All Nature Writing Should be Like This - A Review

There are beautiful books and there are important books. Winter: Notes from Montana, by Rick Bass, is both of these because through its beauty it tells us something important about how to interact with nature and then how to write about it. Profoundly moving, honest, and beautiful, it chronicles the journey into the interior of Bass’s discovery of himself in northeastern Montana’s Yaak valley. The mystery of the book is that it blends the author’s embrace of the landscape and the land’s actual physicality into a single voice. To say that the setting of the book is a character as well as the scene, is an understatement. At times it is difficult to tell if the story is about Bass or whether it is about a land exulting in and enduring winter. I’m curious about this dynamic, about the relationship between scene and writer. What makes a scene leap off a page and quicken the pulse of a reader? Does a writer come to so perfectly describe nature that nature itself lends its unspoken power to the page, or does the magic flow through the words from the reader’s own experience of the land? In other words, does the precision of the writer’s description move readers, or does the power of the author’s recollection and affection do so? In some ways this is splitting hairs. In other ways, it makes all the difference in the world. Could Rick Bass have described a picture or a video of the Yaak Valley in the same way that he could describe it after having lived there? I don’t think so.

To find out, I went to the Yaak Valley with some fellow students. The drive was long, but not so long as to dampen my excitement to see the real setting of the book. We drove from Spokane in a white, university minivan. 173 miles of heartfelt “two truths and a lie” and growing anticipation as forest thickened and mountains sprang up from the hills. We entered the Yaak Valley without fanfare. One minute we were descending the mountains on a remarkably well maintained road and the next, we had officially arrived. One of the rotations of the wheels must have pushed us over an unseen, magical line, and we were no longer driving to the Yaak, but were in the Yaak, home of legends and of ice. I suppose that when you read a book as powerful as Winter, you come to think of the setting as supernatural, alive, and even ‘other’ than the land around it. The fact is, the Yaak valley is no different than the Yaak hills, or the Yaak rises, except that it is lower. As a matter of fact, what sticks out to  me the most about the Yaak valley is the sailboat I saw adorning someone’s lawn as we arrived. At the entrance to the valley, in an unknown and overgrown yard, a blue sailboat rests on blocks, surrounded by several unwheeled cars and a rusted Chevy truck. I say the boat is blue, but really it only used to be blue. It’s blue in the same way that the grey cedar and larch barns that freckle the valley floor are brown. So the boat used to be blue, but now is grey and dusted with rust. It has no sails and its mast rises like disgraced masculinity from the deck - as powerless to propel the boat as the dirt and grass are to give it wings. The grounded skiff cast me into thought and as I pondered its contradiction and mystery, I almost forgot to see the rest of the Yaak.

I say almost, because the valley is beautiful in a way that pulls you out of your thoughts and then drives you to back to deeper ones. Orange and bearded larch play hide-and-seek behind the more subtle browns and greens of pine and fir so that you have to keep a sharp eye to glimpse the elusive fire-tree. So, too, with the white tail deer. When they come out they do not run from the car, having learned from the locals’ profound respect for the natural world that they are safe sharing the road. When the deer hide in the deep forest, however, and the trees thin to a meadow, and the clouds roll away, the snowy mountains stand out like the bedrock of the landscape. Of course, we had just driven down through those peaks, but to see the blinding white slopes, which are white in a way that only untouched cliffs can be, are white in an unconscious rejoicing, was to make sense of the landscape’s beauty. The valley is wild and old and largely untouched, but the great sprawling larch and confident deer are new compared to granite and ice. Maybe that’s why the people live in the valley.

I wonder what Rick Bass would say about that. I think he would say that living there makes all the difference in the world. I hope so, because if I can lay all my cards on the table, I didn’t see the same Yaak valley from the dirty windows of the van that I saw in Winter. I wasn’t expecting to, but it was still a little disappointing, what with Rick describing the valley with lines like, “a step up to heaven, the last place you go before the real thing.”

All of this is a bit of a straw man because I only drove into the valley, walked around a little bit, and left. Bass found himself there. And that is what makes Winter so distinctive. In describing the setting of his personal journey, he’s not simply interested in laying the backdrop for his story, but rather in describing how he opened himself up to the landscape. He embraced the Yaak not for it’s beauty alone, but for how it affected him. When I read Winter what moved me was not just the description of that land, but Bass’ willingness to open himself up to it, his wholehearted embrace of the landscape, his love for the fiber of the land. I respect it, experienced it through his writing, and even want to have it for myself. But driving through the valley, I didn’t see it. And this is a great encouragement to me because, it’s not that Bass is embellishing or making things up, but that the experience of the setting is more important than just the description of it. For Bass, absorbing the setting himself is the point, not just describing it. That seems to be something I can do.

