by John McPhee
At about half past three that afternoon, we came to a small stream that ran straight down the steep mountainside. We shook off our packs, removed our boots, and set our feet in the water. “Oh, gad, that feels good,” Park said. Our feet were as white as fish flesh in the cold water—so cold that I could barely stand it. This was a way to keep going, though. A cold stream offers a kind of retread. The pain goes away for a while afterward, and miles can be added to a day. Reaching upstream, Brower dipped himself a cupful of water. “Wilderness is worth it, if for no other reason than it is the last place on earth where you can get good water,” he said. No one else said anything. We were too tired. We stared into the stream, or looked across the deep Suiattle Valley at the virgin forests on the lower slopes and the snow and ice on the upper slopes of Glacier Peak. Park’s attention became fixed on the pebbles at the bottom of the stream, and after a moment he leaned forward and reached into the water, wetting his sleeve. He removed from the water a blue-and-green stone about the size of a garden pea. He set it on the palm of one hand and passed it before us. “We have been looking all day for copper,” he said. “Here it is.”
The beauty of the mountain across the valley was cool and absolute, but the beauty of the stone in Park’s hand was warm and subjective. It affected us all. Human appetites, desires, ambitions, greeds, and profound aesthetic and acquisitional instincts were concentrated between the stone and our eyes. Park reached again into the stream, and said, “Here’s another one. The blue is chrysocolla—copper silicate. The rest is malachite—green copper carbonate.”
All of us, Brower included, knelt in the stream and searched for stones. Brower found one. He was obviously excited by it. Brigham found one. Snow found one. Park found one as large as a robin’s egg, mottled blue and green, with black specks of cupric oxide.
“My God, look at that!”
“Malachite and chrysocolla in altered intrusive rock,” Park said.
“I’ve got another one,” Brower said. “Good Lord, look at them all!”
“Hey, there are even more up here!” Snow called out.
“The rock is probably monzonite—a granite with equal parts of potash and soda feldspars—altered by hydrothermal solutions. I’d have to take it into a lab to know for sure. The copper came way up out of the earth’s core when these mountains were fluid.”
Larry Snow was shouting from above. He had a green rock in his hand the size of a golf ball. The slope and the streambed were as steep as a ladder, and ten minutes earlier the thought of going up there would have filled me with gloom and inertia. Now I put on my boots and followed him, scrambling hand over foot for the copper.
The higher we went, the larger were the green rocks— two inches, three inches, four inches thick. On a ledge about a hundred yards above Park, Brower, and Brigham, who were still assembling green pebbles, Snow picked up a rock that he could barely manage with one hand. Others like it were all over the ledge—cuprous green and aquamarine.
I held one high in my right hand and shouted down to Brower, “Dave, look at this! Look at this rock! Don’t you think it would be a crime against society not to take this copper out of here?”
“Stay up there! Don’t come back down!” Brower shouted. He was a small figure, from that high perspective. He was waving Snow and me away. “Stay up there! We’ll send a party for you next spring!”
At the back of the ledge was the source of the copper. A deep, narrow hole had been blown into the side of the mountain, making what appeared to be a small cave—a nick in the wilderness, exposing and fragmentarily spilling its treasure. Snow and I filled a small canvas bag with perhaps twenty pounds of ore and made our way back down the streambed.
No one seemed anxious to move. I again took off my boots and put my feet in the stream. Brower had made an attractive collection of green pebbles. He looked with interest and feigned contempt at the big stones we had brought down. Brower is a collector of rocks. Behind his desk in his office in San Francisco were rocks he had collected from all over, and notably from the canyons of the Colorado—Clen Canyon, Grand Canyon. In most cases, he did not know what these rocks were, nor did he appear to care. He had taken them for their beauty alone.
Park was contemplating Glacier Peak. We were as close to it as we would ever be. It was right there—so enormous that it seemed to be on top of us, extending upward five thousand feet above our heads. “That’s the sort of thing that draws people into geology,” he said. “Geologists go into the field because of love of the earth and of the out-of-doors.”
