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Why I Came West
In this poignant look at the thirty-year journey of one of our country’s great naturalist writers, Rick Bass describes how he fell in love with the mystique of the West--as a dramatic landscape, as an idea, and as a way of life. Bass grew up in the suburban sprawl of Houston, and after attending college in Utah he spent eight years working in Mississippi as a geologist, until one day he packed up and went in search of something visceral, true, and real. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where despite extensive logging not a single species has gone extinct since the last Ice Age.
Bass has lived in “the Yaak” ever since, and in Why I Came West he chronicles his transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He explains how the rugged, wild landscape smoothed out his own rough edges; attempts to define the appeal of the West that so transfixed him as a boy, a place of mountains and outlaws and continual rebirth; and tells of his own role as a reluctant activist—sometimes at odds with his own neighbors—unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.
Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Lives of Rocks, The Diezmo, and Winter.
Bass has lived in “the Yaak” ever since, and in Why I Came West he chronicles his transformation into the writer, hunter, and environmental activist that he is today. He explains how the rugged, wild landscape smoothed out his own rough edges; attempts to define the appeal of the West that so transfixed him as a boy, a place of mountains and outlaws and continual rebirth; and tells of his own role as a reluctant activist—sometimes at odds with his own neighbors—unwilling to stand idly by and watch this treasured place disappear.
Rick Bass is the author of many acclaimed books of nonfiction and fiction, including The Lives of Rocks, The Diezmo, and Winter.
238 pages, Hardcover
First published July 3, 2008
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236 people want to read
About the author
Rick Bass
119 books485 followersRick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.
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April 5, 2018
https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/172618...
Either way, the story is again a question of fit, and of being shaped — going on a journey to escape the old ill fit, or riding into town and seeking to discover or establish one’s new fit.
The life story of Rick Bass is atypical for most of us. His is a teaching moment for those who want to listen and learn. Count me in as one of the above.
…To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one’s life…There may be different reasons for and ways of living a life, but certainly for me, those two criteria — engagement, and the passion of desire — are high on the list…There’s nothing wrong with hunger, I think, or passion, or desire — on the contrary. It’s gluttony, I think, that’s the sin.
Rick Bass writes in Why I Came West, a memoir how he eventually put his every energy into his activist-environmentalist work instead of his love for writing fiction. Reading this memoir made me feel that Bass had somehow lost himself in the process. And because environmental rewards are slow in coming, he feared his persistent frustration and anger would take over him, and his daughters would not know the real man he wanted to be. Bass has lived in the Yaak Valley in Montana for over twenty years. He ventured out only when necessary to get a living, or to fight in his attempts to protect what remained of this wilderness natural area. To imagine Bass driving into the big cities again after living in the woods for so long was unnerving. Fighting in front of our United States Congress seemed to me only to be an exercise in futility. In this memoir Bass is aging and wondering what he should do with what remains of his life and time with his young daughters. It is sad to think after all these years that he did not make a difference. Our own prospective travels around the country are patterned around the idea of seeing what remains of the magnificence of our country before it is too late. Corporate and personal greed continues to rape the land in unsettling and unimaginable degrees.
Just as the forest is being taken from us, so too — like an echo, or perhaps a foreshadowing — the language of the forest is being taken from us — insidiously, slyly, steadily — and we are being given instead, are accepting, unthinkingly, the language of machines, and the language of the sick and the diseased.
The more one reads of this book the less fun it is. Bass has obviously sacrificed a good part of his life to protect and save what amounts to 1/4 of the Yaak Valley land mass. The majority of his neighbors do not approve of his efforts. False reports about him have been printed in newspapers. Bass has sacrificed his blossoming career as a fiction writer in exchange for this environmental activism. One cannot imagine the sacrifices he has made and the relationships that have suffered due to his diligent efforts in convincing Congress to act and declare a small portion of the Yaak Valley a wilderness.
One of the fine things about living in the woods is that you often (and quickly) forget how you might appear to the outside world — a forgetfulness that is proportionate, of course, to the reduction of your involvement with that world. Among your neighbors, there’s no need to try to represent yourself as being something or someone you’re not…
Rick Bass has detailed an important history of his twenty-one year quest to designate a portion of the Yaak Valley as wilderness. An exhausting process, Bass goes on to prove how tired he is, how burned-out he feels, and how important it is for him to return to his other life of writing and enjoying his family. It is time to pass the baton to another younger person with energy Bass no longer has at his disposal. So what was proving to be a convincing argument over how taxing and frustrating the fight for wilderness designation can be turns out to be a vision of hope, of alternative measures enacted to bring opposing factions together instead of separating these warring nations further. The demanding work Rick Bass has done for years to protect our wild lands is admirable. He has my greatest respect and my solemn wish for him to live what remains of his life in peace and tranquility.
…Many have told me that it is my passion, not my ideas, that frightens people, but if I had any of it to do over again, I would have been twice so rather than half as much…
Either way, the story is again a question of fit, and of being shaped — going on a journey to escape the old ill fit, or riding into town and seeking to discover or establish one’s new fit.
