Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  “Where are the sheared beams?”

  “They’re lying in the parking lot.”

  “And we’re supposed to have a topping-out ceremony with the roof beams lying in the parking lot? You’re not going to kid the press to the point of thinking you’re having a topping-out ceremony in a building that has a structural defect so that you can’t put a roof on it. You’ve got the First Lady involved. You don’t involve her in a sham. Call her people and tell them we don’t think we should go ahead with the ceremony.” A man on Hartzog’s right gets up and leaves the room.

  “The structure is safe enough, George. You’re not worried about anyone getting hurt, are you?”

  “I’m not worried about anyone getting hurt, except politically.”

  The crisis is abruptly dropped.

  “I need a superintendent at Chamizal like a Buick needs a fifth hole, but I got one, because he is locked into the budget,” Hartzog says. “I don’t want that to happen again.” He raps his knuckles on the table. “Senator Bible is complaining about our slowness on the Craters of the Moon Wilderness Area. I want that tied into the next budget appeal. And we’ve got to move on Alaska. Alaska is hot right now. What is the list of the things we want?”

  “Klondike Gold Rush International Historical Park, Wood-Tikchik National Recreation Area, the Lake Clark Pass, extensions to Mount McKinley National Park, Gates of the Arctic National Park, and the St. Elias Range—fifteen million acres in all.”

  “Before you assign someone to the theme study, I want you to touch base with Pat Ryan. Any more questions?”

  The Park Service archeologist, smoking Kools, begins to talk about a Park Service underwater-salvage plan involving ancient shipwrecks off the Florida coast. He wears a string tie secured with a silver-and-turquoise shell-inlay brooch. Hartzog lets him talk for a while, then says, “Any more questions?”

  “St. Catherines Island, on the Georgia coast—do we want it? The foundation that owns it wants to get rid of it.”

  “Do we want it? I don’t know. It’s not in the study plan.”

  “Yes, it’s one of three we want.”

  “Any more questions?”

  “You know about the arson at the Richmond Battlefield?”

  “Yes. Disgusting. How much damage?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars.”

  “When are the Connecticut River hearings?”

  “Thursday. In Hartford.”

  “Nothing else? That’s all, gentlemen.”

  Hartzog hurries back to his console, and moments later he is again on the phone, while his secretary orchestrates incoming and outgoing calls. He punches a button. “Senator, I want you to know I’ve gone the last mile with these people. Make a deal with them and it turns to ashes. We simply aren’t going to have enough water. Not nearly enough water … . Yes … . Thank you … . Thank you, sir. I deeply appreciate it.” Punch.

  “Congressman, you and I have been through this sort of thing before, and we know that in a situation like this a lie goes around the world before the truth gets its britches on.” Punch.

  “Senator, I want you to know I’ve gone the last mile with these people … . Yes … . No … . Yes, I knew you’d tell me honestly, that’s why I called you.” Punch.

  “Better hold off, Joe. I have the Secretary roiled up enough now, and I think if you were to throw a restudy in there at this time you’d kill it.” Punch. A fresh cigar.

  “No. It’s very simple. The Indians have the government over a barrel. We can’t force those Indian lands into this, because both tribes have now changed their minds and want to stay out. The Indians are listening to their white brother the realestate speculator.” Punch. Puff.

  “Mr. Secretary, I appreciate your returning my call. It’s about this photographic safari in Yellowstone. I’d like very much to give you this exposure. You would inaugurate it, then we’d take you off and bring you out.” Punch.

  An incoming call informs Hartzog that the White House feels it is too late to stop the ceremony at Wolf Trap Farm, because the invitations have all gone out. Hartzog, staring into the floor, is quiet for two minutes. “Then just don’t call it a topping-out ceremony,” he says at last. “Whatever you do, change the name.”

  It is noon. He gets up to leave, explaining to his assistants that the meeting he is going to is secret. “It’s with the Idaho delegation,” he tells them, “and it’s so secret they won’t even let their staff in on it. But when I come back, I may have a national park.”