“The irony is that they go into wilderness and change it,” Brower said.
Park appeared to be too tired to be argumentative. “There are some silly things about the mining laws,” he said after a time, and he went on to explain that once a mining company or anyone else establishes a patented claim on public land they have complete rights to do anything they want, just as if they—and not the people of the United States—were owners of the property. Within federal law, they can cut down all the trees, they can build skyscrapers. If Kennecott wants to, Kennecott can put up a resort hotel in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. This law, enacted in 1872, makes no sense now to Park. He said he thought that mining companies should be given leases, and that these leases should include strong restrictions on mining practice and use of the land. In his view, something like that would go a long way toward eliminating the dichotomy that currently exists between conservationists and miners. While he was saying all this, he dried his feet in the air. I noticed for the first time that Park’s heels were so raw red they were all but bleeding. He pulled on his socks and, with care, his boots. He got up—we all got up—and moved west along the ridge. He was forced to trudge, even after we rejoined the trail. Going to Image Lake would add several miles to the trip, involve an extra climb, and, the next day, a precipitous descent, but when the trail forked, Park headed for Image Lake.
Above Park’s desk at Stanford was a picture of a jackass, with the caption “Can I help? Or do you want to make your own mistakes?” Near it was a photostatic blowup of a five-cent postage stamp showing cherry boughs and the Jefferson Memorial over the legend “Plant a More Beautiful America.” Park’s great-grandfather was a Minuteman. His grandfather was a guide on the Santa Fe Trail. His father had a real-estate and travel agency in Wilmington. His older brother went off and became a cowpuncher for the Bell Ranch, in New Mexico, and this in part established the draw to the West that Park felt throughout his youth. Tall, loose, rangy, and graceful, Park was a basketball player—a very good one—and he loved the game so much that he played not only for Wilmington High School (he was in the Class of 1922) but also, on the side, for various churches. His father told him that he had to worship at any church for which he played basketball, so for a long time he went to church at least twice each Sunday. He says he hasn’t been to church since, except on the day that he was married. Also in those days, he made camping trips along the Brandywine, fished with a drop line in Chesapeake Bay, collected rocks that people sent him from beyond the hundredth meridian, and waited for the day when he could go beyond it himself.
When he was eighteen, he went to New York and shipped out in steerage on a Matson Line steamer for Galveston. It was the cheapest way West. He was not sure where he was going. He thought he might go to Golden (the Colorado School of Mines), or possibly to Socorro (the New Mexico School of Mines). “In those days, if you wanted to go to one of those places all you had to do was show up,” he once explained to me. Eventually, he showed up at Socorro. He was the captain of his college basketball team, and he learned his mineralogy, and went on to get his master’s degree at the University of Arizona and his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. In mining camps in those years, he became known as Chas (pronounced “chass”), specifically because the nickname distinguished him from the numerous Chinese in the mining camps, who, to a man, were known as Charlie. For a time, he worked as a mine surveyor for the New Jersey Zinc Company in Hanover, New Mexico, wher
e he met a girl from Colorado—Eula Blair—who eventually became his wife and the mother of his two sons and his daughter. His daughter is a teacher of physical education. His sons are both working geologists—one with Humble Oil, the other with Hanna Mining. Mining geology is not widely taught anymore, and across the years students have come from all over the earth to Stanford because—in term, anyway, when he was not in equatorial Africa or the Andes or the Great Basin or the Black Hills—Park has been there, to teach them courses with names like Ore Genesis 101.
We were about a mile east of Image Lake. Park stopped, picked up a stone, split it in half with his pick, and said, “We are well past the mineral deposit. The mine won’t come anywhere near Image Lake. The rock here is not intrusive. It’s completely volcanic.”
“Of course, it could be a volcanic overburden,” said Brower, to suggest the possibility that far beneath the earth’s surface the copper might spread to untold dark horizons.
