Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  With Brower as its executive director, the Sierra Club grew from an organization of seven thousand members to an organization of seventy-seven thousand members. The figure seems both large and small. There are more people in Cedar Rapids than there are in the Sierra Club. Nonetheless, under Brower the club became a truly potent force, af fecting legislation that had to do with the use of the land, the sea, and the atmosphere. Brower was not the leader in every battle. He concentrated on certain foes, and many were in the Department of the Interior. To the Bureau of Reclamation, he is the Antichrist. They say there that Brower singlehanded prevented the construction of two major dams in the Grand Canyon for at least two generations and possibly for all time. On the Green River in Utah, Brower stopped cold a dam that would have inundated parts of Dinosaur National Monument. In the cause of mountains, he and lieutenants in the State of Washington fought loggers, miners, and hunters, and won a North Cascades National Park. For nearly twenty years, Brower has crossed and recrossed the United States campaigning for conservation before every kind of audience. The federal government’s Outdoor Recreation Resources Review was his idea. He was a primary force in the advancement of the Wilderness Act. His counterparts in other conservation organizations long ago acknowledged him as “the spokesman for protected wilderness.” Once, when Brower had driven for several hours through wretched fog and rain to attend a meeting and make a speech in Poughkeepsie, I asked him if he could say why he did all this, and he said, “I don’t know. It beats the hell out of me. I’m trying to save some forests, some wilderness. I’m trying to do anything I can to get man back into balance with the environment. He’s way out—way out of balance. The land won’t last, and we won’t.”

  Having moved above the trees into a clear area, Park stopped to look back over the forest, the green lakes, the glacier, the snowfields, and the white peaks beyond. I asked him if, from his experience, he would call this wilderness. “No,” he said. “Not with this trail in it.” He agreed that what we were looking at was almost incomparable, and he said he doubted if Brower saw anything he didn’t see. “That is a beautiful view,” he went on. “And these are magnificent mountains. They remind me of the Chilean Andes. But how is a mining company operating a pit on the other side of this ridge going to hurt all this? I don’t see it. My idea of conservation is maximum use. I think preserving wilderness as wilderness is a terrible mistake. This area is one of the few places in the country where copper exists now in commercial quantities, and we just have to have copper. The way things are set up, we can’t do without it. To lock this place up as wilderness could imperil the whole park system, because in ten years or so, when copper becomes really short, people will start yelling and revisions will have to be made. Any act of Congress can be repealed.” Park was speaking slowly, and we were making our way up through open alpine meadows that were splayed with streams and full of heather, lupine, horsemint, daisies, and wild licorice. “I’m in favor of multiple use of land,” he continued. “Have you ever been in the Harz Mountains? With proper housekeeping, you can have a mine and a sawmill and a primitive area all close together. When the Kerr-McGee Corporation wanted to mine phosphate on the coast of Georgia, conservationists howled. A hearing was held, and twenty-six people, most of them representing groups, testified against Kerr-McGee. No one testified for them. This shocked me. It was like people standing around watching a man get beat up. When Texas Gulf Sulphur drilled three holes and found an ore body in Ontario, people accused them of hiding information. I testified before the S.E.C. on their behalf. The image of copper companies is bad today, with all this conservation poop. There’s a Clark’s nutcracker!” The nutcracker, in flight, was a hundred feet above us.

  We were now about to top the final rise to Cloudy Pass, where Brower was waiting. We looked back again over the eastward view—lakes, peaks, beaver ponds, cascades, snow, ice, white-ribbon streams, and dark-green forests. Again Park said, “I don’t see it. I don’t see how a mine on the other side of this ridge is going to affect that.” Park lives in a trim, attractive, solid-looking one-level house on a deadend street in Palo Alto, and beside his front door is a decorative grouping of green rocks—copper ore—and an old pick with a broken handle. With his present pick, he swung at an outcropping with what seemed to me to be unusual curiosity and force.

  “What are you looking for?” I said.

  A grin came into the corner of his mouth. “Nothing,” he said. “I just haven’t hit one in a long time.”

  Most of the pass was covered with snow, but there were some patches of bare ground, and these were blue, green, red, yellow, and white with wild flowers. The air felt and smelled like the first warm, thaw-bringing day in spring in Vermont, and, despite the calendar, spring was now the season at that altitude in the North Cascades, and summer and fall would come and go in the few weeks remaining before the first big snow of September. Brower had dropped his pack and was sitting on a small knoll among the flowers. Park and I and Brigham and Snow dropped our own packs, and felt the sudden coolness of air reaching the sweatlines where the packs had been—and the inebriate lightness that comes, after a long climb, when the backpack is suddenly gone. The ground Brower was sitting on was ten or fifteen feet higher than the ground on which we stood, and as we went up to join him our eyes at last moved above the ridgeline, and for the first time we could see beyond it. What we saw made us all stop.

  One of the medical students said, “Wow!”

  I said slowly, the words just involuntarily falling out, “My God, look at that.”