The life story of Rick Bass is atypical for most of us. His is a teaching moment for those who want to listen and learn. Count me in as one of the above.
…To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one’s life…There may be different reasons for and ways of living a life, but certainly for me, those two criteria — engagement, and the passion of desire — are high on the list…There’s nothing wrong with hunger, I think, or passion, or desire — on the contrary. It’s gluttony, I think, that’s the sin.
Rick Bass writes in Why I Came West, a memoir how he eventually put his every energy into his activist-environmentalist work instead of his love for writing fiction. Reading this memoir made me feel that Bass had somehow lost himself in the process. And because environmental rewards are slow in coming, he feared his persistent frustration and anger would take over him, and his daughters would not know the real man he wanted to be. Bass has lived in the Yaak Valley in Montana for over twenty years. He ventured out only when necessary to get a living, or to fight in his attempts to protect what remained of this wilderness natural area. To imagine Bass driving into the big cities again after living in the woods for so long was unnerving. Fighting in front of our United States Congress seemed to me only to be an exercise in futility. In this memoir Bass is aging and wondering what he should do with what remains of his life and time with his young daughters. It is sad to think after all these years that he did not make a difference. Our own prospective travels around the country are patterned around the idea of seeing what remains of the magnificence of our country before it is too late. Corporate and personal greed continues to rape the land in unsettling and unimaginable degrees.
Just as the forest is being taken from us, so too — like an echo, or perhaps a foreshadowing — the language of the forest is being taken from us — insidiously, slyly, steadily — and we are being given instead, are accepting, unthinkingly, the language of machines, and the language of the sick and the diseased.
The more one reads of this book the less fun it is. Bass has obviously sacrificed a good part of his life to protect and save what amounts to 1/4 of the Yaak Valley land mass. The majority of his neighbors do not approve of his efforts. False reports about him have been printed in newspapers. Bass has sacrificed his blossoming career as a fiction writer in exchange for this environmental activism. One cannot imagine the sacrifices he has made and the relationships that have suffered due to his diligent efforts in convincing Congress to act and declare a small portion of the Yaak Valley a wilderness.
One of the fine things about living in the woods is that you often (and quickly) forget how you might appear to the outside world — a forgetfulness that is proportionate, of course, to the reduction of your involvement with that world. Among your neighbors, there’s no need to try to represent yourself as being something or someone you’re not…
Rick Bass has detailed an important history of his twenty-one year quest to designate a portion of the Yaak Valley as wilderness. An exhausting process, Bass goes on to prove how tired he is, how burned-out he feels, and how important it is for him to return to his other life of writing and enjoying his family. It is time to pass the baton to another younger person with energy Bass no longer has at his disposal. So what was proving to be a convincing argument over how taxing and frustrating the fight for wilderness designation can be turns out to be a vision of hope, of alternative measures enacted to bring opposing factions together instead of separating these warring nations further. The demanding work Rick Bass has done for years to protect our wild lands is admirable. He has my greatest respect and my solemn wish for him to live what remains of his life in peace and tranquility.
…Many have told me that it is my passion, not my ideas, that frightens people, but if I had any of it to do over again, I would have been twice so rather than half as much…
March 9, 2016
These essays are the parallel, the mirror, the bookend to Wild to the Heart. Not the coda— we’re still far off from that— but the counterweight, the follow-up, the cost. Wild to the Heart was pre-Montana, before the love story. This is the twenty-year toll of that love story.
Which makes it oh, so necessary. We grow, we learn, we tire, we change. We’re ten different people within the span of our lives and that’s the important part, the vital and rare part— to get to look back and see the span of it. For Bass it’s geologist, novelist, essayist, activist: the flux and flow through three decades of work. But for him, like everyone, it’s never discarding the one thing for another. It’s the accumulation, the striation, like glaciers, like rocks. Like us. Changed, and the same, through the geologic millennia of our so-brief, fire-starter lives.
Once you’ve read a lot of Rick Bass, this is where to come for the crucial puzzle piece— not the final one, just the linking one. The long marriage of any love story, the most important part.
(Also, I think the four stars are just to see if I could. What’s more impossible, to give it four stars or to give every one of them five?)
Which makes it oh, so necessary. We grow, we learn, we tire, we change. We’re ten different people within the span of our lives and that’s the important part, the vital and rare part— to get to look back and see the span of it. For Bass it’s geologist, novelist, essayist, activist: the flux and flow through three decades of work. But for him, like everyone, it’s never discarding the one thing for another. It’s the accumulation, the striation, like glaciers, like rocks. Like us. Changed, and the same, through the geologic millennia of our so-brief, fire-starter lives.
Once you’ve read a lot of Rick Bass, this is where to come for the crucial puzzle piece— not the final one, just the linking one. The long marriage of any love story, the most important part.
(Also, I think the four stars are just to see if I could. What’s more impossible, to give it four stars or to give every one of them five?)
