The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [254]
But Arctic Alaska, the fragile tundra that the Muries had fought to protect, worried Matthiessen. A warning prayer from a Togiak elder stuck with him: “If we fail to save the land, God may forgive us, but our children won’t.”25 Much like Bob Marshall, Matthiessen used a book—in his case Wildlife in America—to promote the “sequestration of inviolate primeval wilderness for posterity” in the Arctic. To Matthiessen the Wilderness Bill—which was pending in Congress during the late 1950s—needed to be passed. It was senseless, he argued, for America to rethink land policy every four years to deal with special interests or political expedience. Matthiessen understood Alaskans’ need to timber, drill, and mine. His chief concern was that once a place earned the designation of a wildlife refuge, it should be left alone. Matthiessen believed that the Arctic land needed to be protected in perpetuity. Gold and oil might be found decades later, he argued, but this possibility didn’t mean that the Arctic Game Reserve should be reopened for oil derricks or mine shafts. Otherwise, Yellowstone or the Tetons could become a natural gas reserve. “Glimpsed from the air between banks of cold rolling fogs, the region is beautiful and forbidding,” Matthiessen wrote of the Arctic. “Its tundra is desert of a kind, but the great beauty of Alaska lies in its bleakest areas—tundra, ice pack, glacier, and bare mountain, with their unique and precious complement of life.”26
III
Wildlife in America was a nonfiction work set during the late Eisenhower era. Half of the book was a eulogy for extinct species. At times the prose read like a lyrical forensic report, a long-distance gaze backward in time to the sad legacy of mankind’s inhumanity toward animals. Matthiessen sadly documented how reckless Americans had been toward the bison, manatee, flamingo, and sea otter. The grimmest Greek tragedies were mild compared with stories of Alaskan wolf exterminators, trophy hunters who sought Dall sheep, and reckless fishermen who overfished and then blamed bald eagles for poor harvest seasons. Matthiessen didn’t report on American highway life like Kerouac in On the Road (or like John Steinbeck in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley). There was no ego on display in Wildlife in America. Matthiessen wasn’t a preacher, a braggart, or a show-off about his Alaskan literary expeditions. But Matthiessen was prescient in warning about the toxicity of DDT, ammonium phosphate, and organophosphates and their effect on wildlife. His first book is both a throwback to the meticulous zoological research of Hornaday and an environmental manifesto giving—from the eastern establishment—credence to McClure’s bitter “For the Death of 100 Whales” and Snyder’s more hopeful “A Berry Feast.”
Although the Paris Review had no conservationist agenda, both Matthiessen and Plimpton were ardent Auduboners. Matthiessen took from his odyssey on the road a newfound sense of himself as a world traveler. Like the humpback whales, sea otters, and Canada geese he saw in Alaska, Matthiessen recognized himself as a migrant. So when he spied on a Northern wheatear (Oenanthe oenanthe) along the Bering Sea he knew it would join its Siberian counterpart on a trek across Russia before heading south through Turkey and Syria into eastern Africa. The bird spends its winter in the sub-Saharan grasslands of Africa after traveling more than 7,000 miles from its breeding grounds. Traveling the world to find great white sharks, snow leopards, and caribou herds became his specialty. There was a lot of Roosevelt and Hornaday in Matthiessen’s approach. But there was also a spiritual awakening about protecting wild places that reflected the beat writers Snyder, Whalen, McClure, and Kerouac.
One thing that differentiated Matthiessen from the “dharma writers” on the Pacific coast