Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Rick Bass: Platte River

Rick Bass’s Platte River is a collection of three longish stories–not novellas , as the publisher claims–which have been previously published in the Mississippi River, the Quarterly, and the Paris Review. For what those three quarterlies cost, they are now available in a single volume, handsomely produced by Seymour Lawrence. Bass, though young, in his mid-thirties, had published three collections of largely natural history essays (The Deer Pasture, Wild to the Heart, Oil Notes) before a prize-winning collection of stories, The Watch, appeared in 1989. The nonfiction shares some of the same locations as his stories, and the same interest in the land, animals, the adversity of extreme climates, and the isolation of men and women. Russell Chatham’s painting for the cover of Platte River does echo the book’s tone: awe-inspiring nature, a sky-dominated landscape, country where the environment is in the foreground, and man is in the background. As Bass himself renders it early in the volume’s first long story, “Mahatma Joe:” It had been a hard winter in northern Montana, so hard that ravens sometimes fell from the sky in mid-flight, their insides just snapping, it seemed, and like great ragged clumps of black cloth they’d fall into the woods, or into a pasture, landing a few weeks shy of spring. Rick Bass: Platte River 287 288 The stave-ribbed horses–those that the coyotes and wolves had not gotten–would go over and pick the crows up with their teeth and begin eating them, chewing the shiny black feathers. Mahatma Joe is an itinerant preacher who migrates to northern Montana, a region where: “Everyone knew there were dangers still left to living up in Grass Valley. There were mountain lions, wolverines, bears, and wolves; it was one of the only places like that left.” Mahatma Joe “had always imagined the little valley, ringed by snow and glaciers even in the summer, as a new place to build something, a new place to get it right.” He had gotten it wrong in Alaska, and had come down to the Canadian border with his Eskimo wife, and put a stop to Grass Valley’s spring celebration, “Naked Days, where no one wore clothes at any time, not even when they went in for groceries, not even when they went into the saloon. People fed their horses naked, slept naked for the first time in six months, and checked their mailboxes naked.” It doesn’t take long for Mahatma Joe to accomplish this cultural change; he just sows a little self-consciousness, and, at least in town, the citizens put back on clothes. Now, there is something a little more than fanciful going on here in Grass Valley, a place where both Jack London and Tom Robbins would feel right at home. Bass is fashioning a new sort of western myth-making for gullible city slickers: strong men,strongwomen,strongdrink,andstrongemotions.Butasonecan see from what’s quoted above, it’s a tangible world; Bass feels his flora and fauna down to his toes. A young, single woman, one who had left the most selfish man in the world back in California, arrives in Grass Valley and, eventually, she and the sixty-eight-year-old Mahatma Joe hook up, after his wife slips under the river’s ice and doesn’t reappear again until early summer. The pleasures of Bass’s story come from the soundness of his prose, and his ritualistic descriptions of nature and its extremes, rather than the new romanticism of his outsized indi- 289 vidualists, who accomplish physical tasks that would task a company of marines. The second story, “Field Events,” extends the outsized quality. Its dominant male, A.C., most often referred to as “the big man,” is big enough to dance with a cow on his shoulders. He also manages to build a shed as long as a football field out of trees surrounding the abandoned farmhouse he occupies. A.C. is first sighted by two young men, high school discus throwers, “swimming upstream, doing the butterfly stroke. He was pulling a canoe behind him, and it was loaded with darkened cast-iron statues.” The boys more or less adopt A.C. and bring him into the bosom of their family, in residence near Glens Falls, in northeastern New York. The two boys have two sisters, one, Lory, “was thirty-four, a...