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December 10, 2019It's fascinating to read the writing of someone you know, because it will always read differently than the way you know that person. I know Rick as the "Ohmagawsh-you-got-Rick-Bass?!" instructor in my creative writing program which I completed two years ago. Now I also know him as the man who thinks about the time he has left and wonders if he wisely spent the time he had. I mean, all of that is sprinkled into some sensational writing about nature and his decades spent trying to keep nature nature. So really, I guess I think the "aboutness" of this book is coming to grips with the decay of what we see as our individual natural state--in Rick's case, abundance of energy and passion.
There is some sensational writing here because Rick writes sensationally. Proof:
There is some sensational writing here because Rick writes sensationally. Proof:
So I can see what has shaped me; I can identify, fairly easily, those forces, images, and impressions toward which I was already disposed, and which have brought richness and complexity to my life, and have -- gradually, because I am a slow learner -- helped teach me things about natural processes, which have also been helpful in how I look at the rest of the world and my place and goals and manners in that world. Lessons such as the discovery that you can possess seemingly competing and even oppositional ideas, and discoveries such as the notion that you don’t have to be perfect in the world, just sensate and passionate, which is sometimes as challenging as perfection. Perfection -- in the biological sense -- has come slowly to all the other species that have been here so many millions of years longer than we have; how many millions more do we have to wait, and work, and yearn? Surely being sensate and passionate are the first two basic steps across those millions-of-years-yet-to-come. It will not come in this lifetime.
The next day, the world, and our youth, would open up all over again, with pretty much the same wonderful pacing, though with enough slightly different variations each day -- new things explored, or old favorites revisited -- to keep us in love with that world and, not least of all, each other. The days were like the fine beds of strata that form in perfect parallel, one thin day atop another, as if at the bottom of a still lake, and then one year after another.
I hear, and feel, that yearning to slow down and step back; and I do not know what to do except to keep doing both things, the thing and the shadow of the thing -- making the pretty little pictures and continuing also the slogging grunt-work of the hardcore activist -- until one day, I assume, nothing will be left.
It is a survival mechanism, entering this attenuated place of waiting where, after having dreamed the dream and assembled the parts, and assisted, with your noble compatriots, in designing a plan, and then presenting it to the world and lobbying for it -- beseeching, and fighting, and plotting, and beseeching again -- the point at which you realize that you have done all you can do, have given your best and most honest effort every day, and every night, and that not so suddenly, life has passed you by.
November 28, 2023
At the publication of this book, Rick Bass had spent more than two decades advocating for the Yaak Valley located in Northwest Montana. Instead of approaching environmental issues from an acute angle, perhaps incorporating such agendas into his fiction, Bass has charged head on into the battle, trying to affect change the only way it can be done nowadays, through politics. For him, the end goal is to have the 180,000 acre Yaak Valley designated as Wilderness by the US government. This book is his historical recount of his struggle, the slow uphill drudgery.
Bass’s dedication is admirable. It’s no fun, and he keeps promising himself that one of these days, next year, in two years, he will step down and be free to commit himself entirely to what he loves to do: write fiction. But with each year comes glimpses of success, of the end, which each time retreats a little farther down the path when spotted, trailing him along. After 21 years, Bass feels it, the dreaded burnout:
He hasn’t to succumb to it, but he’s aware of its lurking presence. As he states later on, it is a coping mechanism. Similar to how extreme stress can lead to apathy, your body shutting down to end the unceasing tension. And then there are those who fight the environmentalists like Bass, who are
From what I can gather it seems that since this book’s publication Bass has continued the good work. In an article in the Mountain Journal published this year, Bass advocates for turning Black Ram Forest into a Climate Refuge, a new solution and model for fighting climate change in which the stored carbon in this ancient forest is left undisturbed. Sadly, according to the article, the forest is scheduled to be clear-cut. Thank you Rick Bass for fighting for the thing we all need, but which most of us can’t be bothered about.
