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American birds and animals. He had a brother who willingly served as a marine consultant. “I wasn’t planning on writing Wildlife in America,” Matthiessen remembered. “I didn’t want to write the book. But I had done all this research. Back then magazine editors tended to treat young writers very badly. I had all this material. So why not a book?” Nobody since Hornaday had written comprehensively about endangered species, wildlife in crisis. “So I went to discover wild America,” he recalled. “U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the 1950s was always very helpful. They had Rachel Carson, whom I unfortunately didn’t meet, writing enormously powerful pamphlets and papers, all quite lyrical and influential.”19

Matthiessen, by now separated from his wife, loaded his forest green Ford convertible with books by naturalists such as Spencer F. Baird, A. C. Bent, and Roger Tory Peterson; tossed in a .20-gauge shotgun and a down sleeping bag; and headed west. “The gun was for protection,” he recalls. “Perhaps I thought I might need to shoot a bird to eat in the Mojave or Sonora. But I never once used it.” What he did use was the booze bottles that were also among his essentials in lighting out for the territory. His mission “on the road” was to document the history of wildlife struggling to coexist with humankind during the atomic age.

As a scholar, Matthiessen knew the history of wildlife extinctions—such as the Carolina parakeet, Steller’s sea cow, and Merriam’s elk—and wrote high-minded eulogies, including his elegant lament for the Labrador duck. (One of the last of this species was shot off Martha’s Vineyard in 1872 by Daniel Webster for the Smithsonian Institution.) What made Matthiessen different from Hornaday in Our Vanishing Wild Life was his novelistic trick of imagining that someday flocks of Labrador ducks would be back in the marshlands of the Atlantic coast. “Today, off Long Island’s beaches, on a still day of winter the great rafts of black and white pied sea ducks are a fine sight,” Matthiessen wrote, “the trim old-squaw and neat bufflehead, the mergansers and goldeneye and dark, heavy-bodied scoters. The sharp air is clean, virtually odorless, and only the strange gabble of the old-squaws breaks the vague murmur of the tide along the shore. Alone on the beach, one can readily imagine that, momentarily, the loveliest pied duck of them all might surface, startled, near a sand spit, the white of it bright in the cold January sun, as it did winter after winter long ago.”20

From 1956 to 1958, Matthiessen was quite a sight driving around the United States in his beat-up convertible, visiting national wildlife refuges such as Aransas in Texas and the Lower Klamath in Oregon. Books were piled up on his backseat. While camping in the Great Plains, he became fond of George Catlin’s depictions of animals; he used them as endpapers for Wildlife in America. For the first time Matthiessen also discovered the narrative panache of Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail. He was a sponge for information and found the species reports of Dr. C. Hart Merriam especially valuable. Circulating among the U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologists of the upper Midwest, who were working on various federal refuges, Matthiessen started drafting chapters for his first nonfiction book, Wildlife in America. “Forests, soil, water, and wildlife are mutually interdependent,” Matthiessen wrote, “and the ruin of one element will mean, in the end, the ruin of them all.”21

Dutifully keeping journals, reading everything possible about the wildlife protection movement of Roosevelt, Grinnell, and Hornaday when he stayed at campgrounds, parking lots, and motels, Matthiessen, who in the late 1960s would convert to Zen Buddhism, eventually flew to Alaska in May 1958 for research. “I started off in the Kenai Peninsula and flew everywhere in Alaska,” he recalled. “U.S. Fish and Wildlife took me all around. There weren’t roads back then to get around. You had to fly. Every big gravel bar we saw had a wrecked plane. Pilots constantly crashed. They’d break a shoulder blade