New West Book Review

Rick Bass’s “Why I Came West”

By Jenny Shank, 7-21-08

Why I Came West: A Memoir
By Rick Bass
Houghton Mifflin, 238 pages, $24

Rick Bass’ new book Why I Came West is subtitled “A Memoir,” but it’s more of a cri de coeur.  Bass spends a few pages discussing his life, explaining how he came to move to the remote Yaak Valley of northwest Montana after growing up in Houston, and devotes the rest of the book to a philosophical reflection on twenty years spent as an environmental activist.  His goal, simply put, is that he wants “the last roadless lands in the Yaak Valley to be designated as wilderness.”

Although he thought this was a fairly modest aim when his quest began, he met vehement opposition or indifference from his neighbors, logging interests, and politicians.  Bass never could have predicted the course his life would take when he left his job as a petroleum geologist in Mississippi and drove with his eventual wife west and north until they hit his “beloved supple landscape with its velvet folds and curves,” a valley in which no species has gone extinct since the last ice age. 

As Bass writes, this is “a story of love,” and so he’s never given up despite what it’s cost him.  He has been ostracized and threatened in his small community of around a hundred people (a burden his wife and daughters share) and has spent so much time in committee meetings and strategy sessions that he fears he’s lost many good years that he could have spent producing fiction.  Although he just published a terrific collection two years ago, Bass writes of “the ghost of one of my old lives, which was short story writing—the ghost I try always to keep near and hope soon to reinhabit.” This aspect of Why I Came West is a little dispiriting for fans of Bass’s fiction, but when you glance at the list of books he’s published—almost two dozen, an enviable output for any writer—you get the idea that maybe he’s lost less than he imagines.

Bass makes a convincing case that he’s not the sort of wild-eyed environmentalist that his detractors demonize him as.  He’s an avid hunter, spending several months a year shooting the meat to feed his family for the coming year.  And he soon realized that in order to reach his goal of preserving the remaining roadless areas, he had to incorporate the desires of his neighbors.  To that end, he’s worked to keep small local timber mills open and applied for grants that would allow the cutting of selected trees (useful for fire mitigation and as a source of wood for people who make their living from timber).  Bass acknowledges that the Yaak Valley isn’t an easy place to earn a living, and he understands his neighbors’ fears of losing their livelihoods if access to trees is restricted.  Still, he no longer visits the local bar after too many altercations, and is frequently attacked in the town paper.  Although Bass praises many people who he has met through his activism, you get the idea that he would agree with Sartre’s belief that hell is other people.

I consider Rick Bass an uncommonly successful person—he’s certainly one of the most respected and admired writers of the Rocky Mountain region, if not the entire country.  It was surprising then, to read Bass’s account of what he considers his many failures, chief among them his failure to secure the wilderness designation for the Yaak Valley after decades of Sisyphean struggle.

I kept thinking of Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as I read Why I Came West.  Both Bass and Kingsolver are accomplished fiction writers and passionate environmentalists, and both have, at times, let their political views slip into their fiction, but for the most part have managed to focus on telling a story as their primary goal (which is why they’ve won so many fans and accolades). 

And both Bass and Kingsolver have taken personal action to right what they see is wrong with the world.  Kingsolver’s abhorrence for foods laden with pesticides and antibiotics that are shipped long distances led her to move from Arizona to Virginia and raise much of the food she ate.  And Bass’s desire to preserve unblemished wilderness led him to spend big chunks of time writing letters to politicians, crafting op-ed pieces, and sitting in endless committee meetings. 

Kingsolver’s account of her quest was buoyant—she seemed freed by being able to write about the issues that she cares about most passionately, and did so with good humor and cheer.  Bass’s book, by contrast, is a lamentation.  His assessment of irrevocable environmental losses might be accurate, but his vision is frighteningly apocalyptic.  He writes:

“And when the bleeding is all done and the oil is all gone—not just the peak oil, but all the oil, down to the last drop—and we lie buried beneath our history, still waiting for some greater salvation or redemption to ignite us…even then, another temptation will reside beneath us and around us: if not the fluid supple allure of oil, then the densely compacted chitin of coal, the old dirty brown Paleozoic swamps, each lithified like a charred heart into brittlecake seams of strata—ten thousand years’ worth of such brittlecake.  And I fear that it will be the easiest thing in the world then to simply remain buried in this land of the fossil fuels, and to continue gnawing at the coal, worsening our problem tenfold with every sulfurous exhalation, and with the now acidic celestial dome or dark curtain above raining sulphuric hail, mercuric tempest, brimstone.”

So I guess it’s time to get into the anti-brimstone umbrella business. 

There’s a welcome shift toward optimism at the end of Why I Came West that begins with Bass’s hilarious stories of the times he’s been the victim of pepper spray meant to ward off bear attacks, and continues with Bass’s explanation of a careful plan he and his compatriots have forged, a plan he thinks just might succeed in finally designating some of the Yaak as wilderness.  I, for one, wish Bass the best of luck with his goals, which he has addressed with what he calls “engagement and the passion of desire” throughout his adult life.  I hope he achieves them soon, and heads back with some sense of peace to his writing desk.

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