I had the good fortune to encounter The Lost
Grizzlies on the coldest night we have had in these parts in
five years. The fire in the hearth was a necessity; no other heat
in the house could keep my fingers from becoming too cold to turn
pages. The dog loves a fire, and although she does not deign to
curl up on the floor in front of it, she nested in the chair
nearest it where her associate master left his fleece-lined jacket.
The brandy I poured soon took a chill from neglect, but perfumed
the room nonetheless. It might have been better only if the power
had failed and given me an excuse to light the oil lamps.
The problem of The Lost Grizzlies is for Bass and
his friends to determine whether any grizzlies remain in southern
Colorado. The last evidence of a grizzly—and that means a
dead grizzly, which is the only evidence authorities seem inclined
to accept—was in 1979, some eleven years before Bass begins
his inquiries. Government biologists have concluded that there are
not any more. Yet, if they can be proven wrong, perhaps the bears
that are left can be protected.
The book is not really about the grizzlies at all. At the
literal level, the point is that if the grizzlies do exist and can
be protected this will protect the wilderness as a whole—for
the only way to protect the grizzly is to keep the land as wild as
possible. Large predators can be sustained only if the lower parts
of the food chain are relatively intact.
Yet Bass doesn't linger near the literal. Sometimes the grizzly
is a metaphor for man, and other times man is a metaphor for the
grizzly. The grizzly is a symbol, a talisman, an article of faith.
Beyond this, the bear is the Mcguffin; everyone in the book
believes in the bear, searches for the bear, but in the end it
hardly matters whether the bear appears or not.
In his first of three expeditions, Bass accompanies nature
writer Doug Peacock and Earth First! artist Marty Ring as they make
reconnoiter of the general area of the last confirmed grizzly
contact. These are fascinating people in a wonderful story. Like
any story of quest, this one is a page-turner, and there are a few
heart-stopping moments for dog lovers and acrophobes. The company
could hardly be more convivial, although if this were a novel we
would want Peacock to be available for the third and final
expedition in spite of his ability to make us uncomfortable. And we
learn that bear scat is, in fact, more often found outside the
woods.
Bass is fairly unrelenting in his ecological self-righteousness.
I cannot believe that this sort of smugness really serves any cause
well, but at any rate there are screaming contradictions, and some
of them even Bass cannot overlook. The party passes up an Exxon
station, but must gas up somewhere and stops at a Conoco station
"pretending it's better." Gas is gas, and they have to have it.
Almost immediately one of the cars breaks down and the expedition's
dependence on the hated technological world could not be clearer.
The next contradiction seems to escape Bass. They pass up a
campsite. It is posted, but also it is too near an abandoned gold
mine and they fear the cyanide that may have been left behind.
Although they see living trout in a stream near the mine, Bass
imagines the trout to be three-eyed or otherwise malformed. But
when they do make camp they down a bottle of Wild Turkey EACH
before sleep. Would the gold mine really have been that much more
toxic?
Indeed, all of the adventures in search of the bear seem to be
exceptionally well lubricated, and scenes around the campfire
resemble in some respects those of my favorite book, Jerome
Jerome's comic Three Men in a Boat. On the third
expedition Bass threatens to shoot the wind, which he supposes to
be outfitters attacking his tent, a scene virtually parallel to one
in Jerome's book. Although Jerome's characters get nowhere wilder
than the banks of the Thames a century ago, I cannot help but
wonder whether there is not something in the combination of men,
spirits, and sleeping in the fresh air that is a bit more universal
than Bass thinks. In particular, I wonder whether there is that
much difference between the Basses and the Peacocks of the world
and the weekend trophy hunters they so despise.
True enough there is something despicable in the outfitters who
leave their camps a mess, who trick the wildlife into making easy
targets for the inept urban marksmen, and so forth. The outfitters'
clients, on the other hand, would seem to want nothing more or less
than to share something of the life Bass has, to experience a bit
of the wilderness Bass experiences. Bass knows what they want,
knows it because he wants it and loves it himself. But for the
wilderness to be there for Bass, the others must be kept out.