  Across a deep gulf of air, and nearly a mile higher than the ground on which we stood, eleven miles away by line of sight, was Glacier Peak—palpable, immediate, immense. In the direction we were looking, we could see perhaps two hundred square miles of land, and the big mountain dominated that scene in the way that the Jungfrau dominates the Bernese Alps. Glacier Peak had originally been a great symmetrical cone, and that was still its basic shape, but it had been monumentally scarred, from within and without. It once exploded. Pieces of it landed in what is now Idaho, and other pieces landed in what is now Oregon. The ice sheet mauled it. Rivers from its own glaciers cut grooves in it. But it had remained, in silhouette, a classic mountain, its lines sweeping up beyond its high shoulder—called Disappointment Peak—and converging acutely at the summit. The entire upper third of the mountain was white. And below the snow and ice, black-green virgin forest continued all the way down to the curving valley of the Suiattle River, a drop of eight thousand feet from the peak. Spread around the summit like huge, improbable petals were nine glaciers —the Cool Glacier, the Scimitar Glacier, the Dusty Glacier, the Chocolate Glacier—and from each of these a white line of water ran down through the timber and into the Suiattle. To our right, on the near side of the valley, another mountain—Plummer Mountain—rose up about two-thirds as high, and above its timberline its snowless faces of rock were, in the sunlight, as red as rust. Around and beyond Glacier Peak, the summits of other mountains, random and receding, led the eye away to the rough horizon and back to Glacier Peak.

  Brower said, without emphasis, “That is what is known in my trade as a scenic climax.”

  Near the southern base of Plummer Mountain and in the deep valley between Plummer Mountain and Glacier Peak —that is, in the central foreground of the view that we were looking at from Cloudy Pass—was the lode of copper that Kennecott would mine, and to do so the company would make an open pit at least two thousand four hundred feet from rim to rim.

  Park said, “A hole in the ground will not materially hurt this scenery.”

  Brower stood up. “None of the experts on scenic resources will agree with you,” he said. “This is one of the few remaining great wildernesses in the lower forty-eight. Copper is not a transcendent value here.”

  “Without copper, we’d be in a pretty sorry situation.”

  “If that deposit didn’t exist, we’d get by without it.”

  “I would prefer the mountain as it
is, but the copper is there.”

  “If we’re down to where we have to take copper from places this beautiful, we’re down pretty far.”

  “Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper deposit in Yellowstone Park, I’d recommend mining it. Proper use of minerals is essential. You have to go get them where they are. Our standard of living is based on this.”

  “For a fifty-year cycle, yes. But for the long term, no. We have to drop our standard of living, so that people a thousand years from now can have any standard of living at all.”

  A breeze coming off the nearby acres of snow felt cool but not chilling in the sunshine, and rumpled the white hair of the two men.

  “I am not for penalizing people today for the sake of future generations,” Park said.

  “I really am,” said Brower. “That’s where we differ.”

  “Yes, that’s where we disagree. In 1910, the Brazilian government said they were going to preserve the iron ore in Minas Gerais, because the earth would run short of it in the future. People—thousands and thousands of people in Minas Gerais—were actually starving, and they were living over one of the richest ore deposits in the world, a fifteen-billionton reserve. They’re mining it now, and people there are prospering. But in the past it was poor consolation to people who were going hungry to say that in the future it was going to be better. You have to use these things when you have them. You have to know where they are, and use them. People, in the future, will go for the copper here.”

  “The kids who are in Congress in the future should make that decision, and if it’s theirs to make I don’t think they’ll go for the copper here,” Brower said.

  “Sure they will. They’ll have to, if people are going to expect to have telephones, electric lights, airplanes, television sets, radios, central heating, air-conditioning, automobiles. And you know people will want these things. I didn’t invent them. I just know where the copper is.”

  Brower swung his pack up onto his back. “Pretend the copper deposit down there doesn’t exist,” he said. “Then what would you do? What are you going to do when it’s gone?”

  “You’re trying to make everything wilderness,” Park said.

  “No, I’m not. I’m trying to keep at least two per cent of the terrain as wilderness.”

  “Two per cent is a lot.”

  “Two per cent is under pavement.”

  “Basically, our difference is that I feel we can’t stop all this—we must direct it. You feel we must stop it.”

  “I feel we should go back, recycle, do things over again, and do better, even if it costs more. We mine things and don’t use them again. We coat the surface of the earth—with beer cans and chemicals, asphalt and old television sets.”

  “We are recycling copper, but we don’t have enough.”

  “When we knock buildings down, we don’t take the copper out. Every building that comes down could be a copper mine. But we don’t take the copper out. We go after fresh metal. We destroy that mountain.”

  “How can you ruin a mountain like Glacier Peak?” Park lifted his pick toward the mountain. “You can’t ruin it,” he went on, waving the pick. “Look at the Swiss mountains. Who could ruin them? A mine would not hurt this country —not with proper housekeeping.”

