With Every Great Breath (2024)
Rick Bass (1958)
321 pages
After a pair of openings essays about people – a childhood friend who’s become a firefighter in Into the Fire, and a man who dedicated his life to competitive weightlifting in The Rage of the Squat King – Bass turns to the nature writing for which he is best known.
In these essays on the natural world, Bass’s prose truly sings. His joy fairly radiates off the page in Whale Song, as he recalls witnessing a pair of whales breaching near a charter boat off the coast of Maui. Then, in the waters around the Galapagos Islands in Whale Shark, he joins a host of fellow passengers scrambling overboard and into the water to see the title fish – the awe he feels as he swims alongside the gigantic shark evident in every sentence.
Aside from a few such essays centered on his visits to far-flung locations, the majority in this collection are set in and around his backyard – the Yaak region of Montana. His love for the region and how blessed he feels to live there shines through in each of them, whether chronicling the characteristics of the tree that dominates the Yaak landscape in The Larch, pleading the case for saving the remaining handful of grizzly bears that have survived in this mountainous region despite steadily increasing human encroachment in A Life with Bears, or cherishing an afternoon with one of his daughters on a remote lake in Ice Fishing.
In these essays, Bass goes far beyond simple descriptions of nature, revealing the profound interconnectedness of the flora and fauna that inhabit a region, and the broad range of destructive impacts of human behavior on them. One of several essays set in Yellowstone Park, Wolf Palette, provides a fascinating case study of the complexity of such linkages, describing the results of one small attempt to rectify the damage humans have caused. Recalling the re-introduction of fourteen wolves into Yellowstone in 1994, Bass describes the variety of changes that occurred in the ten years that followed. The wolves’ prey animals experienced the direct impact, of course, but he traces the multitude of consequences for plant and animal species in the Yellowstone region. The essay’s title references the hook Bass uses to describe the recovery of these species as adding a mosaic of colors back into the park.
By pruning the wildly excessive elk numbers, and by forcing elk to be elk again, the Yellowstone wolves kept the elk herds on the move, allowing overgrazed riparian areas to recover. The elk were no longer encamping in any one spot like feedlot animals, and the restored riverbanks served as nesting and feeding habitat for songbirds of different hues. Blink, and a howl equals the color yellow.
… Beautiful groves of aspen, snow-white bark and quivering gold leaves in the fall, are now prospering, flaring back up on the landscape like so many tens of thousands of autumn-lit candles. Entire mountain ranges are ultimately being painted anew – more color, more vitality, more light.
… Cerulean, sapphire, claret, jade – the return of deciduous saplings to the hoof-cut, denuded riverbanks. (114-115)
Although Bass’s environmental engagement and activism runs through many of these pieces – especially examinations of plants, animals and entire ecosystems now at risk – none of them quite prepare a reader for the title essay. The longest in the collection, it details the long-standing and deadly impacts of a century-old asbestos mine on the people in the area just south of the Yaak region.
He reveals the brutal illnesses people in the area have been suffering and dying from due to the asbestos dust, and the grinding losses and uncertainty for those not yet ill. His description of the responsible company’s legal maneuvering at their criminal trial makes evident his feelings about our society’s broad unwillingness to face the damage inflicted by our choices:
I understand that human beings are capable of just about anything, but never before had I witnessed quite such a depth of amorality – neither moral nor immoral, but instead, simply a vacuousness, a hollow bravado or swagger, the defense attorneys like blind hostages to evil, not acknowledging or considering the consequences of their servitude, other than the short-term treats of their sterling careers. (232)
Perhaps most affecting about the title piece, beyond the suffering of his neighbors, is a reader’s sudden recognition that the beautiful wilds of this northwestern region of Montana, for which the earlier essays have built up an almost irresistible attraction, suddenly takes on a dark veneer from this frightening story of invisible, deadly dust filling the air.
This sense of both beauty and concern runs through all the pieces on nature in With Every Great Breath. Bass revels in the wonders of the natural world he passes through, as a hiker, hunter and traveler. But he also fears for the future of these wild places, and his writing represents a call to action to join him in protecting them, whether the nature in one’s backyard or in a landscape far from one’s community.
Other notes and information:
I’ve also read his wonderful For a Little While, a larger collection of stories which he develops, again, around people’s connectedness to nature, in ways they may or may not always recognize. My review linked to at left.
Connections, in a different sense, that I also enjoyed as I read Bass’s essays: Firebuilder writes of his long friendship with another writer and environmental activist, Barry Lopez. I’ve so far only read one of Lopez’s books, Horizon, a collection of essays (my review at right), but the discovery that they are fellow travelers is not surprising.
Bass also quotes in several pieces the poetry of the wonderful Mary Oliver; I deeply enjoyed her New and Selected Poems: Volume One (my review at right), and she’s clearly also a fellow traveler of Bass’s, in her profound love of and immersion into the natural world.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
