Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  To Robert Bingham

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PART 1 - A Mountain

  PART 2 - An Island

  PART 3 - A River

  BY JOHN MCPHEE

  Copyright Page

  PART 1

  A Mountain

  A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening—as five of us did—it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. Men from the Chelan County Snow Survey use the cabin in winter while they measure snow depths and snow densities, and figure how much runoff to expect at the time of thaw. Because of the almost unbelievable amount of snow that can accumulate in that part of the State of Washington, what they do there is a vital matter to the people below and even far beyond the mountains.

  What we were doing there was something else again. We were tired. We had walked seven and a half miles uphill since three that afternoon. One of us was in his sixties, another in his fifties, and all of us saw the cabin as a haven from what obviously would have been very cold ground. Until midsummer, the trails had been impassable, and to make the trip we had had to wait for the winter snows to melt. An entry in the register in the cabin said that snow had fallen one week earlier, August 5th. But we had been drawn to the Cascades in part because a great many people believed that they were the most beautiful mountains in the United States. A somewhat smaller and, on the whole, more parochial group felt that these huge, conical peaks, raised in volcanic fire and later carved by moving ice, were the most beautiful mountains in the world. In 1964, the United States Congress set aside this region and others as permanent wilderness, not to receive even the use given a national park, not to be entered by a machine of any kind except in extreme emergency, not to be developed or altered or lumbered—forevermore. Within the structure of this so-called Wilderness Act, however, was a provision known as “the mining exception”: all established claims would remain open to mining, and new claims could be made in any wilderness until 1984. At the foot of Glacier Peak, in the center of this particular wilderness, is a copper lode that is half a mile from side to side. The Kennecott Copper Corporation has a patented claim on this deposit and could work it any time. We wanted to have a look at the region while it was still pristine. The others left it to me to add their names to the register in the cabin: Charles Park, geologist, mineral engineer, who believes that if copper were to be found under the White House, the White House should be moved; David Brower, who has been described by Stewart Udall as “the most effective single person on the cutting edge of conservation in this country,” leader of a conservation organization called Friends of the Earth; and Larry Snow and Lance Brigham, medical students from the University of Washington, who were along to help with the logistics of the trip and perhaps incidentally to give first aid.

  A mouse ran out from under the cabin, made a fast move among the packs, and went back under the cabin. We collected firewood and water. There was a cascade, white and plummeting, beyond the cabin. We changed into warmer clothes and lighter shoes. Brower, who hiked in twill shorts and a T-shirt and soft gray Italian boots, put on a long plaid shirt, trousers, and a pair of basketball shoes. Although he was out of shape, Brower was a prepossessing figure. He was a tall man. He had heavy bones, thick wrists, strong ankles. And he had a delicate, handsome, ruddy face, its features all finely proportioned but slightly too small, too refined, for the size of his frame, suggesting delicacy. His voice was quiet and persuasively mellifluous. He had an engaging smile and flashing white teeth. He was in his late fifties, and he had a windy shock of white hair. Brower had dropped out of college when he was nineteen, and disappeared into the Sierra Nevada. He had spent his life defending mountain ranges and what, by extension, they symbolized to him, and one of the ironies of his life was that his love of the mountains had long since drawn him away from them and into buildings impertinently called skyscrapers, into congressional corridors, into temporary offices in hotel rooms, into battle after battle, and out of shape. (In the idiom of conservation, “battle” is the foremost term for what conservationists do, and conservationist publications are “battle tracts.”) Brower’s skin was pink from the work of the climb, and when he was taking off his soaked T-shirt he had revealed a fold across his middle. The mouse ran out again from under the cabin, looked around, its nose vibrating, and retreated.

  Lance Brigham said, “Stick your head out once more, mouse, and it’s curtains for you.”

  Brower said softly, “It’s we who are the intruders.”

