Within an afternoon’s motorboat ride from Homer on the Kenai Peninsula were four major volcanoes: Redoubt, Douglas, Iliamna, and Augustine. Sometimes they looked like picture-postcard peaks, particularly when blanketed in snow. But eruptions were—from a geologic time perspective—commonplace. Mount Douglas, which guarded the entrance to Cook Inlet just north of the Shelikof Strait, had a highly acidic crater about 525 feet wide. To set off an atom bomb on an Aleutian island could very easily trigger earthquakes, causing smoke plumes to rise 50,000 feet in the sky. Then again, the Soviet Union had conducted more than 2,000 nuclear tests on the island of Novaya Zemlya (including a fifty-eight megaton, which is considered the biggest explosion in world history) and nobody at the United Nations was chastising the Kremlin.14 Why couldn’t Americans understand that wildlife and nuclear explosions didn’t mix?
When the AEC did detonate nuclear bombs on Adak in 1961, all Jones could do was weep. As a government employee, he felt trapped in a corridor with no exit, or a tunnel with no opening. If he quit U.S. Fish and Wildlife because of the detonation on Adak, who would look after the sea otters and emperor geese? The U.S. government also detonated nuclear bombs on Amchitka Island in 1965, 1969, and 1971.15 All Sea Otter Jones could do was try to protect the wildlife in the Aleutian chain—and outfit his home for solar energy, a small first step in the green movement. To reassure himself that humans weren’t invariably monsters, he’d play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor over and over again on the turntable.
II
Coinciding with Jones’s work in the Aleutians during the 1950s was Peter Matthiessen, a New York–based writer determined to document American wildlife in peril. Born on May 22, 1927, in a Manhattan hospital, Matthiessen was raised in Connecticut near Bedford Village, New York. The Matthiessen family was full of nature lovers. Peter’s father, Erard Adolph Matthiessen, became a spokesman for the Audubon Society and The Nature Conservancy; a hunter, he had nevertheless been inculcated with ecology by his two boys, Peter and George. The Matthiessens loved Connecticut, where they collected reptiles, bird-watched, and hunted. They lived in Long Ridge, an idyllic rural Connecticut town northwest of Stamford. “My brother and I were always finding animals,” Peter Matthiessen recalled. “We played near the Mianus River. One afternoon we found a copperhead den on our property. We took seven as pets. Mother made us get rid of them.”16
Erard Matthiessen joined the U.S. Navy during World War II to help design gunnery training devices. Young Peter followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the U.S. Navy during the Truman years. But his true love was bird-watching. The shifting patterns of nature fascinated him. As a student at Yale University, Matthiessen studied biology and ornithology. Nature writing became another of his passions, fanned by his reading of Thoreau and Muir. In his early short story “Sadie”—which won the Atlantic Prize—Matthiessen demonstrated a flair for descriptive writing. Upon graduating from Yale in 1950, he married Patricia Southgate. Bold, daring, filled with artistic inspiration, Matthiessen moved with his bride to Paris, where they took classes at the Sorbonne. To promote literature, Matthiessen cofounded the Paris Review in late 1951, along with Harold Humes and George Plimpton. By 1953, this handsome monthly English-language journal offered its first issue. (The same year, the Matthiessens had a son, Luke, and Peter finished his first novel, Race Rock.)
