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8b3a776
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I do not concern myself with my inability to feel such comfort amidst humans (other than with very few friends and family), but, rather, am simply thankful that at least dogs exist, and I'm humbly aware of how much less a person I'd be - how less a human - if they did not exist.
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friends
family
exist
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Rick Bass |
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f722af6
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A dog creates, transcribes, a new landscape for you. A dog like Colter sharpens your joy of all the seasons, and for a while, sometimes a long while, such a dog seems capable, by himself alone, of holding time in place--of pinning it, and holding it taught. And then when he is gone, it is as if the world is taken away. Dogs like that are young for what seems like a very long time.... One you have lost a dog--especially the first you trained..
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Rick Bass |
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a3716c2
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The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.
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Rick Bass |
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9d42bc0
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How we fall into grace. You can't work or earn your way into it. You just fall. It lies below, it lies beyond. It comes to you, unbidden.
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Rick Bass |
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ee533b3
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There are none among us who have not been, even for a moment, cruel to those whom we love most, as if unable, in that moment, to shoulder any longer the magnificent weight and burden, the responsibility, of that love.
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Rick Bass |
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38bbfe6
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Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.
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juggernaut-short-story
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Rick Bass |
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1bdd597
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It is a kind of church, back in these last cores. It may not be your church -- this last one percent of the West - but it is mine, and I am asking unashamedly to be allowed to continue worshipping the miracle of the planet, and the worship of a natural system not yet touched, never touched by the machines of man. A place with the residue of God - the scent, feel, sight, taste, and sound of God - forever fresh upon it
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Rick Bass |
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67416ae
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We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, there is no innocence; and there is no death, there is only life.
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life
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Rick Bass |
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980b3c9
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Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy
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Rick Bass |
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427e2d5
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Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?
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loneliness
humanity
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Rick Bass |
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fb227fb
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His errors and failures have not traveled the same distance as his successes.
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Rick Bass |
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b85f101
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everyone has to do one really bad thing in life to call their life a life.
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Rick Bass |
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40285b7
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There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards--the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.
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Rick Bass |
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be22dbc
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Slater used to be a poet, he's nothing now, and he sort of looks on Robby and me with awe because we aren't nothing yet, we haven't given up yet, awed at me because I'm thirty-one and haven't given up yet, and at Robby because he's young and has potential. Most people stop wanting to be a writer around the age of sixteen.
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writing
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Rick Bass |
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6d485ac
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The thing about nature is that each species does what it's best at. That's why it's all so locked together. I'm certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony - the white light people speak of having when they come back from "the dead." And what does our species do best? We construct artificial systems wherein we are mighty predators, or mighty thinkers, or sagacious, benevolent rulers of the universe - allies with God..
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Rick Bass |
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e2cbc05
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I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we'd been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger, and a swatch of my own hair. A headstone, a footstone. I planted an aspen tree above the headstone, to give her shade, and to someday provide leaf-music in the breeze. It took a long time before I was worth a damn again. How to measure the el..
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Rick Bass |
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eee2a38
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is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?
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Rick Bass |
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2ab8674
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Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are?
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the-universe
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Rick Bass |
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1bbfd07
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You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard winters, and the assaults of time.
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Rick Bass |
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18994e4
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I'm surprised when I walk right into yet another abandoned hunters' camp. Tattered plastic sheeting still hangs askew here and there. Blackened aerosol cans of Cheez Whiz sit in the fire pit, which sits in the middle of the trail. Assorted Styro-ware. Rotten leather boots. Where are these people? Are they back in civilization now, appearing to all observers to be as normal as pie, but inwardly ticking like time bombs and spreading their hot..
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litter
trash
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Rick Bass |
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bcdd644
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When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd's mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy's face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he'd ridden by the day's end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd - a phantasmagoric b..
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longhorns
cowboys
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Rick Bass |
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24e5041
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I think the idea of holing up and hunkering down against the larger forces of the world has not lost its allure since Thoreau's time. If anything that instinct, or impulse, continues to reside in almost all of us, sometimes activated or bestirred and other times dormant but always present.