Bass’s dedication is admirable. It’s no fun, and he keeps promising himself that one of these days, next year, in two years, he will step down and be free to commit himself entirely to what he loves to do: write fiction. But with each year comes glimpses of success, of the end, which each time retreats a little farther down the path when spotted, trailing him along. After 21 years, Bass feels it, the dreaded burnout:
It is the crime of weariness, and possesses also the brittle self-righteousness of believing sometimes that your heart is purer or your manners nobler than those of your opponents: for in choosing not to fight any longer, to not lie down in the mud pit of small-town fears, and to begin to serve yourself rather than a Cause, or the mountains themselves, you cross I think some threshold of scorn and arrive in the place of I-just-don’t give-a-damn-anymore. (215)
He hasn’t to succumb to it, but he’s aware of its lurking presence. As he states later on, it is a coping mechanism. Similar to how extreme stress can lead to apathy, your body shutting down to end the unceasing tension. And then there are those who fight the environmentalists like Bass, who are
so filled with a hate and a rage within that they must have a scapegoat, must hate another with that terrible blackness – the blackness of their hurt and outraged and stunted, tiny hearts, if they themselves are not to be crushed by it, the poison within. (147)Bass has his doubts, and wonders if it may have actually ended up better if he had never come to the valley at all, if he had kept silent. It is difficult – near impossible – to make progress toward achieving something that stands in the way of others getting every other possible something. It’s discouraging and tiring, trying to swim against the overwhelming current of consumerism and industrialization. And
[w]hat hope, really, you wonder some days, do we have of effecting any real positive change in the world, when in reality we’re so puny and fragile? (148)At the same time, Bass understands that no matter how ineffective, we must do something, anything, to buy at least a little more time. Regarding the momentousness of this present time and our vested responsibility, Bass writes:
I cannot shake the feeling that it is somehow we in this moment who possess a greater responsibility than all the sinners who preceded us – for never before have the imperfect been so charged with the clear knowledge of the consequences of those wrongs. (98)How long must we wait, remaining blind to the fact that we need nature, wilderness? But then again, do we all need wilderness? I may be speaking for only a minority. In A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There Leopold opens with:
There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot…Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free…The whole conflict thus boils down to a question of degree. We of the minority see a law of diminishing returns in progress; our opponents do not. (vii)But don’t take Bass to be a staunch oppositionist to technological advancement. Bass is imperfect, and recognizes his own dependence on things like fossil fuels, his own unsustainable-ness. He is very aware of the current situation, and is a realist. For example, he is not against logging, which has been integral to the economy of Montana since its inception. In fact, he sees the potential for logging to help make the forests healthy again, by reducing overcrowding and thereby make water more available to the trees that are left standing. What Bass is against is the type of logging that that cuts down an entire forest, that leaves nothing left but stumps, logging roads, and barrenness. Bass stresses the importance of searching for creative solutions, instead of merely lambasting the current system.
From what I can gather it seems that since this book’s publication Bass has continued the good work. In an article in the Mountain Journal published this year, Bass advocates for turning Black Ram Forest into a Climate Refuge, a new solution and model for fighting climate change in which the stored carbon in this ancient forest is left undisturbed. Sadly, according to the article, the forest is scheduled to be clear-cut. Thank you Rick Bass for fighting for the thing we all need, but which most of us can’t be bothered about.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 30, 2017
My one-phrase rundown: It’s what you’ve come to expect from Rick Bass – beautiful prose about some wondrous, and some ugly, stuff.
The first few chapters of the book touch, at various moments, the topic on which my sullen envy of Rick Bass rests. The Adventures of Rick and the Magical Yaak Valley.
He discusses at length and with much heart the special qualities that make the Yaak so unique, from the weather to patches of uncut forests to furtive grizzlies and the occasional visitor of the most clarion clan when it comes to solitude, the giant weasel we choose to poetically call the wolverine.
My envy stems not simply from these things, incredible though they are unto themselves. It comes from the fact that Rick and his wife aimlessly wandered into the Yaak – after having left the lucrative world of petroleum geology behind – and were guided by fate to settle there. And thusly with little to no effort he found his place in the world. Not a certain job, or a nice neighborhood – his place in the world. He found a landscape which called to him in a voice that some – most? – people will never hear, much less follow. For those of us seeking such places, however, it is a fairy tale. It’s as if, without knowing, he followed a beam of light to the Promised Land while others wander in thick fog with a fading flashlight.
Having explained and validated that streak of jealousy, I moved into other topics, some made familiar by previous readings. He goes into detail about hunting, and how much sense it makes to his life in the Yaak. He also, sadly, spends not a small amount of verbage in reminding the reader just how ugly the social discourse surrounding logging in the northwest US has been. His descriptions of the hatred he has experienced can seem repetitive, because it often is the same groups of people – the same kinds of people – making the same arguments and threats, year after year.
His tales of being hit with bear spray was a nice essay – reminiscent of my own experiences with the volatile stuff – but it was only a feint, a momentary diversion away from the local-community war stories of public land management policy. In the end, he doubted his own fitness to continue these battles but finally decided to be thankful that he was able to fight, and keep fighting, the good fight. We should all so humble and hopeful about our lives.
The first few chapters of the book touch, at various moments, the topic on which my sullen envy of Rick Bass rests. The Adventures of Rick and the Magical Yaak Valley.
He discusses at length and with much heart the special qualities that make the Yaak so unique, from the weather to patches of uncut forests to furtive grizzlies and the occasional visitor of the most clarion clan when it comes to solitude, the giant weasel we choose to poetically call the wolverine.
My envy stems not simply from these things, incredible though they are unto themselves. It comes from the fact that Rick and his wife aimlessly wandered into the Yaak – after having left the lucrative world of petroleum geology behind – and were guided by fate to settle there. And thusly with little to no effort he found his place in the world. Not a certain job, or a nice neighborhood – his place in the world. He found a landscape which called to him in a voice that some – most? – people will never hear, much less follow. For those of us seeking such places, however, it is a fairy tale. It’s as if, without knowing, he followed a beam of light to the Promised Land while others wander in thick fog with a fading flashlight.