  By the door is another framed quotation. This one says, “Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I have walked a mile in his moccasins.”

  For two hours now, Hartzog has been sitting in a boat on the Buffalo River doing the closest thing to nothing at all. He is fishing. Fishing is his only recreation. The Park Service stocks bass and bream in Prince William Forest Park, near Washington, and Hartzog sometimes goes out there for what he contemptuously calls “put-and-take,” but the Buffalo, in Arkansas, is his idea of the real thing, and there is almost nowhere he would rather be. He says he feels he has to “stay close to the deck,” though—to Washington, to Interior, to Capitol Hill, to the console—and so he allows himself to make such a trip only once every three or four years. The Buffalo River rises in the Boston Mountains. Wild and free-flowing, it drops to the cast for a hundred and fifty miles through Ozark forest terrain. It is punctuated with rapids, and it has cut canyons five hundred feet into limestone. Infrequently, it passes small farms, which are for the most part abandoned, and in the river below such farms are islands of coarse gravel. Hartzog’s boat is anchored in the stream just beyond the tip of a gravel island. The anchor is a two-foot piece of railroad track. Hartzog, casting rod in hand, cocks his wrist and flips a crawdad in a high, silent parabola. It falls, and splats near the riverbank—a skillful cast. He wears desert boots, white socks, a fading shirt and old gray trousers, a suède jacket, a baseball cap. He has a string tie with a shell-inlay clasp that was made by a Zuñi about a hundred years ago. After some minutes of silence, he says, “The gravel came from erosion from that hardscrabble farm. That was before we learned what contour plowing was about. And by the time we learned what contour plowing was about, the people had all moved to the city, and contour plowing was irrelevant.” He casts again. Splat. More silence. Hartzog, who ordinarily holds intense conversations with at least a hundred people a day, appears at this moment to be drinking the silence. The fishing is terrible, but he doesn’t seem to care. The river is full of twigs, leaves, and specks of forest trash. It is swollen four feet above its normal level, and only ten days earlier it was twenty-eight feet above normal and in savage flood. “She’s perky. Oh yeah, she’s real nasty,” says Hartzog’s boatman, whose name is Cal Smith. The boat is a johnboat, twenty feet long, narrow, flat-bottomed. Hartzog sits near the bow in a strapped-down director’s chair, and Smith is in the stern beside a nine-and-a-half-horse Johnson outboard. Smith is a big man with heavy bones, frank-furtery fingers, lithic jowls. He grew up by a quiet stream in Missouri. His father used to tell him what the bullfrogs were saying to each other when they conversed in the night. “Come around, come around,” said Mr. Frog. And Mrs. Frog’s answer was “Too deep. Too deep.” Hartzog laughs a big, shaking laugh at the story of the frustrated frog. So Smith tries another one—about President Roosevelt gettin’ in trouble with a gal named Pearl Harbor. Hartzog’s laughter has the same volume but is somewhat forced this time. Hartzog tells Smith about a moonshiner who took up counterfeiting and made a fifteen-dollar bill. He gave it to a country storekeeper, asking for change, and he was given two sixes and a three. Smith almost chuckles himself out of the boat. The silences between these stories are long ones, without a nibble. That flood really stirred up the river. The engine of another johnboat whines impatiently several hundred yards downstream. This one contains Hartzog’s friend Anthony Buford, and Buford’s boat is now heading back upstream, apparently to rendezvous with Hartzog’s. Buford is a mi
ddle-sized man with a leonine head, deep facial wrinkles, and a gruff, gravelly voice. (A third boat, beyond sight around a bend, contains Hartzog’s two sons, one of them under ten and the other in his twenties.) Like Hartzog, Buford is a self-educated lawyer who grew up against a rural background—in his case, southeastern Missouri, where he now has a big farm. Buford is an aggressive man. He aggressively raises quarter horses. He aggressively raises peerless cattle. He was an aggressive attorney, before he retired. He was general counsel of Anheuser-Busch. Hartzog and Buford got to know each other when Hartzog was the chief Park Service ranger at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, in St. Louis. It was Hartzog who took a set of plans that had been lying dormant for fifteen years and built the great arch of St. Louis. Those who know the story of the arch say that had it not been for Hartzog there would be no arch. Hartzog the Ranger is a hero in St. Louis, but at this moment he is not a hero to Tony Buford. “God damn it, George, this river is a mess. There is no point fishing this God-damned river, George. The fishing is no good.”

