The Thinness of the Soil

I live in a place that amazes me. This is the condition of love: the eye and the soul love that which they behold as familiar, and are amazed by that which is not and may never be familiar. This is the condition conducive to what Wallace Stegner—in describing the emotions stirred in us by the western landscapes—called “the birth of awe.”

I live in such a place—a place that has really never been lived in fully before. Or if so, maybe only once or twice. For the small handful of us living here, in the Yaak Valley of extreme northwestern Montana right up on the Idaho and Canadian borders, there is a responsibility in this newness—not quite that of a creator, but in some ways, almost. What is being created, with each day and each year, is a story, and, as Bill Kittredge reminds us, stories matter. And first stories, I would suggest, matter most of all, in the way that the first scouring of ice—the ragged claws digging furrows in the exposed Cambrian bedrock—determine so strongly the course of many of the other natural processes that are to come.

Students of writing will recall that there are really only two stories in the world: a man or woman goes on a journey, or a stranger rides into town. Mine was doubly rich. I went on a journey, and I rode into town.

I moved from the lush and verdant East—Mississippi—to live in the mountains of the West, to become a writer. Or rather, I was already becoming a writer—had just started—but was beginning to repeat the same colors in my stories, greens and yellows. I had been west before. I had gone to college in Utah, had skied and snowshoed in the steep blue mountains, had backpacked in the red deserts. The greens and yellows of the East had stimulated me, but they did so, I realized instinctively—and if there is one thing I believe in, it is instinct, and our 180,000-year capital investment in those tactics—they did so with the quick, sugary flash of fine fuel, rather than the deeper, slower, more powerful burning of the blues and whites. Those colors burned too, but with a deeper burning. I was hungry for the cold implacability—the sleep—of glaciers. I was young and needed more dreamtime. I was not quite ready to awaken. I didn’t know why, but I knew it: knew it deeply enough to be drawn back north and west, abandoning my life in the South and East, with the same unconsidered relentlessness, perhaps, with which a salmon turns inland and pushes steadily up into the mountains, carrying with it the nutrients from the sea.

We are all part of something larger. We know this, yet we spend our days forgetting it. We are all part of something larger. There is no in-between. It is either this way, or there is only nothing.

The place I found—moving toward it without knowing it was out there—was the newest place on earth, the Yaak Valley: just about as far north as you can go in this country. The bitter edge; the sweet edge. All artists, I believe, belong in one way or another at the perimeter. They would become lost if too long in the center; they would vanish, would be absorbed, would no longer be able to exert the strange centripetal force of their curious influence.

It occurs to me that wilderness—that tiny (but so powerfully charged) 4.5 percent of America’s landmass that is designated as wilderness—helps hold together the spirit and fabric and, in many ways, the deep core-depth of this country’s soul. Certainly, the wilderness is the West’s soul—no matter whether this is realized or celebrated by a resident. No matter whether a resident realizes this, or cares; the far reaches of the wilderness spin, and our non-wilderness center holds.

In the West, there is wilderness in our soul...