Having explained and validated that streak of jealousy, I moved into other topics, some made familiar by previous readings. He goes into detail about hunting, and how much sense it makes to his life in the Yaak. He also, sadly, spends not a small amount of verbage in reminding the reader just how ugly the social discourse surrounding logging in the northwest US has been. His descriptions of the hatred he has experienced can seem repetitive, because it often is the same groups of people – the same kinds of people – making the same arguments and threats, year after year.
His tales of being hit with bear spray was a nice essay – reminiscent of my own experiences with the volatile stuff – but it was only a feint, a momentary diversion away from the local-community war stories of public land management policy. In the end, he doubted his own fitness to continue these battles but finally decided to be thankful that he was able to fight, and keep fighting, the good fight. We should all so humble and hopeful about our lives.
December 28, 2018
A tough read. The introduction tells why he came west. The book could be better titled “Why I stayed out West”. In any case the author stumbles into the Yaak Valley in northwest Montana about a quarter century ago with a desire to live simply as a writer and falls in the love with the land. He evolves into an ardent protector of the land seeking the highest protection of land in the United States, that carrying a designation of Wilderness so described by the Wilderness Act of 1964. It takes an act of congress to get such a designation and it is not easily obtained. His passion and his efforts have to be appreciated but he expresses a lot of anger or as he calls it caterwauling. Through this book you get a flavor for what it is like to live on the front lines of the wilderness preservation movement in a small town sustained by an extractive industry. It is not pleasant. He is a soldier in an ongoing war and his life is probably duplicated throughout the rural west. I sincerely thank him for his sacrifice. Secondly, he has opened my eyes to a part of the country I had driven past while heading for Banff and Jasper. We can’t preserve enough of what is left uncut.
February 7, 2018
I think this is an important book by an author who has worked steadily and ceaselessly to preserve the tiny corner of Montana in which he and his family live. He has been through a lot of heartbreak and has experienced enraged neighbors as he has tried to get this area declared a Wilderness Area with certain protections. Towards the end of this book (which is really more short essays than a memoir) he states that he is not as alone as earlier in this quest; there are more neighbors joining him to preserve the area - and there is more support from his elected representatives. This is in many ways a heartbreaking story, and rather difficult to read - especially in 2017, a less optimistic time than when the book was written.
January 12, 2014
In the afterward Bass writes: "I feel like apologizing to the reader who might have picked up this book hoping, perhaps, for lyrical descriptions of a fantastic and mythic landscape, only to find a disproportionate amount of caterwauling" (229). Indeed. But the first few essays are gems, especially #2: "Landscape and imagination" and the rest show the toll a life of political activism can take on an artist's creativity and personality.
November 16, 2008
I generally love Bass, and parts of this memoir were fantastic, but mostly it is repetitive and a bit conflicted in its purpose.
February 16, 2015
I have always wondered, as I have read Rick Bass over the years, how the protection of his adopted Yaak Valley in Montana was progressing, but I never could follow it because it seemed and seems so hopeless, and I prefer the hopeful. Tell me of the gains the environmental movement has made protecting this coastline, this shoreline; don’t tell me how long and hard and passionately and humanly Bass has worked in vain to protect the Yaak. Even after reading this book with its ending on a hopeful note, that maybe, maybe he has broken through the inhuman opposition, I can’t go online and find out. I need to know both that he is still fighting for it and that it is still a possibility. I can’t know he and his neighbors have failed or given up, even though I would have long ago. I know I would have. This book has a misleading title, it is entirely about his activism, and his activism didn’t bring him West but became who he was. I would have titled it, How I Became the West, or Why I Became the Defender of the West. This is another in a line of amazing books about activist heroes and heroines that fulfill Emerson’s successful life decree: to try to leave a positive legacy on the planet. Bass’s contribution is so multidimensional and meaningful: from his words and art of writing, fiction and natural history, to his protection of wilderness, to his children who might have the most amazing upbringing in this day and age. Bass writing elsewhere:
“In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century.
For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.”
So much of what he writes resonates with me, and I am glad I continue to read him and continue to hope for his home. His words are pure beauty and perhaps resonate with me since he is a geologist and geologists have been such guides for me in exploration of our external and internal landscapes.
“…so immediate was my attraction for the place I now call home-the place where I have lived for the past twenty one years- that I would be hard put to argue that there might not have always existed a kind of magnetism, operating in either the subterranean earthworks of the layered substrate or in the equally inscrutable celestial arrangement of sky and unseen constellations- the magnetism of planets and black hole gravities exerting a fierce call on the specific directions and probabilities, if not quite the ultimate destinies, of all below- that summoned me from my claustrophobic and uniplanar childhood in the petrochemical redoubt of Houston, Texas toward the high country of Montana.