  Hartzog looks at Buford for a long moment, and the expression on his face indicates affectionate pity. He says, “Tony, fishing is always good.” The essential difference between these friends is that Buford is an aggressive fisherman and Hartzog is a passive fisherman. Spread before Buford on the bow deck of his johnboat is an open, three-tiered tackle box that resembles the keyboard of a large theatre organ. Buford has fished at least nine places while Hartzog has been anchored at the gravel island.

  Hartzog flips another crawdad into the air. Splat.

  “God damn it, George, I think we ought to pull our lines in, turn up the engines, and go for the White River. We could be near there by sundown, make camp, and be ready to fish the White in the morning.”

  A long period of quiet follows while Hartzog contemplates the tip of his rod. The quiet is so prolonged, in fact, that Buford becomes impatient and tells his boatman, Preston Jones, to move on and try another spot. “Under that cliff,” he says. “Maybe that’s where they’re all hiding.”

  The cliff is a high limestone wall that has been striped by dripping water. Beyond the rim of the cliff is a forest of red oak, white oak, cedar, hickory. On the other side of the river, where the ground is lower, are groves of sycamore, locust, and willow. The strata of the limestone are level—flat lines reaching out beyond the peripheries of vision. Below them, and above the bend, is a run of white rapids.

  “We’ve got to have this river,” Hartzog says. He wants to make its entire hundred and fifty miles a national river, which means that the Park Service would buy the river and all the riverine lands necessary to—as he puts it—“protect its overview.” The opposition consists of the Army Corps of Engineers, which would like to arrest the Buffalo with flood-control dams, and private owners who are against the intrusion of the government in any form; but Hartzog thinks he can get the river for the Park Service, and he will work to get it as long as he needs to. “It’s just unspoiled,” he says. “People haven’t found it yet.”

  He stretches his legs a little and leans back, watching the tip of the rod. He would like to see the tip move in short, erratic arcs. That, after all—that brief, dactylic burst up there at the end of the fibre-glass rod—is what he is supposedly waiting for. He pushes his baseball cap forward on his head, as if he were about to catch a nap in a dugout. There are five eyes on his rod. He sights through the last one into a patch of flat blue among high mounds of cumulus. He finds a fragment of cloud loose in the blue and he frames it steadily in the fifth eye while he waits for the glass to bend.

  From five hundred feet in the air, Jamaica Bay looks something like the Okefenokee Swamp—mud islands, dry islands, fringe vegetation, mottled marshland. Hartzog points to the hull of a wooden ship, its ribs protruding from the water. He points to a flight of geese descending toward a landing. He points to two men on horseback, cantering along a dirt road at the water’s edge. In the background of the riders, wiggling in heat waves, is the Empire State Building. The aircraft is a big, boat-hulled Sikorsky helicopter borrowed (with crew) from the Coast Guard. Hartzog and members of his staff are flying over the proposed Gateway National Recreation Area. They came to survey the terrain and to discuss how best to bring a natural and recreational environment—offering light, air, and quiet—close to the masses of the city. But, just now, pointing is the only way Hartzog can communicate. Strapped tightly into a bucket seat, he is beside an enormous open doorway, and his ears are covered with heavy black plastic cups that appear to be some sort of audio headset but are connected to nothing. The headset simply blocks sound. Each person in the cabin is wearing one. Printed instructions warn that the plastic cups should be kept firmly in place “to minimize ear damage due to high-frequency engine noise.” A little ear damage is apparently routine—all part of a day with the Coast Guard. The chopper circles, doing eighty miles an hour, and the pilot turns it on its side to provide an optimum view. There is nothing but a seat belt between Hartzog and Jamaica Bay. The open doorway—now beneath him—is so large that a mature camel could fall through it, let alone the Director of the National Park Service. On a map, Hartzog circles Jamaica Bay with his finger, indicating that he wants all of it for the Park Service—twenty square miles.