Matthiessen approved an American bald eagle donning a Phrygian cap for the journal’s logo. The Paris Review, based in New York City, ran a long interview with authors in every issue. With Jack Kerouac publishing “The Mexican Girl” and Samuel Beckett contributing a selection from Molloy to the Paris Review in the 1950s, one could reasonably assume that the journal was simply an antiestablishment publication promoting avant-garde arts and letters. But as Matthiessen divulged in 1978 to the New York Times, he had “invented” the Paris Review as a cover for his spying for the CIA.17 “I was only in the Agency for two years—1951 to 1953,” Matthiessen recalled. “Trending left, I quit over a disagreement on my Paris assignment. Plimpton, who had been in Cambridge, took over the Review. My interest was in writing fiction. The Atlantic Monthly had published two of my pieces. But fiction paid poorly. So I started writing nonfiction essays for magazines to live.”18
Plimpton became the Paris Review editor in chief in 1953, in New York City. The journal had nothing to do with the CIA. Meanwhile, Matthiessen worked on both charter and commercial fishing boats (flatfish, blowfish, tarpon, and tuna) out of Montauk, Long Island, earning extra money from the blue-green depths of the Atlantic. He also captained various shark-watching excursions. “I’d see eighty or ninety sharks in a day as a boy,” he recalled. “Now they’re scarce everywhere.” Matthiessen was collecting good material on sharks, possibly to use in a book or article. Worried that huge corporations were destroying the planet, concerned that the U.S. government was doing too much nuclear testing, Matthiessen decided to become a generalist biologist in the Hornaday vein. During the cold war, the Bering Sea seemed like a moat protecting Alaska from invasion. But Matthiessen was concerned that the Aleutian chain and the Pribilofs—with their wildlife—were being killed by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Besides his rambles in Connecticut and his charter fishing off Montauk, another influence on Matthiessen, in biotic terms, was his brother, George, who studied marine biology at Princeton University and conducted research at Woods Hole Laboratory. While writing wildlife articles for Sports Illustrated, Matthiessen was accumulating reams of information about North American birds and animals. He had a brother who willingly served as a marine consultant. “I wasn’t planning on writing Wildlife in America,” Matthiessen remembered. “I didn’t want to write the book. But I had done all this research. Back then magazine editors tended to treat young writers very badly. I had all this material. So why not a book?” Nobody since Hornaday had written comprehensively about endangered species, wildlife in crisis. “So I went to discover wild America,” he recalled. “U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the 1950s was always very helpful. They had Rachel Carson, whom I unfortunately didn’t meet, writing enormously powerful pamphlets and papers, all quite lyrical and influential.”19
Matthiessen, by now separated from his wife, loaded his forest green Ford convertible with books by naturalists such as Spencer F. Baird, A. C. Bent, and Roger Tory Peterson; tossed in a .20-gauge shotgun and a down sleeping bag; and headed west. “The gun was for protection,” he recalls. “Perhaps I thought I might need to shoot a bird to eat in the Mojave or Sonora. But I never once used it.” What he did use was the booze bottles that were also among his essentials in lighting out for the territory. His mission “on the road” was to document the history of wildlife struggling to coexist with humankind during the atomic age.
As a scholar, Matthiessen knew the history of wildlife extinctions—such as the Carolina parakeet, Steller’s sea cow, and Merriam’s elk—and wrote high-minded eulogies, including his elegant lament for the Labrador duck. (One of the last of this species was shot off Martha’s Vineyard in 1872 by Daniel Webster for the Smithsonian Institution.) What made Matthiessen different from Hornaday in Our Vanishing Wild Life was his novelistic trick of imagining that someday flocks of Labrador ducks would be back in the marshlands of the Atlantic coast. “Today, off Long Island’s beaches, on a still day of winter the great rafts of black and white pied sea ducks are a fine sight,” Matthiessen wrote, “the trim old-squaw and neat bufflehead, the mergansers and goldeneye and dark, heavy-bodied scoters. The sharp air is clean, virtually odorless, and only the strange gabble of the old-squaws breaks the vague murmur of the tide along the shore. Alone on the beach, one can readily imagine that, momentarily, the loveliest pied duck of them all might surface, startled, near a sand spit, the white of it bright in the cold January sun, as it did winter after winter long ago.”20
From 1956 to 1958, Matthiessen was quite a sight driving around the United States in his beat-up convertible, visiting national wildlife refuges such as Aransas in Texas and the Lowe
r Klamath in Oregon. Books were piled up on his backseat. While camping in the Great Plains, he became fond of George Catlin’s depictions of animals; he used them as endpapers for Wildlife in America. For the first time Matthiessen also discovered the narrative panache of Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail. He was a sponge for information and found the species reports of Dr. C. Hart Merriam especially valuable. Circulating among the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists of the upper Midwest, who were working on various federal refuges, Matthiessen started drafting chapters for his first nonfiction book, Wildlife in America. “Forests, soil, water, and wildlife are mutually interdependent,” Matthiessen wrote, “and the ruin of one element will mean, in the end, the ruin of them all.”21
Dutifully keeping journals, reading everything possible about the wildlife protection movement of Roosevelt, Grinnell, and Hornaday when he stayed at campgrounds, parking lots, and motels, Matthiessen, who in the late 1960s would convert to Zen Buddhism, eventually flew to Alaska in May 1958 for research. “I started off in the Kenai Peninsula and flew everywhere in Alaska,” he recalled. “U.S. Fish and Wildlife took me all around. There weren’t roads back then to get around. You had to fly. Every big gravel bar we saw had a wrecked plane. Pilots constantly crashed. They’d break a shoulder blade but walk off relatively unscathed. It was very foggy, I remember, and navigation was a worry.”22
Seeing the brown bears on Kodiak Island was a must for Matthiessen. But the far north was the magnet that tugged on his psyche. Roger Tory Peterson had written in 1955 that Arctic Alaska was, without question, the “wildest” remaining part of “wild North America.” Matthiessen heard that call. He also started observing the caribou and Dall sheep on the North Slope. And everything about Alaska’s bear population grabbed his attention. Matthiessen had read the reports of the Harriman Expedition about its successful hunt for Kodiak bears in 1899. Now, in the late 1950s, the Kodiaks, like the grizzlies, were becoming endangered race. Polar bears had become even more scarce. At the beginning of Wildlife in America—which Viking published in 1959—Matthiessen included a color plate of a polar bear drawn by John W. Audubon (son of the great ornithologist).
