Bass, Rick. The Lost Grizzlies: A Search for Survivors in the Wilderness of Colorado. Houghton Mifflin: New York, 1995.
Rick Bass is a preeminent of a small group of youngish American writers today (others include Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez) regularly creating both fiction and environmental nonfiction. A former bank clerk in Jackson, Mississippi, Bass grew up in Houston and worked occasionally in the oil fields, gradually building up a reputation for serious essays and short stories before severing the cords of corporate responsibility and fleeing to the Yaak Valley of northern Montana, where today his output has enlarged into novels both long and short. In The Lost Grizzlies, Bass takes us into the mountainous wilds of southwest Colorado, where he and his comrades—including the legendary bear researcher and iconoclast Doug Peacock—hope to find sign that a few grizzly bears have survived the bloody purges of the last half century. If grizzlies are still present in the San Juan Mountains, as a series of tantalizing hints make possible, and their presence could be indisputably recorded, the US Forest Service could no longer deny their existence and would have to take their endangered status into account when planning timber sales in the district.
Peacock, perhaps inescapably, is the focus of two of the book’s three chapters, and his dire presence assures us of a rollicking adventure, whether the action involves tracking giant bears in the outback or buying groceries in a country store. The model for Edward Abbey’s relentlessly inflammable character George Washington Hayduke in the novels The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives, Peacock served as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, and his autobiographical Grizzly Years graphically portrays the restorative experience he found in filming and studying grizzlies in Glacier National Park.
Bass’s straightforward portrayal of one of the conservation movement’s most inimitable figures, a man whom he says “reminds me of how good it feels to be alive,” is worth the price of admission in itself: though he lives in Tucson, Peacock spends the majority of the year in the big outdoors, traveling a yearly circuit from Montana to Arizona and inhabiting the wilderness areas thereof. At home in metropolitan downtowns as well as in the back of beyond, the massively built Peacock, like many of us, runs into trouble only when between the two extremes. Buying supplies for their outing, Bass, Peacock and their friend Marty stop at a quickie mart in Pagosa, Colorado, where the harried Peacock refuses to shop around for decent beer: “’Just get anything,’ he says to Marty and me, staring up at the dull overhead light. His face wrinkles as he moves unsteadily on the linoleum between the narrow aisles. He knocks a can of chili off a shelf, shouts ‘Fuck!’ and bolts, so Marty and I buy the beer and pay for the gas.”
Like a grizzly bear or any other wild animal, Peacock is genetically programmed to fight or flee from modern civilization—his tolerance for the nuances of dealing artfully with the techno-industrial world has its inherent limits. And he can never get far enough from it in our shriveling wildernesses. Coming down off the mountains after several days of intense exploration, the searchers enter the shabby Skyline Lodge in the village of Platoro, looking among the suspicious locals for nutritional and alcoholic provisions to tide them over the next leg of their journey. Too late to warn the volatile Peacock, Marty suddenly recalls that this is where one of the last grizzlies killed in Colorado, an undersize juvenile, has found it final resting place.
“…We’re gathering up our things when Peacock bursts into the lodge looking so frazzled, so confrontational, that it seems certain he believes we’re being held hostage…. (He) spies the bear head on the wall and walks over to examine it. Marty and I watch as Doug touches its teeth, its nose, and smoothes back some of the fur around its eyes. From where we stand, Doug seems to be petting the creature. He might even be speaking to it…. (We) drift over to the moth-eaten bear. It looks tired now, as if its spirit wants nothing more than to rest. Doug is pressing his thumbs and fingers lightly against the bear’s toy-savage features, and when we draw near him he straightens up, checks to be sure we’ve got the groceries, and turns and hurries out.”
At camp that night, to mollify Marty’s anguish (“I can’t stand to think of that bear sitting up there forever … their goddamn trophy”), Peacock admits that he “whispered some secrets in that little bear’s ear.”
Accompanying Peacock in his own habitat for prolonged periods of time is not an occupation to be taken lightly. Hiking along in the San Juans, deep in the wilds, or so they believe, Bass and party discover a camouflage bowhunter’s glove, alone in a meadow and far from any road, with no tracks nearby. Bass surmises that it was dropped by a hunter circling the area in an aircraft. “We did not get far enough in,” he thinks. Peacock’s reaction is a visceral, disgusted outrage. “All he sees is a mask of red webbing, a mist of blood … it’s a terrible look, and I wish to hell he hadn’t come across the glove.”
Finding definitive verification of the bears’ continued existence proves difficult, even when a possible grizzly print is found. (“’When they know they’re being hunted, they’re aware of [leaving] tracks,’ Peacock says. ‘Tell me that’s not indicative of a higher fucking state of being.’”) Nonetheless, the Round River school that Peacock’s researches support remains determined to produce young conservation biologists who will continue to comb the San Juans for traces of Lord Grizz, that ultimate apparition of wilderness, never so imperiled as now. Rick Bass’s deeply felt journal of the valiant expedition he was part of leaves us with a sense of hope that the greatest relics of wild America may yet be preserved.