  Brower started on down the trail. We retrieved our packs and caught up with him. About five hundred feet below us and a mile ahead was another pass—Suiattle Pass—and to reach it we had to go down into a big ravine and up the other side. There were long silences, measured by the sound of boots on the trail. From time to time, the pick rang out against a rock.

  Brower said, “Would America have to go without much to leave its finest wilderness unspoiled?”

  We traversed a couple of switchbacks and approached the bottom of the ravine. Then Park said, “Where they are more easily accessible, deposits have been found and are being—or have been—mined.

  We had seen such a mine near Lake Chelan, in the eastern part of the mountains. The Howe Sound Mining Company established an underground copper mine there in 1938, built a village and called it Holden. The Holden mine was abandoned in 1957. We had hiked past its remains on our way to the wilderness area. Against a backdrop of snowy peaks, two flat-topped hills of earth detritus broke the landscape. One was the dump where all the rock had been put that was removed before the miners reached the ore body. The other consisted of tailings—crushed rock that had been through the Holden mill and had yielded copper. What remained of the mill itself was a macabre skeleton of bent, twisted, rusted beams. Wooden buildings and sheds were rotting and gradually collapsing. The area was bestrewn with huge flakes of corrugated iron, rusted rails, rusted ore carts, old barrels. Although there was no way for an automobile to get to Holden except by barge up Lake Chelan and then on a dirt road to the village, we saw there a high pile of gutted and rusted automobiles, which themselves had originally been rock in the earth and, in the end, in Holden, were crumbling slowly back into the ground.

  Park hit a ledge with the pick. We were moving up the other side of the ravine now. The going was steep, and the pace slowed. Brower said, “We saw that at Holden.”

  I counted twenty-two steps watching the backs of Brower’s legs, above the red tops of gray socks. He was moving slower than I would have. I was close behind him. His legs, blue-veined, seemed less pink than they had the day before. They were sturdy but not athletically shapely. Brower used to put food caches in various places in the High Sierra and go from one to another for weeks at a time. He weighed two hundred and twelve pounds now, and he must have wished he were one-eighty.

  Park said, “Holden is the sort of place that gave mining a bad name. This has been happening in the West for the past hundred years, but it doesn’t have to happen. Poor housekeeping is poor housekeeping wherever you find it. I don’t care if it’s a mine or a kitchen. Traditionally, when mining companies finished in a place they just walked off. Responsible groups are not going to do that anymore. They’re not going to leave trash; they’re not going to deface the countryside. Think of that junk! If I had enough money, I’d come up here and clean it up.”

  I thought how neat Park’s house, his lawn, and his gardens are—his roses, his lemon tree, his two hundred varieties of cactus. The name of the street he lives on is Arcadia Place. Park is a member of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America. He hit a fallen tree with the hammer end.

  “It’s one god-awful mess,” Brower said.

  “That old mill could be cleaned up,” Park said. “Grass could be planted on the dump and the tailings.”

  Suiattle Pass was now less than a quarter mile ahead of us. I thought of Brower, as a child, on his first trip to the Sierra Nevada. His father drove him there from Berkeley in a 1916 Maxwell. On the western slopes, they saw both the aftermath and the actual operations of hydraulic mining for gold. Men with hoses eight inches in diameter directed water with such force against the hillsides that large parts of the hills themselves fell away as slurry.

  “Holden was abandoned in 1957, and no plants of any kind have caught on the dump and the tailings,” Brower said.

  Holden, in its twenty years of metal production, brought out of the earth ten million tons of rock—enough to make a hundred thousand tons of copper, enough to wire Kansas City.

  Park said, “You could put a little fertilizer on—something to get it started.”

  When we reached the pass, we stood for a moment and looked again at Glacier Peak and, far below us, the curving white line of the Suiattle. Park said, “When you create a mine, there are two things you can’t avoid: a hole in the ground and a dump for waste rock. Those are two things you can’t avoid.”

  Brower said, “Except by not doing it at all.”

  In a bottle gentian, Brower found a butterfly
drinking. With a quick but precise move of his hand, he picked it up. He said it was a monarch and that it had a flying range of two thousand miles. “Monarchs almost have a sense of humor,” he went on. “They play with the wind.” He let the butterfly go, and it went up into the wind, looped, dipped, and sailed off on an oblique tack through voids of air against the backdrop of the big mountain. Noting patterns, habits, frequency of wingbeat, Brower can identify butterflies in flight. He will be moving along a trail and his eyes will be attracted by flutterings sometimes hundreds of yards away, and he will say, for example, “Parnassian.” I was with him once near Piute Pass, in the Sierra, when he saw a Parnassian beating its way west, and he said he was impressed by its being at that altitude, which was twelve thousand feet. On the same day, he found a California tortoiseshell butterfly—orange, black, and yellow—sitting on a rock. He picked it up. It was so cold it couldn’t move. Brower warmed it up, and it flew from his hand.