by John McPhee
Candler said, “You don’t want to develop that line, Charles. You might spoil it.”
“All right, I’ll leave it as it is, but did you know that one of the older Carnegie ladies told Stewart Udall that only blooded heirs of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie should ever be allowed to set foot on this island?”
“How do you know that?”
“I was told by someone present. She wagged her finger under Udall’s nose and said, ‘Only blooded heirs of Thomas and Lucy Carnegie should ever set foot on Cumberland Island.’ You know, during all the present talk about National Parks and National Seashores the Carnegies have been keeping something under the table. A few years ago, most of them were in favor of strip-mining the beach. The sand is full of ilmenite, zirconium, and rutile. I have no patience with the Carnegies. All they want to do is maximize their dollar, either through the mining industry or through the federal government or by piggybacking on me. Now look at one more headstone.”
The inscription said, “Thomas Hutchison, Golf Professional, eldest son of William and Helen H. of St. Andrews, Scotland. Born October 6, 1877. Died December 8, 1900.”
“He was surely the first golf pro to be buried in America,” Fraser said. “When this property was bought by the Carnegies, there were no golf courses in the United States. A golf club had once been in operation in Charleston and another in Savannah, but they had long since ceased. The oldest continuing golf organization in the United States is St. Andrews of Yonkers. It was built in 1888, and from then to 1900 golf swept the country. Hundreds of courses were built, including one here on Cumberland Island—where we landed in the airplane. The Carnegies brought this young man from St. Andrews, Scotland, and he died here when he was twenty-three.”
Fraser had already made something out of his research into the history of golf in the South. He had arranged with the Professional Golfers Association a new hundred-thousand-dollar tournament, to be held at Sea Pines, and to be called the Heritage Classic, because the first golf club in America had been built in South Carolina. The first Heritage Classic was won by Arnold Palmer, and because Palmer had not won a tournament in more than a year this was major news in the sporting world, and the names of Sea Pines and Hilton Head were publicized throughout the United States. As we stood there in the graveyard on Cumberland Island, I looked at the tombstone and then at Fraser, feeling a kind of awe for his luck. Someday, if he had his way, there would surely be a hundred-thousand-dollar First Pro Classic on the Thomas Hutchison Memorial Golf Course, Cumberland Oaks.
Reflectively, Fraser placed a hand on the tombstone and said, “Druids hate golf. I keep telling them golf was here seventy-five years ago. Dave, you wouldn’t mind if I built a little golf course here on Cumberland Island, would you?”
“I suppose not, if you don’t take too many trees,” Brower said.
“You know I don’t take too many trees, Dave,” Fraser said. He turned to Candler. “Sam, Dave is going to let us have a golf club here.”
“He is?”
“Yes.”
“That’s damned white of him.”
That night, in a place called Greyfield, before a big fireplace that glowed with burning logs and coals of oak, Fraser and Brower spread out on the floor a map of Cumberland Island twelve feet long. Together they crawled around on it, pushing cocktails from one part of the island to another. Antlers hung above them, and portraits of Carnegies, and a portrait of George Washington, while the skull of a loggerhead turtle, huge and primordially human—or so it seemed—faced them from a cluttered shelf. The map was about twenty years old and bore the names of quick and dead Carnegies —Thomas M. Carnegie, Jr., Florence Carnegie Perkins, Carter C. B. Carnegie, Lucy Ricketson Ferguson, Nancy Carnegie Johnston, Andrew Carnegie II. Greyfield, with high porch and high columns and a need of paint, belonged to Lucy Ferguson’s son Rick, who once ran a plastics factory in Jacksonville and was now running Greyfield as an inn for selected guests. Fraser could hardly be said to have been selected, but he was made welcome at Greyfield, and nearly all the inimical things said about him were said behind his back. Meanwhile, on his hands and knees on the big map, a Martini at his fingertips, Brower was saying, “When you get onto a floor with a big map, something happens. You think you’re in an airplane.”
Fraser said to Brower, “Dave, suppose you owned this island. Suppose you were the dictator and were under no financial pressure whatever. How do you think this island ought to be used in the last thirty years of this century?”
Brower said, “I’d have one feeder point to the beach per mile.”
