy, Montana and explore the country. Those thoughts passed my mind on a number of occasions as our family sped past the junction toward Spokane, a growing community over in Washington State, where we'd often visit my favorite aunt and uncle. Sadly, I didn't go see the Yaak in its primeval beauty -- before three decades of logging rampaged across the valley. I just never got around to it, even though I had come close to John McIntire in that mindless instant -- if you like, that brief grazing of celestial paths, which set up the Yaak as a special, maybe even mystic place for me, long before I visited the country. The Yaak: The place the "wagon master" lived.

McIntire's visit to my family's store is only my first recollection of the Yaak. Much later the Yaak acquired an additional, a reinforced status for me. That occurred during a trip my wife, daughter and I made to Florida. Florida? You ask. Yes, Florida. We flew to Florida, Orlando and Disney World, where we stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel inside the Disney complex. I attended a commodities buying show sponsored by the hardware buying group to which our family business belonged. Immersed in the "make-believe-land" my six year old daughter had a fantasy time. That was February 1990: politics and wilderness discussions, land-use debates and timber production concerns dominated the news coverage in Montana. It was the beginning of the end of the timber industry's unsustainable harvests. It was a time of denial.

During those several days of the Florida conference, a group of executives from the Champion Corporation gave a talk on the coming shortages in dimension products -- two-by-fours and other construction sizes -- and how the wood supply appeared to be tightening. In looking back, they knew well of what they spoke! Those were the days of the Kootenai-Lolo Accords and the heavy cuts on the Champion timber holdings. Both the Libby and Bonner plants, huge Champion operations, were gulping timber far faster than the lands and nature could grow the trees back. Champion was a "Junk Bond" corporation. These mills were shipping lumber across the nation at breakneck rates in order to keep pace with excessive interest rates demanded by the bond holders; in that process the management and employees were stripping the trees from the lands of the company. It was greed, simple greed, and everyone knew it, but denied the facts just the same.

At my Florida meeting, Champion was represented in the persons of several Chicago headquarters officials, vice-presidents in charge of something (I don't recall any longer exactly what). There were also a couple of sales people from the regional offices located, at that time, in Couer d'Alene, Idaho. Couer d' Alene is about as far from the Yaak as Whitefish. One of the Couer d' Alene guys stood up at a panel discussion, in front of some forty or fifty lumber dealers, largely from the Southeast, and largely affluent, well-funded, multi-generational good-old-boys. He expressed outrage at the nineteen-cent-postage-card-protest-campaign then being waged against the timber industry. The nineteen-cent-postcard argument slipped easily off the corporate spokesmen's tongues and sold well in such formats. This fellow spit out how the appeals to the forest service could cause unbearable delays in timber harvests and "lock-up" federal lands; how all good Americans needed to do something about that skewed process. This Champion employee went on to expound on the specifics of the Yaak River drainage; how thousands of acres of forest needed to be harvested in order to protect the trees against the pine beetle infestations, then spreading through the lodgepole forests of the Yaak and other parts of western Montana.

He went on and on: suggesting how the forests needed cut; how the mills in north Idaho and Libby needed the logs; how the obstruction of a few misguided protesters could be so devastating to the extraction dependent communities of the rural West, and of course, the Wall Street economics of his company. He even justified his arguments around the American flag, and again suggested the national economy -- yes the national economy -- was in peril from the lack of timber in the Yaak. According to him, it was just terrible to think about how the lack of timber in the Yaak might bring the whole timber industry to a halt!

He spun his tale way past the facts and used it to enrage a number of these big-time southern dealers. He continued encouraging them to write their congressmen and press for release of timber in the Yaak.

It was at this point that I stood up and explained that I lived in Whitefish, Montana, only an hour or two drive away from the Yaak. I looked at him and flatly said he'd painted a tainted picture at best, a lie at worst. I expressed the honest view that the issues were far more complex than he'd let on! I offered the Accords process and the politics of the state and questions of sustainability as parts of the discussion. He knew full well they were difficult; he failed to answer my comments and then his boss, a Chicago based exec, summarily stopped the discussion.

Immediately, I was surrounded by a gathering of fifteen or more dealers and timber company people. I knew some of the issues, but far from enough to clearly argue and defend many of the details. Even the folks who were deeply involved in the issues, and with the various wilderness discussions, along with the partisan politics of Burns and Marlenee versus Baucus and Williams (examples of those ever continuing congressional dances) failed to understand all the happenings.

At any rate the Champion people shuttled me off to a corner and tried to figure out how this enviro-wood-dealer had ended up in what they -- the Champion folks -- believed to be a safe venue for propagandizing timber and their interests in the Yaak.

