----- Original Message -----
From: "DON BERTOLETTE" <forestorat...@msn.com>
To: "Western Native Tree Society" <wnts@googlegroups.com>, ents@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 19, 2009 10:38:57 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: [WNTS] The Wild Marsh...

WENTS/ENTS-

I have a book that I have been reading, putting down, and reading this summer. So rich is it land and forest analogies that like the surfeit that comes from too much chocolate or honey, it is easy to take my fill. It is written by Rick Bass, and called "The Wild Marsh". While it was published first in 2009, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [Boston, NewYork], Bass began this Thoreauvian journal of sorts some 8 years prior, dedicating it to his daughters, that they may look back upon themselves in wonder at the world he tries to daily show them.   Bass chronicles a year in remote Yaak Valley, Montana where he and his family have lived on and off for some twenty years.

In the chapter April, he hikes with his daughter Lowry into an old-growth grove, as the sun pushes the snow patches further and further back. I quote from page 125,

  "Again, the snow is pulled back farther. A hike with Lowry to a nearby grove reveals a carpet of deer bones, the mass boneyard of a mountain lion's winter cache: a dozen whitened legs strewn atop of one another, beneath the boughs of a big cedar. Old stories from the winter gone by being revealed, even as the onrush of new ones comes muscling in, honking in, flapping in, surging.

I tell Lowry the usual nature rap-the oldest story of all.   The bones will dissolve, and the cedar will absorb their nutrients.   The deer will be lifted into the sky. The cedar will grow even taller and thicker, even shadier.   Deer will wait out heavy snowstorms beneath the protective spread of its boughs.   The old deer legs will be caught up within the sweet grain of the wood, between the growth rings of one year and the next- the deer traveling vertically now, in the xylem and phloem, as they once picked their way gingerly and horizontally through the old forest in winter, pausing sometimes to paw at the snow with shiny black hoofs and nibble at an exposed frond of cedar seedling.”

Elsewhere, but in a low profile way, Bass bemoans that the gain in forage after a logging of old-growth forest, for deer coming out of a harsh winter needing immediate energy laden and abundant forbs, only to have lost the protection that the now-cut old-growth forests would have offered the following winter. He vowed at the start to restrain his activist tendency. In his introduction, on page 6, he says,

“This book, unlike so many of my other Yaak-based books, aims to be all celebration and all observation, without judgment or advocacy.   I’m not sure why I made that choice, with this book; perhaps in order to simply stay sane a while longer. One of the dreams and hopes I have for the Yaak is the establishment of an intricate biological survey, a series of ecological transects and measurements aimed at identifying the presence, distribution, and if possible population counts of as many different species as possible, to serve as a baseline data point for the coming century.”

Were I a younger person seeking a topic for post undergraduate study, I’d be ringing Mr. Bass up. I have a few more snippets to excerpt for WNTS/ENTS discussion, and they will follow upon my return to Anchorage later this week.

-Don

PS: In his first introductory paragraph he writes “Whether it’s true or not, I find it wonderful that Thoreau’s last words were reported to have been “Moose. Indians” More economical than even a haiku, the two words twine perfectly the occasionally but not always harmonious relationship between landscape and humanity”.

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