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of information as to details and equipment and if, when I finished my picture, there is a single rivet in the dog harness out of place,” Kent wrote to a friend, “it won’t be my fault.”35

Nervously, Kent unveiled his mural in September 1937 to a group of assembled journalists and bureaucrats. Everybody admired how amazingly he had captured Eskimo dogsleds and reindeer teams, and people bidding good-bye to their mail in the Arctic. All was well—until a few weeks later, when Kent was accused of having tried to foment revolution in Puerto Rico and Alaska, inciting indigenous peoples to break the chains of colonialism. Kent, citing the Bill of Rights in his own defense, said he was only encouraging people to be “equal and free” individualists. Only sheep could possibly believe in communism, colonialism, or corporations. Always his own man, Kent didn’t like isms at all. Perhaps the poet Gary Snyder best captured the essence of Kent’s mischievous, nonconformist mystique in his 1988 poem “Raven’s Beak River at the End,” written after a trip to Alaska:

Raven-sitting high spot

eyes on the snowpeaks,

Nose of morning

raindrops in the sunshine

Skin of sunlight

skin of chilly gravel

Mind in the mountains, mind of tumbling water,

mind running rivers,

Mind of sifting

flowers in the gravels

At the end of the ice age

we are the bears, we are the ravens,

We are the salmon

in the gravel

At the end of an ice age

Growing on the gravels

at the end of a glacier

Flying off alone

flying off alone

flying off alone

Off alone36

Chapter Nine - The New Wilderness Generation

I

While Rockwell Kent was living on Fox Island, Theodore Roosevelt—who turned sixty on October 28, 1918—was dying. A certain listlessness was evident. Physically spent, he often sat very still, his eyes glazed. Owing to deafness in his left ear, his balance was off, and there were many other health issues. He had spent some of the year at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City as a patient, receiving emergency surgery to remove abscesses in the leg and thigh. “I feel as though I were a hundred years old,” he wrote, “and had never been young.”1 Adding to his general misery, his feet were so swollen from inflammatory rheumatism that he couldn’t wear shoes. Gout, headaches, and sinus congestion—he suffered from a host of discomforting afflictions. One thing that cheered him up was receiving letters from readers who had enjoyed Through the Brazilian Wilderness. And he was pleased that an utterance of his had been adopted as the motto of the twentieth-century conservation movement: “The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.”2

Shortly after the armistice was announced on November 11, 1918, with Germany surrendering unconditionally to the Allied forces, thus ending World War I, Roosevelt again entered a hospital in New York; he spent forty-four days there. At times he was incontinent. He had lost his strength and felt like a broken-down engine that couldn’t make it over the next hill, an old gnarled oak about to come down.3 His doctors wouldn’t allow him to return to Sagamore Hill until Christmas Day. Writing for the Kansas City Star from his hospital bed, Roosevelt claimed that he was praying to God in his “infinite goodness and mercy” to give him a “speedy death.”4 But once he was back on Long Island for the holiday season, Roosevelt busied himself with reading William Beebe’s A Monograph of the Pheasants and keeping up his lists of birds and wildflowers. “In it you say by inference that the grouse of the Old World and the grouse of the New World are in separate families,” Roosevelt complained to Beebe in a letter, “although I believe that three of the genera and one of the species are identical.”5

Harold Ickes made an appointment to see the Colonel, as he and others called Roosevelt, at his Manhattan office, only to be told that Roosevelt had been rushed to a hospital. Ickes found himself wondering whether to visit his hero’s sickbed, perhaps offer