Thanks very much, Alison.
Can you all hear me?
At the back?
Great.
Thank you all for coming in this evening.
I've got a long list of thank you's.
I should have made a list.
I'll probably forget some, but thanks, Alison and the school,
for having me and my family down.
We're having a good vacation.
I was thinking how--
I was worried I was going to forget who all to say thank you
to this evening.
Not worrying so much that I did make up a list,
but I was thinking that's always what writers do when
they start to give a reading.
They say, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Yeah, I get through the boring stuff and get to start reading
or whatever you came here for.
The thank you's are always so boring and--
I mean, from what I read about writers back 30
and 40 years ago, they used to show up all drunk
and belligerent and stuff, and it just never ever
happens anymore.
[LAUGHTER]
And talking about what a hellhole Tucson is
and how you want to the--
the quicker you can get out of here, the better.
And just start reading and just--
and I kind of toyed with the idea of saying that,
but it's just not anywhere close to the truth,
but nobody does that anymore.
I don't why.
They all died.
[LAUGHTER]
I didn't almost die.
I mean, that would be exaggeration,
but I got my behind walked off today with Dick Shelton.
Thanks for taking me out there walking,
but it was straight up and straight down and lickety-split
and I had to take a lot of aspirin and a few drinks
when I got back.
But I wouldn't have missed it for anything.
Thanks for that hospitality.
At the same supper where I'm eating aspirin and drinking
whiskey, my first writing teacher, Bob Houston,
was telling me--
400 pages into this novel that I'm working on,
and he was saying, oh, no, you gotta shitcan--
You've got to start all over.
It's all bad and stuff.
So I want to thank you for that advice, Bob, and really,
really great to see you again after so--
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm just so motivated for this reading tonight.
Thank you for really focusing on it.
I want to apologize for suckering anybody
in on the premise of art.
As I think you may be--
Alison alluded to and you're probably picking up on,
there's going to be political activism.
I say also.
Mostly.
I have some propaganda, some flyers, newsletters
out there by the Poetry Center's propaganda,
and if you all pick that up on your way out, I'd appreciate it.
It's about Yaak.
This thing is burning a laser in my kidney.
It's really hot.
[LAUGHTER]
I want to show some slides from where I live,
which is the Yaak Valley in Northwest Montana.
It's, I guess, the thing that keeps me from wallowing in art
or writing short stories all the time.
It's a wild place that's fast losing its wildness.
It's the wildest place I've ever seen in the lower 48.
It's got all of--
it's got-- to get to the bottom line about Yaak,
if something eats meat, it lives in Yaak.
It's a very wild place.
Everything except the subtropical cats,
every carnivore except the subtropical cats
is found in Yaak.
It's a dense, wet, rich, mysterious, magical, beautiful
place.
It's 97% public land national forest,
and it's been clear cut to hell and back, roaded
to hell and back.
There's not one acre of land protected
with permanent protection in the Yaak.
And several years ago, I thought: not one acre?
You would think that we could change that pretty easily,
but it hasn't changed and it's not really
moving in that direction.
So I'm going to ask folks to write some letters to Congress
and the administration and the forest service asking
for wilderness protection for the last roadless areas in Yaak.
It's a 500,000-acre valley right up on the Montana border
and Canadian border and Idaho border.
It's way up in the northwest corner of Montana.
Of those 500,000 acres, there's only about 150,000
left that doesn't have roads in it that's
just raw, rugged, wild jungle.
It's not the traditional kind of wilderness
that we think about where you go sit by a lake
and cook a marshmallow and camp out and stuff.
It's this rich, wet, diverse jungle.
Almost a rainforest.
They call it Montana's only rainforest.
It's very low elevation.
About 1,800 feet is the lowest spot
in the valley, which is one of the reasons
that it is so diverse.
It grows big timber because of that elevation.
These slides, there's not many of them,
but I just wanted you all to get a picture of the country
that I'll be reading about by a wildlife photographer who
lives up there.
His name is Don Jones, and he's very kindly
let me use these slides to show pictures
of what the country's like.
It's right between the Paci-- it's
in this little same, this magic fissure
or crack between the Pacific Northwest
and the northern Rockies.
And so as such, it has twice the diversity
of either of those systems' relationships
between species that aren't found
anywhere else in the world.
What is rare in Yaak is--
what is rare in the world is very common in Yaak.
This is a stand of old larch trees
and that's the rarest form of old-growth in the West,
but it's the most common form of old-growth in the Yaak.
It's this weird tree, also called a Tamarack.
It's a deciduous conifer is what it is.
It's like it can't make up its mind.
It's an incredible tree.
I won't get all new age and talk about the force and aura it has,
but it's got it.
I mean, it has a real joy at being alive.
And I think the decision to be deciduous and coniferous
is because it just loves both so much.
