by John McPhee
Brower and Fraser climbed a high dune. Candler stayed on the beach. From the dune, he appeared a lonely figure—the only person on twenty miles of white sand. “People develop passionate attachments to these islands, and any change from the way they have known them since childhood is emotionally disturbing to them,” Fraser said. “It’s a jolt to them to have any of their property used by strangers.”
One afternoon in Atlanta, Candler had told me what Cumberland Island meant to him. “Changes come slowly there, and leave marks on one another,” he said. “There is a blending from one era to the next. Indian mounds are there. When I am on Cumberland Island, I see the same things the Indians saw. I would like to live where the Indians lived. They were closer to the earth, a part of the environment. Fraser said that after the hurricane there were no sea oats on Cumberland. The island teaches you the value of patience. The sea oats came back. Dunes that are washed down will return. You’ve got to have some places that are hard to get to. I don’t think this is a selfish thought. I think it’s thoughtful.”
Fraser, for his part, had told me that nothing would please him more than to develop his property in consonance with a National Seashore that would take up the rest of the island. In fact, he would be hesitant—even unlikely—to develop his land without knowing what might happen around it. Another Sea Pines freshly rising among the live oaks could so enhance the value of the island as a whole that the Carnegies and Candler might find irresistible the offers of ticktack developers. There was so much of Cumberland that, even for a man of Fraser’s resources, protective buying was out of the question. So he dreamed of a beautiful enclave in various shades of income, with forever-protected wildernesses stretching away from either side and rationed quantities of the public wandering the great beach.
Now, on the dune, Brower and Fraser—Columbus and Cortez—stood high above the wild and pristine seascape. Fraser said, “I think it is wise public policy for the government to take a place like this from private owners. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes.”
Candler, who had moved farther down the beach, was an even smaller figure. From the dune, he could be framed between a thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart. His hands were in his pockets.
“I would like to reverse my ninety-ten here,” Brower said. “I would like to see ten per cent developed here and ninety not.”
Fraser said, “I hope that can be arranged.”
Oysters on the half shell, when they are as fresh as the ones we ate for lunch that day, are so shining and translucent, so nearly transparent, that if you were to drop one on a printed page you could read words through the oyster. I had lived beside tidal creeks at various times in the past, and had once set up my own amateur oyster farm, from which I regularly removed a hundred and forty-four oysters each day to eat before lunch, but even the memory of my oyster farm was turned slightly opaque by the quality of the oysters from Candler’s tidal creek. Mantle to palpi, each vitrescent blob was a textural wonder. We ate at least five hundred of them, raw or roasted (over an oak fire)—Ostrea virginica, better than the best oysters of Bordeaux, and, as it happened, long-range appetizers to the roasted game hens that were spread before us that evening on Fraser’s yacht.
On the yacht, Brower held up his glass and studied the prismatic coupling of gin and light. He then looked off into the rouge afterglow over the marshes to the west. “The outdoor life is all right,” he said. “But don’t knock the amenities.” Pale wines escorted the game hens, and brotherhood bobbed on the water with the yacht, while the dark mass of Cumberland Island stood beside the boat with what Joseph Conrad once described as “the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.” No one was looking at the island. On a color-television set inside the yacht, the San Francisco 49ers were bombing the Baltimore Colts. Brower said, “Long live the instant playback—the nicest thing technology has given us!”
“We will create a conservation conference center here on the island,” Fraser said.
“That will require an airport,” said Brower. “I’m Machiavellian enough to know that if you are going to have a conference center you have to have a way to get there.”
“We’ll let druids land free,” Fraser said. “If you were dictator, what would you do with that marsh?”
“Save it! Save the greenery! I can make noise, but you can make deeds,” Brower said. “Save the marsh! Grasses are one of the nicest ways the green thing works. The green giant is chlorophyll, really. When I come back in another life, I am going to spend my whole life in grasses. I’m addicted to the entire planet. I don’t want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells. Life began Tuesday noon, and the beautiful organic wholeness of it developed over the next four days. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. You, Charles Fraser, have got to persuade the whole God-damned movement of realtors to have a different kind of responsibility to man than they have. If they don’t, God will say that man should be thrown away as an experiment that didn’t work. I have seen evidence of what you can do. Now make others do it. The system must be used to reform the system.”
