Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

  “With his own staff, he will delegate, but the delegation is only good while the delegatee operates exactly the way George would operate if he were the delegatee.”

  “This building is loaded—it’s stuffed—with people who are overridden by personal ambitions. But that is not true of George. I never have a fear that I’m being used and that when I’m used up I’ll be discarded.”

  “Instead of being preoccupied with the process, he is preoccupied with the idea. I’ve never heard him discuss reasons why things can’t be done.”

  Hartzog lights his seventh cigar. He says, “People, people, people—they’re coming out of my ears.” The door of his office opens and in walks the superintendent of Yosemite National Park. His name is Lawrence Hadley. He is in Washington to confer with the California delegation to Congress, and Hartzog has fifteen minutes to sift Hadley’s thoughts before Hadley goes to the Hill. The superintendent of Yosemite is a young and strong-appearing man with dark features, dark hair, and a suggestion of melancholy in his face. He wears a silver watchband with turquoise inlay and a large silver-and-turquoise shell-inlay ring. He speaks softly and with an unpretentious air of absolute competence. He is Hartzog’s idea of the Park Service personified—a man who does anything well and is ready to serve anywhere any time. Hartzog is confident that when Hadley and his wife are asked abruptly to change their personal plans and go to an airport to meet an official visitor, they will do so without pause or regret. Hadley grew up in Maine, where his father was the superintendent of Acadia National Park. The word is that Hadley may one day succeed Hartzog as director of the Service, and that Hadley will soon be transferred to Washington. Meanwhile, the problem of Yosemite Valley is the sort of thing he ought to be dealing with, for the Yosemite’s problem is population pressure as expressed in the invading automobile, and if solutions can be found there, where the pressure is most intense, the solutions may be applied throughout the national-park system. Yosemite Valley has a flat floor and sheer granite walls. It is about six miles long, and has been penetrated by a roadway from the west. Driving into it is like driving up through a drain and out into an exaggerated bathtub. The vertical walls of the valley in places are three thousand six hundred feet high, and for an automobile there is only the one way in and out. With its pluming waterfalls, its alpine meadows, and its granite pinnacles, the Yosemite is in all likelihood the most exquisite cul-de-sac on earth, and each year about seven hundred thousand cars go in there.

  “The automobile as a recreational experience is obsolete,” Hartzog says. “We cannot accommodate automobiles in such numbers and still provide a quality environment for a recreational experience.” Accordingly, Hadley will ask Congress for three hundred thousand dollars so he can close at least a part of the valley to automobiles and carry people through the closed area in chartered buses. Hartzog says that eventually he would like to block cars from the valley altogether and possibly build a funicular that would lower people into the Yosemite from the rim. To transport people around the valley floor, he contemplates the use of electric trains, which would run on rubber tracks. As Hadley and Hartzog talk, it becomes increasingly apparent that everything they are saying rests on the assumption that the visiting public has the right to be carried from place to place—that the right to vehicular transportation, privately or publicly provided, now comes under less question than the right to freedom of assembly or freedom of speech.

  The Park Service tried elephant trains in Yosemite for a period of ten weeks. The valley was stuffed with cars, but people got out of them and spent twenty-five thousand dollars on the trains, at three dollars and fifty cents a ride. “People want some alternative,” Hartzog says. “No more roads will be built or widened until these alternatives are explored. We want to give people a park experience, not a parkway experience. We need to limit access to parks and wilderness. We’ve simply got to do something besides build roads in these parks if we’re going to have any parks left. We need controlled mechanical access. We can put parking lots outside the parks, then take people in with public transportation. When you get too many people, simply shut off the machinery. If we get rid of the automobile, we can have more people. No one knows what the carrying capacity of Yosemite is for human beings alone. I don’t think you can stay bound up in this knot you’ve been in of roads and trails and more roads and more trails, Larry. You’ve got to end it. The beauty is that you can take a dynamite stick and blow up the pavement and then all you have is a hole there and you can fill up the hole. I’m not inflexible on anything except that I’m going to get rid of the damned automobile and I’m not going to get rid of people in the process.”

