In the wilderness

‘It’s simply a matter of where one chooses to keep one’s heart. It’s very simple,’ thinks Judith. ‘Either one keeps it in the woods or in the palm of one’s hand.’ In the first story with which Rick Bass opens his collection, we see a woman running for her life through a cold Alaskan forest. Her name is Judith and she is fleeing from her husband, Trapper. She is fleeing from an all-consuming and unhealthy love, where emotion and death have now become inextricably intertwined. Judith dresses in animal skins to survive the bitterly cold climate, hunts for food, and masks her scent so as not to leave any traces. The nature surrounding her both protects and repels her, standing out with its wild and untamed essence. Trapper searches for her as the seasons pass; he refuses to give up on the love she has sought to escape, yet cannot do without. Meanwhile, in the Appalachian Mountains of Alabama, Wallis possesses a magic touch: he is able to identify oil-rich plots of land, which he then drills, building his fortune with his own hands. He is opposed by his former employer, who tries to steal the best oil fields from him, in a ‘black gold’ rush where nature gives and takes away ruthlessly and arbitrarily, according to unwritten laws. ‘Roots’, on the other hand, is the central theme around which Bass’s latest story revolves. We are in Texas, on a ranch to which the protagonist returns after a long absence; she must now come to terms with everything she left behind, with what it means to belong to a family, to a place, to a land. “Everything belongs to a place – to one place alone – and not to everyone or to no one.” The thread linking Bass’s stories is the dialogue between man and nature, the power dynamics and interdependence that govern this relationship, and the presence of a wild and indomitable element that eludes control. Nature imposes its own laws, dictates times and ways; it is something that precedes and follows. It remains, in spite of man. The places described are frontier lands, a rural and unrefined America, shaped by basic needs and where human desires are stripped bare to the bone. “His fear was like this – and the word beyond fear: desire”. The natural setting is always unsettling in these stories; it possesses something both menacing and, at the same time, redemptive (for it always draws man out of himself, into a dialogue from which he cannot escape). And nature also teaches that everything is subject to change and that, in order to survive, one must come to terms with this constant dynamism. “That purity cannot last, that nothing lasts, everything changes, always.”

     

Rick Bass
, In the Wild
, Mattioli 1885, 176 pp., 18 euros