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.
