Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  Another day, on the surface, Park went out to look for greenstone pillows in a hill of amphibolite. Someone in the Geological Survey had suggested that these rock pillows, by the way they were positioned in the folds of the Black Hills, could indicate the direction of gold. Park walked along a ledge on the face of an escarpment, nagging at the pillows with his pick. Finally, he said, “Pretty inconclusive, I’d say.” We were on high ground, and we could see around that beautiful country, with its big pines and its Engelmann’s spruce so dark, dark green that the Sioux called the hills black. Surrounded by hot, dry terrain—the South Dakota Badlands on one side of them and Wyoming on the other—the Black Hills reach seven thousand feet and are cool and moist, with green valleys and clear-stream waterfalls and beaver ponds and deer and trout. “The Sioux loved this country,” Park said. “No wonder they didn’t want to give it up.”

  Land was a form of religion to the Indians, and the Black Hills, in this sense, were the religion of the Sioux. With all the fish, game, and beauty any man could want, the Black Hills fed the Sioux in body and spirit. Indians had no sense of private property, private land. The idea of individual human beings’ owning pieces of the earth was to them at first incomprehensible and, when comprehended, a form of sacrilege. With the white man and his sense of property and the rights of property came the inequities and paradoxes that eventually led to the need for a conservation movement. Meanwhile, in 1851 the Sioux were promised by treaty that they could keep their Black Hills forever. In 1874, white men found gold there, and in 1875 white men entered the Black Hills in staggering numbers—white trash, in the main, like Wild Bill Hickok. It was the last gold rush in the United States. The promise to the Sioux was permanently broken, and the Sioux expressed their grief by destroying General Custer and his soldiers. “The Sioux are now a hundred miles east of here on a flat reservation in the Badlands,” Park said to me. “There are no Sioux in the Sierra Club.”

  As we walked through a narrow swale filled with lilies, daisies, horsemint, and yellow vetch, we passed depressions in the ground that appeared to be graves that had been dug but not filled. Kinnikinnick berries grew in these depressions, and in one grew an aspen, tall and spreading, and in all likelihood nearly a hundred years old. “Prospectors,” Park said. “A man would have come here and spent a day or a day and a half digging that hole in the ground. If he found anything, that would be his discovery-point pit, around which he would stake his claim. It was hit or miss. He had little to go on but the association of gold with quartz and pyrite. Sometimes prospectors found nuggets the size of peanuts. But that was extremely rare. Mining, and panning in the streams, was generally very hard work.” There was a cool wind in the ponderosas, and a long view down through the stands of aspen below them. The rock formation before us stood on end. “It’s Pre-Cambrian,” Park said. “It’s between three and four billion years old, probably. There are some old Pre-Cambrian flows like this up in Michigan—old pillow flows. There’s some Pre-Cambrian rock in the Berkshires. There’s also some in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Look there! There are two good pillows! Maybe that boy has something.”

  The Black Hills are veined with unpaved roads. One of them was the stage route, a hundred years ago, from Telegraph Gulch to Deadwood. Driving his car along it one afternoon, Park said, “This is what I like about my profession. You see so much beautiful country. If I were starting over again, I’d do the same thing.” In the next few miles, he saw a night hawk, a white-winged junco, a vesper sparrow, a western flycatcher, and a Townsend solitaire. He is a member of the American Ornithologists Union. He is a man who knows what he is looking at in wild country. I have never spent time with anyone who was more aware of the natural world, and he seemed to find in the land and landscape of the Black Hills an expression of almost everything he had come to believe about that world. He said, “People have a tendency to get a little bit emotional about preservation of the environment, I’m afraid. There are a couple of sawmills in here. They take mature trees. What harm do they do? They don’t hurt the country. I don’t see it. While I love the out-of-doors, I have no use for wilderness. We need to lumber. We need to mine. People don’t realize what mining is. They don’t realize the contributions that minerals and metals make to their lives. You can’t live without industry. But that is what preservationists will say. Sawmills, mines, and forests can live together. These forests are beautiful here. They really are. The Black Hills are an example of where industry has not ruined an environment.” In Park’s view, about all that has been ruined in the Black Hills is Mount Rushmore, where the face of a mountain was blasted away and replaced with the faces of four American Presidents. It happens that Jefferson’s nose is cracking. So is Lincoln’s chin. And there are water stains on George Washington. But all that is just added insult. No face should be there except the face of the mountain. Even now, the face of Chief Crazy Horse is being sculpted on a mountain nearby. The Sioux need no monuments. Their monuments are seven thousand feet high and have been there since Pre-Cambrian time.

  The deep gold mine is all that lives on from the legends of Deadwood Gulch. Park, a director of the mining company, was in the Black Hills to make a model—a sort of cubic map—of the mine. Three metamorphic-rock formations, called Homestake, Ellison, and Poorman, are folded together there like three kinds of ice cream. The gold is in the Homestake. From established drifts, narrow drills “feel” their way into the rock, sometimes as far as fifteen hundred feet—strange antennae. With data so obtained, Park was reproducing on stacked plastic sheets all the streaks, striations, bands, and brindles in several cubic miles of rock.

