Customer Reviews

Winter : Notes from Montana

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

Rick Bass transports the reader to a remote valley in Montana and convincingly portrays his love and affection for all things wild and natural. This testament to the environment never preaches yet may be one of the most powerful arguments to preserve that which is still wild. It calms the mind and stirs the spirit.

Rick Bass is a gifted author with an amazing ability to make simple pleasures (like watching the snow fall) sound irresistible to even the most restless souls. "Winter" is effortlessly my favorite book of all time; a masterpiece of time and solitude. Often while reading the book, I almost want to sell everything and go off to Montana, cut wood, take great adventurous hikes and happily watch the snow fall for an entire day. We're missing the point of life - Rick Bass has captured it in this important book. Anyone who enjoyed Bryson's "A Walk In The Woods" should not miss this superior classic.

There is something enchanting and mystical about new fallen snow. However, along with its beauty comes danger and isolation. Winter is comprised of journal entries written by Rick Bass as he and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, experience their first winter in the northern most part of the country, Yaak Valley, Montana. In the beginning of the book, the author writes about his anticipation of winter. As you read each journal entry, you find yourself enthralled in the author's excitement. When the snow finally comes, there isn't disappointment like there sometimes is when a person looks forward to an event. Bass finds a whole new world in Yaak Valley and to him each snow fall is an event. You can feel his excitement when he writes, "Perhaps all the snow in the world will fall, burying everything, such silence, and then I will come out of it in the spring, different, cleaner, not born again so much as built up." (Page 103)

Living in this remote valley with no prior experience of deadly winters, the author sometimes makes light of how truly dangerous the winter can be. He writes about men taking the safety devices off their chain saws so they can cut trees faster. He mentions dangerous wind chills of 80 degrees below zero. At one point in his writing, he describes how he found Hughes standing outside in her nightgown when he came home from cutting wood. She had been standing very close to the fireplace in order to keep warm and her flannel nightgown caught on fire. You can't help wonder just how many accidents occur, however, Bass brushes over them very lightly in his romantic love affair with the snow. The author paints a vivid picture of the local bar, the Dirty Shame Saloon. You find yourself feeling right at home as Bass shares a beer and exchanges stories with the local men and Hughes joins the ladies for a game of pinochle. The valley is friendly and typical of a small rural area. However, in this remote valley that has no electricity and dangerously cold winters, the people depend on each other for survival. We forget how the same beautiful, natural wonders like snow can also be deadly. Bass does a much better job showing us the enchanting side of living in the valley during the harsh winter than he does the life-threatening dangers that exist.

Although Bass brushes over the risks and threats of living in Yaak Valley, the book is an easy read well worth your time. I recommend the book for anyone interested in a non-fiction, down-to-earth book that leaves you with a renewed love for nature at its purist.

Winter (notes from Montana) takes place in the Yaak River Valley of Montana in the late 1980's. Rick Bass's riveting journal transports the reader to this remote area and helps to involve the reader in his transformation from dependence upon civilization to the ability to appreciate solitude. The sporadic entries enable the reader to see the changes that are taking place in the author more readily than he sees them. "I suppose I was pretending that I had always realized what I needed-deep, dark woods and quietness, a slowness-and that I hadn't been floundering for thirty years trying to figure this out, trying to get along in the cities, trying to move fast. He was right, though. I have changed. I can take apart a generator and put it back together. I can file a saw. My heart has changed too. I'm in less of a hurry." (p. 161). Bass finally begins to see that by learning to depend on nature and himself, he is learning that what we think we need is not always the best for us. This book is an excellent piece to help readers appreciate the life of convenience but also envy the simpler life Bass is living in Yaak.

Rick Bass is one of my favorite writers and in my opinion deserves much more attention.

This book is a memoir of his first years in Yaak, Montana with his wife Elizabeth. They move from the city to a small cabin in the Montana wilderness. It is a beautifully written tribute to a world no longer in demand where the sound of silence feels too loud. Bass finds out just how little he actually knows, a marvelous experience in humility, once he encounters the harshness of winter. He writes about snow being strong and silent in the same breath. He discovers a new life where he only needs bare essentials to survive and soon finds that all other existence seems superficial. He writes in a style like no other man I have ever read almost poetic but not overdone, and like Walden, he suggests that tremendous value exists in the wilderness away from a roaring crowd.

If you love nature and the idea of healing such as that found in solitude this book is for you. Bass writes so wonderfully that your senses are taken along with him on his various wilderness excursions for life's rations. My favorite passage is on page 81, on which he describes a lone male moose, "He broke into the smoothest of gallops, a lazy, long legged floating. His wide antlers could have held a tea service without spilling a drop, so smooth and level was his gait." How many men do you know who would think of a tea service and not a loaded gun upon seeing a magnificent male moose? This is where I find Rick Bass so appealing; in all his male machismo he finds the subtle intricacies of art in nature and has the ability to describe it all magically.

