by John McPhee
“I grew up with cottonmouths and rattlesnakes,” Hartzog says. “Where I grew up, you never stepped over a log. You stepped on it, or you might wish you had.”
In the Geechie section of the South Carolina coastal plain, streams had names like the Little Salkehatchie and the Hog Branch of Buckhead Creek; swamps were called Tony Hill Bay, Bull Bay, the Copeland Drain; and the big Edisto River, an entrail of continual oxbows, flowed through marshlands miles wide. On the higher ground were pinewoods, small cleared farms, dirt roads, and every two miles a church—Beulah Church, Bethel Church, Mount Olive Church, Tabernacle Church. Reaching into the pinelands on a single track, trains of the Hampton & Branchville Railroad stopped at hamlet crossroads and picked up turpentine and rough-cut boards and the produce of the small farms. One place they stopped was Smoaks. Hartzog was born in 1920, in Smoaks.
His father was a dirt farmer who worked about a hundred and fifty acres and also had a stand of loblolly pine. His grandfather had farmed the same land. The house the family lived in was paintless and weathered. A large porch wrapped around a front corner, and there was another porch off the kitchen, in back. There was a pump in the yard, between the house and the outbuildings—the smokehouses, the chicken houses, the barn. Hartzog’s first school was a one-room building by the Edisto. Whenever he could, he fished the river for red-breasted perch, catfish, pike, and bream. At home, he learned early to “plow a mule,” and he helped his father grow cantaloupes, cucumbers, watermelons, corn, green vegetables, and cotton. His father was also a hunter and a fisherman, and he had a big sense of humor. He could tell stories all day without repeating himself. He sent his watermelons to New York and his cotton to Columbia, and before the Depression the family had a “cash income”—apparently as good a one as any farmer’s in the area, for George Hartzog, Sr., was the first man in that part of the country to own a Model T Ford. After it was delivered to him, he drove it without knowing how. He kept shouting “Whoa! Whoa!” at the car as it circled the farmhouse out of control. “Whoa! Whoa!” Finally, it wedged itself between two trees.
Hartzog always signs his name “George B. Hartzog, Jr.,” although his father has been dead for many years. It is as if he were reluctant to add, however minutely, to the erasure of his father’s existence, remembering, as he does with something just short of bitterness, how his father’s relatively good life was suddenly knocked apart—his hope and eventually his health broken by the great economic depression. When Hartzog, Sr., shipped his watermelons to New York, the railroad sent him a bill instead of a check—freight costs for carrying produce that found no market. The price of cotton dropped to five cents a pound—a figure lower than the cost of picking and shipping it. So the Hartzogs’ cotton was left in the field, where cattle, in their hunger, ate it. The family had no money at all. “For a dirt farmer who had been put out of business life became a very simple issue: Did we have something to eat or didn’t we have something to eat? This was the poverty level of zero. My father became a severe asthmatic—a combination of pollen and nerves. He did odd jobs, farming. He tried to hang on, but he couldn’t.” One day when Hartzog came home from school, his father, his mother, and his two younger sisters were standing in the yard helplessly watching the house burn. A bed was all that had been removed to the yard before the intense heat stopped further salvage. While the house was burning to the ground, flaming debris fell on the bed and destroyed it.
Hartzog is walking on the beach at Sandy Hook. The big chopper is down and silent, but its high-frequency engine noise still rings in his ears. The wind is gentle, coming off the ocean. The day is warm. Coney Island was covered with people, but over here in New Jersey, Hartzog’s party aside, there are only two on this broad stretch of beach. They are soldiers, sunbathing near their car, which has a Nebraska plate. The major part of Sandy Hook is a military base, Fort Hancock—a thousand acres reaching out into New York Bay. Its huge, curving beach is spectacular, with the open ocean in one direction and the skyline of the city in the other. Hartzog, in his black suit, black shoes, looks like a preacher, not a bather, and he starts to preach. “The selfishness of the military in terms of the recreational needs of people in urban areas is unbelievable,” he says. “It is pointless to lock up an area like this when people need a little sun in their faces and water on their backs. Each of those soldiers over there has two miles of beach to himself.”
