The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [202]
“Your film, which you presented at the Annual Meeting of the Wilderness Society Council on the Olympic Peninsula, was an inspiration to us all,” Olaus Murie, director of The Wilderness Society, wrote from Moose, Wyoming. “The photography was of course excellent, and you have a happy choice of subject matter. The artistry and warmth of feeling which permeates the whole film presented the wilderness quality of Olympic National Park in a manner that can hardly be excelled. You are doing a great service for the American people in showing this film and I only wish it were possible for all the millions of Americans to have the privilege of seeing and experiencing its inspiration.”20
The Crislers were on their way to becoming stars. Herb would spend time with Walt Disney, regaling him with folk songs and poems and pioneer tales like a backwoods bard. No longer did Herb and Lois have to sleep in flophouses. In Detroit they stayed at the Statler, and in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria. At one studio meeting in Hollywood, Disney told the Crislers about a coyote den in his backyard; he found coyotes charming. Lois recognized that in Disney, an Eisenhower Republican, the wildlife protection movement had a stalwart ally. “We could see that to a lot of people in the United States, the wilderness that we take for granted up in the Olympics,” Lois wrote, “was becoming one of the choicest things they could contact.”21
Wildlife documentaries were coming into vogue, and the Crislers were leading the filmmakers. Unlike a Hollywood set production, the great outdoors offered a wildlife photographer plenty of elbow room. But lugging a ninety-pound camera up hills and switchbacks was physically draining work. Capitalizing on their growing fame, Lois started writing scripts; these had an overdrawn, dramatic narrative and seemed more like Dashiell Hammett than like John Burroughs. Lois could make a bluebird feeding its chick an insect into an event of grand importance. “The fawn got itself somehow down the steep bank and onto the lake,” she wrote in a typical passage; the style is exhilarating yet clipped. “It crossed the flat whiteness, now hurrying, now seeming very tired and standing still. But it drove itself on.”22
When the opportunity presented itself, Lois wrote serious articles—one was about a rare marmot (Marmota olympus) in the Olympics—for Natural History.23
With regard to wolves, Herb and Lois Crisler were walking, talking zoological encyclopedias. Lois was fascinated that in 20,000 B.C. southern Europeans were drawing wolves on cave walls. Besides the mandatory books of wolf biology in her library, she had underlined references to wolves in such literary classics as the epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad. According to Lois, Jesus Christ used wolves in parables to emphasize moral principles; Pliny the Elder gave a pseudoscientific account of wolves in Natural History; Beowulf—the oldest important narrative poem in English—had a wolf as the heroic protagonist who kills the monster Grendel; and Shakespeare also mentioned wolves in his plays with noticeable regularity. Lois Crisler liked to point out to people that wolves used to be beloved animals, part of the wild kingdom, not beasts to be exterminated. It infuriated her that the average American mistakenly thought a wolf’s howl was menacing. “Like a community song, a howl is a happy occasion,” she explained to the general public. “Wolves love to howl. When it is started, they instantly seek contact with one another, troop together, fur-to-fur. Some wolves . . . will run from any distance, panting and bright-eyed, to join in, uttering, as they near, fervent little wow, jaws wide, hardly able to wait to sing.”24
For eighteen months, the Crislers