Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  We stepped around several piles of fresh dung. Brower said he didn’t know what it was. Park said, “It’s bear dung.”

  A pluming waterfall, hundreds of feet high, fell from the east face of Plummer Mountain, and, for lack of a more specific goal, we were homing on it.

  “This scenic climax is of international significance,” Brower said.

  “That may be, but as long as you’ve got copper here, pressure to mine is going to continue.”

  “Well, I’ll give up when copper has to be used as a substitute for gold. The kids will decide then. And I think they’ll decide not to mine it.”

  “A mine would remove the mining area from wilderness —anyone in his right mind would admit that,” Park said. “You’re going to have people, equipment, machinery. You’re going to blast. You’re going to have a waste dump. You’re also going to get copper, which contributes to the national wealth and, I think, well-being. And all that can’t possibly affect Glacier Peak.”

  “The mine will affect anybody in this whole area who looks at Glacier Peak. One of the last great wildernesses in the United States would have been punctured, like a worm penetrating an apple. There would not only be the pit but also the dumps, the settling ponds, the tailings, the mill, machine shops, powerhouses, hundred-ton trucks. Good Lord! The mood would go. Wilderness defenders have to get into abstract terms like mood and so forth, but that is what it is all about. How are the people and equipment going to get in and out of here? A road? A railroad?”

  “I think cost would have to enter into that.”

  “O.K. I put a price of ten billion dollars on the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Actually, that is facetious. There is no price. The price of beauty has never been evaluated. Look at that mountain! What would it cost to build an equal one?”

  A galvanized pipe rising about a foot out of the earth stopped the conversation, and stopped us where we stood. Only three inches from rim to rim, it seemed somehow, to me, in the surprise of coming upon it, to reach far out into the surrounding wilderness, to be the mine itself. It had been marked as Kennecott’s Drill Site No. 3. Park said it probably went down about five hundred feet, and that the core samples that had been removed through it must have been three-quarters of an inch in diameter. The core samples would have shown not only whether copper was there, in that spot, but also the concentration of it in the porphyry. Earlier in this century, if copper ore was not at least two or three per cent copper it was bypassed. Now if it is seventenths of one per cent copper it is mined. We sat down, roughly in a circle, around the pipe. We each had a plastic bag full of a mixture of peanuts, raisins, and chocolate, and we opened the bags and ate while we looked at the pipe, although there was so little to see. Around it spread the meadow grass, the vetch, and the buttercups, undisturbed.

  “What per cent of the world’s known copper is under here?” Brower asked.

  “I don’t know,” Park said. “Kennecott hasn’t told me.”

  For a time, the only sound was from the wind and from the waterfall on the mountain. Then Brower said, “We don’t know the size of the reserve.”

  “That’s true.”

  “If you start with point seven per cent and work down, say, to point three five—if that level becomes commercially feasible, then there’s no telling how big the pit will be.”

  “That’s true.”

  “The theory of economic growth is doomed on a finite planet.”

  “It has to be.”

  “We have to figure out how to cool it. I think a major change in thinking is around the corner.”

  Park took off his cap and smoothed his hair. “I hope your optimism holds,” he said. “I’m a pessimist.”

  “I have to be an optimist. It keeps me in business. Otherwise, I’d open a waffle shop.”

  Of all the things Brower swallows, the two he seems to like most in the world are Tanqueray gin and whipped-cream-and-strawberry-covered waffles.

  “Copper affects the international balance of payments,” Park said. “We are net importers of copper.”

  “I can’t get excited about that.”

  “Again, what you’re saying is that you’re willing to lower the standard of living.”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then you increase ghetto problems in cities.”

  “There is a gap between a lowered standard and the ghetto,” Brower said. “One thing we could do, to begin with, is stop copper roofing.”

  “That’s not a great amount. It’s mostly in wiring.”

  “A lot of copper goes into coinage. Quarters are sandwiches of nickel and copper.”

  “Yes. We could get rid of that.”

  “We could use aluminum coins.”

  “Aluminum coins are horrible,” Park said. “They’re dirty.”

  “Well, then, I’d rather have a hole in a coin than a hole in Plummer Mountain. A mine in this wilderness is horrible, too.”