Fort Hancock is prime duty. Soldiers bring their girls here, and the couples get lost together on the enormous beach. Officers live in houses designed by Stanford White. A Nike tracking site is here. The general in charge of all Nike installations from Boston to Philadelphia presumably could live anywhere he wished between the two cities, and he has chosen Fort Hancock. Ospreys nest in the telephone poles, and herons in rookeries among the dunes. The central landmark is the oldest operating lighthouse in the United States. New Jersey rents a small piece of the peninsula, at its landward end, from the Department of Defense. The rented area is called Sandy Hook State Park and is the most heavily visited park in New Jersey. People press in there by the thousands, but the beach is quite narrow where it is open to the public, and the dunes behind it are green with deep growths of poison ivy. When the tide comes in, the ocean shoves the people into the poison ivy.
Hartzog, on the broad Army beach, continues. “We’ve asked the military to surrender these lands for recreational use,” he says. “Beach land simply needs to be made available. The military usually claim that they have to have places like this for military recreation. They need it like a Buick needs a fifth hole.” Sandy Hook is almost the least of Hartzog’s ambitions toward military land. He wants Vandenberg Air Force Base. He wants the Aberdeen Proving Ground. He wants Quantico, Fort Belvoir, Eglin Air Force Base, the Naval Air Station at Floyd Bennett Field, and Forts Barry, Baker, and Cronkhite on the Marin Headlands of San Francisco. He wants at least a dozen other military principalities as well, all close to cities, and all, in his view, being now given a mistaken priority. He thinks he could get the Department of Defense out of Fort Hancock in two years. Other difficulties would remain, though. Reaching out as it does into the mouth of the Hudson, Sandy Hook catches a high percentage of what the river disgorges, and the beach near its tip is blemished with flotsam—plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic buckets, rusted cans, little bits of Albany, the tenth part of Troy, and hundreds of acres of driftwood. When trees die in the Adirondacks, they go to Sandy Hook. Rangers could take care of the cleanup, but not on an hourly schedule, and all that plastic would have to be stopped at its source. The Park Service thus joins, as it has all over the country, the general fight against pollution, and not simply against things that float. The feasibility of the Gateway project depends on an optimistic view of what can be done about river and ocean pollution. Right now, when striped bass are caught in the waters of Sandy Hook they sometimes have fin rot, and cataracts over their eyes.
“In 1960, Congress said no to the arch. Any other Park Service ranger would have said, ‘O.K. Where am I to be sent now? Back to the Great Smokies? Out to Alaska to count blankets?’ But not George. He kept at it until funds were appropriated.”
“George was a lawyer. That’s why they had him in St. Louis. The Park Service had never built anything bigger than an outhouse before.”
“When the arch was halfway up, the contractor was losing money, so he stopped work, saying the structure was unsafe. Two legs, three hundred feet high, were sticking out of the ground. Hartzog said to the contractor, ‘Listen. I ordered an arch and I want an arch.’”
“In the pecking order of park superintendents, the superintendent at St. Louis is not very high. I just spotted him immediately as a good leader, a driving type, full of enthusiasm and interest. I met him on the Current River, in Missouri, in 1962. We were trying to make the Current a national river, and a group of us made a two-day float trip there. George went on the trip. He and I rode in the same boat, and I felt that in those two days I really got to know him well. It was a s
ituation of utter informality, heightened communication. We went skinny-dipping at night. It was in September, and chilly. But this was a group of outdoor people, who were in their element. The Current was going to be the first national river. We hadn’t done anything like it before. George knew all the arguments, all the facts, although the Current River is a hundred and fifty miles from St. Louis and the project was not part of his job. Later that year, I heard he had quit the Park Service, because he thought he had no future in it. I went to St. Louis and looked him up and asked him if he would come back and if he thought being director was enough of a future. He said, ‘Mr. Secretary, I surely do.’”