Bass does not provide us with a map and he does not give the
true names of the places he goes because he thinks the thing
certain to kill off the grizzlies, if there are any, is for more
people to coming looking for them. One night at the fire, Peacock
tells the others a great secret: the place where Edward Abbey, guru
of the Western ecology writers (whose character George Washington
Hayduke is based on Peacock), is buried. Of course this information
is not shared with us for the place is in the fragile desert and
pilgrims would harm the ecology. All his fellows seem to approve
when Peacock refuses to accept a small sum he has asked for to
support the expeditions; there is some hint that the donors want
some small accountability. This sort of elitism is difficult to put
over, but Bass does about as good a job of it as can be done. While
we remain in his company it all seems agreeable enough, but I
wonder whether in the long run the public will tolerate it.
Inevitably the question has to be asked of any Platonic structure:
who guards the guardians.
In the Loyal Mountains is a collection of literary
short stories, by which I mean they aspire to have realistic
characters and settings, neither more plot nor less than life
itself has, and usually, exactly one very bizarre element or
incident. The title story is set in Central Texas. I never could
decide whether the uncharted little range, the Loyal Mountains were
supposed to be real or not. As I once spend a whole day driving
around looking for Pilot Knob, Austin's long-extinct volcano,
without finding it—although highway markers said I was never
more than five miles from it—I can believe in a little
mountain chain that I have never heard of. Others of the stories
are set in Houston, Bass's beloved and adopted Wyoming, and a
couple of places Mississippi, one of which is rather like Port
Gibson (which has not actually been a port since the river left
town). Although I cannot speak for Wyoming, all of the places ring
true, and the better I know a place, the more Bass's portrait of it
seems correct. I could feel the blond mud between my toes as he
described the wooded bayous of Houston—although I cannot
imagine that they are anymore as he describes or I remember
them.
The thing I find intriguing is that places, except for Wyoming,
so familiar to me, are inhabited by people who might as well have
just flown in from Mars, so alien are they to anything in my
experience. I don't mean, of course, in the bizarre elements: the
boys who put on wolf masks to pursue and bully a classmate, the
snowy Halloween parties at which all the adults wear antlers, or a
witch who might turn a Civil War general into a dog-killing pig.
No, I mean the people when they are being ordinary are the sort of
people who are quite out of my orbit. I believe in them, at least
as much as I believe in the grizzly, which is to say, a great deal,
so I assume that some of them will be as familiar to the next
reader as they are unfamiliar to me.
Bass's interest in natural history is reflected in all of the
stories, but only in the penultimate story "Days of Heaven," is
there much tree hugging. Here the caretaker of a rough-hewn estate
in Montana discovers that the new owner of the property wishes to
develop the valley, and the caretaker, of course, wishes it will
not happen. There seem to be, in Bass's view, two kinds of
environmental villains. Ordinary people do things like tossing beer
cans out of their car windows and shooting game for trophies,
leaving the meat to rot. On the other hand, there are the money
men, the outfitters, the corporate planners, the guys who think up
the plots to destroy the environment. In these matters, the
ordinary folks usually get off fairly lightly. As someone wiser
than I has pointed out, we can wade waist deep in beer cans if we
have to, but we will never be able to breathe sulfur dioxide. The
ordinary folk toss the beer cans, while the corporate planners spew
the sulfur dioxide. In this story the caretaker has stumbled onto a
pair of the latter sort who, incidentally or not, are
homosexual.
Bass's caretaker sees well enough that the developer wants to
come live in the woods. What is not so clear, is that the
developer's wanting to live in the woods is not the problem, and
neither really are the developer's rather farfetched
schemes—one of which is a champagne delivery
service—but the problem is lots of other people want to live
in the woods and would pay dearly to do so. There is, in other
words, between Joe Six-Pack tossing his beer can and the scheming
directors in their board room, the people who endorse with their
checkbooks the machinations of the evil directors. Of course, it
does not exculpate the directors—the developers—the
outfitters—to point out that they engage in their duplicity,
their deceptions, their corruptions, and their foolishness because
others make it profitable, but while we think the evil few are all
there is to the problem we will always be chopping the foliage and
leaving the roots.
