Review of the novella collection The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness by Rick Bass

“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.”* 

     I need some out of doors, natural world contemplative, wilderness and universe glorifying reading right now. It's about that time. When the realization of this habitual yearning finally dawns on me, the first book I always reach for is Rick Bass's collection of three novellas, The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness. The Texas-born and Montana Yaak Valley-dwelling author excels in the short form of literature. And he is one of the few American writers who can consistently and seamlessly marry his deep adoration for the wilderness with the fictional tales he puts on page.
     The ethereal yet realistic stories that comprise this collection are all rooted firmly in the land. And a deep respect and awe for how that land which his characters inhabit comes to inhabits them as they pass through on the eye blink-quick trajectories of their lives. Bass's characters find themselves altered by the rocks, rivers, meadows, and trees that they so naively believed they had total dominion over. 
     In the first tale, a desperate man chases his resourceful, quick-witted wife through the winter-heavy foothills of the north country. She lures and thwarts his progress over and over, until it is uncertain who is attempting to ensnare whom. The second story centers around a young and brash oil surveyor in flight above the Appalachians and the site of the ancient sea that formed them so long ago. The author's reverence for the natural world is clearly spoken through the ruminations and words of a childless woman returning to the vast tract of west Texas land on which she was raised in the final story. She is the last of her family left alive to keep claim of this ranch that has been their's since before Texas became a state. And she takes stock of and wonders at the wild terrain that will surely outlive her.
      These men and women again and again discover their existences bumping up against the inevitable mortality that waits for all. Because what is left behind when we die but the land? No matter how drastically we alter the landscape, or however long we believe we have ownership of those rocks and trees, they will replenish, thrive even, long beyond the brief specks of our lives by millennia. 


*excerpt from the title novella.