The Writer, The Fighter -- Rick Bass Has It All - Family, Literary Success, A Home In God's Country. So Why Isn't He Smiling?

YAAK, Mont. - The man in the cap and dungarees who hops out of the rust-dotted Toyota pickup must be a mistake.

At 39, Rick Bass already wears the rode-hard look of a man a decade older. He's been cutting wood for a winter that will pour down from Canada any day now, and the faded Dickies overalls he's pulled on over his work boots have a patch of duct tape over a hole in the pocket. The clasp on a suspender is jury-rigged with a rubber band. A wide scab - the lingering casualty of a hunting trip to Eastern Washington - coats one forearm.

This is not the profile cut by the usual tweedy writer of Serious Fiction. Nor is it how one might picture even one of the major literary voices of the New West, whose 11 books range from true tales of Montana's Ninemile wolves, to Wallace Stegner-esque stories of sad and precious lives tied to the harsh and beautiful landscape of the West.

Right now, though, Bass wants to show what he's fighting for - and against. He climbs into his pickup - its side-view mirror hog-tied into place with baling wire - and sweeps the 20-gauge shotgun shells off the passenger seat. They land on the floor next to a rusty hatchet head.

Where the two-lane country road narrows to one lane, Bass pulls off, hikes up a logging road until its end, then charges straight up the mountain - through bunch grass and huckleberry tripwire - like a man with little time to waste. He crests the peak and looks out at his world on fire. This remote corner of the Pacific Northwest harbors some of the West's greatest stands of rare old-growth larch - a pine whose green needles flame out each autumn before dropping - and the mountains burn beneath the broad-shouldered Montana sky. It's so pretty it hurts.

People swear that magic lives here, that it rises with the mist off the Yaak River to hang among the mossy tamaracks and silver the fur of wolverines and grizzlies that have escaped the fate of those in a thousand other places across the West.

Bass has spent the past 10 years writing a flurry of award-winning short stories and nonfiction that capture the gut essence of this place, its peculiar autumn softness and blue-cold winters, its characters and wild creatures and the mysterious humming rhythms of nature still intact. He knows where he lives is special.

"It's hard to be angry out here," he says.

Hard, but not impossible. When conversation turns from the nuances of fiction writing to proposed timber sales in this valley's last pristine pockets, Bass' soft, Texas-edged voice leaps an octave and about 20 decibels. He sputters. Swears. Apologizes. Swears again.

"I have a personal sense of urgency, because you see little nibblings and deteriorations, and you see that suppleness being lost," he says of the valley, which is considered one of untold small-but-crucial patches of wildness in the ever-shrinking wilderness of the West. "I . . . love this landscape so deeply that I am tortured watching it be diminished, and made weaker and smaller and less diverse."

A decade ago, a youthful Bass holed up in this little valley hard by the Canadian border, wanting nothing but inspiration and solitude. Now he finds himself caught within a troubling irony: reluctantly introducing his hideaway to the world and exploiting his minor celebrity in hopes of preserving the Yaak. Something more gnaws at him, too. He worries about the time lost, about the greedy sleeve-tugging of activism that exhausts him and pulls him away from art.

Not everyone agrees that the Yaak is in such peril, or agrees with the steps its self-appointed advocate wants to take to make things right. "He's got the right attitude," says one state biologist, "but it's just, to what level do we (pursue) things?"

Looking out from this mountaintop, down on the shimmering hills teeming with animal life and untapped inspiration, Rick Bass probably can't think of a more ridiculous question.

SEVERAL TIMES on his quick hike uphill he stops, taking time to interpret the stories on the land. Overturned rocks tell of bears fattening themselves with insects before winter. Scratches in the earth are the echoes of startled deer.

"We just missed 'em," Bass says, pointing to hoof marks in the soil. "An animal can slip anywhere, but that series of kicks, when they kick up that much, they're getting the hell out, fast." Every few steps in the Yaak yields fresh wonder, a new tale. Bass has vigorous blue eyes set in rim-red sockets that, combined with the slightest hook of a nose, grant him a peregrine's gaze. He misses little.

