Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  There is a butterfly called Anthocaris sara reakirtii broweri. Brower discovered it, when he was fifteen years old. He was a solitary boy, a collector of butterflies, and he knew he had something unusual when he saw that its primaries were black and white and the undersides of its secondaries were green. He found it near Grizzly Peak, in the Berkeley Hills, where he used to go for long walks after school as a boy, sometimes leading his mother by the hand. She was blind, and he would describe to her the terrain they were moving through and the plants and animals he saw. His mother was a tall, attractive woman. She had an advanced degree in English literature. An inoperable brain tumor had blinded her when he was eight.

  Brower was born in Berkeley, in 1912. When he was a year old, his mother went shopping one day at a Red Front store and left him for a few minutes in a baby carriage on the sidewalk. Squirming around, he fell to the pavement, and smashed out several of his front teeth, damaging also the wall of the gums. His second set of front teeth did not come in until he was twelve, and when they did they were awry. He was ashamed, embarrassed, unsure of himself, shy. He was afraid to smile. In school, he was known as the Toothless Boob. He withdrew into the Berkeley Hills—which are now covered with houses, including his own house, but were wild then. He also liked to go to Two Rock Valley, some fifty miles north of Berkeley, to the chicken ranch where his mother had grown up. The place was a haven for both of them. Brower avers that he could hear the chickens growing there. He also says he learned to talk with chickens. He believes that tones cross the barriers of species. There was a mare at Two Rock Valley that no one could handle, but whenever Brower went near her she whinnied cordially and did as she was told.

  Brower’s father taught mechanical drawing at the University of California. He was a small man (five seven), with a rock-ribbed face and stern habits. His first name was Ross. He never smoked. He did not drink, even coffee. One traumatic day, he came home with the news that he had lost his instructorship. Home was 2232 Haste Street, where the family had two frame houses, one behind the other, that had been partitioned into eleven apartments. For the rest of his life, Brower’s father managed and janitored the apartments. Things became, in Brower’s words, “pretty thin,” and he remembers holes in his sweaters, holes in his shoes, and paper routes. His father’s mother moved in to help with the apartments. She was a high-momentum Baptist who had seen to it that her grandson David was underwater when presented to God. She also saw to it that he always had plenty of housework to do. He washed clothes. She banned card games. She permitted the drinking of hot Jello.

  The family’s escape zone was the Sierra Nevada. Ross Brower had made something he called a camping box. It fitted on the running board of the Maxwell—and, later, of the Willys Knight—and it held food and utensils; one side of it let down on chains and became a table. In Berkeley, the camping box was kept in the basement, and frequently young David would go down there just to look at it. To Donner Summit was a three-day drive. (It is now a three-hour drive.) They would spend the first night in a campground in what is now metropolitan Sacramento, and the second near Colfax, on the American River. The river was potable then. As if he were there still, Brower remembers lying on the ground inside an arrangement of blankets and blanket pins—his mother at one end, his father at the other, his two brothers and his sister with him in the middle—listening to the elegiac whistling of the big Mallet engines of the Southern Pacific. He developed an extraordinary affection for trains. Malapropos as it may seem at this point in his career, he still has it. The force of nostalgia in Brower is such that it can in some instances bend logic. A railroad over the Sierra is all right. It was there. An interstate highway is an assault on the terrain.

  At Donner Summit, Brower once pointed out to me the road he and his family had used. It was a dirt road seven feet wide and as tortuous as the contours of the mountains. On almost every trip, they camped in the wild country at the south end of Lake Tahoe, in a forest of big pines, white fir. He would wade in the cold, clear, notoriously blue lake and catch minnows. He stood there one day not long ago and took in the scene as it is now. Just up the street were Jimboy’s Tacos, Pettyjohn Realty, Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, Harrah’s casino, Harrah’s Thrifty Gambler, Shell, Texaco, Phillips 66, Standard, Enco, Stoddard the Jeweler (“Wedding Rings”), and the south-shore offices of O. R. “Bode” Martin, Real Estate. We went into Harrah’s Thrifty Gambler, where Brower dropped a dollar and five cents at nickel roulette and ten-cent craps, then on into the big casino. “These people were perfectly happy in Las Vegas, Carson City, and Reno,” Brower said, looking around. “They didn’t have to come to this lake.”