In a chapter titled “Land of the North Wind,” Matthiessen included black-ink drawings by the illustrator Bob Hines of a polar bear, Alaska worm salamander, Aleutian tern, whiskered auklet (Aethia pygmaea), northern right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), ribbon seal, Kodiak bear, barren-ground caribou, grayling, and woodland caribou, and a wolf pack. In 2010, in an interview, Matthiessen said he was pleased that Hines—his illustrator—also provided the drawings for Silent Spring. “In the state of Alaska,” Matthiessen wrote, “America has a splendid chance to demonstrate that the hard lessons of conservation have been learned, for the great part of it is still under federal jurisdiction and, protected from the excesses of private exploitation, remains unspoiled. The effects of statehood on this unique wilderness should not be the responsibility of its inhabitants alone, for the future of Alaska is crucial to the nation.”23
Matthiessen investigated the great fisheries throughout Alaska. With awe he visited Native villages, with salmon drying in rows. Point Barrow—Allen Ginsberg’s forlorn radar-station outpost in the summer of 1956—was to Matthiessen a magical place where the rose-tinted Ross’s gull (Rhodostethia rosea) sometimes appeared after wandering all the way from the Asian Arctic. His prose meditation on the scarcity of Ross’s gull predated The Snow Leopard (which won the National Book Award), about his search in the 1970s for these rare Central Asian cats, which adapted to cold mountainous environments. Matthiessen knew of Edward Curtis’s 1899 photographs of Inuit village life, which appeared in the report of the Harriman Expedition. How had life on the isolated North Slope changed in more than half a century? Not much, it turned out. What really surprised Matthiessen about Point Barrow was that he was the strange roadside attraction. “When we got out of the plane, Inuit people were snapping photos,” he said. “We were the odd visitors. But they had Kodaks”24
It becomes apparent in Wildlife in America that Matthiessen wanted to keep Alaska wild—free of fish propagation, fur farms, and reindeer ranges. On the eve of statehood all anybody would talk about was North Slope oil concessions. Saloons in Fairbanks were abuzz with stories of new fields. Just as Ansel Adams had visited Alaska’s national parks, the twenty-nine-year-old Matthiessen focused on the national wildlife refuges: the Pribilof Islands for seals; Kodiak Island for bears; and the Kenai Peninsula for moose. Matthiessen believed all three of these species would survive the onslaught of timber agents and oil geologists. And his bush pilot flew him in a Cessna over the National Petroleum Reserve near what was about to become the flagship Arctic NWR.
The highlight of Matthiessen’s travels for Wildlife in America was touring Arctic Alaska in May 1957. Two U.S. Fish and Wildlife pilots—Jim Branson and Ray Tremblay—took him around on an animal survey east and west of Point Barrow. Just to see all those caribou thronging across the tundra, and Arctic primroses popping up on the pebble-strewn beaches, was life-changing. They flew along the Arctic Ocean toward Canada, feeling minuscule. “From the sky I could see the National Petroleum Reserve, where wildlife was thick,” Matthiessen recalled. “And the caribou herd was unreal. I was determined to come back someday.”
