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Rick Bass: A Thousand Deer

“It’s all a cycle, and I have little interest in the short-term. I think it’s the shits, too, when Russ starts talking about a single year. I want to talk about sixty-four years. And so do my uncle and father” (25), writes Rick Bass in his book, A Thousand Deer. While the genre of Bass’ book could arguably be philosophy, theology, or religion—deemed nature by its publisher—Rick Bass’ intention is as keen as his descriptive, natural environment. Rick Bass, utilizing observed patterns, discusses and connects his life, a Bass’ lifetime, and a thousand lifetimes by focusing on the complex layers and anomalies he sees shared with self, other, nature and all living things.

Bass writes unique, detailed stories within each story. His essays are in memoir form and thus, each chapter is a fragment or memory. However, when looked at together through a retrospective lens, Bass’ digressions tell a larger story. This connective, textual tissue or pattern highlights the human story and the current human condition being observed and articulated by Bass. In his Q & A with SUNY Brockport students, Bass stated, “We’re all part of something larger. There’s nothing in between. Either this or nothing.”

When Rick Bass shares his experiences hunting, all events involve nature’s encompassing seduction. Yet, readers see him searching too, as a man looking back and within himself. Textually, Bass will even doubt himself. In the opening of the chapter “Aoudads,” he writes, “[e]ven if each accruing year brings only one or two new stories, then over the course of a lifetime, or half a lifetime, an incredible architecture can and will be constructed…of family and self, of place and time, and even consequence and meaning” (141). After this philosophical digression and exploration of the meaning of memories, stories, and how, like honeycombs, “[e]ven the dramatically incorrect mistakes are preserved and put to good use in the erection of such an edifice” (141), Bass then addresses himself in the next paragraph, “I might be wrong” (142). He allows this doubt to not be misleading, but rather, enlightening. Doubting himself, he eradicates potential ego or being deemed preachy. He shows he is always hunting for more understanding and awareness.

Bass searches. He has started documenting his part of a circular story that began long before him and will continue well after. He does not discriminate writing from hunting. Consider the way he describes several memories with his mother while searching for ancient arrowheads sticking up from the mud after a spring rain. Once in his palm, some turn out to be fallen leaves and like his writing, in retrospect, he’s okay with being wrong. Bass sees the connective lesson, the binary system or opposition in right and wrong, over time. This camouflage of patterns, look-alikes, and resemblances observed over decades has become an analogy. Bass announced in the Q & A, “Contemporary humanity is not a sustainable culture.”

“There was not that veil of impending sorrow that accompanies many of my own moments in nature these days,” (6) writes Bass. In the first chapter, “My Naturalist Mother,” Bass introduces readers to his mother’s organic influence on him. In one sentence, Bass admires his mom’s parenting style and conveys she offered an unbiased education of nature without imposing her own agenda. Rick Bass is seeking meaning and purpose, these days, in the patterns of nature he’s noticed recurring, altering, and returning from childhood to now. He is a grown man not only looking back on the influence of his naturalist mother, forever grateful for her organic introductions of nature, but also keenly aware of seemingly unrelated events that occurred while growing up between wildness and civilization. Bass paints vivid images with his words and digresses at paragraph lengths: the face of a mountain, the crook of a river bend, the dressing of a deer. “A close observation of nature cannot help but yield a poetic sensibility” (48) and Bass aims to invoke sensibility in his readers with his imagery, especially when the same locale is described in a different season or time-period so as to indicate subtle patterns or anomalies in natural patterns.

Adding, the “ability to be two things in the world—pattern-viewer but anomaly-seeker—has sharpened who we are as a species and as a family and as individuals, and it occurs to me that stories serve the same purpose” (48). Similar actions over generations and varied imagery observed over time are surfacing again and again in “A Thousand Deer.” By indicating patterns and pointing out anomalies, Bass hopes to invoke a deeper sense of awareness.

Bass writes, “[i]n retrospect, from a natural history perspective, I think I got to inhabit the last good childhood unfreighted by that degree of awareness of loss—that she and I got to inhabit it together” (2). Conveyed on page two, it would be impossible for readers to understand Bass’ double meaning at first reading but this is part of Bass’ writing craft. He is setting up an opportunity for readers to share in his retrospective thinking.

Bass’ gratefulness for his upbringing as a boy, being introduced to nature under the guidance of his loving mother, all occurred before his awareness.