Once again, the Yaak seemed to grow a bit for me. I noted to myself I should go see it before it was all gone. I'd failed to see the Kootenai Valley, just next door to the Yaak, enough to know it well. This was when Libby Dam was constructed in the early 1970s and then the valley flooded under the waters of Lake Koocanusa. When the Army Corps of Engineers had done their Libby Dam thing, I'd been too preoccupied with other happenings to go spend any time visiting the condemned country; only realizing after the fact that the dam had carved a new face on the land, covering it with water. Later, after Koocanusa filled, I sensed the arrogance of humans as I first drove Montana Highway 37 along the river turned lake. These feelings stemmed from the realization this was the same place where high school friends and I once fished for trout and ling along the low banks, and on the sandbars, of a free-flowing stream, a large, international river. Concrete and steel changed all that for centuries to come.

Still, in those days, it was just a sense, something in my mind, ill-defined, hazed, pressed back by the day-to-day activities and thoughtless journey toward prosperity. Dollars lay most on my mind. Even as I argued with the Champion executives in Florida, I really only held a fleeting sense of the harsh effects of corporate timber production. Nothing solid, nothing beyond the unsettled stomach I controlled too often with too many Tums. At some moments I considered a strange idea in which if you multiplied all the bad practices by all the thousands of places across the country -- even the hemisphere, and then, naturally, all the world -- you'd arrive at some really ugly circumstances. I never fully did the math: afraid of it? Maybe... I don't really know. These were just quiet glimpses in a hectic pace.

Even so, I recall the quiet, over-coffee-cups comments of my old high school friend, a man who'd never mouthed the harshest of words against Champion, but allowed that he and his brother, both of whom logged for their livings, were watching big transitions coming in how the lands were to be managed under Champion. His remarks were balanced against the old owners, St. Regis and before St Regis, J Neils Lumber. I still recall how Tommy -- my logger friend -- sat across from me in the cafe booth; shook his head, saying simply that he needed the work, he'd do the deeds which the company demanded, but actions didn't mean he'd have to like it! He simply refused to think of the harsh cuts as being right for the land.

Again, these were just senses, unformed thoughts, to complex to deal with in the craze of daily tasks. I was just too busy to pay much more attention to the details, give more than to nod of my head in agreement and race to pay the bill at the cash register. I was a lumber dealer, a small business man with alligators of my own constantly snapping: cash flows and balance sheets needed to be justified to bankers; sales and the bookkeeping reports needed to balance; and there had to be dollars enough to pay the help, the suppliers; the customers' needs to balance with our inventories. I allowed no time for looking around at the beauty, the place I lived. There was no time to ask the questions... or even consider what the questions should be. All this exists as just excuses, not much different than the guards at the German death camps, or the citizens who smelled the events from outside those camps. They knew and so did I. It's a fact which refuses to be ignored. I'll plead guilty, but no more so that any of the rest of our society hooked on personal economic prosperity, or our nineteenth century ingrained belief that the wild stands before us in need of taming and trampling. A mistaken and arrogant belief for which the twenty-first century wisdom will demand a change.

What prompts all this recollection?

It came during an evening as I sat down at a table with a modern day advocate for the Yaak. His name is Rick Bass, a one-man PR campaign for the place he lives: the forest lands, up stream in the wild country about that junction I used to whiz past as our family headed for Spokane. It's the same country for which those men in Florida wanted to encourage the southeastern convention dealers to help "slick-off" the trees in expansive clear cuts. The cut and run business of corporate "junk bonders".

Rick Bass writes short stories and essays. He's published a number of books, most collections of his short stories, fine books of varied themes. His latest, "The Book of Yaak", screams (his own word) for America to wake up; save some of these lands. Save some wild places.

Rick is a sticker. He stayed in a place that would just as soon toss him out: that includes the wild country itself and the people who live in the towns of Libby and Troy, where the dominant thought process has encouraged the extrication of timber from the woods, turning the forest fibers into commodities and dealing them out across the nation. These products are carried by railcars and semi-trailer loads from the milling operations across a country feverish with consumerism. The mill and timber men of Montana are "red necks". They are fierce and proud! Set in their ways; often offended when people like a Rick Bass point out the old days of timber pillage are nearly over, and the new days surely offer less to the resource extractors. Such messages scare these shrinking communities; they don't have a lot of options beyond the woods and their histories are crafted around timber dependency.

