I didn’t spend as much time reading this as Rick Bass did writing it. Not the three summers in the San Juans, not the years of friendships and research and passion that made it possible. But it’s the kind of book where I lean in to listen. Where I put my ear to the ground, where I tread more slowly, more carefully. The kind of book that sinks into my bloodstream, and maybe all the time it will spend in my brain will, eventually, come close to the time it’s been in Bass’s, or maybe I can never catch up. But there’s a pulse here I want to lay my head against and listen. Maybe that’s enough.
The utter holiness of being alive and part of such a system, the holiness of being allowed to be lichen within the system— I’m not normally a cheery person, but here on the chalk-rubble slope, tucked into my little lunch cave, I find myself grinning, then laughing at how tenuously alive I am. To hell with electricity, with sizzling nerve endings and mispronounced words. I want to learn a new language anyway, the language of breathing forests, the language of further mystery.(If I’d happened to leapfrog this book in front of the other, I would have read Barry Lopez via Rick Bass too. It all connects. Boy, does it.)