Granted, the mountains called out to Bass even from an early age, even when he lived in a mostly flat part of Texas. He often retreated to peaks, though it meant spending most of his weekend driving to get there and back. In a way, this early fascination with the mountains prepared him for the Yaak. Bass was not sightseeing when he drove there for the first time. He was looking for a home that not only removed him from the scurry of life in the fast lane, but also resounded with his soul. No wonder, then, he says he had never felt such magic anywhere else. No wonder, then, that the Yaak drove Bass to a connection not only with nature, but with a primal side of himself. When Bass writes about the setting of his book, he is writing about a place that he is doing his best to absorb.

The beauty of the Yaak valley in Winter is as much the outpouring of Bass’ exuberance over finding and living in a place that connects with him on a spiritual level as anything else. He doesn’t merely describe snow, he pours out his amazement, fear, and childish giddiness. Where I see only a reclusive, orange tree, Bass knows the physical exertion of chopping and splitting of it, and the simple reliance upon the heat it produces in the wood stove. The point is, Bass’ description of setting is powerful because he feels powerfully about the Yaak valley.

If I take anything from Winter it will be an attempt to allow a setting to affect me before I ever try to write about it with any seriousness. I’m curious about whether a deep connection with place can happen in multiple locations, and if so, whether it can happen simultaneously. It seems that for Bass, the Yaak is the place where he feels right. I’m not saying that he wouldn’t write beautifully about other places, but the emotive power of the writing comes from his experience of the land. Bass’ describes his love for the land as much as he speaks about the beauty of it. In an almost Emersonian way, he becomes the voice of the valley as it speaks through someone who is enthralled. I suppose, then, that a way to answer the question of where the power of Bass’ description comes from is to say that it is a synthesis of the actual beauty of the land filtered through the enthusiasm and skill of the writer who has absorbed the beauty and soul of the land.

While this hints at some answers about the relationship  between writer and scene, there’s another point I want to make. While I did not feel strongly about the valley when I drove through it,  I was nevertheless able to see it through the lens of Bass’ experience. Because Bass shared vivid and pertinent details about the land around him, spotting larch became my favorite game. I gained tremendous insight from his description of the scene and I think it’s because he chose to write about details that matter. Granted, he knows they matter because he has lived there, but his decisions about what things to write about are spot on. Often, when I want to write about a setting that really moves me, I get lost in trying to find the perfect words that paint the scene in its fullness. What I learn from Bass, though, is that some details are more important than others. The main components of Bass’ setting are the snow, the trees, and the town. Yet his book spans six months. So while he surely saw and could have described different aspects of the nature around him, he focuses only on several. Whether this decision was instinctive or purposed is hard to tell. Certainly he wrote every day about his experience, but when he edited he chose what to focus on.

This selection process is something that I think often gets overlooked. And while it’s impossible to know what Bass omitted, there are things about what he included that stand out. For instance, he focuses on details that matter to his story. The trees, while beautiful, also provide other lines of tension such as the struggle to survive and stay warm, local opinions about the logging industry, a personal quest to meet his quota of firewood, and a pure delight in the labor of cutting and splitting. So too, the snow, which embodies winter, keeps neighbors in seclusion, presents a real danger of getting lost or of freezing, and provides a physical manifestation of the hibernation of life. By choosing details with multiple touch points in his story, both physically and internally, he not only is able to continually paint the beauty of the setting, but is able to examine the landscape in multi-faceted ways. It’s hard to imagine being able to describe ferns in as many ways as he does the trees in this particular story. They just aren’t as important in the Yaak valley. When I actually saw the larch trees in the Yaak valley, I saw survival, controversy, and beauty. I felt a sense of accomplishment just having noticed one between the rest of the trees. Bass doesn’t just describe the setting, he describes what it means, why it’s important, and how it touches him. 

This is helpful. Certain details or components are more important to the voice of a poem or to the plot of a story. Some elements of the setting embody diversity and should be capitalized on. Part of writing about setting has to be an awareness of what is being written and part of it has to be a conscious examination of how the landscape enhances or at least affects the themes and movements within a piece. In some ways, reading a chronicle where Bass wrote every day about his experience and then edited later is a perfect way to examine this issue. I have to assume that there was intention in what he took out and what he left in. If that’s the case, then he knew the way the scene he chose to include would complement his journey. But he couldn’t have known that going into the project. That leads me to believe that when setting the scene in a piece, it is important to write about what has moved me, but then to edit by comparing the scenic elements with the thematic and technical considerations.

Passion and restraint - that’s what I learn from Winter and from visiting the Yaak valley. Allow the landscape to affect me. Examine the world of the piece in ways that will enhance the writing. Consider the setting from multiple perspectives. I’m thankful that Bass had the vision and courage to dive into his own soul and to write so appropriately about how the Yaak valley was beautiful and terrifying to him. But I wouldn’t live there. I fact, I left the Yaak thinking about that sailboat, doomed to dream of the water, tasting it on its hull only as snow melt floods the ground and tickles its underside with a memory like an amputated leg. And what I realized is, apart from this paper, I may never write about the Yaak valley again. Sure, it may find a home in the periphery of my imagination and it might speak up if I need mountains or forests or bearded larch. One thing’s for sure, though, I will write about that sailboat.