I live in a land where what is rare elsewhere is common, or in the instances where it is not common, still exists, despite having perished almost everywhere else. The upper part of the valley where I live, the Yaak, in northwest Montana, is only about half a million acres in size, though in that half-million acres there are as many trees, and as many different kinds, I suspect, as in other valleys twice the Yaak’s size, or larger.

But even if the Yaak didn’t possess the diversity equivalent of, say, a4-million- or 5-million-acre ecosystem, this valley would be just as valuable in its own right, as a salamander or a frog can be said to be no more or less valuable than a warbler, a wolf, a grizzly or a lynx.

The Yaak stuns me with its diversity, and its complex integrations of grace, and diversity within diversity. For example, few groves in the Yaak, with the exception of some lodgepole forests, dominate the canopy with only one or two species, as is so often the case in the rest of the West. Instead, there is much more often a sharing, a co-dominance, a tri-dominance—a pulsing, breathing partnership up there at the canopy level, as well as down below, at the level of the forest floor, and even deeper, where the tangled industry of roots writhes within the barely buried moraine, the for-now-stilled clattering of where glaciers once crept. You can stand in a “typical” forest in the Yaak and turn in a circle and spy seven or eight trees sharing that canopy, all within a stone’s throw: aspen, ponderosa pine, cedar, spruce, white pine, lodgepole, Douglas fir, larch.

This is the place I have come to love, despite the heavy rains and snows, or perhaps because of the heavy rains and snows; loving it because of the swamps, and the seething insect life. Even the music of the wind here can be like that of no other place. Every day this forest shows me new questions to ask; questions that despite their simplicity—a child’s questions—possess no answers.

This unanswerability, I am only now beginning to realize, is the answer: the point, or lesson, if it must be called that.

Does wind sound different and behave differently if it blows through the top branches of seven lodgepoles, as opposed to, say, six lodgepoles and one larch?

All right then, what about four lodgepoles and three larch?

Does the wind make a different sound (I envision some distant, soulful calliope) if two are lodgepoles, two subalpine larch, one spruce, one cedar, and one ponderosa pine?

Is the forest affected differently by those different sounds, different shadows? Are our hearts?

What does rain do, when it first encounters those breezy canopies? How does the snow act differently? What about temperature? What about scent? Can we map these things? Can we measure them? Can we control and capture them?

How should I speak of my love for and of this place, and all deep, dark forests? How canI best convince the world of my need for unmanaged forests? Should I speak with the precision of science and reason—which will always lag behind the immediacy of the here and now, comprised as science is of documents and data of the past—formulas and theories woven from the rubble of the trail behind us?

Or should I speak of my need by concentrating on the deeper taproots of emotion? Forget carbon monoxide absorption, carbon loading, transpiration, water filtration and nitrogen stabilization; I need forests, and, most of all, wild forests, with their wild inhabitants, because I love them.

What words, as a writer, do I choose? Here in the Yaak, there are so many words available: grand fir, alder, hawthorn, cottonwood, willow, whitebark pine, alpine fir, hemlock, grizzly, goshawk, bull trout, caribou, golden eagle, Coeur d’Alene salamander, wolverine, gray wolf, lynx, coyote, black bear, badger, fox, skunk, marten, fisher, bald eagle, bobcat, sturgeon, ferns, mushrooms, great gray owl, moose, elk and mountain goat, bighorn sheep, torrent sculpin, westslope cutthroat trout, inland redband trout Š So many words, maybe enough words, how could you ever run out of words?

I love all the forests in the Yaak, but especially those in the last of the roadless cores. We have thirteen little islands, or atolls, of roadless cores left on the public lands here, connected in tatters, like a wind-battered archipelago, by thin seams running between the clear-cuts. (To view the clear-cuts, you need to be up high; you really can’t see them, or their quilt-work fragmentation, from ground level.)

In a way that we have not yet been able to define or measure, these last untouched forests are as different from the regenerating forest units in old clear-cuts as an elk is from a horse.

I have nothing against horses; in fact, I love them. But I want elk in my world, too.

Is that too much to ask? Am I being too extreme?

For the most part, I missed the forests last year. I spent far too much time hunched over the desk, working on essays and editorials that advocated for the permanent protection—wilderness—of these last wild places.

Some years are like that. Once you’re set on a certain course, it’s hard to change your direction. Nature, with all her myriad cycles and rhythms, would give us lessons if only we’d watch and learn, but so often, the only model or pattern we know is that of the straight-ahead bull-rush.

For the last several years, in an attempt to help lobby for the protection of these last remaining roadless areas, I’ve been jamming my head full of facts and figures and statistics. Too often I’ve found myself defining the forest by the opposition’s terms—listing the things the forest has to offer us rather than simply celebrating and revering its beauty; and too often, as well, I’ve been allowing myself to be defined as an advocate, rather than as a lover of the woods.

And in my advocacy, I’ve allowed my thinking to become too defensive and strategic. I find now often that the way I see the woods is not always with my heart’s joy, but logically, and in terms of the arguments I know I’ll encounter in my advocacy, in my love.

Instead of leading with my heart—instead of hurling myself into the woods, into the forest, with pure pleasure, glorying only in the beauty of the season, with no awareness that these unprotected wild places are not guaranteed to be here forever, it seems that increasingly I am frantic in the forest, and arguing, even in my mind, with the voices of those who have opposed protection for these last roadless areas.