As Rick and others point out the narrowing possibilities, the locals brace their jaws, stiffen their necks and strike in retribution against the messengers: the truth of the messages be damned. Rick Bass -- and the other the conservationists, the "environmentalists" -- are the messengers (And just as the Biblical story about the messenger who carried bad news from the battle front suffered death at the hands of his king, so do these modern messengers suffer personal attack, refusal to accept their point of view.) and it's very obvious, looking from outside the areas, there's need to recognize the truth of the message. (Here, its fitting to remember, the king still lost his war; it just wasn't the messenger's fault that the battle went against the "good-old-boy".) The plight for places like the Yaak -- or the Rocky Mountain Front of Montana, or the Big Snowies or dozens of other wild places, listed, and compiled in inventories of roadless acres, by the Forest Service, the BLM, the various advocacy groups, and the many educators and researchers across the nation -- and the towns and communities associated with those places -- aren't the fault of the messengers. The problems are broad based, societal, economic and business driven, not the singular fault of those wise enough to look, to observe and to reason.

Old style timber is a lost cause; it continues ugly and destructive practices, it cheats the locals who depend on the extraction of the natural wealth. There is little difference which company name hangs above the mill facility. Even so, speaking the message still hurts, the truth is a painful medicine, especially when the whole of a person's life -- even a town's entire population -- have been based in a belief, a philosophy, an economic idea, which upon proving false and unsustainable, becomes a lie. A lie which refuses to go away. No matter what is done to the messenger, the lie remains. That is difficult. That spells disaster to communities.

That evening we ate dinner and then Rick spoke -- read a few pages from his works really. We listened with respect; paid attention as the lines and passages of his books graced the atmosphere within the room, then settled to our ears. We were a friendly crowd. Respectful and in awe of a man capable of telling of the grizzly and black bears; the elk and the fishers; the caribou and the lynx; even tiny lichens and the stately old-growths of cedar and pines. Initially, he shared the fictional life of Galena Jim, a character of mixed wisdom, hard living: a man tough enough to ride a wild moose, foolish enough to cheat on a beautiful, faithful woman in favor of a short-term-teenage-she-bitch called Tiger. Hero and mentor to the story's first person narrator, still Galena Jim offered up a life tainted by human imperfections. We all recognized the symptoms. They fell on our ears, not much different from reality: a good -- much better than good -- an authentic work of fiction. I wondered who the composites might be for the characters.

After the earthy stumbling of Galena Jim, Bass turned to his latest collection, The Book of Yaak, and read from the pages he titled "This Savage Land." The essay, just a tale of fishermen and floating, mixed with wilderness quiet, and balanced against some chainsaw madness, finally ended with the observations of the close friend, the guide to the fishermen and Bass. Rick offer up ample allegory. The guide, a man of professional politeness and personal wisdom, ends the story telling of a lynx he'd just seen. The animal had recently escaped from a trap, was missing a foot, but seemed willing to recover and go on, try to remain wild and free. Not too different from the Yaak, the valley caught in the squalid trap of man's invasion, but now coming to the point where it might be possible to escape most future damage, then reestablish its base, find the faith to rest and recover and continue on, and maybe eventually become whole again. Rick Bass's voice, quiet, almost shy, rolled strong, defending his adopted valley, the space he now calls home. A place of seemingly endless lists of plants and animals, those as regal as the grizzly and elk; as minute as the moss and lichens; as mysterious and hidden as the woodland caribou; as numerous and obvious as the lodgepole pines. The message: Rick Bass loves his valley, wants it to recover, to go on and be whole. Hope exists in him: the Yaak might survive.

I sit at the back of the room and think of the many messages I've heard. Rick Bass's offers hope, but is steeped in the reality of man's slowness to accept change, the changes which are so inevitable, but so easily denied. Just as the truth of the W.W.II death camps were ignored by those nearby, so to seem my failures to listen for three decades; the idea haunts me. Still, the question: Will the message reach enough folks, will the land rest and recover -- continue on? I want the answer to be yes.

I understand: it's our grandchildren that will be able to answer with full knowledge. "How will they know? What will they have to relate the Yaak of 2050 to the Yaak of 1900? How will they judge our actions?" Words and pictures will describe the place -- the Valley of the Yaak. Those words will tell what the land looked like before men, from Couer d'Alene, Chicago, and now -- today, 1997, Portland -- hacked and mowed, only to leave, content to find another place, another set victims. Places willing and able to supply the raw consumption materials for the modern America. The America we all must accept as a part of each of us.

"US": associates in the crime, accomplices not intentionally evil, just there, misguided, or ignoring the facts. The words and pictures are all the folks of 2050 will have to understand the expanse of what was wild in 1900. The twentieth century took the wild out of much of our land and in doing so lost a great part of our national soul.