Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  “Yeah? What does it say?” said Dominy.

  “It says, ‘Don’t flood it.’”

  Inevitably, the buoys and the floating directional signs of Lake Powell lead to the Rainbow Bridge Marina, the only source of food or fuel within a radius of fifty miles—a floating hamlet where merchants and Park Service rangers live in structures built on pontoons and drums. No other design solution was possible in a place where the lake surface keeps rising, and sometimes temporarily falling, between shores of sheer stone wall. On the decks of this marina, the people of Lake Powell congregate—campers, skiers, rangers, Reclamation men—and it was here that the sway of Dominy, if it had not been altogether evident before, was displayed in full. From cabin cruiser to cabin cruiser, his name spread everywhere within moments of his arrival, and as he-moved along the nonskid marina decks he was regarded as a kind of god, creator of the unending blue waters. A child asked for his autograph. People thanked him repeatedly for the lake. The Kmish winked, and told them they were welcome. He also handed me his camera, put his arm around Brower, and said he wanted a visual record that such a moment had actually happened.

  Brower captioned the picture, “Brower gives up.”

  Moving on from the marina, we tied up the boat at a small wooden dock where the water of Lake Powell met the dry bed of Aztec Creek, and we walked a mile or so uphill among the boulders of the arroyo. Now Brower and Dominy stood under Rainbow Bridge, and there they reopened a running battle they had fought for ten years.

  Rainbow Bridge was formed—in an era when the land was uplifting—by waters that raced off Navajo Mountain and punched through a sandstone wall. Pushing gravel and boulders through the opening, cutting down and cutting wide, the creek, in centuries, made the gigantic stone span that crosses it now. Thick and red, immense against the sky, it would fit over the national Capitol dome. It is the largest known natural bridge on earth. When Lake Powell is full, still water will reach into the deep groove of the creek bed below Rainbow Bridge and will fill it to a level twenty-two feet below the base of the span. To Brower, this is simple sacrilege. To Dominy, it is a curious and agreeable coincidence that the water will stop just there.

  There have been fly-ins, hike-ins, Congressional hearings. Brower wants a cutoff dam to keep the lake out of the creek bed under the bridge, a diversion dam above the bridge to make the creek—when it runs—run elsewhere, and a diesel pumping station to move the diverted water. Dominy and Brower were standing like two chinch bugs under the enormous stone arch. In a curious reversal of roles, Dominy told Brower that he was “a pyramid builder,” that his cutoff dam and diversion dam would cost twenty-five million dollars, and that a little still water beneath the bridge would do far less damage to the natural setting that Brower was trying to preserve than would a pair of flanking dams. Brower said that water under the bridge would undermine its foundations. Dominy said geologists had told him that still water would do far less damage over the years than the flash floods that now go through there. Brower said he did not believe Dominy’s geologists. Moreover, he said, Dominy had not taken into account the eventual problem of aggraded silt, which would one day pack the pillars of the bridge in mud.

  If there was one concept Dominy had had enough of for a lifetime, it was aggraded silt—all these conservationists telling him about the high-piling ooze that was inescapably going to rise above his clotted reservoirs.

  “It won’t build back into here, God damn it!” he shouted.

  “Yes, it will,” Brower said, in a low, firm voice.

  “What are you talking about—two hundred years from now?”

  “No. About three hundred and fifty. Luna Leopold says that silt aggradation will be eighty feet here.”

  “That’s what he says. I say it’s crap. You conservationists say we are destroying Rainbow Bridge simply because we are making it available to people.”

  The two men walked around for a while, not saying anything, looking up in awe at the bridge. The spanning rock is forty feet thick. It could support a highway. Curiously, it is in more danger from sonic booms than from water. It shakes when booms hit it.

  Two hikers appeared from up the creek bed. They had on backpacks, and had come to the bridge overland from Navajo Mountain, an extremely rugged journey. They were college age. One was from Bethesda, the other from St. Louis. We all shook hands, each person giving his name. One of the hikers said, “Did you say ‘Dave Brower?”