“That’s true. It could,” Park said, with a tired shrug, and he trudged on.
We were a somewhat bizarre group on arrival at Image Lake. Park and I could scarcely place one foot after the other. The medical students appeared to be as fresh as they had been in the morning. And Brower was yodelling with pleasure. Brower yodels badly. The happier he seems to be, the more and the worse he yodels. He is Antaeus in the mountains, and he was clearly feeling good.
Image Lake is very small—a stock-water pond in size—and it stands in open and almost treeless terrain. Slowly, we went around it, looking for a place to sleep. The sun was just setting, and we had arrived much too late. We walked past tents along the shore—blue tents, green tents, red tents, orange tents. The evening air was so still that we could hear voices all around the lake. We heard transistor radios. People greeted us as we went by. The heaviest shadows were in the northwest arc of the shore, so the air was particularly cold there, and space had been left. We took the space. We had come into the mountains from the east. These people had come in from the west. It had not been an easy trip for them, to be sure. The nearest roadhead was fifteen miles west of us and some four thousand feet below. Nonetheless, the lake that night had the ambience of a cold and crowded oasis. Shivering, I climbed up a slope to witness in the water the fading image of the great mountain. Objectively, the reflection was all it was said to be. But a “No Vacancy” sign seemed to hang in the air over the lake.
A real sign pointed the way to a privy. We collected firewood, which was very hard to find, and when we had something of a blaze going and had all drawn in close around it for warmth, I said to Park and Brower, “Do you feel that you’re in a wilderness now?”
“Yes,” Brower said. “All these people certainly diminish the wilderness experience, but I’ve seen crowds in wilderness before. I know that they’ll go away, and when they go they haven’t really left anything.”
Once, on a trail in the Sierra, Brower and I passed numerous hikers coming in the other direction, and because there were so many of them they disturbed him. They weren’t riding Bonanza Trail-Bikes and they didn’t have transistor radios and they weren’t tossing beer cans away. They were disturbing to him only because they were there. Brower kept asking them if we were likely to find “too many” people in Humphreys Basin, which lay ahead of us, and when he concluded that Humphreys Basin—an area of several thousand acres—was going to contain too much of humankind he left the trail and struck off overland for another part of the mountains. Once, also, Brower and I were approaching the Sierra from the west on Route 198, and it happened to be the evening of the final day of a holiday weekend, and a river of cars was coming in the other direction. Brower drove without hurry. “The longer we wait, the more people we’ll get out of the mountains,” he said.
Now, at Image Lake, Park said, “This is no wilderness to me. My idea of wilderness is not to walk a quarter of a mile to a biffy. There’s just too many people here.”
Brower said, “It’s hard to believe that this many people would walk this far.”
“Population pressure,” Park said. “You can’t stop it. I don’t really understand why they come here, though. This is a very ordinary little mountain lake.”
We put our dinner into a single pot, boiled the food, ate it; and no one noticed what it was. Park was the first to speak again. “The more I see of this country, the more I fail to see what that copper mine would do to it. When we started, I was under the impression it might do something, but, golly, I can’t see that now.”
“The excavation would be within a mile of here and would effectively remove even this lake from wilderness. Right now it has more impact than it can bear. The ecosystem is delicate here. Recovery rates are fast, but nonetheless it is getting pounded. And the disruption would go all the way to Suiattle Pass, so the Glacier Peak Wilderness would effectively be cut in half.”
“There would be a mining company here on business, and that’s what they’d be doing—that’s all. The miners would stick to the mine. Some would go off hiking or fishing, sure, but they would be doing that anyway. Miners like wilderness.”
“The trouble is they want to dig it up and take it home.”
“Awww.”
“Logging follows mining.”
“You can control that.”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Your idea of control is to keep it out.”
“All a conservation group can do is to defer something. There’s no such thing as a permanent victory. After we win a battle, the wilderness is still there, and still vulnerable. When a conservation group loses a battle, the wilderness is dead.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“It’s dead by definition.”