  Hadley, thoroughly coached, departs for Capitol Hill. As he goes out, Nathaniel Owings, of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, comes in. Owings wearily says, “Hello, George,” sits down, takes out a handkerchief, and wipes his brow. He is middle-aged, middle height, middle weight. He, too, wears a turquoise ring. He is, as it happens, chairman of the Advisory Board of the Park Service. Immediately, he says what he wants. He is redeveloping the Mall—the sweeping greensward that runs between the Capitol and the Washington Monument—and he wants to put a subway entrance in the middle of it. Hartzog’s eyebrows rise. Some of Owings’ ideas are untraditional; the Mall would not be everybody’s first choice as a site for a subway station. Owings says, “The Mall doesn’t have to be just for monuments, George. It can be for living. The subway station won’t be junk and crappy, I guarantee. There is nothing that says we can’t put the subway entrance where the people are.”

  “With that idea, Nat, we can start something new in planning,” Hartzog says, with a booming laugh.

  After Owings leaves, Hartzog begins assembling papers. He punches the telephone console and says, “Ed, just make sure of one thing. Whatever you do, just make sure there’s no tree on top of that structure at Wolf Trap Farm.” Papers in hand, he hurries out. He has an appearance of his own on Capitol Hill.

  “I stay pretty close to the deck,” Hartzog says as he rides across the city in a chauffeur-driven unmarked patrol car of the United States Park Police. “If the Congress of the United States is going to hold hearings on my legislation, I ought to be there to testify.” He has only once permitted himself a trip to Europe, and that was just a fast tour of England, France, and the Netherlands with a governmental committee sent to study historic preservation. He will travel, though, to the remotest corner of any state in the Union to please a senator or a significant congressman. Remote corners of distant states can be, in a sense, integral segments of the deck. He once made a speech at the Cherokee Strip Living Museum, in Arkansas City, Kansas, for example, because Joe Skubitz asked him to go there. Arkansas City is in Skubitz’s district. Skubitz is the ranking minority member of the House Subcommittee on Parks and Recreation. Among other things, Skubitz promised Hartzog on this visit that he would arrange with Wayne Aspinall, the chairman of the committee, for a hearing on Hartzog’s proposal for a Buffalo National River. Hartzog is tireless. He knows that in Washington the shortest distance between two points often includes a trip to Kansas. So he goes. He fears flying, but he goes. He speaks. He drinks. He grins. He guffaws. And he comes home with a hearing (or the promise of one) that might otherwise not occur. He travels, too, as an evangelist for his causes. Wherever something is up—Florida, Minnesota, Arkansas, California—he goes to talk to farmers, freeholders, Indians, or entrepreneurs and tries to show them what he wants to do, and why. “These things go slow,” he says. “You don’t make any converts at a big meeting. You have to get one man talking to one man. The opposition always has the advantage at first, because a lie goes around the world before the truth gets its britches on. You’ve got to get the facts out onto the table so the local people can see them.”

  Where the success or failure of all this effort is measured, of course, is on Capitol Hill, in hearing rooms, where Hartzog presents and defends his programs. Now he gets out of the car, tells the driver to wait, and, l
ooking over his papers as he goes, hikes the long corridors of the Senate Office Building. In the hearing room are folding chairs, carafes of water, maps of the Everglades, and a raised platform where seven senators sit at a curvilinear table. “Each time I think I have agreement with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Central and Southern Florida Flood Control District, it turns out to be ashes in my mouth and papier-mâché,” Hartzog tells them. He speaks strongly and colloquially, reviewing aspects of the training jetport and of the water system of southern Florida. He also talks about fifty-eight thousand acres of inholdings—private lands within Everglades National Park—that he would like Congress to condemn and buy. What he says is clear and is obviously well prepared, and this, among other things, has earned him the high regard of the men on the platform. They say that when he speaks he always knows what he is talking about, and that this puts him in something of a minority among bureaucrats making appearances on the Hill. Hartzog has friends and enemies in both houses and both parties, because, in the words of Congressman John Saylor, of Pennsylvania, “he’s willing to stand up and fight—he has a healthy respect for Congress, not a callous disregard, but he’s willing to stand up and fight. Some days I wouldn’t trade him for anyone in the world, and some days I could kill him.”

