Book Review: The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana, by Rick Bass
I just finished reading Rick Bass' new book The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana. This book is an ode to phenology and local knowledge, and Bass' love of his home, the Yaak of northwest Montana, which some consider to be a "Noah's Ark of Diversity," with mountain lions, moose, elk, bobcats, grizzly and black bears, lynx and wolverines. He took inspiration from Thoreau's Walden, wondering what it would be like to re-imagine such work so profoundly Eastern in a remote wild landscape of the West. Bass writes from a pioneer homestead on a marsh in the Yaak, tracing the changes and events of a year's cycle, month-by-month, the transect of a year, of time rather than space. Although Bass is well-known as an environmental writer, the focus of this book is not advocacy and politics, but celebration and observation. Why? Said Bass, "I'm not sure why I made that choice, with this book; perhaps in order to simply stay sane longer." (6) As someone who grew up in the Helena valley in Montana over the last 40 years, and being roughly the same age as Bass, I am coming to share his views on the retention of sanity in the world that is coming to pass.
But even the remote Yaak valley is not immune to change:
"The thought occurs to me again how strange and perhaps hopeless this chronicle is, destined to disappear like melting snow, with regard to its calendrical observations...That these days will never again have compare; that not only is time rushing past, but so too is the four-seasoned, temperate nature of this place. As if it is all finally, after so many centuries, becoming only as if but a dream. ...But my God, what beauty." (p. 159)
"It's not just for the scientists of the future that I've profiled the passage of a year, here in a northern land still fortunate enough to have four full seasons despite the rising tide of the world's increasing heat, the ever-increasins global exhalations of warmth and carbon. I like to imagine that this record has value, in a scrapbook sort of way, to my family, and to others who will in the future inhabit, and love, the Yaak. ...That the passing on of such knowledge constitutes a transfer of some of the most valuable currency, other than love, possible; that the transfer of that kind of intimate and place-based knowledge, the knowledge of home, is a kind of love, and rarer and more valuable now certainly than silver or gold...Some days I worry that there is a sand-through-the-hourglass effect to such observations, and the passing on of that knowledge; that though the knowledge might be passed on to the next generation, and the next, so rapid now are the ecological changes in the West, so severe the dissolution of various biological underpinnings as one piece after another is pulled from the puzzle, the map, of previous integrity, that the future will render such knowledge irrelevant: as if, already, I am describing things that are gone-away, or going-away. ...But one of the key components of love is hope -- enduring hope --and to let fear replace hope would be a bitter defeat indeed, a kind of failure in its own stead." (p. 8)
This recordation and compilation of twenty years of place-based memory is a real gift from Bass. As a poet of natural history, he muses over the opening of the icy and snowbound land in March, the appearance of baby robins in July, a forest fire in August, hunting in November...It should inspire each of us to consider passing on our own legacy of local knowledge to future generations, although most of us, less gifted as writers and chroniclers than Bass, can only do bravely what we can, through writing, storytelling, record-keeping, and the arts. But it is not only a matter of the natural world; Bass is as sensitive and attentive to the importance and value of the human world in equal measure:
"Children grow up and move away, friends grow old and stooped, communities shift and flow, fragment and weave back together. The deliciousness of a moment, and of beauty, is almost always heightened by the consciousness of such brevity. It is a sweetness, and awareness, however, that I sometimes tend to overlook, or take for granted; and it's good for me, particularly during the holidays, to step back and remember that it is not merely the marsh, or the natural cycles of things, that give me stability and even peace in a tumultuous world, but also the braid, the weave, of people passing all around me -- a current of people, friends and others, as ceaseless and interesting as the wind itself, or the currents of some broad river, or again, the flow of the seasons themselves, passing around and around the globe, year after year, bathing us in change, and at the same time bathing us in regularity, with a constancy that is remarkable, and which in my opinion follows very much in the same pattern and logic as does the human emotion of love." (p. 375)
A highly recommended book, especially for folks who are in love with the land and their place on the land, who would like to pass on their knowledge to the future, and for those of us who wish "to simply stay sane longer."
But even the remote Yaak valley is not immune to change:
"The thought occurs to me again how strange and perhaps hopeless this chronicle is, destined to disappear like melting snow, with regard to its calendrical observations...That these days will never again have compare; that not only is time rushing past, but so too is the four-seasoned, temperate nature of this place. As if it is all finally, after so many centuries, becoming only as if but a dream. ...But my God, what beauty." (p. 159)
"It's not just for the scientists of the future that I've profiled the passage of a year, here in a northern land still fortunate enough to have four full seasons despite the rising tide of the world's increasing heat, the ever-increasins global exhalations of warmth and carbon. I like to imagine that this record has value, in a scrapbook sort of way, to my family, and to others who will in the future inhabit, and love, the Yaak. ...That the passing on of such knowledge constitutes a transfer of some of the most valuable currency, other than love, possible; that the transfer of that kind of intimate and place-based knowledge, the knowledge of home, is a kind of love, and rarer and more valuable now certainly than silver or gold...Some days I worry that there is a sand-through-the-hourglass effect to such observations, and the passing on of that knowledge; that though the knowledge might be passed on to the next generation, and the next, so rapid now are the ecological changes in the West, so severe the dissolution of various biological underpinnings as one piece after another is pulled from the puzzle, the map, of previous integrity, that the future will render such knowledge irrelevant: as if, already, I am describing things that are gone-away, or going-away. ...But one of the key components of love is hope -- enduring hope --and to let fear replace hope would be a bitter defeat indeed, a kind of failure in its own stead." (p. 8)
This recordation and compilation of twenty years of place-based memory is a real gift from Bass. As a poet of natural history, he muses over the opening of the icy and snowbound land in March, the appearance of baby robins in July, a forest fire in August, hunting in November...It should inspire each of us to consider passing on our own legacy of local knowledge to future generations, although most of us, less gifted as writers and chroniclers than Bass, can only do bravely what we can, through writing, storytelling, record-keeping, and the arts. But it is not only a matter of the natural world; Bass is as sensitive and attentive to the importance and value of the human world in equal measure:
"Children grow up and move away, friends grow old and stooped, communities shift and flow, fragment and weave back together. The deliciousness of a moment, and of beauty, is almost always heightened by the consciousness of such brevity. It is a sweetness, and awareness, however, that I sometimes tend to overlook, or take for granted; and it's good for me, particularly during the holidays, to step back and remember that it is not merely the marsh, or the natural cycles of things, that give me stability and even peace in a tumultuous world, but also the braid, the weave, of people passing all around me -- a current of people, friends and others, as ceaseless and interesting as the wind itself, or the currents of some broad river, or again, the flow of the seasons themselves, passing around and around the globe, year after year, bathing us in change, and at the same time bathing us in regularity, with a constancy that is remarkable, and which in my opinion follows very much in the same pattern and logic as does the human emotion of love." (p. 375)
A highly recommended book, especially for folks who are in love with the land and their place on the land, who would like to pass on their knowledge to the future, and for those of us who wish "to simply stay sane longer."