  I remarked that the people in Harrah’s looked young and fresh-faced, and not made of ochre suede, like the people in downtown Las Vegas.

  Brower said, “Maybe that’s because they go out and look at the lake once in a while.”

  On the precise spot where Brower and his family used to camp when he was a boy now stands the Royal Valhalla Motor Lodge-Diners Club, BankAmericard, Carte Blanche, Master Charge, American Express, sunbathing balconies, and an eight-foot Anchor fence to keep undesirables away from the lake. People with oil-glistening skins were languid on the balconies.

  “These are people who got on the wrong subway and missed Coney Island,” Brower said. “This is Jones Beach West. I’m glad there’s a Jones Beach. I’m sorry this happened to Lake Tahoe.”

  Brower was standing by the Anchor fence, which had barbed wire along its top, and through it a stiff north wind was whistling. Visible through the fence were high whitecaps on the lake. The water was noticeably green. By a process called eutrophication, algae build up as a result of the accumulation of various human wastes, and even lakes that are famous for being blue will turn green. Brower said, “When Lake Erie started to die, it went in twelve years. This lake is a lot smaller than that. I can’t think of a scenic climax in the world more polluted, and in more ways, than this one. Oh, is this ever grim!”

  I asked him, “What do you think would happen if you were to address an audience collected out of these motels ?”

  “They would understand. They would be with me,” he said. “People love the land.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes,” he said. He pointed to a small bush. “Look at that plant,” he said. “There has been some attempt at landscaping here.”

  “It’s plastic.”

  “O.K.,” Brower said, “I take it back. This long ago ceased to be my country anyway. You can see into my country.” He pointed. “Pyramid Peak is just visible, in the Desolation Wilderness.”

  “Have you been up Pyramid Peak?”

  “Seven times. Three times in the winter, on skis. But by the time I was twenty even that was behind me. I found bigger peaks, wilder places, higher country.”

  As a child, he had at times been frightened in that country. The family had always headed south after Tahoe, into the higher mountains, higher than the Rockies—the High Sierra, tallest mountain range in the contiguous United States. To minor summits—Gaylor Peak, Sentinel Dome, Vernal Fall—the family would scramble, but David was afraid to go, and he sat in the car, sometimes trembling, while the others were away. At Glacier Point, a look-off reachable by road—and three thousand two hundred and fifty-four feet up a cliff face from the floor of Yosemite Valley—the family always went out to the lip to have a look. David stayed behind, terrified even by the thought of looking over the rim. Not many years later, though, with rope and pitons, he started up that cliff from the bottom, and he was two thousand feet off the valley floor when rocks and beer cans started to fall around him, tossed down by tourists above. Afraid for his life, he shouted until his voice was gone, but the tourists did not hear him. He says that beer cans in that situation make a light and Christmassy tinkle, while rocks go by with a Doppler effect—peeeeenyow. By pure luck, nothing hit him, but he was discouraged and gave up the climb.