  “Yes,” said Brower.

  “Dave Brower?” the boy repeated. Then, almost to himself, he said it again. “Dave Brower.”

  I wondered if the hiker was going to bend over and draw a picture of a fish in the sand.

  Dominy said, “You’re happy to meet him? How would you like to meet the Commissioner of Reclamation?”

  Perhaps because they were from Missouri and Maryland, neither of the young men had any idea what the term meant, or where the commissioner of whatever it was might be, nor did they ask.

  “Dave Brower.”

  They went with us all the way down the trail to the waterhead and the government boat. They stood there, watching Brower, as we pulled away. Without moving, they watched him until we passed out of sight around a bend. Briefly, we came into their view again. They were still watching.

  “His supporters believe that the prophet can do no wrong.”

  “Conservation is a religious movement. So you get sects. And then you have the art of exposition of the individual creed. Each sectarian knows that he is right. Dave Brower has been the prophet leading the faithful.”

  “The Sierra Club itself is a religious movement.”

  “If the prophet goes off the straight and narrow course, he becomes more of an adversary than the adversary in the distance.”

  “He has been bitten by the worm of power.”

  “He has jumped in front of a moving car, which he was driving.”

  “Dave had to violate orders of the board, in order to get done what he had to do.”

  “He once said he had thousands of volunteers working with him and that if he ever tried to do things himself there would be one person instead of thousands. And that, tragically, is what has happened in recent years.”

  “The power structure broke down, or there was insubordination, depending on how you want to look at it.”

  “He has become, over the years, increasingly less tolerant of the conservation opposition. He used to be far more flexible in his attitude toward the conservation problem.”

  “This is why the Sierra Club membership has grown, however. He has built it from seven thousand to seventy-seven thousand. People, particularly younger people, flock to the cause. They are fed up with traditional attitudes. Brower once had a willingness to see the other point of view, but now he is a flaming firebrand, and he has split the Sierra Club right down the middle.”

  “He wasn’t arrogant once, but he is now.”

  “I think that’s a fair statement.”

  “I don’t think ‘arrogant’ is really the right word. You wouldn’t associate arrogance with Jesus Christ, for example. I don’t mean to make a comparison there.”

  “With tact, he could have avoided his present trouble. He is stubborn. He’s just God-damned stubborn.”

  “His concern is wilderness. He doesn’t really care what happens to people.”

  “There is a pre-Eden strain in Dave—no question.”

  “I will say this: I prefer Dave’s vices to the virtues of his enemies.”

  “They are crucifying him, and they are self-congratulating bourgeoisie.”

  The people who said these things eddied in the Empire Room of the Hotel Sir Francis Drake, in San Francisco, where—lour or five hundred in all—they awaited the gavel that would begin the most momentous meeting of the directors of the Sierra Club in the fifty-five years since the defeat of John Muir. There were bearded men in open shirts who appeared to have walked directly in from the trail. There were good-looking women with hairbands, an advertising w
riter with a Beethoven haircut, at least twenty members of the press, a television-news crew. There were a preponderant number of old people, very local, very San Franciscan people—old bankers in vested suits, with fine memories of Sierra Club high trips in the nineteen-twenties, old men on canes who had reached into low reserves of energy just to be there, because they felt that Brower had expanded their club beyond recognition and had therefore, in a sense, usurped it. They had come in for the kill.

  “He is financially reckless.”

  “He has impugned the motives of the opposition.”

  “He has disobeyed the directives of the board.”

  “There has been a growth in ecological sophistication in the United States over the past twenty years, and Dave has in part caused it.”

  “He is a high-risk politician, that’s all. He risked his neck and he lost.”

  “He has a death wish.”

  “He’s been edging toward it all the time.”

  “He loved his job, and was always pushing things to the point where he might lose it.”

  “He is a great practitioner of brinkmanship, and this time he went much too far.”