“I don’t agree with that concept of wilderness—to just take a big block of land and say you’re going to keep it for the future. I can’t see it.”
“Wilderness was originally a nice place to go to, but that is not what wilderness is for. Wilderness is the bank for the genetic variability of the earth. We’re wiping out that reserve at a frightening rate. We should draw a line right now. Whatever is wild, leave it wild.”
“I would take a certain area and make part of it accessible and part of it inaccessible. Taking very large areas out of the country and keeping them as they were a thousand years ago—you can’t do it. The population pressure is too great.”
“A wilderness is a place where natural forces can keep working essentially uninterrupted by man. If ten per cent is still wild, we should tithe with it. Man has taken enough for himself already. We should pretend the rest doesn’t exist. It’s there for a different purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“Not man’s purpose. Man is a recent thing in the time scale here.”
The moon had risen, pale and gibbous. We looked up at it. Men had been there recently and were going back in a few weeks. “There may be possibilities in the moon, but I can’t see it,” Park said.
“Apollo 11 proved the capability, and that was quite enough,” Brower said. “Now let’s spend the money on something else. We need to save the earth.”
“Moon walking is silly,” Park agreed. “There are too many things about the earth that we don’t know, that would improve our lot, and that cost a lot of money.”
“We’re not so poor that we have to spend our wilderness or so rich that we can afford to. That kind of boxes it in nicely. Newton Drury said it.”
“I don’t believe you can stop expansion of the consumption of raw materials.”
“You stop when you run out,” said Brower. “Meanwhile, you make it less wasteful.”
“Waste is criminal.”
“If we recycled enough copper annually, we could do without this mine. Now that we know that we ourselves are on a spaceship, we have to get into our heads a concept of limits. Some things must stop or the world will become repugnant. There are limits everywhere, whether we are dealing with an island, a river, a mountain, with people, or with air. Living diversity is the
thing we’re preserving.”
The fire had subsided almost to nothing, and the conversation subsided with it. The air was quite cold. We dispersed and got into our sleeping bags. Brower had arranged his pallet on top of a high promontory above the lake-shore. As a mountaineer, he knew that less dew condenses on high ground, and also that the air is warmer there. Park and I felt too achingly sore in the feet to bother making the climb. We stretched out below. As Park adjusted himself to the ground beneath him, he said, “I know half a dozen lakes like this that I can drive to and where I would find less people. I’ll give you my interest in Image Lake for a piece of a counterfeit penny.” Then he fell asleep. It was 8:30 P.M.
Once, in the Black Hills, Park had taken me with him into the deepest mine in the Western Hemisphere. The descent took one hour—first in a wire cage down a shaft almost a mile deep, then a level mile or so on a narrow-gauge railway, then on down in another cage, until we were six thousand eight hundred feet beneath the earth’s surface. Heat increases in that area about two degrees for every three hundred feet you go down into the earth. The rock down there was a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, but the temperature in the tunnels we walked through had been brought down into the nineties by air pumped from the surface in long cloth tubes. The tunnels are known as drifts. Wearing coveralls, rubber boots, lamps, hard hats, and shatterproof glasses, we followed one drift to its end—to the deepest and remotest working face in the mine. Park hit away with his pick. Sparks came off the wall, and so did pieces of rock, basically dark gray with shining seams of pyrite and nodular insets of white quartz. I still have the pieces of rock that he knocked off that wall, and I have often shown them to people—particularly to children—and asked them what they thought they were looking at. What is in that rock? Why would men dig a hole that deep? What would make them go six thousand eight hundred feet underground? What could they possibly be seeking? The answer seldom comes quickly, perhaps because the rock is truly prosaic. “Iron?” they say. “Copper?” “Silver?” No. Keep going. It is the sum and symbol of why we mine anything, the base substance of the economies of nations, the malleable, ductile, most saint-seducing mineral in the crust of the earth. Something happens in their eyes when at last they say, “Gold.”