  In 1969, when rumor spread that Hartzog was about to be replaced, congressmen and senators heated up in sufficient numbers to evaporate the rumor. They think he is the most industrious director the Park Service has ever had. They admire his effort to give new directions to the park system, and they feel that he has drawn into the Park Service people of very high calibre who might not have been attracted to it had he not been there. They are sympathetic to some of Hartzog’s problems within the Administration. “Sometimes he gets clobbered by the Secretary or the White House,” Saylor has said. “Sometimes he comes in here in a straitjacket. He is not always free to act as an individual. He is told policy. It takes a strong, strong man to overcome the political shenanigans that go on here in Washington. His is supposed to be a nonpolitical job, but it’s not.”

  “George has too many irons in the fire,” Aspinall once said. Aspinall is in his seventies and is covered with spikes, and from him this is uncommon praise. “George is a little too fast for his own good. He skips over details. He is a builder without considering the cost of the building. So I say to him, ‘No, George. Back up and start over.’ He has the personality to be able to back up. He is a personable, lovable character, a very fine companion, a complete public servant.”

  Hartzog taps together his papers on the table before him, thanks the senators above him, and leaves the hearing room. He walks about thirty feet down the corridor, opens a back door to the hearing room, goes in, takes one of the senators aside, and says to him privately, “You really hit the sciatic nerve in there, Alan, and unless this committee gets with this thing we’ll probably get the short end of the stick again.”

  When the Director of the National Park Service goes on a camping trip, survival in the wilderness is not at issue. His party on the Buffalo consists of nine people, four of whom are professional rivermen, paid to do all the work. One is a full-time cook, and he rides alone in the “commissary boat,” which is crammed to the gunwales with food. Mornings, the cook runs on ahead, so that when lunchtime comes and the other boats catch up with him he has already set up a tent fly to create shade, a table and chairs are beneath it, and dozens of pieces of batter-dipped chicken are gurgling away in deep Ozark fat. At night, he fries multiple pork chops or big individual steaks and covers the meat with fried potatoes. His breakfasts compound cords of dark bacon with eggs and pancakes fried in bacon grease. The cook’s name is Karl Hudson. He is not light on his feet. He has a mustache, and he seems to radiate anachronism. He could be a wax museum’s idea of a cook in the Civil War. In fact, the whole campsite seems to be ready for Mathew Brady. The big iron skillet. The tall black coffeepot. The two wall tents. The folding cots. The canvas armchairs. The tent-fly kitchen. The heavy iron stakes. The sledgehammer.

  The tents are pitched by the rivermen, who set up the cots and carefully line the sleeping bags with white percale sheets. Tony Buford pours a drink. There are worse things in life than Scotch on the Buffalo. Buford has had his way all day, for he finally succeeded in disengaging Hartzog from the swollen river, persuading him to turn up the engines and shoot on downstream in anticipation of better fishing on the morrow in the White. Every so often, the Buffalo drops enough to make a rapid—to leap with haystacks, with gardens of standing waves. These rapids would give a feel of the river to people in canoes, but the johnboats go through the white water the way automobiles go across wet pavement—no pitch, no roll, no river. Now, at the campsite, young Edward Hartzog is fishing for big channel cats. He is using minnows. His father calls to him, “Try a wurrum.” Edward reels in his line and tries a wurrum. He is in the second grade, and his brother and sister are in college. Friends say that when Edward was born Hartzog’s age went down ten years. The family lives in an old remodelled farmhouse on a big lot surrounded by a rail fence, in McLean, Virginia. They raise chickens. A small brook runs through the property—a wet ditch, really—and Hartzog from time to time promises to clean it out and build a series of dams. The brook disappears into an uncut thicket known as the Bird Sanctuary. There is a burro as well. Hartzog hitches her to a two-wheeled cart and, with Edward at his side, races around his land shouting “Gee!” and “Haw!” “Many men are captains of industry, but when they get home they are mice,” one of Hartzog’s close friends has said while observing this scene. “George is the captain at home.” His wife, Helen, is from Massachusetts, and is described by their friends as a Yankee trader. She sells real estate, and buys and sells antiques, which she stores in an unoccupied house next door. The two buildings stand very close to a county highway. Hartzog’s front yard is mostly gravel and is barely large enough for the bug Volkswagen in which he drives to work. Inside the house, over a stone fireplace, is an oil painting that consists of a field of miscellaneous red dots traversed by a bulging black line, thick with dried paint. The title of this painting is “Nature.” It was given to Hartzog in appreciation of, among other things, Hartzog’s modern approach to the natural world.