Fraser had been listening with his hands clasped behind his head. When Brower finished, Fraser said nothing and sipped his wine.
In the early morning, in the yacht’s saloon, Brower performed his matins. He spilled out and sorted the contents of his briefcase—an old and thick one, jammed with books, notebooks, magazines, clippings—and he read for an hour or so, as if to put himself in context. He read a Sierra Club tract called Machiasport: Oil and the Maine Coast. He read a copy of a letter from Earl Bell, the planner, to Senator Henry M. Jackson, asking how the island Amchitka could still be called a National Wildlife Refuge since it had become a military missile dump, a military garbage dump, and a site for atomic testing. Simultaneously, Brower made cryptic notes for a talk he would give at Harvard: “Loop the system … Ravisher of the Month … SST … Signs … Dams … Sawlogs.” Reading on, he piled up newsclips on the table before him: “JOIN POLLUTION FIGHT, NATO TOLD,” “BP OIL ESTIMATES ALASKA TRACT AT FIVE BILLION BARRELS,” “DROWNING AN ECOLOGICAL PARADISE,” “CAN ANYONE RUN A CITY?,” “PLANNER URGES TWO-CHILD LIMIT,” “SLOW DOWN THE OIL RUSH,” “BAN ON ABORTION STRUCK DOWN,” “THE MAZE OF HAZE THAT SPOILS OUR DAYS,” “WE ARE SUBVERSIVES IN THE STATE OF NATURE,” “NORTHWEST PASSAGE TO WHAT?” He had heretical material, too: “ALARMISTS IGNORE THE FACTS,” “MAN MUST CONTROL NATURE,” “THE POPULATION FIRECRACKER” (William Buckley arguing that there is no population explosion), and an editorial from the New Scientist mocking the excessive excitability and the platitudes and dogmas of “ecological high priests.” Brower next examined a dummy for a conservation newsletter to be called the National Hammer, an article from the Stanford Law Review called “The SST: From Watts to Harlem in Two Hours,” and a list of proposals—to him as publisher—for a series of Suppose We Didn’t books, on things that would be best left undeveloped: the SST, the oil refinery in Machiasport, the Alaska pipeline, the sea-level canal through Central America. He read the Leopold Report (“Land drainage … will destroy inexorably the South Florida ecosystem”) and an article from Trial called “Can Law Reclaim Man’s Environment?” Finally, he read a piece on architectural ravages in New York City’s West Village, and he waved in the air a Business Week article—“The War That Business Must Win”—and said, “Here is the first faint streak of dawn coming up over the business world. They are at last finding out that environment is not only to sell.”
From below, Fraser appeared, dressed in a dark suit and tie. After breakfast, he was going to leave Cumberland Island in order to do battle with druids in other parts of the South. The rest of us would stay on for a while. Fraser clearly f
elt that Cumberland was safe, for the moment. In the Land Rover, he drove to the primitive airstrip. The same small plane was waiting in the field of fennel. Fraser walked confidently away from an atmosphere of cordial farewells and climbed into the plane. The pilot advanced the engines to maximum r.p.m. Four wild horses slowly walked off the runway. The plane raced through the fennel and into the air. Watching it rise and turn, Brower said softly, “What makes Sammy run in the South?”
We got into Candler’s jeep and spent the day slowly reviewing the island. At Candler’s speed—ten to twenty miles per hour—details came into focus that, at Fraser’s speed, had previously tended to blur. The jeep, for one thing, was open, and we felt the island around us in a way that we had not in Fraser’s Land Rover, which was closed in. “You can’t see the whole island anyway—it’s too big—so you might as well enjoy what you can see,” said Candler. “Going along in Fraser’s Land Rover was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.”
