The Book of Yaak by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass [Bass, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I had, once again, meant for this whole essay to be numbers: a landslide of numbers, like brittle talus. But I cannot tolerate them, at present. There is a space in me, this short winter day, that cries out for words.

I just read that when the freshman United States Representative from Idaho, Helen Chenoweth, addressed a Wise Use-Endangered Species Conference, she told the audience that the Yaak Valley was in northern Idaho, not northern Montana, and that it was so dead and sterile that there weren't even any bugs there.

I wish to differ with the representative. I live in this vanishing valley and it is still in Montana. Many of the logs from this valley, it is true, are trucked over to mills in Idaho (did you know that the recently developed single-grip tree fellers now require only two men to run them, whereas it used to take sixteen sawyers to fell a comparable number of trees?), but the Yaak is still in Montana.

Words.

Here is a list of some of the species still found in this place.

Bull trout, gray wolf, woodland caribou, grizzly bear, wolverine, lynx, fisher, harlequin duck, golden eagle, bald eagle, torrent sculpin, sturgeon, Coeur d'Alene salamander, great gray owl, Westslope cutthroat trout, flammulated owl, short-head sculpin, northern goshawk, boreal owl, peregrine falcon, wavy moonwort, Mingan Island moonwort, Townsend's big-eared bat, small lady's slipper, common loon, sparrow's egg lady's slipper, kidney-leaved violet, maidenhair spleenwort, black-backed woodpecker, round-leaved orchid, green-keeled cottongrass, bog birch, crested shield-fern, Spalding's catchfly, linear-leaved sundew, northern golden-carpet, northern bog lemming, water howellia....

There are more, of course—a Noah's ark of diversity in this magical, totally unprotected wilderness—lions, moose, elk, bobcats, black bears, geese, grouse. The thing the earlier names all have in common is that they are on the threatened, endangered or sensitive species watch list: all imperiled, but still here, still hanging on—numbers be damned—as is my love for this place, and my hopes, in all seasons.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.