Rick Bass’s “Platte River”

By Jenny Shank, 3-15-07

Platte River,
By Rick Bass
Bison Books,$18.95

This month the University of Nebraska Press released a paperback edition of Platte River, a collection of three long stories by Rick Bass that was originally published in 1994.  Platte River was Bass’s second published book of fiction, and though it doesn’t measure up to some of his more recent work, there are intimations of the formidable writer that Bass would become, particularly in the title novella, the story of an ex-NFL athlete who lives in the Montana woods with a longtime girlfriend who is in the process of leaving him.

I first discovered Rick Bass through the 1996 edition of the Best American Short Stories, which reprinted his story “Fires.” I was at college in northern Indiana, suffering through the dreary winter there and missing home, so I was particularly vulnerable to Bass’s story of the attraction that develops during a fire-plagued summer between a young woman who comes to the Montana mountains to train as a runner and a year-round resident.  After that I read all of Bass’s fiction and a lot of his nonfiction--since the prolific Bass has published nearly two-dozen books it’s difficult to keep up with him.

I’d somehow missed Platte River until now, which is an even more interesting book in the context of his career than it is on its own.  Two of the three stories in this collection contain traces of magical realism, an approach that Bass largely abandoned later.  The magic in his stories now is mostly of the natural sort—the wonders of the earth conspiring to bring his characters low or inspiring them to reach high. 

The first story, “Mahatma Joe,” concerns a white itinerant preacher who moves with his Inuit wife from Alaska to Montana’s Grass Valley after he finished converting all the inhabitants of his wife’s village to Christianity.  He learns of Grass Valley because of its Naked Days celebration, “where no one wore clothes at any time, not even when they went in for groceries, not even when they went into the saloon…It was hard to describe the sense of freedom Chinooks brought, after the entrapment of winter.”

“Mahatma Joe,” Bass writes, “put an end to Naked Days almost single-handedly.” But his successes stopped there, as he found this group of Montanans difficult to convert.  So he spends his time growing and canning fruits and vegetables to send to famine victims in Africa.  One spring he and his wife Lily decide to plant a grander garden in better land that they find in a valley on the other side of a frozen lake.  They skate across the lake at night and work the ground. 

Meanwhile, Leena, a young woman who is fleeing a bad relationship by living in a tent in that valley watches their progress. This story reminded me of a later, more fully realized Bass story, the title tale in his 2002 collection The Hermit’s Story, which also focuses on a fantastic and harrowing experience amid winter ice.  I found the later work to be more satisfying.  In “Mahatma Joe,” Lily, who develops into a very endearing character, falls through the ice and Mahatma Joe and Leena go on caring for the garden like nothing happened.  The story suggests that they did so in her honor, but it just seems cruel, as they don’t even take a night’s break.

The second story in Platte River seemed an oddity to me.  “Field Events” is the story of two strapping, discuss-throwing brothers in rural New York who find a big naked man swimming in the Sacandaga River, and naturally decide to bring him home and introduce him to their fetching spinster sister.  The sister and the big man, A.C., fall in love, of course, but the story never reaches the heights that Bass is capable of.  It was one of Bass’s first attempts to create a portrait of an athlete, a task I think he better accomplished in “Fires” with the runner and in “The Watch,” the title story from his first collection about a cyclist named Jesse training on dusty Texas roads.

The final story in the collection, “Platte River,” contains the sort of twists and turns, melancholy, humor, and natural beauty that are Bass’s trademarks.  “Shaw used to be a model and is still beautiful, fierce and timid both, like a coyote or a wild dog,” Bass writes.  Shaw makes plans to leave her ex-football player boyfriend Harley for good this time, and meanwhile Harley goes off to visit an old college football buddy in Michigan who teaches at an art school and has arranged for him to receive a speaking fee in exchange for making a presentation to his students.  The story meanders beautifully as Harley muses about his relationship gone wrong and meets his friend’s fellow teachers, one of whom is suicidal in part because he has had no luck landing a fish in months.

Bass intermingles the characters’ past as football players with their present as outdoorsmen expertly, as in this passage when Harley is trying to reel in a fish: “What it feels like, to Harley, is that he has hooked into a linebacker.  He might as well be standing on a football field, having cast his fly toward the jersey of an all-American, and that all-American is running down the field, running toward Canada, surfing down the center of the river, under water, running.”

The culminating scene, in which Harley stages a bizarre display of physical skills in front of his friend’s class, is weird and wonderful.  (His friend instructs the students, “Next we’ll touch this man, to see what it’s like to be as strong as he is.”) It’s just the sort of surprise that all Bass’s best fiction contains, and Platte River is worth reading for this moment alone.