“I’ve never run into anybody quite like that,” Brower said.
“Are you sorry or glad that he developed Hilton Head Island?”
“I don’t know. I think probably I’m not glad. I’d rather have more wilderness on the coast than there is. But if it had to be developed, I’m glad it was developed by him.”
As we moved along, deer walked across the road in front of us. Candler showed us a place where he had often found arrowheads at low tide and a place where we picked wild grapefruit. We went to the south end of the island, which was ribbed with hummocks and was full of freshwater ponds and tall magnolias. A jetty there had been built ninety years ago at what was then the southernmost point of the island. The jetty was now at least two thousand feet inland from the southern shore. Land had simultaneously been eroding from the north end. Cumberland Island was gradually migrating to Florida, and had already crossed the state line. A sonic boom hit us with a report so loud that Brower staggered as if he had been shot, and tens of thousands of birds—oyster catchers, pelicans, sandpipers, gulls—rose screaming into the air between the Cumberland shore and the Florida mainland. They stayed up there, flapping in panic, for ten minutes, clouds and clouds of shrieking birds. Candler showed us where he had once dug into a mound and found a skeleton in a sitting position, and he told us how as a boy he used to play with muzzled alligators. We visited a tame buzzard at Lucy Ferguson’s place, where a rusting automobile engine hung from a tree and no one but the buzzard was home. The buzzard’s eyes glittered like the running lights of an airplane. The buzzard nibbled at Brower’s basketball shoes. Brower stroked the bird and talked gently to it. The buzzard nibbled at his fingers and draped a talon over his hand. We saw blue herons, bluebills, and egrets in the marshes, and cacti hanging like strings of sausages from live oaks in the woods. At Candler’s place, we ate a foot-high pile of shrimp from the tidal creek—under a big kitchen clock on which red lettering said, “Things Go Better With Coke.” Shrimp, like oysters, are as transparent as clear gelatine when they come out of the creek. On the beach, Candler noticed the remains of a leatherback turtle, its back as large as a steamer trunk. It had been there for days, but we, whipping by, had not seen it before. We saw wild pigs in the tidal marshes eating seafood, and a flight of seventy cormorants, in imprecise formation, passing overhead.
“What are they trying to spell to us?” Brower said.
“Pepsi-Cola,” said Candler.
As far as I could see, though, the message in the sky over Cumberland Island was “Finis.” We drove up a marching dune and snowplowed down the other side, leaving fresh tracks in the powdery white sand. The wind would cover them. But how many tracks could the wind cover? Since early morning—in fact, for three days—we had roamed an island bigger than Manhattan and had seen no one on its beach and, except at Candler’s place and Greyfield, no one in its interior woodlands. In the late twentieth century, in this part of the world, such an experience was unbelievable. The island was a beautiful and fragile anachronism. We were, as Candler had said, seeing what the Indians saw, and it was not at all difficult to understand why he wanted to “live where the Indians lived … closer to the earth, a part of the environment.” We, too, had eaten from the tidal creeks and had gone where and how we pleased—a privilege made possible in our time by private ownership. That was the irony of Cumberland Island and the index of its fate. The island was worth nothing when the Muskhogean Creeks lived and fished there. Now it was worth at least ten million dollars, a figure that could swell beyond recognition. Need, temptation, and realistic taxes would eventually wrest the island from its present owners. They would not be able to afford it. The question whether it was right for a few individuals to own twenty miles of beach had already been bypassed by these inexorable facts of economics.
Actually, the resolution was to arrive swiftly. In months to come, druids in massed phalanx were to create so many pressures—social, political, financial—and so much ecological propaganda that Fraser would give up his Cumberland territory, selling Cumberland Oaks to the National Park Foundation. Money for the purchase was to be made available to the Park Service by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, with enough left over to acquire the rest of the island from the other owners. Thus Fraser, in his coming and going, was in the end to be the catalyst that converted Cumberland Island from a private enclave to a national reserve. The other owners, as Brower had said, were without choice, really. They would have preferred to keep the island the way it was—and no wonder. It was Earth in something close to its original state. The alternatives—private development, public park—came nowhere near that, and never would. In the battle for Cumberland Island, there could be human winners here or there, but—no matter what might happen—there could be no victory for Cumberland Island. The Frasers of the world might create their blended landscapes, the Park Service its Yosemites. Either way, or both ways, no one was ever to be as free on that wild beach in the future as we had been that day.