  “The mine has to come. Population pressure is irresistible.”

  “Population is pollution spelled inside out.”

  “I agree. At least, I agree that it is a very real problem.”

  “Families with more than two children should be taxed,” Brower said.

  “I agree with that, too. Everything is hopeless without population control.”

  “How many children do you have?”

  “Three. How many do you have?”

  “Four,” Brower confessed.

  They both turned to me.

  “Four,” I said.

  The medical students looked on with interest.

  “Seven billion people are going to be on the earth in the year 2000,” Park said.

  “It is wrong to assume so. Demographers make a projection like that and then we all assume it’s inevitable and we go ahead and make it so.”

  Brower has a metaphysical or perhaps superstitious belief in the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy. He also has no regard for the extrapolations of social scientists.

  “India? Africa? Have you seen the figures?” Park asked him.

  “I think there will be a massive pestilence.”

  “Perhaps so, but meanwhile population pressure is irresistible.”

  “Central Park and the Adirondacks have resisted it pretty well.”

  Adirondack State Park is the largest park, state or federal, in the United States. It was created in 1892, principally as the result of the efforts of a group of conservationists in Brooklyn, who put into the constitution of the State of New York this guarantee: “The Forest Preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands.”

  Park put on his cap. “There was a titanium mine in the Adirondacks during the Second World War,” he said.

  Around the galvanized pipe, there was no evidence that copper ore had in fact come through it. We moved on. Our eyes began to hunt—in a sense, to forage—for green rock. The alpine meadows ended abruptly at the edge of an extremely steep escarpment above the stream that ran from the waterfall off Plummer Mountain. We picked our way down the face of the escarpment. Park was wielding his pick with more intent than whimsy, and when he hit something we all looked around, as if we were expecting him at any moment to crack open the vaults of the Glacier Peak Wilderness. Halfway down the incline, he split off a hunk of gray rock about the size of a book and looked with interest at the part of it that was newly exposed to light.

  “What did you find?”

  “Nothing. Just a good streak of mineral. We’re in the mineralized area.”

  “But no copper.”

  “None there. Copper is water soluble. It leaches out and precipitates below. This is certainly your ore horizon.”

  “Will we actually see copper ore?”

  “Maybe. Who knows?”

  We inched on down toward the stream, which had the pools, the clear water, the smooth water-magnified rocks, and the airy white rips of a perfect trout stream. A spring spilled into it from a ledge about eight feet above it. We paused there. Looking far up to the level w
here we had begun our descent to the stream, Park said, “We’re locked in here now. I wouldn’t go back up there for anything.” Our intent was to cross the brook and try to work our way around the mountainside along a kind of welt that was known as Miner’s Ridge—so named for prospectors who had worked small claims there in an era when open pits were ten feet deep.

  Brower filled his Sierra Club cup and offered it to Park, who thanked him, drank the water, and said, “If you stuck a nail in that spring and came back in two years, I think you’d have a copper nail.”

  “Is there copper in seawater?” I asked him.

  “Very little,” Park said.

  “Harrison Brown thinks seawater is a viable source of copper,” Brower said. “And he is considered a leading authority on resources for the future.”

  “That depends on who you talk to,” Park said. “Anyway, I’m sure he doesn’t think there is that much copper in seawater.”

  One of the medical students said, “Who is Harrison Brown?”

  Park and Brower described Brown as a geochemist at the California Institute of Technology who believes that in energy lies the answer to the problem of diminishing resources. Minerals are almost everywhere for the taking if we can develop the energy and technology to extract them. In a mere cubic mile of seawater, for example, is more magnesium than has yet been mined in the history of metallurgy. According to Brown, uranium can be drawn from the granite of mountains. Thus, said Brower with irony, a kind of total mine could be made of the Sierra Nevada, starting at one end and consuming the entire mountain range until the area between the Nevada Desert and the orchards and vineyards of California consisted only of a vast gray peneplain.

  I said that a conservationist in Seattle had told me that one method Kennecott might use to extract the copper from where we stood was to insert a nuclear bomb in Plummer Mountain, bring the mountain down in shards into the Suiattle Valley, then pour rivers of chemicals over it to leach out the copper.