Fraser seemed to levitate, to float above the map. He might have been a skin diver who had just picked up a doubloon. The excitement he felt was almost, but not quite, palpable. Was this the David Brower of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club—the slayer of environmental dragons, the uncompromising defender of wilderness? Fraser’s face was a mask. He tucked in his chin and said unflickeringly, “I call them ‘beach social points.’”
The conversation was semi-private. Several duck hunters and the odd Carnegie or two moved around it. Beyond the firelit room was a long hall, and off this was a small room where Rick Ferguson had set up a self-service bar. He was there, a short man, wiry and strong, in tennis shoes, khaki trousers, an old blue oxford-cloth button-down shirt—the great-grandson of Thomas Carnegie. Ferguson’s wife, in a long hostess gown, was with him.
“Cumberland Island is going down the drain,” Ferguson said.
“Fraser’s drain,” said his wife.
“I feel like a man who has just been told his block is up for urban renewal. We seem to be on the sidelines while this big show is going on. All I want to protect here is my children’s inheritance.”
“We have no rights except what the majority lets us do.”
“I was giving Charles the benefit of the doubt once when I called him insensitive. I think his rudeness is an inherent characteristic.”
“Charles is over-self-righteous. He thinks he is absolutely right and is doing good—and that is his mistake.”
“No one is interested in this island but the family, basically.”
Ferguson excused himself and went off to slice a roast of beef.
On the floor in the big room, Brower was leaning on his elbows. Fraser was on his knees.
“How many people would you, as dictator, permit on the island July 4, 1980?” Fraser asked.
“I don’t know,” Brower said. “An answer is needed, but if on the evening I come here I come up with an answer, I’m an ass.”
“Ninety per cent of Americans want bedrooms when they are on vacation,” Fraser went on. “Ten per cent want to camp with automobiles. Only five per cent of that ten per cent—or five people in a thousand—want wilderness camping. How many would you permit on this island, and how would you accommodate them?”
“Let’s keep Cumberland Island for the five per cent of the ten per cent who want wilderness,” Sam Candler said.
“I think I’d recommend the Yosemite formula,” Brower said. “Seven square miles of Yosemite bears heavy and concentrated use. The rest is open.”
Brower has deep affection for the Yosemite, which is, or was once, the most beautiful valley in the Sierra Nevada. He has spent whole years there, and a great deal of time in or around the valley throughout his life. When he is in the Yosemite, he seems to be packed in nostalgia, and he appears to be unaffected by the valley’s peeled-log Levittowns, its tent cities, its bumper-to-bumper traffic, and its newsstands—all results of what has been described as the fatal beauty of Yosemite. In all likelihood, he accepts Yosemite whole because the valley was already urbanized when he was young. And now, on Cumberland Island, he was recommending something similar. “I would cluster all development in one place,” he said to Fraser. “People could walk elsewhere. Walking on the beach is the most important thing a person can do here. If you were going to develop just one spot on the entire island, where would that be?”
“To be very explicit,
my tract has tremendous diversity,” Fraser said. “I have Whitney Lake, the Scotch fort, the marching dunes. But we’re pretending you’re the dictator. The island as a whole is twenty miles long. How many people can your area of concentration absorb?”
“You mean at night?”
“Yes, at night.”
“They do have to be there at night,” Brower mused. “People will want to see what the sky is saying. It’s their last contact with Mother Earth.”
“How many people?” Fraser said again.
“It’s their last chance to listen to the sun and the moon.”
“How many people?”
Brower shrugged. He said, finally, “I wouldn’t mind having a population of twenty thousand here.”
“Twenty thousand?”
“Twenty thousand.”
Brower got up and went in to make himself another drink. When he came back, he and Fraser agreed that if a National Park or Seashore could surround Fraser’s place on Cumberland Island, that would be very good. Brower said that what worried him was that if Fraser were to go ahead and develop his land without some such federal protection of the rest of the island, the value of the remaining properties would rise so sharply that the neighbors might have to let the land go to less capable developers. Fraser said that worried him, too.
“Whatever happens to this island, the automobile should be ruled out,” Brower went on.
“I agree,” said Fraser.
“No tourist vehicles. No bridge. No private automobiles or other vehicles on the beach.”
“I agree.”
“How would you get people around?”