  Edward has caught a big channel cat. Hartzog is elated. “I told you to stop poormouthin’ those cottonpickin’ fish,” he says to Buford. Edward draws the catfish into the shallow water. Sinister and spiky, it looks like a drifting mine. “Be careful,” Hartzog warns him. “He’ll fin the daylights out of you.” The big cat occasions a series of stories told by the rivermen about even bigger catfish caught in the Buffalo, in the Ohio, in the Mississippi, in the Arkansas. And the catfish series, in turn, leads to a sequence of expanding stories about deer. Orville Ranck, who is tall, one-eyed, slim, and old, remarks that it was he who shot the second-largest deer ever shot in the United States. Preston Jones, brown and thin as a cowboy, looks away. Jones is working on a Coleman stove that he found a few hours ago, full of muck and sand. He knows who owned it—a couple who were camping on an island in the river when the twenty-eight-foot rise occurred two weeks ago. The couple climbed a willow and were clinging to its uppermost branches when the sheriff of Marion County came along in a search boat and made the rescue. “Their eyes were like a treeful of owls,” Jones says.

  “When you camp on these rivers, you’ve got to have land to your back,” Hartzog comments.

  “On the other hand,” Jones tells him, “I’ve seen big bears come out of the woods here, fighting like hell.” This occasions a series of stories by the rivermen about enormous bears they have known, and Hartzog throws in a story of his own about a bear in the Great Smoky Mountains. Two tourists were feeding this bear by the roadside when a Cherokee drove up. (There is a Cherokee reservation just outside the park.) The Cherokee got out of his car, shot the bear, put the bear in the back seat, and drove away while the tourists stood there with their mouths open and popcorn in their hands.

  Under Jones’ me
ticulous attention, miraculous hand, the Coleman stove is sputtering with flame. Even its thinnest tubes were packed with the muck of the flood, but one of its burners is now blazing in yellow spurts. Gradually, Jones works down the flame to a hard copper blue. Looking up, finally, he says, “Orville, tell us about the time you shot the second-largest deer in the United States.”

  “I can’t see too well. I have only one good eye. I lost the other to a fishhook,” Ranck explains—and how this led to the second-largest deer in the United States was a simple matter of optics: anything smaller would have escaped his attention. One fall, Ranck went to Meeker, Colorado, because near Meeker is a narrow mountain pass through which thousands of Rocky Mountain deer move on their annual migration. So many of them go through there, Ranck says, that they resemble driven cattle. They even raise a dust cloud. Ranck crouched on a ledge so close to the deer that he could almost reach out and touch them, and to improve his chances he had equipped his rifle with a large telescopic sight. All day, he sat there looking point-blank at the deer through the big lens, and finally he saw the great buck, the second-ever largest deer. Its tines were multiple and fine. Moving the crosshair across a wall of venison, Ranck stopped it just behind the animal’s shoulder, and he fired. The buck turned the second-largest somersault ever seen in the United States, and it lay on the ground, its four legs kicking in the air.

  “How much did it weigh, Orville?”

  “Five hundred and twenty-two pounds.”

  Jones looks away.

  Buford, who is unimpressed by deer of any size, says, “One thing that surprises hell out of me on this river is that we haven’t seen any snakes.”

  “I saw twenty-four today,” Jones says.

  “You don’t say. What kinds did you see?”

  “Mainly moccasins. Some cottonmouths.”