  “Operation Plowshare,” Park said. “It wouldn’t level the mountain. That’s a gross exaggeration. It would hardly show on the surface. But it wouldn’t work well, either. They can’t direct their blast. They make a cylinder. Most ore deposits are not cylindrical, to say the least. They’re on an angle. The nuclear blast goes straight up.”

  Brower said, “If Harrison Brown can get so much out of granite, he ought to be able to get something out of concrete. He could start with the Embarcadero Freeway.”

  I once drove across the Mojave Desert with Brower; and to help pass the time in the hundred-degree heat I asked him if he could make a list of places for Harrison Brown to grind up. Where, if anywhere, would Brower find such megamining acceptable? “The Mojave Desert,” Brower said, and then fell silent in thought. Brower’s son Ken, who was twenty-three, sat up in the back seat and said, “He’s hardpressed. It’s going to be a short list. He likes everything.” The list was less than short. Brower began to look around the Mojave, his eyes taking in the plumbing-fixture weirdness of the Joshua trees, the zigzag fissures in the earth, the curls and crests of desiccated waves. “I take that back,” he said. “There are some nice shapes here.”

  In the streambed we found another galvanized pipe. This one had been bored into the earth at a forty-five-degree angle. Again there was no tangible evidence of copper. Other than the pipe, the only evidence that men had been there was a number of crushed fuel cans among the boulders in the stream. A helicopter must have delivered the drill, later flying away heavy with core samples, cuprous and green. I noticed that Park was limping, and, as it happened, I was limping, too. We had a long way to go even to return to the trail, let alone to reach the place where we had planned to stop for the night, a scenic climax of much renown—Image Lake, a mirror-surfaced mountain tarn so situated that it reflects and even magnifies Glacier Peak. Park was not much interested in going there, since a detour would be involved. Brower felt that the lake should not be missed. Meanwhile, we would hunt for copper along Miner’s Ridge, which at that point was the most uninviting piece of terrain I had ever seen, being thickly vegetated, trailless, chopped with rock walls and ravines, and generally so steep that the use of hands would obviously be necessary most of the way. Park moved quite slowly, hunting the best route, making his way downhill, breaking through meshed branches, and continually chipping at rocks. Somehow, he and I became separated from the others. We shouted and heard them shout back. They were above and behind us. We waited for them to join us.

  Park said, “Dave lives in a house, doesn’t he?” Park had a grin in the corner of his mouth, and I developed one in mine. I told him I had once heard a man in an audience in Scarsdale tell Brower that to be consistent with his philosophy he should wear a skin and live in a cave.

  I thought of Brower’s house and how it clings to a steep hillside far above the campus at Berkeley. It is a simple structure, made of redwood. Although it is far from large, it almost completely fills Brower’s lot, which he acquired in 1946, at the start of the postwar building boom. He sketched a plan on the back of an envelope, showed it to a contractor, and told him to build what he saw-thus the first house in what quickly became a neighborhood. There is almost no front yard—just a concrete apron for Brower’s Volvo and his Volkswagen bus. In back is a patch of ground, Brower’s private claim on the out-of-doors—the eighty-seventh part of an acre. Filled with vegetation—loquat, lemon, fuchsia, apricot, peach, camellia—it is an infinitesimal jungle. From the front windows of Brower’s house the view of San Francisco Bay is panoptic—the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge, the Marin Peninsula, the white city—and would be a breathtaking view were it not for a high telephone pole, directly across the street, where lines come in from four or five directions and have been looped and bunched into something that suggests a huge tumbleweed hanging in the air, an enormous ganglion of copper wires.

  “Yes, he does live in a house,” I said.

  We could hear Brower and the medical students crashing through the undergrowth and coming closer to us.

