Nonfiction review: The Wild Marsh

NONFICTION
Readers hoping Rick Bass' new work of nonfiction, "The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana," would advocate on behalf of his beloved Yaak Valley will have to be satisfied with a few paragraphs that appear on Page 5.

"I have spent the bulk of my adult life advocating for the permanent protection of these wilder, farther places in the Yaak through the congressional designation of wilderness areas," Bass writes. "But right here, right now, is -- in this book -- the only time you'll hear me carry on about any of that."

Instead, Bass has written a book that "aims to be all celebration and all observation, without judgment or advocacy." It's a splendid work, and it might do more to boost sympathy for environmental causes than a shelf of stridently opinionated books could.

Bass has chosen a beguilingly simple structure to draw us into "The Wild Marsh." With each chapter devoted to a calendar month, it explores the rich annual cycle of the place Bass calls "a million-acre island in northern Montana."

"It amazes me, the way each month has such a separate identity," Bass writes. "We think of time as a river, and know intuitively that it is. But if one pauses to look back almost any distance, the months might seem as discrete blocks, chunks of stone, all stoved up and jagged against one another, like the spines and teeth of glaciers, gnashing at the sky and both devouring and yet creating the mountains and, in the mountains' dissolution, creating the dusty plains below."

Heady stuff, that, but it rings true in Bass' descriptions. With spring near, he writes, "April is like sitting in a dark theater thirty minutes before the show, or an hour before the show -- arriving early, and waiting, and waiting, and then finally seeing the light come on, on the screen before you, and hearing the reel-to-reel tape begin to flicker."

And May, with its frenzied burst of renewed life, "is the month of disorderly conduct." By contrast, the heat of August is merciless. "To our north woods shade-loving selves, it feels as it does when you stoke a stove too full of dry wood, too much too fast -- as if someone is throwing such wood on the sun itself," Bass writes.

"The Wild Marsh" overflows with carefully observed minutiae of nature at work, but it's the passages in which Bass describes the woods' impact on him and his family that linger. In one passage, he describes skiing with his daughters on a cold, moonlit January night.

"We ski into and through the blue light," Bass writes. "I hold my breath, hoping that the girls will remember the strange sight -- though, perhaps better still, the conscious part of them might forget it, might take it for granted, assuming such wonder to be a daily occurrence in the landscape up here. That would be all right: would be more than all right. Nonchalance and wonder, right next to each other."

Bass may be the closest our era comes to having its own Henry David Thoreau, and his belief that the woods -- whether it's a quaint stand of trees in New England or a million acres of wilderness in Montana -- can hold a transcendent place in our lives is seductive.

"Maybe I'm not a godly man, for loving the woods so much," Bass writes. "But in my defense, if any is needed, it's the only time I feel close to a god, or God. If I made a wrong turn somewhere, well, have pity on me. But there is nothing in this world that could ever convince me that God is to be set against the wild forest and the wilderness. That would be like trying to convince me that God is set also against another of God's creations, humankind itself."

Bass and Thoreau aren't identical twins separated by 150 years. Bass is a family man living in an enormous wilderness, for example, and Thoreau was a thwarted bachelor who boasted in the opening sentence of "Walden; or, Life in the Woods" that "I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor." (As Bass points out, Thoreau lived only "a mild saunter" from his mother's house.)

But in its gentle, beautifully evocative nature writing, "The Wild Marsh" is a "Walden" for the modern world.

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.