2008 Autobiography Finalist Why I Came West, by Rick Bass

by Celia McGee | Feb-26-2009

Each day leading up to the March 12 announcement of the 2008 NBCC awards, we highlight one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Celia McGee discusses Rick Bass’s Why I Came West (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Rick Bass, who has lived twenty-two years in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, is now securely mountain man enough to quote poetry. “I want to speak about the forests,” he echoes W.S. Merwin in Why I Came West. “I will have to speak in a forgotten language.”

The language Bass remembers not to forget in his new memoir is not so much recovered as invented to suit his passion (a rare resource that doesn’t demand conservation, he calls that) for the anomalous inland rain forest high in the Rockies where he originally settled, a lapsed petroleum geologist out of Houston and Mississippi, to write. With his vocabulary, the art of memoir leaves behind the repeat habits of American nature writing and becomes the act of a landscapist doing self-portraiture.

Bass makes almost garishly clear from the get-go who he thinks will remain stuck in the amnesia about the shrinking wilderness he seeks to renew with his words by unburying, from beneath giant rotting tree trunks, short-lived wildflowers and some of the last grizzly habitats, the reasons he has accumulated, over two decades that have seen him turn from young man to mature, for defending nature’s right to stick around. The energy lobby: “that camped out in Dick Cheney’s bunker.” The “extractive industries,” for which “the West has never been anything but a colony.” Those of Bass’s neighbors among the million-acred valley’s 150 citizens who’ve attacked him for trying to rob them of livelihoods he maintains he just wants to keep local, and respectful of his pickup-truck Eden.

He states his goal, of providing a “true grassroots primer on the front lines.” If it’s an instruction manual you’re looking for, he fails. But who wants that in a memoir, anyway? The grassroots part, on the other hand, rings true throughout, and sounds a note interestingly congruent with a newly elected administration that claims to have no use for the bunker, its mentality, and the men in suits peering out at other Americans’ cultures and countrysides from the dark.

Bass offers up a diary of why he came West, not why he went—it’s where he’s at, in other words, not a place he’s visiting from someplace he feels he actually belongs. I, too, once moved from East to West, to Montana and a Rocky Mountain childhood. Bass’s book reminds me why, though I live there no longer, I would choose the same, exact homing verb he did to mark the transformative nature of those surroundings, which never leave you, no matter where you are. They also make you part of who you are, and the evolution of such an autobiographical eco-system is what Rick Bass lays down.