  Down on the Sixty-eight—as the sixty-eight-hundred-foot level of the mine is called—Park looked with admiration at the walls of a drift and said, “These miners can look at a turn in a drift and tell who made it. They’re proud of a good drift, clean walls. These are hard-rock miners, not coal miners. And they want you to know the difference. There are advantages in mining. Conditions are fixed. Man has control of the environment. People who work in a mine figure they are creating something. They feel that they are creating wealth. They all think they’re geologists. There isn’t a miner here who doesn’t have a favorite place he wants to blast into.”

  Park drew a couple of miners into the conversation, which was spoken in high voices, because of the noise of the air pumps and the working drills. “I prefer working underground to on the surface,” one of them said. “Conditions are set. You’re not going to get caught in a thunderstorm. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be doing it. We’re tearing apart solid rock.”

  The rock, Park explained, is taken to the surface and crushed until it is fine sand. Mercury is poured through the sand. The mercury adroitly picks up gold, and nothing else. The mercury is then boiled away. Cyanide is poured into the sand and dissolves from it even more gold. Zinc is then put into the gold-cyanide solution. The zinc dissolves, and replaces the gold, which falls as metal to the bottom. The sand is put back in the mine, where concrete is poured on it to make platforms for upward mining. Thus, the mine consumes its own tailings, sparing in large measure the beauty of its environment—but not sparing it entirely. Because crushed rock expands in volume, all cannot be put back into the mine, and one of the Black Hills is a flat-topped mountain of black sand. And, as it happens, Whitewood Creek flows black after it passes the mine.

  Park said that three tons of rock yield only one ounce of gold—a bit of gold about the size of a drop of rain. There is only about a third of an ounce of gold to back the financial wherewithal of each person now on earth. The very name Fort Knox implies vast vaults and armories full of piled gold, but actually the gold in Fort Knox could be formed into a twenty-foot cube. All the gold in all the monetary reserves of the world could be stacked on a single tennis court and scarcely reach over the fence.

  Now, on the ground by Image Lake in the North Cascades, Park had begun to snore. To block the dew, we had stretched a clear-plastic tarpaulin over our heads, and I l
ay on my back and looked up through it at the disrupted constellations. I remembered walking into Park’s living room once in Palo Alto. What I had noticed first, on a coffee table, was a book called Gold, Its Beauty, Power, and Allure.

  In the morning, we went down to the Suiattle River—a drop of three thousand feet from Image Lake down the face of Miner’s Ridge on a grassy incline so steep that Brower began telling stories about what happens to people on slopes like that if they fall. They apparently start to tumble, and sometimes can’t stop. Park said he didn’t care whether he fell or not—he was that uncomfortable. He finally took off his boots and put on his open leather sandals, deciding that bruises all over his feet would be preferable to the pain in his heels. His difficulty notwithstanding, he kept knocking rocks apart all day. After the big drop, the trail, for something like ten miles, ran roughly parallel to the river. The more altitude we gave up, the larger were the trees, the deeper the forest, until we were walking among big Douglas firs six feet thick. The air was warm and sunlit, and even when we could not see the river through the dense trees, the Suiattle was something to hear. It had the overbearing sound of rock sliding in a steel chute. As the afternoon lengthened, the sound grew louder. Park said he had known rivers in Alaska that could be crossed in the morning but by afternoon were unfordable torrents of melted glacier ice. “This one is like them,” he said. Coming into view, the Suiattle was a headlong chaos of standing waves and swirling eddies, white with spray and glacial flour. “This one is a really wild river,” Park went on. “Look at that rush of glacier milk.”

  The lower reaches of the trail had been scarred and battered by an improvement project commissioned by the United States Forest Service. Dynamite had torn great rocks apart, and some of the big trees had been felled to make the trail wider and the grade easier. Brower began to say unflattering things about the Forest Service, which he described as a collection of timber engineers who have no concept of ecology and whose idea of selective logging is to select a mountain and cut all the trees down. He said, “We conservationists would like to keep the Forest Service out of wilderness, and, for that matter, the National Park Service, too. They build too many things for their own convenience —for rangers who have forgotten how to range.”

  Brower had scarcely said this when we came upon a man who had three horses with him and several empty dynamite boxes. He was about thirty-five, strongly built and in excellent condition, solid muscles under his T-shirt, short-cropped hair, pale-gray eyes. His name was Don Dayment, and he told us he had been the foreman of the crew that improved the trail. Brower complained bluntly about the desecration of the trail. Dayment looked from Brower to Park to me to the medical students, and he said, “You wildernesslovers are all the same.”

  “You foresters are all the same,” Brower said.