  The helicopter moves across Rockaway Inlet and along the Breezy Point peninsula—first over Jacob Riis Park, then over the Nike bunkers of Fort Tilden, and on to Breezy Point itself. Breezy Point, the lower extremity of Queens, is the southernmost tip of Long Island. It reaches out into one side of the entrance to New York Harbor in much the way that Sandy Hook, New Jersey, reaches into the other. Together, Sandy Hook and Breezy Point are pincers in the sea that constitute a kind of gateway to the city. The Park Service would include the whole of each peninsula in the Gateway National Recreation Area, where twenty million visitors a year would find swimming beaches, surfing beaches, pavilions, restaurants, promenades, golf courses, tennis courts, playing fields, bike trails, hiking trails, surf fishing, pier fishing, campgrounds, picnic zones, amphitheatres for the performing arts, a museum of marine life, a cultural and educational center, “creative open spaces,” “nature areas,” and “walk and wander” areas for solitary ambles by the sea.

  Hartzog points down to sand dunes. The outermost two hundred and thirty-two acres of Breezy Point peninsula have never been developed. Although they are an integral part of the City of New York, they are as pristine as they were when Verrazano discovered them. The chopper moves out over ribbed blue waves and flecks of whitecaps—New York Bay. Now framed in the open doorway—and two miles distant—are the flypaper beaches of Coney Island, three and a half miles of people. Hartzog’s ferries—fast single-screw pontoon airboats, shooting around the harbor like waterbugs—would siphon people from Coney Island and spread them out into Gateway’s twenty thousand acres. Hartzog holds in his hand a copy of the Gateway proposal, a map-filled booklet that flutters wildly in the breeze. He folds it back to show a map of the ferry system, trellising the harbor.

  The chopper descends. Two miles south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, almost in the lane of the giant ships, are two small islands. The helicopter hovers over them. The northern one has three trees on it. It is called Hoffman Island. The other—Swinburne Island—has no trees at all. Only one New Yorker in, say, fifty thousand has any idea that these islands exist. Hartzog envisions, among other things, an outdoor restaurant there beside the sea lanes, the big ships slicing by. The chopper moves. A gust rips into the cabin and tears several maps from Hartzog’s hands. Clutching the remaining sheaves, he writes on one of them, in shorthand, “There goes half my park.”

  “Any government agency has its own personality, and George knows his bureau. He knows what’s happening here in Interior, he knows what’s happening in Morro Castle, and he knows what’s happening at Mount McKinley.”

  “The personality of the Park Service is changing as it becomes an organization that reflects Hartzog. The Park Service is vital, active, and on t
he ball today, and has great esprit de corps.”

  “He’s very hard on his people. He cracks the whip. And he has a short fuse.”

  “He is too august, too removed a figure.”

  “He never asks the next guy to do what he wouldn’t do himself. He’s demanding, but his example is high.”

  “He has the service idea. His attitude is that people should be willing to move from one post to another. They should do what they’re told. He inspires both respect and fear. This is true of any strong man.”

  “He is so politically inclined that he shuffles and changes things constantly. The poor old bureaucrats around here don’t know quite where they’re at.”

  “We used to be trying to catch up on development in established parks, but George is trying to find the needs of the seventies. Those who identify the natural scene as the true purview of the Park Service think of him as a renegade.”

  “He reacts emotionally to people. He’s way up on them or way down. He snoops around the parks, and if everything is O.K. the superintendent is great. If not, the guy is finished.”

  “If it rains, it’s the superintendent’s fault.”