Winter: Notes from Montana by Rick Bass (review)

Reviews 153 productivity, zucchini may even be laminated into playing cards, napkin rings, earrings . . .); the concept of the mutt to “peerless pets” (she offers reasons for our love affair sometimes to the exclusion of children); or Christmas to “Chrismyths” (the deconstruction of the “myth of Christmas past,” for ex­ ample). In all, she addresses in a fashion akin to but not as windy as Erma Bombeck psychological trends (“power-napping”), the meaning of holidays, the culture of the family, the consistency of time passing (I grow old, I grow old), and other common experiences which she uniquely views. My own per­ sonal favorite is “Woman Warblers.” Her explanation of why women whistle sheds new light on the musical medleys of my sixth-grade teacher. The point is, ifit hurts, “it” (the many experiences and perceptions Elouise Bell analyzes) deepens our own insight, understanding, and appreciation. As anyone who has hit his or her funny bone knows, comedy is connected to tragedy. No wonder Elouise Bell has been named for “excellence injournalism” by the Society of ProfessionalJournalists. She not only warmly reminds us that “pains”may be funny, but she writes so well that we feel we’ve had a comic, yet engaging, conversation with the author. SHELLEYARMITAGE University ofHawaii Winter: Notes from Montana. By Rick Bass. Illustrations by Elizabeth Hughes. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. 162 pages, $18.95.) “It’seasier to learn certain things when you’re watching them occur in slow motion.” Thus Rick Bass assesses his winter learning in the Yaak valley of Montana which he describes unsystematically in these journal notes dealing with isolation and community, snow and fuel. Fuel is not a new interest for Bass. His 1989 OilNotes is in substantially the samejournal form and deals with the search for underground reservoirs of oil and gas; it reflects his career as a petroleum geologist in the South. In Winter, most of the search is above ground and the fuel which fascinates is wood, especially the giant larch whose interior is the color of “pumpkin-meat.”One of the threads binding these notes together concerns the learning of wood: the tools, clothes, and techniques necessary to the gathering of wood, the forms of its burning. In the Yaak valley, wood is also a means of community, drawing all together in the need, the buying and selling, the cutting and splitting. And it is in the description of this community, of individual discovery within the human situa­ tion, that Bass excels. Though Winteris in some ways a piece of “nature writing” and has been compared to works by Muir, Abbey and Dillard, Bass is really up to 154 WesternAmerican Literature something different. He is more interesting for his reflections on civilization and the record of human change than for his perceptions of nature. This book is not without conventional beauties: descriptions ofwind, larch, snow, and the occasional absorption into nature. But we are definitely occupied with human growth and pursuit. Nature here is tinted with the language of civilization: the moon is a “great aluminum coin”;the snow falls “tumbling like planes crashing.” These notes might be compared to Eliot’s Wasteland or Malcolm Lowry’s OctoberFerry to Gabriola for their sense of flight from a fallen world and their discovery of a temporary heavenly afterlife in nature. On the other side of the hill the town of Libby may “fester and boil”; in the Yaak valley the wood which warms us produces smoke which changes the air. Bass is the voice of the fallen world in retreat, aware that all is not well. “We’re all dirty, but we’re all sweet.” In this remote valley it is with a sense of exposure that we watch the snow melt, opening the road to the world. Rick Bass has created a worthwhile human record and has a message for a late age: “Love the winter. Don’t betray it. Be loyal.” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University UtahPlaceNames. Byjohn W.Van Cott. (Salt Lake City: University ofUtah Press, 1991. 434 pages, $14.95.) If language, as Emerson said, is fossil poetry, then place names are crystals of history, telling tales of adaptation, conquest, dominion; no knowledge of a...