In my mind—even on walks through these cathedrals—I’ll be plotting the scant standing merchantable timber left in these out-of-the-way last corners. (How much am I being defined by my advocacy, and by the opposition? Here is one example: Even in my mind, I refer, almost naturally, to trees, whether standing, leaning or fallen, charred or dead or green or in-between, as timber, rather than trees. Not that timber’s bad; I just forget, often, to use the simplest of words, trees.) When the statistics emerge each year, as they always do, about how each year my forest (the Kootenai) grows more timber—trees—than it cuts, I’ll argue with the opposition that is always with me, even on my walks. I’ll remind those voices clamoring for the destruction of the last roadless areas—the last of the last—that indeed, the bulk of the Kootenai’s fiber production is occurring in the newer, younger trees that are the legacy of the vast clear-cuts of the past. In my mind, I’ll argue that due to high grading and fire suppression, we’ve converted the Kootenai in the last forty years from a forest of old growth to, in many places (with our thousands of miles of roads), weedy, stressed monocultures or bicultures: thickets of barely merchantable timber. I mean, trees.

Numbers flooding my head, these days, rather than poetry. Since World War Two, the buildup of fine fuel in the form of small trees on the Kootenai (trees less than seventeen inches diameter at breast height) has increased by 52 percent, and such trees now comprise two-thirds of the stand volume on all lands in the interior West. The big trees, and the old forests resistant to fire, are disappearing. The volume of big trees (greater than twenty-nine inches diameter at breast height) has declined by 31 percent on the Kootenai in the last half-century alone.

Never mind that the national forests provide less than 4 percent of the nation’s timber supply; there are some communities that, for better or worse, have built themselves around the logging culture, relying increasingly on the mercy of the highly mechanized mills, the volatility of interest rates and new housing starts, and the whims of the import-export wars.

If we are truly serious about helping retain a logging culture in the West, which I am, then we are going to have to find a way to utilize some of that undersized fiber, and a way to pay for the burning and thinning of it. (I’ve heard estimates that in the West there are approximately 40 million acres of overstocked Douglas fir alone.)

Numbers, numbers. Am I hopelessly naive for believing that we can still, barely, have it all—wilderness and logging, rather than wilderness or logging? In a few places like the Yaak, I believe that we still can. Call me an optimist, but I can still see a way out of this. It might take a hundred years to get back into some semblance of graceful, rhythmic health—what was once called by scientists when I went to school “dynamic equilibrium,” but which is now termed “historic ranges of variability.” But we can still get there. Using the models of nature, rather than our straightedges, we can still get there, if we can continue to encourage—to demand—bold leadership.

These last few years of argument have been for me years of gathering science and reason. This year, however, I intend to simply go for more walks, and longer walks, and to write my legislators with renewed enthusiasm, harping not on the science of preservation and restoration, but instead telling them how much I enjoy those walks, and how important they are. To lead with my heart, not my calculator, which can never carry enough decimal places to indicate what a wild forest is truly “worth.” One should never be placed in a position of having to justify one’s love.

I miss the forests. A gauze is settling in between them and me, as a result of this continued, sustained advocacy. (There still is not one single acre protected permanently on the public lands in the Yaak.) I am forgetting that what I love most about forests is simply looking at them, smelling them, touching them, not measuring or defending them. I need to be able to look at the last wild cores and know that we will always leave them to their own wild roaring grace, their own wild roaring vigor.

Instead of trying so hard to come up with answers for all the questions in our arguments, I want to work harder at thinking of more questions, and fewer answers; and the more unanswerable they are, the better: the greater glory such questions give to the forests, then, and to the creation.

What is in the soil beneath a forest, beneath this forest, beneath any forest? What recipe of history exists beneath us? Season after season of larch needles, crumbling to mulch; some sunbaked, some charred, others rotting, stirred by the rains of May, by the warm breaths of summer and early autumn, compressed by winter and muddied by March. A wandering trail of shining deer hair mixed into the batter, from where a lion has dragged a fresh kill through the forest, up and over the cascades and eddies of fallen, rotting logs. What makes a forest, and how do we speak of our forests? Please, less talk of the forest as a crop or even a resource, and more conversations instead about its beauty and its grace. When people who oppose wilderness designation argue that forests are like nothing more than a garden—that “healthy” forests can no longer exist without humankind tending to every last one of them, and that furthermore, as with a garden, we should take the biggest, most mature trees, so that the little ones will then have more room to grow—I now nod and say OK, maybe, as long as we take care to let certain areas, the wilderness lands, lie fallow for a season or a cycle or two, as is the habit of any good farmer.

And here is another of those questions: What is a season, what is a cycle, for a forest? A thousand years? Ten thousand?

Sometimes I think we are afraid to say “I don’t know”—that in the so-called information age, that has become one of our culture’s greatest fears. I think that as society, and the world’s advertisements, portray us increasingly as being in control of everything, there is a hidden terror growing beneath us that maybe the advertisements, and society, are wrong, and that we are not in control, and that there is much we do not know, and even worse, that much of what we think we know is probably flat wrong.

Sometimes I like to imagine that there lies ahead of us a time when we will become more comfortable with the fact that one of the definitions of forest is that of a place where we can never know all the answers; and that as a culture, we will finally listen not only to our science but also to our hearts—no longer uncomfortable, one day, with the strength required in that act—and that we will commit fully to protecting the last of the roadless cores on the public lands, the last of the untouched forests: to let them breathe and grow old, and then young again, and then old again, and then young again, at their own cycle and pace, under the pulse of their own living.

Places where we can listen and observe, and places where we can walk beneath the protection of their sheltering overstory, and continue to be inspired to marvel and wonder, and to keep asking the questions that have no answers.

Those are always the important questions. It takes courage to ask them.

I do not want our culture to lose any more courage.

I want us to be able to keep asking the last wild forests, and our own hearts, the frightening, marvelous, questions that have no answers.