  Theodore Roosevelt, when he was President of the Unit
ed States, slept one night at Glacier Point, a bit of blanket over him, and when he awoke in the morning he was covered with four inches of snow. He said later that it was the greatest day of his life. Brower told me this while we ourselves were standing at Glacier Point one day. A bronze map there shows what you are looking at-Mount Starr King, Grizzly Peak, Mount Clark, Mount Lyell, Mount Maclure, Half Dome, North Dome, Clouds Rest, Mount Hoffmann, Mount Watkins, Mount Broderick, Liberty Cap. Brower had been to the summits of all these mountains. Glacier Point is a scenic climax and a half—fathoms and fathoms of air down to the green valley and up the granite on the far side to Yosemite Falls and beyond to the sharp outlines of the peaks. We shared the scene with a cluster of tourists, all adults, who were making paper airplanes and sailing them to the valley. By paper airplane, that is a long flight; and for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes at a time all these people, some of whom had driven three thousand miles to be there, kept their attention fixed on the paper airplanes. A National Park Service ranger tried to persuade them to have a look at the view. He also politely noted that what they were doing was against the law. To Brower he said that there were worse troubles than that, up there. The trail out to Glacier Point is lighted at night by fixtures placed in clefts and crevices of rock. Tourists unscrew the bulbs and throw them over the cliff.

  By the time Brower reached high school, he thought that he wanted to be an entomologist, but he gave up that ambition, because at Berkeley High School people who were interested in things like entomology were considered odd. Brower had had enough of that. He was still afraid to smile, because of his teeth. As manager of the lightweight football team, he had found the beginnings of a kind of social life, and he feared losing it. He was sixteen, though, when he entered the University of California. He felt out of step, too young. Quiescent sensitivities renewed. He kept “trying for approvals here and there.” He lived at home, and when he was eligible for fraternity rushing he saw from within his house one day a group from a fraternity coming up the street. They stopped and looked at the place in apparent dismay—a narrow lot in a poor section, an ersatz-Victorian clapboard-and-shingle run-down embarrassing house. The boys from the fraternity moved on without coming up the walk. Brower dropped out of the university in his sophomore year. “Because of the Depression,” he said. “The Great Depression—it was a convenient excuse.” He went into the mountains. Before ten years had passed, it was being said of him that if he were to be set down at night anywhere in the Sierra Nevada, with the coming of morning he would know just where he was.

  Now, at Suiattle Pass, Brower was still talking about butterflies. He said he had raised them from time to time and had often watched them emerge from the chrysalis—nrst a crack in the case, then a feeler, and in an hour a butterfly. He said he had felt that he wanted to help, to speed them through the long and awkward procedure; and he had once tried. The butterflies came out with extended abdomens, and their wings were balled together like miniature clenched fists. Nothing happened. They sat there until they died. “I have never gotten over that,” he said. “That kind of information is all over in the country, but it’s not in town.”

  We left the trail and went off to the right, toward Plummer Mountain, in order to attempt to find our way to the center of the area of the copper lode, and to see for ourselves—if possible—evidence of its presence. Park took the lead. The problem was to try to stay on a contour and still move in a generally westerly direction in landscape that was full of thick vegetation, ledges, ravines, and cliffs. It quickly became apparent that Brower thought Park had no idea where he was going. Our feet hurt—at least, Park’s and mine did. I had developed a bone spur under one heel earlier in the year, and Park had made a bad choice with his new Canadian boots, which were stiff and were beginning to wear away parts of his ankles and feet. This fact emerged later. He said nothing at the time. Picking the shortest or easiest route—and assessing the one against the other—was of obvious importance to all of us. Although Brower seemed to be getting stronger with every added mile, he nonetheless was hardly indefatigable. Park had simply assumed command—aggressive, perhaps, because he was so uncomfortable—and we followed him, but Brower kept craning toward other possibilities, other routes. So close up, and so rough in character, the terrain was hard to read. Two or three times, Brower suggested that we try a gulch or a ridge that Park was having no part of, but Park kept moving and paid no attention, perhaps because he does not hear well. What we all feared was that we would come out onto some impossible ledge or up against a cliff face and have to turn back and add perhaps miles to our day. After a time, we got into the beginnings of what appeared to be a descending, curving cul-de-sac; at least, it appeared that way to me and to Brower. We imagined that if we were to go down into it, we would end up facing cliffs and have to climb back out the way we went in. Brower said he wanted to stay on high ground and go to even higher ground to get around the problem. Park kept on walking, downhill and to his right, around the curve, whacking boulders with his pick. With no trail to keep us threaded together, we had to follow. Around the bend, the “cul-de-sac” came open, and the landscape spread out into broad alpine meadows interspersed with stands of spruce and reaching out in gentle gradients toward the talus slopes of Plummer Mountain.