Hartzog is busy catching trout. This river—the White River—is everything Tony Buford said it would be. Cal Smith, the riverman, has to work hard to keep Hartzog’s hook covered with corn. The bait is canned kernel corn. The boat is anchored in a broad patch of dancing water. The corn drifts down through V-shaped riffles and, almost every time, disappears into the mouth of a trout. The White River is the dream of thousands, who come from all over the United States to fish it. It is broad, cold, clear, shallow, and frequently broken by the aerated rips that seem to intoxicate trout. The White River comes out of Bull Shoals Dam, near Lakeview, Arkansas. The water impounded on the other side of the dam is so deep that it is very cold near the bottom, and it is this cold water that comes shooting out of the penstocks and forms the river, which is green and beautiful and as natural as a city street. The White River grows toward the end of the day. Around 5:30 P.M., people start turning on lights, heating up ovens, and frying pork chops in Fayetteville, Little Rock, Mountain Home, Memphis. The river rises. More people, more pork chops—the river goes on rising. Turbines spin in Bull Shoals Dam. The peak comes when one million pork chops are sizzling all at once and the river is so high it flows around the trunks of trees. Then it starts going down. While Arkansas sleeps, the river goes down so far that the trout have to know where to go to survive. At 6 A.M., a small creek is running through the riverbed, viscous with trout. Then people start getting up in Fayetteville, Little Rock, Mountain Home, and Memphis. The fatback hits the frying pans. Up comes the river, cold, clear, fast, and green. Trout are not native down here. There are no trout in the Buffalo. They can live in the White River for a hundred miles below Lakeview because of the refrigerant effect of the dam. The trout are born in a federal hatchery near Norfork, where they are raised on dry meal. They are stocked in the White River—ninety-six thousand trout a month in the summer—creating what most of the sport fishermen who have been here would call a paradise. Smith strings corn like pearls on Hartzog’s hook, one kernel after another, completely covering the metal from eye to barb. Hartzog flips the bait into the stream. Vapors rise from the cold river. The line and the rod vibrate. It is difficult to tell whether the vibration is from the strike of a trout or the pull of the current. Once more it is a trout. Hartzog reels the fish in. It flips once to the right, once to the left, and lolls by the boat as it is netted. The trout is nine inches long. With a pair of forceps, Smith takes the hook out of the fish’s gullet. Then he re-beads the hook with corn while Hartzog tells him about Hazel Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains. “There hasn’t been a stocked trout put in that creek in three hundred years,” he says. “Mountain people have been fishing Hazel Creek since European civilization moved over here. And there’s only been one kind of trout in there, ever, and those are wild trout. I fish for the fun of fishing, and there’s a real difference between a hatchery fish and a wild fish. One good bass out of the Buffalo would be worth more to me than six hundred trout out of here. Tony and the boys can stay here if they want. I’m going back up the Buffalo.”
Hartzog believes that he was the youngest preacher ever licensed in the state of South Carolina. (“The Lord has looked out for me all my life.”) He began preaching when he was sixteen, and the following year—1937—he officially became a licensed local minister. He preached all over the area—in Smoaks, in Cottageville, in Walterboro—and for a time he was assistant minister at the Bethel Methodist Church in Spartanburg. He gave his sermons in Baptist churches, too. In that part of the world, a Baptist was defined as an educated Methodist.
Hartzog’s family had moved into Walterboro when the farm failed at Smoaks. His father got a job as a ticket agent for the Greyhound Bus Lines, and his mother became county supervisor of W.P.A. sewing rooms. A tall woman, severe and serious, she seemed to believe fundamentally in work. “She worked hard. She pulled the family through. She believed you couldn’t fail to achieve anything if you just worked. She encouraged me and instilled in me the responsibility for working.” The law ultimately attracted Hartzog as a kind of practical replacement for his first ambition, which was to spend his life in the ministry. In 1937, he entered Wofford College, in Spartanburg, to study Methodist theology and become something more than an unpaid travelling preacher, but he had to drop out of college after one semester for lack of money.
He went home and worked at any jobs he could find. He cooked and washed dishes in an all-night beanery. He pumped gas at an Amoco station. He typed forms and letters for the National Youth Administration. He worked around the clock. At night, he was busboy and desk clerk at A. J. Novit’s Lafayette Hotel. From 6 P.M. to 6 A.M., he watched the teletype machine for reservations coming in, and he carried bags when the people showed up. “In a service establishment, you learn a lot about human beings,” he says. Novit paid him one dollar a night.