“Perhaps jeep trains.”
“How would you bring in food and services?”
“In sky vans—mini flying boxcars.”
“Whatever you do, don’t give the island to Detroit. Zermatt is carless. Stehekin, in the State of Washington, is carless. It is good conservation practice, if you are going to develop, to concentrate people and leave wild land around them. People need earning territory—territory they have to earn by walking, limping, crawling, or whatever they can do. With that around them, the concentrated area is important, and I wouldn’t mind so many people. Not at all. When you get out of the city, you hear the planet talk, and here it is talking. If the dunes want to march, they ought to march. I know how you feel, but the land itself should not be controlled.”
“The Brower Plan is economically sound,” Fraser said. “I could live within the constraints imposed by the Brower dictatorship. As the island is now, birds enjoy it but nobody’s swimming here. Nobody’s in the woods. There are no people. The island’s stable population is eleven. That comes to one person per mile and three-quarters of beach.”
Rick Ferguson had come into the room to say the roast beef was ready. “One person per mile and three-quarters of beach is just about right,” he said.
“Why do you think the family have kept it this way?” said Mrs. Ferguson. “Because they feel so strongly.”
“If you can keep it the way it is, fine,” Brower told her. “But I don’t think that is one of your choices.”
Not long after Fraser acquired his property on Cumberland Island, he established a public campsite there. He admitted privately that he had several motives. For one thing, it was a way to acquaint the public with the island. For another, it would set a precedent for public use of the island at a fee. Finally, and most ingeniously, it would put Stewart Udall in a position where he might have to criticize camping—tor Udall had been employed by the Carnegies as a conservation consultant, or, as Fraser insisted on putting it, as “a hired mudslinger.” Udall said of Fraser, “I want to push Charlie into a corner where he has to face the truth. He is good news as a developer and bad news for Cumberland Island. He is not interested in having a reputation as a spoiler, but he can’t have it both ways. He tries to incorporate conservation with economic development, but it doesn’t work.”
One motive Fraser emphatically did not have for establishing his campsite was a desire to camp on Cumberland Island himself. Fraser is not in any sense a woodsman or a man of the outdoors, as he will acknowledge without shame. Nonetheless, under urging from Brower and from me, he had agreed to sleep in his own campsite. And now, after dinner at Greyfield, the three of us went out into the black, cold night and headed for the campsite, which Brower was eager to see. After we had gone some distance through the woods, Fraser said, “I’m most happy to go along with this, but, frankly, you are taking me out of my element.”
It would be difficult to say whose element the campsite was. It consisted of fifteen so-called recreation vehicles—tent-covered, two-wheeled automobile trailers, with electric lights, electric heat, and four-burner gas stoves. A central toilet facility had hot showers, an ice machine, and a cedar-shake roof in the Sea Pines manner. Fraser said he believed in “use,” and that this was a good way to start. He said he planned to build a small store at the campsite and, eventually, to rent jeeps by the day. Meanwhile, he was charging five dollars a night for the mobile tents—loss leaders if ever there were any, for they cost him fifteen hundred dollars apiece.
Two of the vehicles had been set up for us, and they faced each other, like canvas tourist cabins, across an area filled with palmettos and cast-iron grills that were mounted on galvanized pipes. Brower went into one tent and Fraser and I into the other. While we were unrolling our sleeping bags, Fraser said, “Very interesting, his views. They’re so different from what I thought they would be.” Spreading out the contents of a briefcase on a Formica-topped table, Fraser looked through them. Then he got out a pen and began to read and make marginalia. He read an article in the Yale Law Journal on large-lot zoning; he read a piece from the Beirut Daily Star on a new kind of sewage-disposal system; and in an issue of American Forests he read something called “The Destiny of Conservation Depends Upon Truth.” “At the moment, I am rather aggravated about the distruth of statements made by certain druids,” he commented. “But Dave is not a druid—not the way he was talking. Arthur D. Little would get ninety thousand dollars for the consultancy Dave did tonight.” For morning, Fraser set aside a copy of Audubon magazine, a book called Land, People, and Policy, and the first draft of a prospectus for the first public issue of stock in his company. He shut off the light. “The highest and best use of this island is for children,” he said as he was settling to sleep. “I believe, however, that the struggle here is too complicated, and therefore hopeless, and that no reasonable development will ever go on here.”