Others have overlooked this entire place. Eastern environmentalists have asked him why this place they've never heard of - this valley with the strange yawp of a name - is worth drawing a line in the dirt.

The Yaak, Bass answers, is a linchpin.

"Because the Yaak so strategically links north to south and west to east, it has the combined, teeming diversity of all the ecosystems of the West," he wrote in "The Book of Yaak," his 1996 cry for the valley. "There are places in the Yaak where I have seen elk, grizzlies, bull moose, lions, grouse and coyotes all bedding and living in the same area. Everything lives together, here - everything is all crammed in on top of everything else.

"There is still a symphony, still a harmony: barely."

The Yaak belongs to Kootenai National Forest, Montana's fifth-largest national forest. Nearly 1,600 miles of logging roads zigzag through the glacier-smoothed Purcell Mountains here, leaving less than than one-third of the area uncut by roads. Not one acre of the Yaak is protected from logging.

From this high perch, the battle lines are clearly drawn on neighboring mountainsides. To the east, clearcut logging has scraped clean several large rectangles, with more slashes on the out-of-sight slopes. To the west, rows of untouched mountains pile up like blue waves in the failing autumn light. Those mountains, Bass says, contain 37,000 acres without anything more than a game trail - the largest of 11 roadless tracts left in the Yaak.

Bass' goal is simple: He wants the Yaak's last unroaded areas designated as wilderness, which would bar logging there, forever. Responsible logging could continue in the rest of the valley, and Bass hopes it does - but not in these roadless areas.

"The reason these little islands are roadless and wild is 'cause there wasn't a lot of timber in 'em to begin with - just the last 5 percent of the valley's marketable timber," he says, his almost boyish voice ratcheting upward in anger. "It's 5 percent that we're asking for - No! I don't apologize for that."

Conservation biology, a field now gaining credibility, holds that wilderness must not become islands surrounded by ski areas, towns, ranches. If that happens, then animals cannot adequately roam to find food or breed outside their gene pool. Wilderness must remain connected, the theory goes, if animals are to survive.

Keeping the roadless areas of the Yaak untouched would help keep the valley stitched together, believe Bass and others like Chuck Jonkel, a former University of Montana biology professor who has studied the valley.

The Yaak, in turn, is one of many crucial pieces of a puzzle as big as the Rocky Mountains, they say. "The Yaak is an extremely important segment within the `Wild Rockies,' " Jonkel says, comparing it to southern British Columbia's near-pristine Kootenai Country, or the land around the north fork of Montana's Flathead River. The valley also sits in the ambitious, 800,000-square-mile corridor from the Yukon to Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park that conservationists proposed for protection two months ago.

The reason few have ever heard of the valley is its location - tucked just under the border in Montana's northwesternmost corner. "Corners tend to get neglected, and sometimes abused," Jonkel says. He adds that the Yaak is a place that might not have been sorely missed if it disappeared a century ago. Today, there are few other places left to take up the slack, he says.

On the mountaintop, Bass squints west and watches the sun turning the harvest mountains blue. "It's just absolutely" - here he pauses and the anger drains from him, until only a whisper remains - "irreplaceable."

HE GREW UP a child of Houston's prairie suburbs and spent weekends hunting with his father and grandfather in the Texas hill country. That dry and folded land was landscape with character. He learned to crave it.

Bass still has the thick chest and arms he gained playing flanker and tailback in Utah State's football program. In college, he studied wildlife science before switching to geology, then headed to Mississippi after graduation to wildcat for oil. His book "Wild to the Heart" opens with his crazy, all-night drives westward to New Mexico's Sangre de Cristos mountains. But even something in the Mississippi flatlands moved him. His love for the earth, its curve and body, ran as deep as the wells he sunk in pursuit of hidden seas of oil.