  Park had been taking off his boots—made in Canada, of heavy leather—and was putting on a pair of sandals. He grinned cryptically. He, too, had a shock of white hair. He was in his sixties, and he was as trim and hard as a college athlete, which he had once been, and nothing about him suggested that he had ever been out of breath. From his youth to the present, he had spent a high proportion of his life in the out-of-doors, and a high proportion of that in wilderness. Going up the trail that afternoon, with his geologist’s pick in his hand, he whacked or chipped at half the boulders and rock faces we passed, and every once in a while, apparently for the sheer hell of it, he rapped the pick’s hammer end on the stump of a tree that had been taken to clear the trail.

  “That’s a habit I developed long ago—banging on rocks and stumps,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Kodiak bears. I never wanted to take one by surprise. The same is true in Africa of leopards and gorillas. In other words, never take an animal by surprise.”

  Park spoke slowly, not because he was hesitant but simply in a measure that seemed compatible with geologic time. He had an almond face, alert gray eyes, and a mobile smile that tended to concentrate in one or the other corner of his mouth. He was even taller than Brower, and he wore khaki from head to foot. He had a visored khaki cap.

  Not far into the mountains from their eastern extremity, at Lake Chelan, we had come to an oddly formal landmark. It was a sign that said, “You Are Now Entering the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area.” In other words, “Take one more step and, by decree, you will enter a preserved and separate world, you will pass from civilization into wilderness.” Wilderness was now that definable, that demonstrable, and could be entered in the sense that one enters a room.

  Park said, “Will they let me carry my pick in there?”

  “Until 1984,” said Brower.

  We stepped across the line. I said, “If we get lost in here with that pick, we may discover a new copper deposit.”

  Brower said, “If you make a new discovery, I’m here to see that you don’t get out.”

  We moved on into the wilderness. The trail was dusty. It was covered with a light-brown powder too fine to be called sand. Park said it was glacial flour—finely ground rock coming out of the ice, ice of the past and ice of the present. Far above us in the high cirques were glaciers—the Lyman Glacier, Isella Glacier, Mary Green Glacier, and, perhaps prophetically, the Company Glacier on Bonanza Peak. The sky was blue and cloudless, a day to remember in the Cascades. Brower said he was disappointed that it was not raining. He explained that he did not like dry duff but preferred the feel and the beauty of a wet and glistening forest, vaporous and dripping. He said that he hoped we would
be fortunate enough to have a good rain before the trip was over. He labored slowly up the trail, taking it conservatively, eating thimbleberries and huckleberries as he moved along.

  “There are no really old rocks in the Cascades,” Park said, nicking a rock in passing. He picked up and admiringly turned in his hand a piece of pistachio-green epidote. Two hundred yards up the trail, he rapped at an outcropping with his pick and said, “That is volcanic.” Minutes later, he swung again, sent chips flying, and said, “That is contact rock.” This in some way entertained Brower, who laughed and shook his head. I remembered once driving through the Black Hills with Park, and how he would stop his car from time to time and just sit there looking at rocks. As a boy in Delaware, Park used to collect rocks and think about the West. While he was still in Wilmington High School, he had fifty ore minerals in his collection—hematite, malachite, galena, chromite. “I wanted to study mining, not particularly geology—mining,” he said. “I just wanted to get into rocks. Mining has always appealed to me. It’s in the out-of-the-way places.”

  A serrated ridge several miles from the trail had a reddish glow in the late-afternoon light. “See that color? That’s pyrite,” Park said, pointing. “Copper often comes with it. If I were in here looking for copper, that’s where I’d head.” The copper terrain we wanted to see was still more than ten miles away, however, and we stayed on the trail.

  We passed a big Douglas fir, at least six feet in diameter, that had crashed to earth in the recent past, and Brower said how nice it was to see it there, to know that some lumber company had never had a chance at it, to see the decay stage of a natural cycle—the forest reclaiming its own. If dead trees are not left to rot, he said, the ecology of the wilderness is disturbed. Park kept his reactions to himself. His eye wandered to a square hole in a cedar stump. He waved his pick in the direction of the stump and said, “Pileated woodpecker.” We moved on.

