THE YAAK MONTANA'S WETTEST & WILDEST PLACE
BY RICK BASS PHOTOS BY DONNIE SEXTON
ll of a sudden it's been a long time; all of a sudden, I've become, or am becoming, an old-timer. It's always been a hard place to make a living—I've been told that even the first people, the Kootenai, didn't inhabit the Yaak year-round, but camped down along the Kootenai River, hunting in the Yaak in the summer and fall—and though there are some of us who live here year-round now, it's still a pretty small number. When I first came to the Yaak Valley, in extreme northwest Montana, everything was new. Even the heat was new. Back then, the super-hot summers still seemed an anomaly, a curiosity, rather than a norm. The country hadn't burned big in over 50 years, and there were more hues and tones of green than I had encountered or even imag-
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ined in Mississippi, where I had been living and working, and certainly more than anything I had known in Texas, where I grew up. Water slid in sheets and from the broad drooping fronds of cedars, dripped in melodies some- times staccato and other times with a hissing harmony from the tips of pine and pipsissewa, trickled in fantastic maze-whorls down the lock-and-key bark of larch and ponderosa. Water splattered heavy and globular from the branches and needles of lodgepole. Water got in your eyes, drenched your hair, scrubbed your face clean as you passed through the screen of alder. Your lungs were so hydrated by the simple act of breathing that sometimes you didn't need to drink a single glass of water, but got all you needed from the miraculous act of respiration.