Much as I would like to believe something like that was at work in my life, I still have my doubts, for it seems to imply a mightier importance, that such foreordination to exist there must be a quite significant relationship between ourselves and the rest of the world. It suggests that in terms or matters of spirit, we may be more important to the world-and the landscape- than we really are. And yet-again, I vacillate- for certain, such predestinies, summonings, and geomagnetisms exist for the wild geese and salmon, fro the cranes and wild ducks. So although our own species is much younger and less fitted to the world, less integral and integrated than those more ancient residents, might not similar accommodations, or rather, negotiations, exist for and within us, after all?
It is possible.
It is possible also that there is simply a grand luck in the world, and that I fell privy to it.
It could be posited also that we are shaped and directed by landscape at every turn of our existence- that such sculpting not only occurred in our deeper, more primitive past, but is every bit as ongoing now as it has ever been. “
“Lesson such as the discovery that you can possess seemingly competing and even oppositional ideas, and discoveries such as the notion that you don’t have to be perfect in the world, just sensate and passionate, which is sometimes as challenging as perfection. Perfection- in the biological sense - has come slowly to all the other species that have been here so many millions of years longer than we have; how many millions more do we have to wait, and work, and yearn? Surely being sensate and passionate are the first two basic steps across those millions-of-years-yet-to-come.”
“Do our personal destinies lie below us, with powerful predispositions, or do they exist more strongly in the world-above, with its scour of wind and ice, its tongues of flames, and all its other magnificent testing and fashionings of our spirit.
I think the answer is an unsatisfying both: a unique and authentic, time-crafted land will certainly sculpt your fit to it, but there can also exist a summons- an unseen tendril of logic and grace-of fittedness- that has not yet been achieved, with every bit as much of the power and unseen subtle elegance of mere electrons and neutrons and protons…That as there is a chemistry of soil and stone, so too there might be a chemistry of spirit, a kind of awareness or trembling pre-awareness…”
“…the unifying thread of the West was water, or the absence of it…but there is something else, too, some unseen thread of spirit. Perhaps it’s best not to pick or pluck at that thread too closely-perhaps what we perceive as spirit in the West is really only something as heartless or lifeless as geology, with the rock outcroppings of the East being some several million years older so that the half-life decay of sun-burnished ions in the West seems still to radiate a bracing and at times intoxicating freshness, able still to be felt and noticed if not yet measured by even a species as insensate as our own. Perhaps science will one day ultimately to be at the heart of religion, or faith…but for now, no such explanation or discovery exists, only the inexplicable awareness that there is a difference between the West and the rest of the country, and that it is no less profound for its ungraspable immeasurability.
So powerful can be this bond between westerners and landscape that it’s possible to believe that the West might have existed in our brainpans long before the first paleface ever dreamed of conquest…As human culture in the Deep South and the East is stacked in vertical layers of time, like geological strata, perhaps the building blocks of the West, are composed of chunks of physical space-basin and range, sunlight, boulder, forest, river, desert-possessing more of a horizontal breath.”
“In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century.
For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.”
So much of what he writes resonates with me, and I am glad I continue to read him and continue to hope for his home. His words are pure beauty and perhaps resonate with me since he is a geologist and geologists have been such guides for me in exploration of our external and internal landscapes.
“…so immediate was my attraction for the place I now call home-the place where I have lived for the past twenty one years- that I would be hard put to argue that there might not have always existed a kind of magnetism, operating in either the subterranean earthworks of the layered substrate or in the equally inscrutable celestial arrangement of sky and unseen constellations- the magnetism of planets and black hole gravities exerting a fierce call on the specific directions and probabilities, if not quite the ultimate destinies, of all below- that summoned me from my claustrophobic and uniplanar childhood in the petrochemical redoubt of Houston, Texas toward the high country of Montana.
Much as I would like to believe something like that was at work in my life, I still have my doubts, for it seems to imply a mightier importance, that such foreordination to exist there must be a quite significant relationship between ourselves and the rest of the world. It suggests that in terms or matters of spirit, we may be more important to the world-and the landscape- than we really are. And yet-again, I vacillate- for certain, such predestinies, summonings, and geomagnetisms exist for the wild geese and salmon, fro the cranes and wild ducks. So although our own species is much younger and less fitted to the world, less integral and integrated than those more ancient residents, might not similar accommodations, or rather, negotiations, exist for and within us, after all?
It is possible.
It is possible also that there is simply a grand luck in the world, and that I fell privy to it.
It could be posited also that we are shaped and directed by landscape at every turn of our existence- that such sculpting not only occurred in our deeper, more primitive past, but is every bit as ongoing now as it has ever been. “
“Lesson such as the discovery that you can possess seemingly competing and even oppositional ideas, and discoveries such as the notion that you don’t have to be perfect in the world, just sensate and passionate, which is sometimes as challenging as perfection. Perfection- in the biological sense - has come slowly to all the other species that have been here so many millions of years longer than we have; how many millions more do we have to wait, and work, and yearn? Surely being sensate and passionate are the first two basic steps across those millions-of-years-yet-to-come.”
“Do our personal destinies lie below us, with powerful predispositions, or do they exist more strongly in the world-above, with its scour of wind and ice, its tongues of flames, and all its other magnificent testing and fashionings of our spirit.