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Rick Bass |
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5244ea2
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I've tried listening to one of those birding tapes but have had difficulty pretending I'm in the woods--no matter how accurately the calls are recorded, I have trouble making myself believe it's a real bird making that call when there is no other accompanying stimuli of the natural world: no odor of marsh or spruce, no slant of sunlight or dimming of dusk; no breeze, no grass rustle, no sky, no earth, and I have to confess also to becoming ..
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Rick Bass |
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b41b6fa
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I've heard it said that when you die you enter a room of bright light, and that you can smell bread baking just around the corner.
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death
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Rick Bass |
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4fb5b99
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there are those among us who are more dog people than others--and a dog person without a dog is missing something. I
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Rick Bass |
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807dac7
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There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that's wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature--not romance--dictate this. It occurs to me that sometimes even nature--raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature--fears, even if only slightly, rot.
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Rick Bass |
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4ace46b
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Ceremony. When we've lost that, we've lost everything, and are only wandering in the dark, like chickens or lambs waiting for eagles.
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Rick Bass |
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5c41a80
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I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery, and that science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels back and forth, unencumbered by anything so frail as man's knowledge.
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Rick Bass |
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85754bb
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The rich-soil part, the mystery beneath all those reasons, is that I love it. There is an awareness, an addictive alertness, a super-heightened sensitivity that approaches and then becomes a kind of spirituality.
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Rick Bass |
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43de261
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What constitutes a fit between artist and mentor? It is not necessarily style, or even sensibility, though sensibility gets closer to describing it. Aesthetic might be the best. If a shared aesthetic exists, the mentor can come to view the mentee as another of his projects: a shaping and sculpting, and a carrying forward of the mentor's aesthetic.
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Rick Bass |
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c6e2587
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My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July. The
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Rick Bass |
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5cf56e2
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Industry, and indeed, even people within the Forest Service itself, continue to try to sell us the emperor's myth that clearcuts imitate wildfires, and as such, are healthy, but clearcuts don't leave behind the forest's nutrients, and don't leave behind standing spars and snags for hiding cover and cavity nests for birds and small mammals. Saying a clearcut is like a wildfire is like saying a bank robbery is the same thing as a savings with..
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Rick Bass |
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e41eedb
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MAY IS THE MONTH of disorderly conduct.
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Rick Bass |
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d2ce771
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hellbenders. I collected with exuberance and totality, bringing home almost everything I could get my hands on, and releasing them into the assorted outdoor terrariums or aquariums in my back yard (the turtles I let run wild in the yard, like dogs or cats).
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Rick Bass |
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0205f4d
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Every spare moment was spent tromping about in the exploration, pursuit, and gathering of elusive living things; or, when the weather was too stormy, reading about the exploration, pursuit, and gathering of elusive living things. We
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Rick Bass |
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9d13a8a
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I look down and see that Colter has returned and has gone on lock-solid, drop-dead point about twenty feet in front of us, head and shoulders hunched and crouched, bony ass stuck way up in the air, body half-twisted, frozen, as if cautioning us of some hidden, deadly betrayal: and green eyes afire, stub tail motionless. We ease forward, adrenaline-drunk. Nothing happens. And then it does. The cock-bird climbs towering above and then flares ..
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Rick Bass |
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963ae86
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buried him next to my cabin door, in that sunken, blissful spot where he had napped, always waiting for the next hunt: beneath the wild rose bushes. I buried him, as I had Ann, with bones and antlers and venison and dog food and a wreath of cedar and lupine. I buried him with shells, both 12- and 20-gauge, for whenever we went hunting again, and I put in extras because I knew I'd miss some shots. The bones and wings of his quarry. A whistle..
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Rick Bass |
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337f764
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The sole purpose of all the other work was just to buy time to be still for a moment and write.
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Rick Bass |
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f55bd7d
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The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it's always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are..
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Rick Bass |