  “He is a shy man who thrusts himself forward—onstage. He is a freewheeling, farseeing visionary when he is not trapped, and he is a rigid personality when he is trapped.”

  “Sometimes he seems paranoid. He believes that the Park Service, the Forest Service, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company are out to get him. We always told him, ‘No one outside the Sierra Club is going to get you. The only person who’ll get you is you.’”

  “What will he do? Do you think he would ever go into private industry?”

  “He would open his own waffle shop first.”

  There was a U-shaped table at one end of the room, faced by hundreds of funeral chairs. People read the Chronicle while they waited. A celebrated tree in the Sierra Nevada—a giant sequoia with a roadway running through it—had crashed to the ground. The paper reprinted on the front page Ansel Adams’ famous old photograph of the tree—the Wawona Tunnel Tree, as it was called—with a Pierce-Arrow nosing into it and a couple of figures standing beside the Pierce-Arrow. No one seemed to be getting much past the front page. Although the outcome of the meeting was a foregone conclusion, the atmosphere was tense. David Brower was going to be ejected as executive director of the Sierra Club. A last-minute resignation notwithstanding, “ejected” was the word. The executive director was an employee of the board of directors, and the board of directors was going to throw him out. The actual showdown had come in a mail-ballot election of new members of the board. Brower himself and a slate of his allies had been candidates, and they had lost, hands down. Supporters of Brower remained on the board, but the balance of power was now against him. Right to the end, Brower held on to the hope that somehow a majority of the fifteen directors would—all their expressed attitudes and commitments to the contrary—decide to keep him on, but he was the only person in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel who was that naive. Whatever the terms might be, today’s event would be a rite of expurgation.

  “As his success grew, he paid less and less attention to what people in the club were thinking and saying. I don’t think the man changed so much as he developed. He began to think, I am the Sierra Club.”

  “He is a combination poet, naturalist, and politician, a generalist in the fight to save the environment. He is tough enough to get into the thick of back-alley fights. He thinks that to win fights you have to have uncompromising militancy. The tax-exemption thing illustrates the risks he has been willing to take.”

  “No one in the Sierra Club faults him for that.”

  “I think Dave is right in feeling that militancy is the stance the Sierra Club should take if it is to be true to the spirit of John Muir.”

  “He started on five-sevenths pay and he worked sevenfifths of the time. His trouble was that he could not take direction. He was unapproachable. He tried to claim all the rights of an individual while representing an organization.”

  “He was the most effective single force in the conservation effort in this country. And he still is.”

  The gavel rapped. The room fell silent. Seated at the U-shaped table was the high tribunal of the Sierra Club.

  Martin Litton, writer. Portola Valley, California. Big, outspoken man, bitter for the cause. Courageous. He goes down the Colorado in rigid boats. Pro-Brower.

  Patrick D. Goldsworthy, biochemist. University of Washington. Wilderness mountain man but not a rope-and-piton climber. Defender of the North Cascades. Pro-Brower.

  Eliot Porter, one of the two great wilderness photographers in the world. Tusuque, New Mexico. Medical doctor. Never practiced. Pro-Brower.

  Larry Moss, nuclear engineer. Tanzania, California. White House Fellow. No outdoor specialty. Pro-Brower.

  Raymond Sherwin, Superior Court judge. Vallejo, California. No outdoor specialty. Anti-Brower.

  August Frugé, director of the University of California Press, Berkeley. Brower’s boss when Brower worked there. No outdoor specialty. Anti-Brower.

  Will Siri, biophysicist. University of California, Berkeley. Mountaineer. Co-leader in 1954 of the Makalu expeditions in the Himalayas. Cordillera Blanca, Peru, 1952. Everest, 1963. Anti-Brower.

  “Say what you will about financial irresponsibility or insubordination, what’s really going on here is a deep death struggle between mountaineers. Siri and others. Mountaineers are individualists—loners. Brower is an individualist, a loner.”

  “Brower is a mountaineer.”

  “Not a single climber he grew up with is still a friend of his.”