  After a series of switchbacks had lifted us seven hundred feet in less than a quarter of a mile, we stopped to rest by a stream that was alternately falling through the air and racing down the mountainside. Everywhere, from every slope, the Cascades cascade. Water shoots out of cracks in the rock, it falls over the edges of cliffs, it foams, sprays, runs, and plunges pure and cold. Enough snow and rain fall up there to irrigate Libya, and when water is not actually falling from the sky the sun is melting it from alpine ice. Down the dark-green mountainsides go streamers of white water, and above the timber-line water shines against the rock. In every depression is a tarn, and we had passed a particularly beautiful one a little earlier and, from the escarpment, were looking back at it now. It was called Hart Lake and was fed by a stream that, in turn, fell away from a high and deafening cataract. The stream was interrupted by a series of beaver ponds. All around these free-form pools were stands of alder, aspen, Engelmann’s spruce; and in the surrounding mountains, just under the summits, were glaciers and fields of snow. Brower, who is an aesthetician by trade and likes to point to beautiful things, had nothing to say at that moment. Neither did Park. I was remembering the words of a friend of mine in the National Park Service, who had once said to me, “The Glacier Peak Wilderness is probably the most beautiful piece of country we’ve got. Mining copper there would be like hitting a pretty girl in the face with a shovel. It would be like strip-mining the Garden of Eden.”

  Park wiped his forehead with his hat. I dipped a cup into the stream and offered him a drink. He hesitated. “Well, why not?” he said, at last. He took the cup and he drank, put the cup down with a smile, wiped his lips, and said, “That’s good stuff.”

  “It’s melted glacier ice, isn’t it?”

  Park nodded, and swallowed a little more.

  Brower drank from a cup that was almost identical to mine—stainless steel, with low, sloping sides, a wide flat bottom, a looped wire handle—with the difference that in raised letters on the bottom of Brower’s cup were the words “Sierra Club.” Brower for seventeen years had been the executive director of the Sierra Club—its leader, its principal strategist, its preeminent fang. In the mountains, a Sierra Club mountaineer eats and drinks everything out of his Sierra Club cup, and in various wildernesses with Brower I had never seen him eat or drink from anything else. In the past, in the High Sierra, he had on occasion rubbed pennyroyal-mint leaves over the embossed letters in the bottom of his cup and added snow and whiskey for a kind of high-altitude julep, but he rarely drinks much in the mountains and there was no whiskey at all on this trip. That night at the snow cabin, we ate our dinner from our cups—noodles, beef, chocolate pudding—and hung our packs on high rafters and were asleep before nine. We slept on bunks that had been tiered in the improbable cabin. At two in the morning, we were all awake, with flashlight beams crisscrossing from various heights in the compact blackness.

  “What the hell is going on?”

  “What is it?”

  “What’s there?”

  “Four very beautiful little tan-and-white meadow mice,” Brower said.

  “Aw, for heaven’s sake,” Park said, and he went back to sleep.

  Park, throughout his career, had not made a religion of camping out, and he had been particularly pleased when we found the cabin and its bunks, although they were little more than stiffly woven wire in frames. His general practice on trips of exploration for minerals had been to sleep in a bed if there was one within five miles, so he had managed to keep his lifetime total down to something like nineteen hundred nights on the ground. On foot and alone, he had hunted for copper in the Philippines, in Cuba, in Mexico, in Arizona, in Tennessee. He had hunted for silver in Nevada and Greece, for gold in Alaska, gold in South Dakota, and—on one curious assignment for the United States Geological Survey—gold in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. He had found what he was looking for. During the Second World War, there was a working gold mine in Rock Creek Park, in Washington, D.C. Such is Park’s feeling for where ore bodies are that some of his friends think he has occult powers. For fifteen years or so, he used his skills in the name of the Geological Survey. Then, in the late nineteen-forties, he began to teach geology and mineral engineering at Stanford University, where he eventually became Dean of the School of Earth Sciences. From one base or the other—Washington or Palo Alto—he has never stopped hunting the earth for metal, sometimes as a consultant to various companies. He has looked almost everywhere for iron and manganese. He once set up a base camp at fifteen thousand feet in the Chilean-Bolivian Andes and, working up from there, found iron at seventeen thousand feet. In 1956, he was taken in a pirogue up the Ivindo River, in Gabon, to a point from which he took compass bearings and walked for two weeks through jungle. On relatively high ground, elephant trails were so wide and hard they were like roads, but in swamps the elephants’ footprints were like postholes. The canopy was so thick it obscured the sky. Park had had serious back trouble for some time, and one day he fell to the ground and could not get up. He lay there for two hours until something jelled, and he got slowly to his feet again and moved on. He was hunting for iron, and he found a part of what is now called the Belinga Deposit. Even in the United States, he usually stayed out, alone, for about two weeks at a time. He went light, eating out of his frying pan and drinking from a small tin cup. He has used the same pick for twenty years. He speaks of the rootlessness of the life of an exploration geologist and says that many people tend to be discouraged by it. “You’re just wandering. You’re on the loose.” He has planted gardens spring after spring and never seen his plants in bloom. Instead, he has drawn from the earth its mercury, lead, zinc, uranium, fluorspar, phosphate, nickel, molybdenum, manganese, iron, lithium, tin, copper, silver, and gold.