But Arctic Alaska, the fragile tundra that the Muries had fought to protect, worried Matthiessen. A warning prayer from a Togiak elder stuck with him: “If we fail to save the land, God may forgive us, but our children won’t.”25 Much like Bob Marshall, Matthiessen used a book—in his case Wildlife in America—to promote the “sequestration of inviolate primeval wilderness for posterity” in the Arctic. To Matthiessen the Wilderness Bill—which was pending in Congress during the late 1950s—needed to be passed. It was senseless, he argued, for America to rethink land policy every four years to deal with special interests or political expedience. Matthiessen understood Alaskans’ need to timber, drill, and mine. His chief concern was that once a place earned the designation of a wildlife refuge, it should be left alone. Matthiessen believed that the Arctic land needed to be protected in perpetuity. Gold and oil might be found decades later, he argued, but this possibility didn’t mean that the Arctic Game Reserve should be reopened for oil derricks or mine shafts. Otherwise, Yellowstone or the Tetons could become a natural gas reserve. “Glimpsed from the air between banks of cold rolling fogs, the region is beautiful and forbidding,” Matthiessen wrote of the Arctic. “Its tundra is desert of a kind, but the great beauty of Alaska lies in its bleakest areas—tundra, ice pack, glacier, and bare mountain, with their unique and precious complement of life.”26
III
Wildlife in America was a nonfiction work set during the late Eisenhower era. Half of the book was a eulogy for extinct species. At times the prose read like a lyrical forensic report, a long-distance gaze backward in time to the sad legacy of mankind’s inhumanity toward animals. Matthiessen sadly documented how reckless Americans had been toward the bison, manatee, flamingo, and sea otter. The grimmest Greek tragedies were mild compared with stories of Alaskan wolf exterminators, trophy hunters who sought Dall sheep, and reckless fishermen who overfished and then blamed bald eagles for poor harvest seasons. Matthiessen didn’t report on American highway life like Kerouac in On the Road (or like John Steinbeck in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley). There was no ego on display in Wildlife in America. Matthiessen wasn’t a preacher, a braggart, or a show-off about his Alaskan literary expeditions. But Matthiessen was prescient in warning about the toxicity of DDT, ammonium phosphate, and organophosphates and their effect on wildlife. His first book is both a throwback to the meticulous zoological research of Hornaday and an environmental manifesto giving—from the eastern establishment—credence to McClure’s bitter “For the Death of 100 Whales” and Snyder’s more hopeful “A Berry Feast.”
Although the Paris Review had no conservationist agenda, both Matthiessen and Plimpton were ardent Auduboners. Matthiessen took from his odyssey on the r
oad a newfound sense of himself as a world traveler. Like the humpback whales, sea otters, and Canada geese he saw in Alaska, Matthiessen recognized himself as a migrant. So when he spied on a Northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) along the Bering Sea he knew it would join its Siberian counterpart on a trek across Russia before heading south through Turkey and Syria into eastern Africa. The bird spends its winter in the sub-Saharan grasslands of Africa after traveling more than 7,000 miles from its breeding grounds. Traveling the world to find great white sharks, snow leopards, and caribou herds became his specialty. There was a lot of Roosevelt and Hornaday in Matthiessen’s approach. But there was also a spiritual awakening about protecting wild places that reflected the beat writers Snyder, Whalen, McClure, and Kerouac.
One thing that differentiated Matthiessen from the “dharma writers” on the Pacific coast was his establishment credentials. The Paris Review’s contributors also wrote for the New Yorker and attended Warhol’s Factory happenings. They attended Truman Capote’s parties at the Waldorf-Astoria and befriended the Kennedys. More than anybody else in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Matthiessen was connecting the beat’s energy into the main consciousness of his time. Matthiessen regularly ingested LSD, getting it from a renegade Ivy League psychiatrist known as Dr. John the Night Tripper. Among the major writers of the era, perhaps only Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson dropped more acid than Matthiessen. But his reason—as with McClure and peyote—was a longing to feel man’s relationship with nature. “On acid I felt the unity of all nature,” he recalled. “It was thrilling to feel yourself as part of the whole planet. But I stopped that at some point. We learned that you can achieve the exact sensation through Zen. It’s slower, but purer and healthier all around.”27
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