PART 3
A River
Floyd Elgin Dominy raises beef cattle in the Shenandoah Valley. Observed there, hand on a fence, his eyes surveying his pastures, he does not look particularly Virginian. Of middle height, thickset, somewhat bandy-legged, he appears to have been lifted off a horse with block and tackle. He wears bluejeans, a white-and-black striped shirt, and leather boots with heels two inches high. His belt buckle is silver and could not be covered over with a playing card. He wears a string tie that is secured with a piece of petrified dinosaur bone. On his head is a white Stetson.
Thirty-five years ago, Dominy was a county agent in the rangelands of northeastern Wyoming. He could not have come to his job there at a worse time. The Great Drought and the Great Depression had coincided, and the people of the county were destitute. They were not hungry—they could shoot antelope and deer—but they were destitute. Their livestock, with black tongues and protruding ribs, were dying because of lack of water. Dominy, as the agent not only of Campbell County but of the federal government, was empowered to pay eight dollars a head for these cattle —many thousands of them—that were all but decaying where they stood. He paid the eight dollars and shot the cattle.
Dominy was born on a farm in central Nebraska, and all through his youth his family and the families around them talked mainly of the vital weather. They lived close to the hundredth meridian, where, in a sense more fundamental than anything resulting from the events of United States history, the West begins. East of the hundredth meridian, there is enough rain to support agriculture, and west of it there generally is not. The Homestead Act of 1862, in all its promise, did not take into account this ineluctable fact. East of the hundredth meridian, homesteaders on their hundred and sixty acres of land were usually able to fulfill the dream that had been legislated for them. To the west, the odds against them were high. With local exceptions, there just was not enough water. The whole region between the hundredth meridian and the Rocky Mountains was at that time known as the Great American Desert. Still beyond the imagination were the ult
ramontane basins where almost no rain fell at all.
Growing up on a farm that had been homesteaded by his grandfather in the eighteen-seventies, Dominy often enough saw talent and energy going to waste under clear skies. The situation was marginal. In some years, more than twenty inches of rain would fall and harvests would be copious. In others, when the figure went below ten, the family lived with the lament that there was no money to buy clothes, or even sufficient food. These radical uncertainties were eventually removed by groundwater development, or reclamation—the storage of what water there was, for use in irrigation. When Dominy was eighteen years old, a big thing to do on a Sunday was to get into the Ford, which had a rumble seat, and go out and see the new dam. In his photo album he put pictures of reservoirs and irrigation projects. (“It was impressive to a dry-land farmer like me to see all that water going down a ditch toward a farm.”) Eventually, he came to feel that there would be, in a sense, no West at all were it not for reclamation.
In Campbell County, Wyoming, the situation was not even marginal. This was high, dry country, suitable only for free-ranging livestock, not for farming. In the best of years, only about fourteen inches of rain might fall. “Streams ran water when the snow melted. Otherwise, the gulches were dry. It was the county with the most towns and the fewest people, the most rivers with the least water, and the most cows with the least milk in the world.” It was, to the eye, a wide, expansive landscape with beguiling patterns of perspective. Its unending buttes, flat or nippled, were spaced out to the horizons like stone chessmen. Deer and antelope moved among them in herds, and on certain hilltops cairns marked the graves of men who had hunted buffalo. The herbage was so thin that forty acres of range could reasonably support only one grazing cow. Nonetheless, the territory had been homesteaded, and the homesteaders simply had not received from the federal government enough land for enough cattle to give them financial equilibrium as ranchers, or from the sky enough water to give them a chance as farmers. They were going backward three steps for each two forward. Then the drought came.