Now, noticing the loss of this treasured landscape, the decline of his wildness, and the loss of his mother, a strong retrospective searching takes place that can only happen through maturation. However, Bass mentions the degree of awareness of loss and this degree of awareness is followed by she and I got to inhabit it together, and this indicates his mother’s absence now. While once she was there, too, while he was a boy, she is in fact, no longer with him and so, the same organic freedom and natural experience he felt as a boy is impossible now. Bass admits in his memoirs that no child can emotionally prepare for the loss of their parent any more than they can truly move pass the loss. Yet, he doesn’t stop there at the obvious. Bass further connects this deep sorrow and inability to stop searching for his lost mother with his beloved landscape. “To see the tracks but not the animal can yield a brief comfort sometimes...I’ll sense some thought, some presence, some feeling, without actually hearing or seeing her, my mother,…,—my loss of her—I will know with rock certainty that she is out there, in a different way, a way I cannot understand” (85).

Reminiscent of Josè Saramago’s, “All the Names,” or Josè Agualusa’s, “The Book of Chameleons,” Rick Bass utilizes binary oppositions which are a pair of related terms or concepts opposite in meaning, e.g. life and death, young and old, etc. Utilizing these binary oppositions, Bass is able to further explore the complex layers of his experiences, memories, and emotions that often remind him of the layers, lines of sediment seen in the faces of rocks or on the aging Bass family. So too, this is Bass’ main way of seeing repetition in nature: personifying these patterns and then making circular conclusions.

Life, “everything around us and in us ancient and new” (187) is connected.

Perhaps the strongest example of this conclusion can be found in the last chapter, “Mary Katherine’s First Deer” in which Bass admits, “[m]uch later I would allow myself the thought, the pondering, of how long ago the wind had passed through that had tipped over this matchstick arrangement of lodgepole…that gust of wind preparing a place, some distance into the future, for Mary Katherine, even before she was here” (179).

While his book covers four generations of deer hunting, there are parallel stories intertwined within his observations. “I have photos, unposed, of my father and uncle working on deer at the butchering table, and then, thirty years later, ourselves, doing the same work, and looking so much alike” (76). Bass is celebrating the passing of knowledge, respect to self and others, and overarching equal love for self and other to his next generation and in the same way he witnessed his father and grandfather in these photographs of generational resemblance. A microcosm of his teaching can be found in his gratitude each time an animal presents itself before a kill. Rick Bass encourages please and thank you much in the way water is necessary to life. By observing patterns and pointing out binary oppositions, Bass is able to form connections he has noticed but only through the passing of time. Now, he is compelled to point out how please and thank you can ripple the world and bring in a new tide of being human.

Equally, Bass is grieving the loss of loved ones and the increasing loss of landscape, drawing a connection to all of humanity and our responsibility to nature and us, due to this connection. He is noticing a growing loss of wildness and further, not only blaming humans for this natural destruction but also displaying the consequential connections that destruction has on humanity. This connectivity is accomplished by showing readers patterns he sees. While otherwise seemingly disconnected persons, places, or things, Bass utilizes binary oppositions in his writing style to clarify his perception.

One need not look far to find irresponsible human behavior, especially littering. Look along a highway or urban riverbed. Yet, one must wait decades to truly grasp the negative impact our contaminants will have on the water supply and wildlife. Rick Bass is done waiting or at least, has waited long enough. To truly be aware of the connections between patterns and anomalies noticed as a boy, it was not until adulthood that Bass could draw complex conclusions from the repetition and changes he’s seen all his life. Bass provides numerous binary oppositions to convey eloquent natural descriptions and observations while simultaneously addressing a more subtle, metaphysical connection. Perhaps fueled by Rick Bass’ environmental activism, it is evident Bass desires to teach a universal audience. If his lesson is about his search being incomplete or unclear, there is wisdom in the journey. It is in fact, the searching that provides awareness or clarity for Bass and all humans. Cliché as it may be, there are universal truths and it’s the journey, not the goal; one must travel a long distance to find what is near, etc. and Bass invokes these truths repetitively throughout.  

There exist a circular connection that, for better or worse, unites the world, life, and human beings with all that exist and most importantly, with each other. Bass has pointed out this connection by indicating the patterns so obvious, so prevalent in his life, that chaos and coincidence could not have played a role. Everyone is hunting and gathering their stories, searching for clarity, until their journey ends and only tracks, at best, can be followed. Tracks too, have their limit. They are pressed into a forever changing landscape. Their tracks or their existence is defined by time.

Inevitably, like even the best of memories, stories or man, all will have their tracks covered by a new print. Winter—a familiar season continually parallel to one’s first and another’s final snowfall.