Rick Bass is a preeminent of a small group of youngish American writers today (others include Terry Tempest Williams and Barry Lopez) regularly creating both fiction and environmental nonfiction. A former bank clerk in Jackson, Mississippi, Bass grew up in Houston and worked occasionally in the oil fields, gradually building up a reputation for serious essays and short stories before severing the cords of corporate responsibility and fleeing to the Yaak Valley of northern Montana, where today his output has enlarged into novels both long and short. In The Lost Grizzlies, Bass takes us into the mountainous wilds of southwest Colorado, where he and his comrades—including the legendary bear researcher and iconoclast Doug Peacock—hope to find sign that a few grizzly bears have survived the bloody purges of the last half century. If grizzlies are still present in the San Juan Mountains, as a series of tantalizing hints make possible, and their presence could be indisputably recorded, the US Forest Service could no longer deny their existence and would have to take their endangered status into account when planning timber sales in the district.
Peacock, perhaps inescapably, is the focus of two of the book’s three chapters, and his dire presence assures us of a rollicking adventure, whether the action involves tracking giant bears in the outback or buying groceries in a country store. The model for Edward Abbey’s relentlessly inflammable character George Washington Hayduke in the novels The Monkey Wrench Gang and Hayduke Lives, Peacock served as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, and his autobiographical Grizzly Years graphically portrays the restorative experience he found in filming and studying grizzlies in Glacier National Park.
Bass’s straightforward portrayal of one of the conservation movement’s most inimitable figures, a man whom he says “reminds me of how good it feels to be alive,” is worth the price of admission in itself: though he lives in Tucson, Peacock spends the majority of the year in the big outdoors, traveling a yearly circuit from Montana to Arizona and inhabiting the wilderness areas thereof. At home in metropolitan downtowns as well as in the back of beyond, the massively built Peacock, like many of us, runs into trouble only when between the two extremes. Buying supplies for their outing, Bass, Peacock and their friend Marty stop at a quickie mart in Pagosa, Colorado, where the harried Peacock refuses to shop around for decent beer: “’Just get anything,’ he says to Marty and me, staring up at the dull overhead light. His face wrinkles as he moves unsteadily on the linoleum between the narrow aisles. He knocks a can of chili off a shelf, shouts ‘Fuck!’ and bolts, so Marty and I buy the beer and pay for the gas.”
Like a grizzly bear or any other wild animal, Peacock is genetically programmed to fight or flee from modern civilization—his tolerance for the nuances of dealing artfully with the techno-industrial world has its inherent limits. And he can never get far enough from it in our shriveling wildernesses. Coming down off the mountains after several days of intense exploration, the searchers enter the shabby Skyline Lodge in the village of Platoro, looking among the suspicious locals for nutritional and alcoholic provisions to tide them over the next leg of their journey. Too late to warn the volatile Peacock, Marty suddenly recalls that this is where one of the last grizzlies killed in Colorado, an undersize juvenile, has found it final resting place.
“…We’re gathering up our things when Peacock bursts into the lodge looking so frazzled, so confrontational, that it seems certain he believes we’re being held hostage…. (He) spies the bear head on the wall and walks over to examine it. Marty and I watch as Doug touches its teeth, its nose, and smoothes back some of the fur around its eyes. From where we stand, Doug seems to be petting the creature. He might even be speaking to it…. (We) drift over to the moth-eaten bear. It looks tired now, as if its spirit wants nothing more than to rest. Doug is pressing his thumbs and fingers lightly against the bear’s toy-savage features, and when we draw near him he straightens up, checks to be sure we’ve got the groceries, and turns and hurries out.”
At camp that night, to mollify Marty’s anguish (“I can’t stand to think of that bear sitting up there forever … their goddamn trophy”), Peacock admits that he “whispered some secrets in that little bear’s ear.”
Accompanying Peacock in his own habitat for prolonged periods of time is not an occupation to be taken lightly. Hiking along in the San Juans, deep in the wilds, or so they believe, Bass and party discover a camouflage bowhunter’s glove, alone in a meadow and far from any road, with no tracks nearby. Bass surmises that it was dropped by a hunter circling the area in an aircraft. “We did not get far enough in,” he thinks. Peacock’s reaction is a visceral, disgusted outrage. “All he sees is a mask of red webbing, a mist of blood … it’s a terrible look, and I wish to hell he hadn’t come across the glove.”
Finding definitive verification of the bears’ continued existence proves difficult, even when a possible grizzly print is found. (“’When they know they’re being hunted, they’re aware of [leaving] tracks,’ Peacock says. ‘Tell me that’s not indicative of a higher fucking state of being.’”) Nonetheless, the Round River school that Peacock’s researches support remains determined to produce young conservation biologists who will continue to comb the San Juans for traces of Lord Grizz, that ultimate apparition of wilderness, never so imperiled as now. Rick Bass’s deeply felt journal of the valiant expedition he was part of leaves us with a sense of hope that the greatest relics of wild America may yet be preserved.