After a taste of writing success, he and girlfriend Elizabeth Hughes (now his wife, with whom he has two young daughters, Mary Katherine and Lowry) lit out West in 1987, looking for a quiet place to pursue art. Late in the summer, they headed into the last empty place on their map, following a one-lane dirt road lined with daisies until it brought them to a little blue valley. It was a feeling like falling in love, he would later write.

Yaak is a place where a body can find the right amount of lonesome. Many of the valley's 150 or so residents can't get television or radio reception, and, like Bass, don't want it. Only radio telephones work away from the main road and its power lines; many homesteads off the grid get no electricity at all, except from what a gas generator provides.

Here, there was peace to work. While Elizabeth painted, Bass wrote and wrote - an astonishing 11 books in the past 12 years. His latest, a collection of novellas titled, "The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness," was published by Houghton Mifflin last month. A reviewer for The New York Times last week praised the book as the work of a writer "who can bring the wilderness back alive and pin it to the page." The prizes piled up as quickly as the books, including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, $20,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PEN/Nelson Algren Special Citation for his 1988 book of fiction stories, "The Watch." The money kept them in notebooks and paintbrushes and spare parts for the truck.

The land, that grandest of American characters, figures centrally in books like "Winter," Bass' 1991 paean to life in the Yaak during a season so harsh that the night cold shatters trees and a few residents use teams of sled-dogs to get to the Dirty Shame Saloon for a beer. In Bass' philosophy, history, wolverines, artistic inspiration, life lessons - it all grows out of the earth. "Landscape - geology - is all there is," he says as he hikes. "I can write (different) stories, but if landscape's not a character, I'm not much interested in them. It fascinates me, to start at the bottom, and work up."

This helps explain why the clearcuts seem to wound him like a physical blow. "We need Nature to soften us," Bass wrote in "The Book of Yaak." "We need the strength of lilies, ferns, mosses and mayflies. We need the masculinity of ponds and rivers, the femininity of stone, the wisdom of quietness, if not silence." We need wild lands, he says, because they stir the imagination and rally the spirit - what Wallace Stegner famously called "the geography of hope."

There was a time when these concerns didn't cloud the writer's mind. During his first few years up here, Bass' life was consumed with wallowing in nature and learning the valley's ways. He made friends with the loggers and the ex-bronco buster and the owner of the Dirty Shame. He wrote in the mornings, hiked and hunted grouse with his hounds, Homer and Ann, in the afternoons. He learned his way around a chain saw and learned that when you cut your own wood, it warms you twice. Most of all, he learned that you must work hard and show that you are loyal to the mountains before they will accept you and present you with all that they know.

Only when he learned all of this - when he found himself in tune with the Yaak's rhythms and its denizens - did he hear this giving place murmuring something else: It was asking for something in return, he says.

THE POSTCARDS and e-mail messages go out in bunches - sometimes 50, 60 in a week. Almost everyone who has ever made the mistake of leaving Bass a return address gets one. Each bears the same request: Please write your lawmakers and tell them to do something about the Yaak.

He writes articles about the valley for magazines like Sierra, and has visited elected officials in Washington, D.C. Now armed with a home computer, he sends weekly dispatches to a Website devoted to the Yaak. He has handed out written pleas at book readings, christenings, weddings. He knows how it looks. "I'm not a hard-core person," he insists. "I'm a moderate . . . The only thing I'm not moderate in is my passion for this place, and for wildness, and wilderness."

His role as burr under saddle hasn't won him many friends with the Forest Service and others. Some critics say Bass crosses the line between fact and fiction when he writes about the Yaak. Biologist Tim Thier admires the author, but says the writer's fervor has made him into the boy who cried wolf.

While the clearing of private land remains a concern, "The level of logging (on Forest Service land) has dropped considerably in the last 10 years" in the valley, says Thier, who works for Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and who did graduate work on the Yaak's black bears. Wolf and bear populations are slowly increasing. "Things are getting better," he insists.

Thier also questions whether designating small roadless areas "wilderness" would be very effective, except in creating a backlash among locals.