So it just says yes to both.
A lot of meat eaters up in Yaak.
That's a great gray owl.
I like that one, too.
The great gray owl is this goofy, goofy creature.
No offense.
No disrespect.
Goofy in the best sense.
It lives back in this old forest.
And it's so shy that somewhere along the line,
the owl decided that if something walks up to it
and if it just sits real still and turns its head around
and doesn't look at that thing like a kid
saying you can't see me?
That's what the owl is.
If the owl is real still and looks away,
then trouble will go away.
And it used to work until bulldozers came.
It's a frustrating political battle
because I'm pretty much a moderate--
I'm kind of, I guess, like the large neurotic
in both directions.
I grew up in Texas and have a real conservative, almost
populist, upbringing, but seeing this
will turn you into a liberal real quick.
That's a grizzly.
The grizzlies of Yaak are of immense value to the world.
There are only two known breeding-age females
left in the valley.
Grizzlies don't breed until they're about six years old,
and they breed only about every third year,
and they have two or three cubs, one
of the lowest reproductive rates in North America.
These grizzlies, there's 10 or 15,
maybe 20 left in the valley total.
These are the kind of grizzlies that if we're
going to have grizzlies in the next century in the lower 48,
this is the kind that we will have.
They're secretive.
They live in the forest interior.
This is the lowest elevation residents
of grizzlies in the lower 48.
They hide back in the dark forest
and they run when they hear a person or smell a person
or even think a person is coming.
That's the kind of genes that--
it's been whittled down to these last 10 or 15 survivors.
Yaak is such a wet place.
That's one of the keys to its diversity of life there.
It's a lush, almost tropical place.
It's not what you think of when you think of Montana.
Because it's wet and low elevation, it grows big trees.
And big trees, because they're on the public land,
timber companies can have them at cut-rate bargains.
It's big dollars.
Everything in Yaak--
I guess that's one of its-- besides being wet,
it's such a secretive place.
Everything there is really--
even the people who are up there.
There's 100 people that live in the valley, that 500,000 acres,
and they're real hermits.
They're real recluses and such.
It's a fantastic place in every sense of the word fantasy.
It's kind of like Noah's ark.
So many of the threatened and endangered species in Yaak,
they retreated to these last little islands of roadless area
that I'm hoping to get protected as wilderness.
And so many of the populations of those rare and threatened
and endangered species are down to single and double-digit
populations.
It's like the opposite of Noah's ark.
There's two of everything, but it's like instead
of you get on the boat, it's you get off the boat and you off
and you off.
There's one woodland caribou that comes into the valley
occasionally.
Those two breeding age female grizzlies, maybe five
or six wolves, a handful of lynx, a handful of wolverine.
There's just one population of inland red band trout.
It's this landlocked salmon that been up there for 10,000 years,
and now one last little creek is where
they're found in a pure strain.
12 pair of mated bull trout.
This big old, again, a salmonoid that
gets to be 20, 30-pound trout in these little creeks.
It's a dramatic landscape.
Because it's so far north, animals
have evolved to cope with the cold winters.
They have larger body masses which
helps keep them warmer in terms of the rate of calories expended
per surface area.
Again, it's like this fantastical place where
everything is larger than life.
These big moose, big herons, big owls, big eagles, big elk,
big bears.
Everything's oversized up there.
The trees are big.
It makes you feel like a kid.
You're just tiny in this landscape.
Again, a measure of Yaak's diversity.
It's one thing and it's another.
It's wet and it's like the Pacific Northwest.
It rots.
It's real lush.
And yet, it also very much has the fire cycle of the Northern
Rockies integrated into its evolutionary history,
and that just adds to the richness.
It's a real wet, fragile place.
Oh, sure.
Excuse me.
Nervous.
Right.
If they stay up there too long, they'll get lost or something.
It's been a real--
education as a person, much less an activist,
to be arguing for the protection of these last little roadless
areas in the Yaak because--
again, I think most people's tendency
is for the middle road and moderation.
And if you keep taking that road,
you end up with nothing left.
But time and time again, at the--
I can't call them negotiating tables
because we haven't gotten anything,
but at the arguing tables.
Time and time again, the industry comes back and says,
well, we used to be bad, but we're changing now,
and I don't know if there's time even for them to be good.
I mean, I want to believe that, that you can log sustainably
from the national forest, but it's a big gamble.
I mean, on my worst days, I worry that the timber industry
wants all of it and wants to eat all of Yaak,
even when they're saying they don't.
And I know on their worst days that they think that I want
to lock all of it up and protect all of it, which I don't.
I just want those roadless areas protected.
But even if I did want to lock all of it up,
I couldn't get there from here.
I mean, it's already gone, the majority of it.
Some of those hillsides will revegetate someday.
Others of them won't.