I think the answer is an unsatisfying both: a unique and authentic, time-crafted land will certainly sculpt your fit to it, but there can also exist a summons- an unseen tendril of logic and grace-of fittedness- that has not yet been achieved, with every bit as much of the power and unseen subtle elegance of mere electrons and neutrons and protons…That as there is a chemistry of soil and stone, so too there might be a chemistry of spirit, a kind of awareness or trembling pre-awareness…”
“…the unifying thread of the West was water, or the absence of it…but there is something else, too, some unseen thread of spirit. Perhaps it’s best not to pick or pluck at that thread too closely-perhaps what we perceive as spirit in the West is really only something as heartless or lifeless as geology, with the rock outcroppings of the East being some several million years older so that the half-life decay of sun-burnished ions in the West seems still to radiate a bracing and at times intoxicating freshness, able still to be felt and noticed if not yet measured by even a species as insensate as our own. Perhaps science will one day ultimately to be at the heart of religion, or faith…but for now, no such explanation or discovery exists, only the inexplicable awareness that there is a difference between the West and the rest of the country, and that it is no less profound for its ungraspable immeasurability.
So powerful can be this bond between westerners and landscape that it’s possible to believe that the West might have existed in our brainpans long before the first paleface ever dreamed of conquest…As human culture in the Deep South and the East is stacked in vertical layers of time, like geological strata, perhaps the building blocks of the West, are composed of chunks of physical space-basin and range, sunlight, boulder, forest, river, desert-possessing more of a horizontal breath.”
April 7, 2022
A passionate treatise on the importance of wilderness and the perils of advocacy.
February 2, 2011
I checked out this book at the suggestion of a friend who admired it. My problem going in was that I imagined it to be more of a memoir, when in truth it is a collection of essays. Bass, a sometimes writing of short fiction and poet, has spent much of his life as an activist in Montana, working on environmental issues. The chapter titles of the book suggest its contents: Why I Came West, Landscape and Imagination, The Community of Glaciers, Wood, Oil, The Poison of Language, Fourteen Gardens, Bear Spray Stories. The gist of the book might be summed up this way. The Yaak Valley of Montana is a beautiful and bio-diverse area that needs to be protected from predatory industrial timber practices by being designated as a federally protected wilderness area. Most efforts in that direction to date have failed. It's darned hard and discouraging work to promote environmentally sound legislation and practices. Bass's voice alternates from lyrical and poetic to strident and almost pompous. Still, you have to love somebody who has found a cause about which he is passionate, and who is willing to soldier on in an effort to promote it. My recommendation, read the first few essays, and skip any that start to fray your nerves.
August 24, 2013
I agree with many of the other reviews on Goodreads concerning Rick Bass's Why I Came West: A Memoir. The book read more like a collection of essays than a memoir, and some of the essays became quickly repetitive and, sometimes, a bit contradictory. The essays could stand individually in magazines and literary journals, but once pared together, each chapter starts to gradually look like the same familiar face. I felt that a more appropriate title for the book would have been Why I Stayed West.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and appreciated the way it made me think about setting, creativity, activism, small town communities, and my relationship to those subjects. It was difficult to relate to Bass's interests in hunting, but I felt as if I understood him. His landscape was different from the woods where I grew up, but I felt as if I had been there before. I found myself often re-reading passages of past chapter, because I wanted desperately to remember just the way he worded a phrase or sentence.
I'm not sure if I will have the opportunity to recommend this book frequently in the future, but I have a feeling I will reference its thoughts and certain essays more than a time or two.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and appreciated the way it made me think about setting, creativity, activism, small town communities, and my relationship to those subjects. It was difficult to relate to Bass's interests in hunting, but I felt as if I understood him. His landscape was different from the woods where I grew up, but I felt as if I had been there before. I found myself often re-reading passages of past chapter, because I wanted desperately to remember just the way he worded a phrase or sentence.
I'm not sure if I will have the opportunity to recommend this book frequently in the future, but I have a feeling I will reference its thoughts and certain essays more than a time or two.
March 1, 2015
"A Memoir". Well, not most of the time. Most of the time it was a passionate rant about preserving the "last road-less areas of the Yaak", not a memoir. At the same time I sympathize with Rick Bass and what he is trying to do, I don't believe his rhetoric, in this book at least, is going to convince many people to join in. He has found approval in the environmentalist movement but I don't think he'll convince people that are not already on board.
The Author also laments a life fighting, always fighting, for the Yaak and he asks himself whether it is all worth it. I can't answer that question but the tone of the book leads me to believe he allowed the joy to be sucked out of his life and that is a shame.
I was hoping for a memoir through and through and at points it was. The chapter where he talks about the four times he sprayed himself with bear repellent was funny, candid and refreshing. I wish he had taken the same tact in all the chapters.
The Author also laments a life fighting, always fighting, for the Yaak and he asks himself whether it is all worth it. I can't answer that question but the tone of the book leads me to believe he allowed the joy to be sucked out of his life and that is a shame.