  “They’ve all turned on him.”

  “There is no love-hate like the love-hate that exists among mountaineers.”

  Philip Berry, lawyer, climber, mountaineer. Age, thirty-one. Grew up in Berkeley. Frequent visitor, throughout his youth, in Brower’s home. Brower taught him climbing techniques. Brower and Berry once attempted a new route up Mount Clarence King, in the Sierra. Brower loosened a rock that hit Berry. Duck hunter. Anti-Brower.

  Richard Leonard. Former president of the Sierra Club. Four years older than Brower and long his closest friend. Neighbor of Brower in Berkeley, and in the Mills Tower office building, San Francisco. Original proposer of Brower for membership in the Sierra Club. Nominator of Brower as executive director. Anti-Brower. Said to be the mastermind of the anti-Brower forces. Lawyer, climber, mountaineer.

  From the bottom of the U, Leonard looked out into the room without expression. He appeared to be a man who had never lost, or even mislaid, his composure. Leonard did not so much as turn his head when Martin Litton grabbed a microphone and shouted, “This election has been rife with perjury, calumny, and fraud!” Leonard, short and unprepossessing, cleared his throat at regular intervals. Nothing of his climbing past showed in his legal present. He and Brower—tied together—had climbed more mountains than either could remember. Among the people Leonard could see from his seat at the U-shaped table was Brower, standing at the edge of the crowd, his chin up, his white hair focal in the room. What Leonard was thinking then is anyone’s guess, but it may have been something close to a commentary he had made in private only hours before.

  “In the early years, Dave was absolutely magnificent as the leader of the club. He fought vigorously, aggressively, and—the point I want to emphasize—courteously. In later years, he started into his philosophy that Nice Nelly could never do the job. He impugned the motives of Forest Service people, Park Service people, congressmen. He seemed to feel that the end justified the means. The board passed resolutions insisting that he wage campaigns on demonstrable facts. Repeatedly, he has disregarded what the board has told him to do. He seems to think that it is he who knows what is best for the Sierra Club and for conservation in the long run, and that the board of directors is just standing in his way. The basis of his drive is that the earth is going to hell fast and something has to be done about it. Because of this, Dave will spend the resources of a
ny organization he is with in unlimited fashion. ‘We’re not trying to save money, we’re trying to save the world,’ he will say, and then he will put thirty thousand dollars or so into another newspaper advertisement, without being authorized to do so by the board. I want you to know this, though: He has never taken one dime for himself. One look at his house shows that—how shabby it is, aluminum pans catching the rain. His ideals are good, but his naivete would eventually destroy the organization. He believes that if he bankrupts the Sierra Club it is in a glorious cause. He was, incidentally, an excellent climber. We began to climb together when he was twenty-one and I was twenty-five. My life depended on his judgment and ability for weeks at a time. We once spent three weeks together on a glacier in British Columbia, sleeping on ice two thousand feet deep. Dave went snowblind. He thought it was a weakness to use dark glasses. He was convinced that he could adjust his eyes to the sun. The sun’s rays will congeal albumin, like cooking an egg. Dave’s eyes were closed for two or three days. I think he feels the need to decide medical and optical questions for himself. He also believes, as you know, in self-fulfilling prophecies. The snowball theory of action. Things will work out. Providence has always looked after the Sierra Club and always will, Dave thinks. I have no personal animosity toward Dave. We just have to save the Sierra Club, that’s all.”

  Richard Sill, physicist. University of Nevada. No outdoor specialty. Anti-Brower.

  Paul Brooks, writer on conservation subjects. Lincoln, Massachusetts. Retired executive editor of Houghton Mifflin. Canoeman. Refers to his wife as “the bow paddle.” At home, she puts up the storm windows. Anti-Brower.

  Edgar Wayburn, San Francisco physician, who grew up in Macon, Georgia. President of the Sierra Club, and long its principal voice of conciliating reason. Describes Brower as “a creative genius.” Anti-Brower.