Hartzog had no idea that he was underprivileged. To the contrary, he felt lucky to have encountered people who opened doors for him, first to the ministry and then to the law. He went on preaching. No one in his congregations seemed to mind that a teen-ager was giving them the Word. He still preaches whenever he can, in churches around Washington, and to his congregations he has explained his work in the Park Service by saying, “I feel that I am performing a mission as necessary and constructive as a ministry.”
Hartzog has never seen anything quite like the Silver Gull Club, Beach 193, Breezy Point, Queens. This wide, low structure rambles lumpily all over the beach and on piles out over the ocean. The Park Service has learned something peculiar about the way the people of New York use their beaches. On Coney Island, on Jones Beach, on Rockaway Beach, more than half the people prefer never to put a toe in the ocean. The Silver Gull Club caters to this majority. It lifts its clientele above the ocean, and even above the beach. The waves of the Atlantic lap helplessly at the club’s cantilevered undersides. Abovedecks, there are three swimming pools, four hundred cabañas, and a cocktail lounge called the Crystal Palace. Families spend five hundred dollars per season to go to the Silver Gull, where they can be close to the ocean but free from contact with the wild sea, and free from contact with its gritty edges.
This is outermost Queens, the middle of the proposed Gateway National Recreation Area, and Hartzog’s brochure indicates that the Silver Gull and everything around it will someday be cleared away. The streets in that part of the city are largely deserted in winter, and they are used as unofficial, illegal dumps, where trucks make deposits in the dead of night: rotting timbers from razed buildings, ash, smooth tires, shards of concrete, stripped and crumpled automobiles—tons upon tons of junk. “One of the greatest things that could happen to this country would be just to clean it up,” Hartzog says. Detritus is nothing new to him. The national parks are for people, and people leave junk wherever they go. Park rangers become so disgusted they can’t wait for the season to end, so the people will go away from the parks. People throw trash over the rim of the Grand Canyon, the world’s deepest and widest wastebasket. So much trash goes into the Grand Canyon that the view is smirched. For this reason, ranger trainees are sent to Grand Canyon National Park to learn mountaineering. They go down on ropes and climb back up with the things that tourists throw over the rim. In Yellowstone, visitors throw junk into the thermal pools. The temperature of the pools is two hundred degrees. Rangers have to rake out the junk. In Washington, D.C., peop
le throw tires, washing machines, refrigerators, mattresses, and automobiles into the Potomac and the Anacostia Rivers. The Park Service cleans up the mess with a thirty-five-foot landing craft. The Park Service has used a scuba team to collect all the junk that tourists throw into the Merced River, in Yosemite Valley. Cans and bottles retrieved from Lake Powell, in Utah, fill five barges a week. “Learning how to pick up trash better than anyone else is a significant achievement in itself,” Hartzog says. In his view, the most heroic achievers in this line are the trash gatherers of Coney Island, and Hartzog from time to time sends his superintendents there to give them a whiff of the major leagues.
The skeletons of five six-story buildings and two fifteen-story buildings stand on Breezy Point, above the trash. The Wagner administration condemned these buildings when they were under construction, because they represented an encroachment of high-rise upon a beach area. The Park Service plans to finish the two fifteen-story buildings and turn them into cultural centers and low-cost hostels. Beyond the skeletal buildings, bent and twisted chain-link fencing topped with barbed wire separates the developed wasteland from the virginal dunes of Breezy Point. The ocean, pounding, is visible through the fence. Hartzog, in a government car, says he is allergic to chain-link fencing and barbed wire and can’t wait to get rid of it. The car swings around and into the Breezy Point Cooperative—twenty-eight hundred small one-story houses on a compact grid of streets. A third of the houses are equipped for year-round use. The cooperative covers four hundred and three acres in all, and its future is a sensitive political issue. In Hartzog’s brochure, the area now filled by the Breezy Point Cooperative is designated as “creative open space.”