Brower called out from across the palmettos, “Good night, and sleep well if your conscience is good.”
Fraser called back, “My conscience is always bad, and I always sleep very well. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Sleep was not all that easy, in part because the bunks folded out and were cantilevered from either end of the mobile unit. Fraser and I were balanced on a kind of rubber-tired seesaw. Every time he rolled to his right, I went up a little, and every time he rolled to his left I went down. I lay there long into the night thinking mainly about the peculiar pattern of the relationship developing between him and Brower.
A beach is for children, Fraser had said. I didn’t think he was just groping for a key to a bank vault. I had seen swings of various kinds all over Sea Pines Plantation—swings hanging from the eaves of covered walkways, swings hanging from the limbs of trees. He had bought tricycles and scattered them around. He had strung hammocks at the height of children. Walking among the fresh foundations of his new town, he had once said to me, “Landscape architects won’t hang swings. They say swings are not a strong enough design statement. I’ll wait until the landscape architects are finished, and then I’ll hang a hundred swings from the live oaks. I’ll have a vender selling watermelon, too—roasted oysters in the winter, ice-cold slices of watermelon in the summer.” Fraser and his wife, Mary, lived in a glass-and-cypress Sea Pines house. Gardeners took care of the environment. The Frasers had two daughte
rs, aged four and two. The Frasers believed that the direction of a life was established almost at the beginning—that no years were as telling as the earliest ones. Hence, among other things, the Montessori School (where Mary Fraser worked) and the swings all over the plantation.
Brower was reverent toward the young. His faith had told him that the young would do better with the earth. He did not associate lumber companies, motor companies, chemical companies, or mining companies with youth. He admired Young Turks while he attacked Old Philistines. By his ready admission, he had learned a great deal from his own children, all of whom were college age or older. Brower himself looked almost unnaturally young, his white hair notwithstanding. He sometimes seemed to trust young people’s judgment over his own. He often said, “I’m impressed with what young people can do before older people tell them it’s impossible.” Any number of times since we had come to Cumberland Island, he had commented on the youth of Charles Fraser. “I didn’t know he was so young … . What energy! I didn’t expect so young a man.”
Out through a picket fence and down a deeply shaded street Fraser, as a boy, had walked every day to school. He was blond then, and had curly hair. His mother and father used to buy athletic equipment for him, but he would give it all away and sit on the porch reading books while his friends—endangering the camellias—played football or baseball on his family’s lawn. His family owned nearly half of Hinesville. Their house had been the first in Liberty County to have running water, inside toilets, and two pianos. The land for the First Presbyterian Church had been a gift from his grandmother. His father had been moderator of the Presbyterian Church of the State of Georgia and president of the Men of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America. The church was the Frasers’ locus of being. “Holy, holy, holy,” Fraser had chanted one day at Hilton Head, waving his hands like a choir leader as he revealed these credentials. “As a Calvinist, I was told that you’re not supposed to do all the pleasurable things in life. But eventually I realized that I would be part of the elect no matter what sins I might commit.” He said that at the age of thirteen he had been a newspaper entrepreneur. Under his ironclad managerial control, his entire Boy Scout troop sold papers. He fished the creeks, hunted squirrels, collected buckeyes. He became the first Eagle Scout in the history of Liberty County. Now the executives of the Sea Pines Plantation Company included a high proportion of former Eagle Scouts. On the Sea Pines boardroom wall was a life-size portrait of Fraser’s father, in uniform, and beside this portrait stood two flags—a United States flag and the three-star flag of a lieutenant general. General Fraser commanded the first ground troops to land on New Guinea. He went into France with Patton. Charles Fraser, at the age of ten, had been quite relieved when his father’s unit was converted from cavalry to anti-aircraft. Charles hated horses and did not want to ride them. His interests were elsewhere. In becoming an Eagle Scout, he won merit badges in birds, reptiles, conservation. He loved beautiful objects and had a gift for design. He painted his family’s coat of arms on a mug, applying the paint with toothpicks. His brother, Joe, was an athlete. Liberty was a coastal county, and one thing Charles particularly liked to do was to go to the beaches and build castles in the sand.