I was hoping for a memoir through and through and at points it was. The chapter where he talks about the four times he sprayed himself with bear repellent was funny, candid and refreshing. I wish he had taken the same tact in all the chapters.
September 17, 2014
I picked up this book because I love to read about places, especially wild places, then discovered that the writer and I have a few things in common. Rick Bass is a longtime environmental activist who longs to return to writing fiction and poetry, but feels called to stay in the "fight" to get the Yaak area in Montana designated as a wilderness area. He's been at it for 21 years. It's a tough call, I know. It was only after we achieved a nuclear test ban (my goal) that I could shift my focus to spiritual teaching and a return to writing poetry. Bass is an accomplished writer. The book is well-written and his dilemma very clearly elucidated for the reader. One favorite part of the book is his list of recommendations for how the reader can help with his goal. My advice to Bass? Don't give up what you love in order to do what you feel you have to do. Find a way to do them both.
June 3, 2016
I had mixed feelings about the book. First of all the title is a bit misleading, Rick spends little time discussing his decision to move to Montana and live very much "off the grid," a subject that very much fascinates me. What this book is instead is more about his struggle to preserve the Yaak, the last roadless area in the continental United States; a struggle he has been involved with for 20 years much to the sacrifice of his artistic endeavors. I don't blame him for continuing to write on the subject that has become his life's work even more than his writing; it is a worthy cause. But I cannot feign interest either. I wanted to know why he moved west. I wanted more stories of his life in the wild of Montana. But it's Rick Bass my favorite author. To me even his books that leave me disappointed are still worth reading.
November 25, 2012
Rick Bass is an author who grew up in Houston, went to college, worked as a geologist and then moved and settled in the Yaak valley, a remote area in Northwestern Montana. This book explores why he chose to live there and of his efforts to preserve the area.
He describes the environmental issues, the political battles but most interesting to me were his descriptions of interacting with the other residents of the Yaak valley, some allies, many strongly opposed to his efforts. Later chapters describe efforts to find common ground with his neighbor opponents and his ruminations balancing his concerns that he was becoming too moderate or too polemic or too tired with the need for concrete steps to preserve the valley that he fell in love with
He describes the environmental issues, the political battles but most interesting to me were his descriptions of interacting with the other residents of the Yaak valley, some allies, many strongly opposed to his efforts. Later chapters describe efforts to find common ground with his neighbor opponents and his ruminations balancing his concerns that he was becoming too moderate or too polemic or too tired with the need for concrete steps to preserve the valley that he fell in love with
January 25, 2016
Why I Came West: A Memoir by Rick Bass (Mariner Books 2009)(Biography). I've enjoyed Rick Bass' writings for the most part, and I find his dedication to his adopted homerange in the Yaak Valley touching. Bass is at his best when writing about the animals and plants that surround him; I was hoping for more than the series of philosophical essays through which the author meanders in this aimless volume. My rating: 6/10, finished 2/25/14.
August 2, 2014
The title is somewhat misleading as most of the book focuses on Bass' advocacy work on behalf of wilderness designation in the Yaak. Great read for anyone in that line of work (conservation advocacy), as Bass makes delightful analogies that compares the work to glaciers and other natural features. Also, great reading for anyone who finds their love of the outdoors brings them to small Western towns
June 9, 2014
Bass has a great way with words, however this falls into the 'don't judge a book by it's cover' category. Picking it up, I assumed it would be about the move, enjoyment, and challenges about living in the west. However, it was mostly about his activism and fight against the logging companies in the area. Not a bad book, just don't expect it to be about hunting or anything like that.
August 14, 2013
Rick Bass came to our library years back. I hadn't realized how active he was politically, but his preface that summarized his experience with the Yaak Valley and how he needed to be there really explains my relationship with Telluride and gave me permission to stay for 8 years.
September 17, 2009
Had to read this in order to edit a scanned digital version for the blind/visually impaired, but I'm glad I did. I don't think I have ever met someone this passionate as he is about the place he calls home. It's inspiring.
September 17, 2009
Excellent memoir from noted naturalist Rick Bass about his decision to live and fight for the safeguarding of the land through safe logging practices and preserving a portion of the land from development.
January 28, 2009
I've got a lot of respect for Rick Bass and so I was glad to read about his activism. But I found many of the essays in the book somewhat repetitive and, honestly, a little dull.
Currently reading
July 23, 2009Magnificent prose, drawing parallels between landscape and fiction; a passionate apologia for wild spaces and a plea for saving what's left.
June 14, 2012
This was a series of essays that weren't really what I was expecting from the description and reviews I had seen. Bass is undoubtedly an excellent writer, but it wasn't really for me.
Read
April 30, 2012I think this book sucks! The writing style is hard to follow and way too wordy. That's too bad too because this subject could be very interesting.
February 5, 2014
Beautiful, engaging language. Gets a bit dry and overly "preaching-to-the-choir" toward the end.
Want to read
March 4, 2008Well, I hope to be reading this book soon. It all depends on the HCN.
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