Why I Came West

by Rick Bass

[jamiereadthis]

These essays are the parallel, the mirror, the bookend to Wild to the Heart. Not the coda— we’re still far off from that— but the counterweight, the follow-up, the cost. Wild to the Heart was pre-Montana, before the love story. This is the twenty-year toll of that love story.

Which makes it oh, so necessary. We grow, we learn, we tire, we change. We’re ten different people within the span of our lives and that’s the important part, the vital and rare part— to get to look back and see the span of it. For Bass it’s geologist, novelist, essayist, activist: the flux and flow through three decades of work. But for him, like everyone, it’s never discarding the one thing for another. It’s the accumulation, the striation, like glaciers, like rocks. Like us. Changed, and the same, through the geologic millennia of our so-brief, fire-starter lives.

Once you’ve read a lot of Rick Bass, this is where to come for the crucial puzzle piece— not the final one, just the linking one. The long marriage of any love story, the most important part.

(Also, I think the four stars are just to see if I could. What’s more impossible, to give it four stars or to give every one of them five?)