  Dayment cinched his horses. “Wherever man goes, whatever he does, he scars the land,” he said. “That’s the way things are. We were told to make a ten-per-cent grade here with a two-foot tread and eight feet of clearance. If we had to chop a six-foot fir, too bad.”

  I asked him where he lived, and he said he had been born twenty miles from where we stood.

  I asked him how he felt about the copper mine.

  “I don’t like it, and I’ll tell you why,” he said. “I don’t like the class of people that would come with it. I’ve seen their camps—in Wallace, Idaho, and Butte, Montana. They’re dirty and run-down, and so are the people. I wouldn’t want my children growing up around them.”

  Over the last five miles, each of us went at his own pace; we gave up all cohesion as a group. I walked with Brower, who was moving fast, because I had the almost drunken, rubber-legged feeling you get toward the finish of a long, long walk, and the roadhead at the end of the trail had become for me a repeating mirage. The trail ran closer and closer to the Suiattle—right beside it in some stretches—and the sound of the water was deafening. Over what proved to be the last thousand yards, though, we became aware of a sound even louder than the sound of the river—a higherpitched roar, coming in jugular gusts, and increasing in volume as we moved down the trail. We came to the roadhead. There in the river, in the middle of the river, the white torrents crashing over it, was a bulldozer. Half submerged, its purpose obscure, it heaved, belched, backed, shoved, and lurched around on the bottom of the Suiattle as if the water were not there. The bulldozer was stronger than the river.

  I took off my boots and sat alone on a ledge where my feet could reach the water. For a couple of hours, I had been able to think of almost nothing but feet. Now the cold milk of glaciers dispelled that, and as I watched the bulldozer my mind went back over the day—all the way back to its beginning. Miner’s Ridge, as it extended westward from Image Lake, was a ridge indeed. The terrain fell away as steeply on the north side as it did toward the Suiattle, and we had walked for a mile or so—before beginning the descent—along the ridgeline of a topographical configuration that was like a sharply pitched gable roof. There was no timber up there, and in the early morning the ridge was isolated from the land below by huge bodies of cloud that filled up the river valleys on either side almost to our shoes. Above the clouds, the air was clear and the sky blue, and nothing else broke into that world but Glacier Peak, seven miles away—all ice and snow, and almost too dazzling to look at as it sprayed sunlight in every direction. Big blueberries were growing along the trail, and we began to eat them as if we had had no breakfast. Some were a half inch in diameter. Filling his Sierra Club cup with berries, Brower said, “I’m just taking the renewable crop. Only bears will object.”

  Park ate his blueberries straight from the bushes. His eyes lifted suddenly and followed a bird in flight above the ridge. He said, “Look at that marsh hawk. What’s he doing up here?” The hawk canted to its left and soared in the direction of Glacier Peak. Streamers of cloud began to rise from the Suiattle Valley, cross the face of the mountain, and above the summit disappear, sparkling, into the blue. Park said it was a shame that more people couldn’t see Glacier Peak—in fact, he thought people had a right to see it—and a nice little mining road would take care of that.

  Brower said that a view of Glacier Peak, to mean much of anything, ought properly to be earned, and that the only way to earn it was to get to it on foot.

  “What about people who can’t walk?” Park said.

  “They stay home. Ninety-nine point nine per cent can walk—if they want to.”

  “The other one-tenth per cent includes my wife.”

  Without hesitating, Brower said, “I have a friend named Garrett Hardin, who wears leg braces. I have heard him say that he would not want to be able to come to a place like this by road, and that it is enough for him just to know that these mountains exist as they are, and he hopes that they will be like this in the future.”

  “The future can take care of itself,” Park said. “I don’t condone waste, but I am not willing to penalize present people. I say they’re penalized if they don’t have enough copper. Dave says they’re penalized if they don’t have enough wilderness. Right?” He smacked a stone with his pick.

  “Right,” said Brower. “But I go further. I believe in wilderness for itself alone. I believe in the rights of creatures other than man. And I suppose I accept Nancy Newhall’s definition: ‘Conservation is humanity caring for the future.’ It is the antithesis of ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’”

  “These are the best blueberries I’ve ever seen,” Park said. “Here on Miner’s Ridge.”

  Brower’s cup was up to its brim, and before he ate any himself he passed them among the rest of us. It was a curious and surpassingly generous gesture, since we were surrounded by bushes that were loaded with berries. We all accepted.

  “I just feel sorry for all you people who don’t know what these mountains are good for,” Brower said.

  “What are they good for?” I said.

  “Berries,” said Brower.

  And Park said, “Copper.”
/>   PART 2

  An Island

  David Brower, who talks to groups all over the country about conservation, refers to what he says as The Sermon. He travels so light he never seems far from home—one tie, one suit. He calls it his preacher suit. He has given the sermon at universities, in clubs, in meeting halls, and once in a cathedral (he has otherwise not been in a church for thirty years), and while he talks he leans up to the lectern with his feet together and his knees slightly bent, like a skier. He seems to feel comfortable in the stance, perhaps because he was once a ski mountaineer.