  In the morning, soon after we were again on the trail, we went around the north edge of a lake that had a surface of at least ninety acres and was almost as big as the glacier that was dripping into it from fourteen hundred feet above. The effect of glacial flour in still water is to tur
n it green. As we moved uphill, and looked back, we saw that there were three other green lakes, closer to the glacier. In them, small icebergs were drifting. Ahead of us, and far above, was a ridge that ran north-south and dipped at one point to form a shallow notch. This was our immediate destination, and it had been named Cloudy Pass, because the most distant view a person usually has there is of his own groping hands. On this day, though, the sky was without clouds anywhere. The climb was steep toward the pass and we tended to string out. Brower, in the lead, said again that he wished it were raining.

  I asked him if, by his own standards, he would describe the terrain we were in as wilderness. “Yes, it is wilderness,” he said. “The Sierra is what I love, but these mountains are perhaps the most beautiful we have.” Then he accelerated his pace and was soon far ahead. He seemed to be feeling good, getting into rhythm with the mountains.

  A mosquito bit Park on the wrist, and he slapped it. “They follow the snow,” he said. “The higher we get, the more mosquitoes there are.”

  We climbed on in silence for a while, and then he asked why Brower had gone on so far ahead.

  “I don’t know. He seems to want to be alone,” I said.

  “He certainly is—let’s say—reserved,” Park said. “I don’t see how anyone could ever break through it. I almost called him yesterday when he said the big trees ought to be left to rot in the forest. Long before they fall, they are dying from the inside out. It’s a shame not to use big trees like that.” He waved his pick at a stand of spruce. “I am not a member of the Sierra Club,” he went on. “I don’t approve of their policy. To me, they are preservationists, not conservationists. You can’t avoid change. You can direct it, but you can’t avoid it. I like Sierra Club books, though.”

  In 1960, in Yosemite Valley, Brower helped put together an exhibit of landscape photographs and accompanying swatches of prose. Then he developed the idea of circulating the exhibit in book form. The result was the Sierra Club’s Exhibit-Format series—big, four-pound, creamily beautiful, living-room-furniture books that argue the cause of conservation in terms, photographically, of exquisite details from the natural world and, textually, of essences of writers like Thoreau and Muir. Brower was editor and publisher. He selected the photographs. He wrote the prefaces. In this way, as in others, he brought the words “Sierra Club” into the national frame of reference. He published Exhibit-Format books on everything from the Maine islands (Summer Island—Penobscot Country) to the Grand Canyon (Time and the River Flowing), the region of his own youth (Gentle Wilderness—the Sierra Nevada), and the mountains we were now crossing (The Wild Cascades). Within nine years, people had paid ten million dollars for Exhibit-Format books, and Brower said he had been surprised to find that people were willing to pay that much for beauty. Brower himself was certainly willing to spend money on it. Once, a set of picture proofs did not look quite right to him and he had ten thousand dollars’ worth of plates thrown out. Udall gave Time and the River Flowing to Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson for Christmas, 1964. At twenty-five dollars a copy, the books were, in a sense, investments, and rich conservationists bought them in round lots. Struggling conservationists could buy them in compacted form as three-dollar-and-ninety-five-cent paperbacks.