A few valley residents are indeed angry at Bass, concedes Bill Shreiber, a friend and neighbor. In this independent-minded region, he says, people fear that government meddling would infringe on everything from snowmobiling to their ability to build or cut timber on their own land. Some also resent the spotlight their neighbor has focused on their hideaway valley, Schreiber says.

Some middle ground may yet be found. A group of 25 locals is lobbying the Forest Service with a more modest proposal: to exclude the roadless areas from logging for at least 10 years. Bass supports the idea, though he sees it as an interim step.

Other conservation efforts have encountered frustration and success. In 1995, the Forest Service took the rare step of letting a group of local loggers, environmentalists and residents decide whether 18 million board-feet of timber should be cut in the Basin Creek area of the Yaak.

Bass and activist Steve Thompson organized a field trip into the area. After the trip, the advisory group shocked the Forest Service by unanimously agreeing that new roads and logging would prove too damaging. The government held a smaller timber sale this fall instead.

Thompson calls the Basin Creek vote a "turning point" in the valley's history. "One thing that I've told Rick is that even though we don't have one acre of wilderness in the Yaak, we've had some major victories, of which he's been an integral part," says Thompson, a former field representative for the Montana Wilderness Association. "I tell him to take heart.

"For him," Thompson says, "it was a very temporary reprieve."

"We have nothing permanent," Bass counters. "If something's temporary, you keep fighting."

He watches the sun hurrying over the wild blue hills to the west, surrounding him with the bronzed tintype light that's one of the thousand things he says he loves so much about the Yaak.

He has a confession. "I'm also tired of fighting," he says. "I'm not weary, but I'm tired."

AND HERE WE arrive at one other possible casualty in this fight, and one whose loss would not be a small one.

"The frenzy of the activist . . . destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful," Bass quoted Thomas Merton in "The Book of Yaak."

For the past several years, the writer has forced himself into a split personality - writing fiction in the morning, switching to advocacy letters, editorials and pleading magazine articles in the afternoons. He tries to return to revising his fiction - his love, and most critically lauded work - in the evenings. It is as taxing as breaking rocks in a quarry.

It is tearing him up, he says.

"It's not the emotional turmoil. You know, great fiction, great art can come out of - does come out of - emotional turmoil. That's the least of it. It is the physical licking of stamps, the physical typing of the letters, the physical loading in of the data into the mind," he says. "That's probably where some of my, at times, bitterness comes from, from feeling like I have to work so much on political inanities, instead of just getting out and hiking and daydreaming and unmooring, and just cutting loose and going as deep into art as I want to go, day after day, night after night."

Bass knows that so much time spent with the hard facts of activism could taint his fiction; a writer writes about what he knows, after all. His guiding lights have become Stegner and Jim Harrison - writers, he says, who have been able to write strongly about preservation, while keeping their fiction supple and free of leaden didacticism.

Mostly, though, he worries about time. At 39, Bass already feels it running through his hands like river water.

He burns to write the stories the Yaak has inspired.

He burns to rescue this place of inspiration.

To throw himself solely behind one is to see the other suffer.

Can the moral man pursue art when he sees his house in flames?, he has asked himself. Isn't the right thing to grab a bucket and heap water on the fire, to stop the destruction?

Yet if the gifted artist, the person with the glimmer of God in his pen, is denied the full chance to create, isn't that a kind of destruction, too?

Bass would like to believe in the saving power of fiction - that writing pretty stories about people and a place could rally the public as effectively as those words that land like hammerblows.

But if he were wrong, the gambit would not have been worth it, he says. So he goes on serving two masters, and he wonders why his eyes sometimes drift.

He keeps moving, because something tells him that the best stories remain untold by the Yaak, and remain within him, too. He just needs the time and freedom for it to work itself out.

At the end of the new novella "Where the Sea Used to Be" Bass writes of the young and determined oilman who is the main character, "The only reason he could have two passions rather than one was because he had never ruined the first."

It is statement of fact. It is admonition. It is Rick Bass' charge to himself.