I read this book during my first winter in Colorado which, having moved here from Arizona, has also been my first real winter ever. "Winter covers some things and reveals others" (p. 162), Rick Bass observes in his journal, which recounts the first winter he spent with his artist girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, without electricity, phones, or paved roads in Yaak Valley, Montana. In his 162-page "journal of winter, a journal of peace" (p. 28), Bass also discovers that winter has the power to transform. After "floundering for thirty years trying to figure this out, trying to get along in cities, trying to move fast," Bass encounters the "deep, dark woods," and the "quietness, a slowness" of winter (p. 161), which causes a change of seasons in his own heart.

Except for a only handful of neighbors, and the "no glitter, no makeup" (p. 77) regulars at the Dirty Shame tavern, Bass shares his "wild, magical valley" (p. 3) with grizzly bears, grouse, moose, mule deer, elk, porcupines, ducks, geese, owls, rabbits, mountain lions, bobcats, black bears, coyotes, gray wolves, badgers, martens, fishers, wolverines, lots of snow, and silence. "We had never felt such magic" (p. 5), Bass writes. "This valley shakes with mystery, with beauty, with secrets" (p. 61).

WINTER is to Rick Bass what DESERT SOLITAIRE is to Ed Abbey. Drawn from journals, both books address the important question of why wilderness is essential to man.

G. Merritt

WINTER notes from Montana is a diary of Rick Bass' first winter in the Yaak Valley of Northern Montana. The book details his on going struggle of learning about and surviving the hardships of living in the snowbound Yaak Valley

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Bass moves from the warm climate of Texas were he was a geologist to the Yaak Valley to write. The book details Bass' struggle as he works to find enough wood to last the long winter and to learn all the tricks of survival in the cold and snow. Bass subtly points out changes happening to him through out the book and this is brought to light when his father comes to visit. While they are fishing ""you've changed," my father said, not uncomfortably, as he mended his line." I think this points out Bass' reason for moving to the Yaak Valley and his purpose in being there. Bass wanted to give up the life of the daily grind and to become one with nature and life.

Although the book is meant to view Bass' ideas on environmental issues, he doesn't over state any of them or push them on the reader. The book is well written and very enjoyable to read. Whether the reader is pro or con on the issues in the book he/she can take an enjoyable hour or two and read the book for the pure enjoyment of Bass' writing.

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Winter (notes from Montana) written by Rick Bass, captivates his audience with his new favorite season of the year. "I watch individual flakes; I peer up through the snow and see the blank infinity from which it comes; I listen to the special silence it creates."(p.90) Bass journals about his experiences with his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hughes, who is also an artist for the book Winter. Bass and Hughes are from Mississippi and try to make Yaak valley, near the Canadian border, their new beloved home. Winter touches on the many hardships of living with nature such as cutting wood to keep warm and being able to repair anything that breaks because there is no one else to help you out. Bass's emotions of excitement in experiencing his first winter are well written, as well as his sadness to see winter melt away.

As other reviewers mentioned, this book does tend to read a bit like a blog. It's more a series of sequential, loosely connected daily musings and thoughts, rather than a concise tome about life in the winter in Montana. That said, if you're looking for a decent read to get you into the winter cabin mood, this is sufficient.
Bass does have a good writing ability, though it shines only occasionally here when he gets introspective and philosophical. There are a few moral inconsistencies, like his ravenous consumption of firewood while musing on the beauty of trees, but to Bass' credit he does attempt to resolve (or justify) it through his seeming appreciation of man's hard relationship to nature. Bass definitely writes like a city transplant to the country, but his child-like fascination with all things wild and rural is endearing. I liked this book, though I doubt I'd read it the whole way through again.
Overall, this book is adequate.

This is more like a book of poetry and paintings. The wording is so elegant and dream like that you feel the snow on your tongue as you read. It makes me crave the cold and the silence of northern Montana, allows me to vividly recall the sound of crunching snow under boot, the snap of frozen tree limb under the weight of heavy ice, the whinnying of horses in the paddok, and the smell of woodsmoke in the cold nights air. A true adventure story built out of a dream for space, and peace, and the ability to still live wild and free. You can find the Fix Ranch on the Montana real estate pages these days, and it's interesting to compare the book to the actual lay of the land. No one tells a better Montana story than Rick Bass, and I strongly urge you, if you crave the solice of quiet spaces and simple times, to read this beautifully written book.