  “Is it painted?” Park asked. “Most people don’t think about pigments in paint. Most white-paint pigment now is titanium. Red is hematite. Black is often magnetite. There’s chrome yellow, molybdenum orange. Metallic paints are a little more permanent. The pigments come from rocks in the ground. Dave’s electrical system is copper, probably from Bingham Canyon. He couldn’t turn on a light or make ice without it. The nails that hold the place together come from the Mesabi Range. His downspouts are covered with zinc that was probably taken out of the ground in Canada. The tungsten in his light bulbs may have been mined in Bishop, California. The chrome on his refrigerator door probably came from Rhodesia or Turkey. His television set almost certainly contains cobalt from the Congo. He uses aluminum from Jamaica, maybe Surinam; silver from Mexico or Peru; tin-it’s still in tin cans—from Bolivia, Malaya, Nigeria. People seldom stop to think that all these things—planes in the air, cars on the road, Sierra Club cups—once, somewhere, were rock. Our whole economy—our way of doing things, most of what we have, even our culture—rests on these things. Oh, gad! I haven’t even mentioned minerals like manganese and sulphur. You won’t make steel without them. You can’t make paper without sulphur. By a country’s use of sulphuric acid you can almost measure its industrial capacity. The top of Mount Adams has been prospected by sulphur companies. Did you know that?”

  Mount Adams is one of the great beauties of the Cascades, a volcano of the storybook kind, its curving lines sweeping to a white summit. The mountain is owned by the government of the United States, but its apex could be mined. The top is where the sulphur is.

  Brower and the medical students caught up with us, and Brower asked how we were doing.

  “Fine,” said Park. “But, to tell you the truth, I wish these boots were still in Canada. My feet are in bad shape.”

  “Did you find any copper?” one of the medical students asked.

  Park shook his head. “It’s down in here, though,” he said,
pointing straight down. “That’s for sure.” With no trail, and without much energy, we continued along the face of Miner’s Ridge, and the going became even slower as we encountered a greater concentration of ravines, but no copper. The desire to see evidence of the copper lode was mere curiosity —no one doubted that copper was inside the mountain—but the curiosity, the sense of hunting, was compelling nonetheless.

  Park talked about minerals. Few minerals are found in their native state, or, as he put it, free in nature; among them are silver, platinum, and gold. Zinc comes from sphalerite, tin comes from cassiterite, cobalt comes from smaltite, mercury comes from cinnabar. Each year, in the United States, about fifteen hundred tons of silver—about a third of all that is used-goes into photographic film and paper. For the price of a pound of hamburger, you can buy ten pounds of steel, and if it were not that cheap there would be economic problems all over the earth. Vanadium comes from sedimentary rock and may be an answer to air pollution; vanadium somehow defeats the toxicity in exhaust fumes. Titanium exists in the rutile of Georgia and Florida beaches, and is needed for the skins of supersonic aircraft, because aluminum without titanium would melt in the friction heat. Almost all mercury comes from three places: Almaden, Idria, Monte Amiata (Spain, Yugoslavia, Italy). Mercury is essential to any instrument intended to measure or control temperature or pressure. There is no known substitute for it, and there is very little of it. Japan buys iron ore from Nevada and coal from strip mines in West Virginia. In many places in the United States, it is impossible to buy nails that were not made in Japan. No nation has an adequate supply of all the minerals it uses. Since 1900, more minerals have been used than in all previous time.

  Park had recently published all this, in less random form, in a book titled Affluence in Jeopardy, which is in part a primer on minerals and their uses and significance and in part an exhortation to mankind to husband what we have. Introducing minerals one by one, he says in clear and fascinating detail what they are, where they come from, what we do with them, and, ultimately, how we are locked into a system of living that is fuelled by them and founded upon them and would collapse without them. He quotes Lord Dewar, who said, “Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open,” and he goes on to define conservation (at least with regard to minerals) as the complete use of natural resources, with as little waste as possible, for the benefit of all the people, and not merely for industrialists, on the one hand, or preservationists, on the other. He says that the search for energy, being vital to the extraction of minerals, and thus to the survival of the society, is far more important than exploration of the back of the moon, and he says that each nation should have a mineral policy that involves the intelligent exploration and development of mineral resources and an acceptance of fully reciprocal international trade. Copper, he reports, is used in the United States at the rate of at least two million tons a year. “As we look at the nonferrous metals, we note that, in spite of the value of mercury and the great demands for aluminum, copper remains the giant of the group. There has been an unbelievable amount of searching for copper, much of it in recent years, and there are entire nations whose economies depend upon this metal … . No substitute for copper is as satisfactory as the metal itself.”