  This place had been named the Golf Course, apparently by explorers for Kennecott—or so we gathered from a crude property map we had with us, the “property” being the corporation’s patented claims. With very little bulldozing, the Golf Course could in fact become one of the seven wonders of sport, with the red wall of Plummer Mountain above it, the deep valley of the Suiattle falling away beside it, and the sparkling, spectacular imminence of Glacier Peak in full view from every tee, fairway, and green. Brower’s response to this conception was that each and every round would have to be played over his remains.

  Park said that we had apparently reached the outermost lens of the copper deposit. He looked up at Plummer Mountain, all rusty and tawny and jagged in the air, and described what he was looking at as intrusive rock impregnated with pyrite and, he assumed, with copper—a porphyry of disseminated copper in granitic intrusive material. He said this mountain glacial topography reminded him of Greenland—sharp peaks sticking up through the ice pack. He could almost see the ice that had been there in the past.

  Brower said he could see the hole in the ground that would be there in the future. He said that it would be a man-made crater so large it would be visible from the moon.

  “Aw, Dave, it wouldn’t be that bad,” Park said.

  While Brower was executive director of the Sierra Club, the organization became famous for bold full-page newspaper ads designed to arouse the populace and written in a style that might be called Early Paul Revere. One such ad called attention to the Kennecott Copper Corporation’s ambitions in the Glacier Peak Wilderness under the headline “AN OPEN PIT, BIG ENOUGH TO BE SEEN FROM THE MOON.” The fact that this was not true did not slow up Brower or the Sierra Club. In the war strategy of the conservation movement, exaggeration is a standard weapon and is used consciously on broad fronts. Beneath the headline was an aerial photograph of an open pit that Kennecott has created in Bingham Canyon, Utah. It would be difficult to exaggerate that one. Bingham Canyon is the largest copper mine in the United States. Two miles from rim to rim, it goes down into the earth in some fifty concentric circular terraces, so that from the air it looks very much like a thumbprint pressed into the ground—the thumbprint, it works out, of a man well over a hundred miles tall. The Internal Revenue Service eventually reacted to the Sierra Club ads by declaring contributions to the Sierra Club no longer tax deductible. Organizations that tried to influence legislation could not have tax-deductible status. That didn’t slow up Brower, either. He went right on with the ads.

  “Well, with a small telescope,” Brower said.

  We moved up the fairways toward Plummer Mountain, walking through buttercups and vetch. Park said cheerfully, “I wouldn’t object at all to seeing
a nice open pit here, improving the standard of living.”

  “Improving the standard of living for a short time,” Brower said.

  “For a hundred years,” said Park. “And fifty years after that it’s all covered over. There’s a beach in New South Wales where the deep sands have rutile, zircon, and other rare things. National Lead and some Australian companies got permission to mine the beach. There was a hullabaloo. They mined it, and now the beach is better than it was before. It’s been rebuilt. Swamps and mosquitoes are gone. The shorebird habitats were untouched. The Australian government wants more beaches to be mined elsewhere.”

  Brower let the beach go. He once wrote and narrated a film about the North Cascades, and, with “America the Beautiful” softly rendered behind his own soft-toned voice on the sound track, he said that these mountains were among “the few surviving samples of a natural world, to walk and rest in, to see, to listen to, to feel the mood of, to comprehend.” The narration continued, “There isn’t much of it left. What there is is all all men will ever have, and all their children. It is only as safe as people want it to be.” That must have been more or less what he was thinking at that moment. At length, he said, “The pit is only a small part of what else they do.”

  “Every mine in the country has someone objecting to it,” Park said. “Where are you going to get your metals?”

  “Nevada, Arizona—Bingham Canyon.”

  “People object there.”