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By Root 3084 0

was his establishment credentials. The Paris Review’s contributors also wrote for the New Yorker and attended Warhol’s Factory happenings. They attended Truman Capote’s parties at the Waldorf-Astoria and befriended the Kennedys. More than anybody else in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Matthiessen was connecting the beat’s energy into the main consciousness of his time. Matthiessen regularly ingested LSD, getting it from a renegade Ivy League psychiatrist known as Dr. John the Night Tripper. Among the major writers of the era, perhaps only Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson dropped more acid than Matthiessen. But his reason—as with McClure and peyote—was a longing to feel man’s relationship with nature. “On acid I felt the unity of all nature,” he recalled. “It was thrilling to feel yourself as part of the whole planet. But I stopped that at some point. We learned that you can achieve the exact sensation through Zen. It’s slower, but purer and healthier all around.”27

Besides gravitating to psychedelics, Zen Buddhism, and remote wilderness areas (like the beats), Matthiessen also championed Native Americans’ rights. When the Sioux leader Leonard Peltier was arrested for the Wounded Knee massacre and convicted in 1977, Matthiessen defiantly stood up for his release from Lewisburg prison; it became a long crusade. At Point Barrow in 1961 the Inupiat protested against limits set by the International Treaty in favor of unlimited hunting and wanted no nuclear tests by the AEC; Matthiessen sided with them in both causes.

Another thing that differentiated Matthiessen from the beats was his embrace of Alaska as his special landscape. Nowhere else were the mirages so profuse: on clear summer days, the tundra shimmered like a dragonfly’s wings. And how could anyone not be impressed by 900,000 wild caribou? Owing to the success of Wildlife in America, he next decided to live on Nunivak Island and write Oomingmak: The Expedition to the Musk Ox Island in the Bering Sea. Nunivak was the offshore part of Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, which Theodore Roosevelt had created by an executive order in 1909. A volcanic island of Cretaceous sedimentary rock, Nunivak—with the Estolin Strait separating it from the mainland—had an end-of-the-Earth feel. It was the year-round home of Cup’ik-speaking Eskimos and the summer home of cliff-nesting seabirds such as puffins, murres, and kittiwakes. The only village on the island—which was sixty-five miles long and forty-five miles wide—was Mekoryuk, with a population of fewer than 200.

Because Nunivak wasn’t on the Alaskan mainland, it was extremely difficult to reach; also, it was protected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Thus a herd of shaggy, surreal musk oxen were released on Nunivak in an effort to restore the species to Alaska. To Matthiessen, the musk oxen were the “last of a great Ice Age family of goat-antelopes that includes the European chamois.”28 They had a wonderful aura about them. About 480 of the musk oxen were still alive on the island when Matthiessen started tracking them on the boggy tundra like a field biologist. All of these Greenland musk oxen were descended from a group of thirty-three calves, which had been imported to Fairbanks in 1930 as breeding stock to help restore the herds to their former range in Arctic Alaska. In 1935 and 1936 eighteen males and nineteen females from the University of Alaska Experiment Station in Fairbanks were taken to Nunivak Island and released. In the 1960s, working with researchers from the University of Alaska and the Institute of Northern Agricultural Research, Matthiessen helped relocate a herd of Nunivak musk oxen back to Fairbanks. Matthiessen brought out Oomingmak (Eskimo for musk ox), in 1967; an excerpt ran in the New Yorker. Two years later, Matthiessen was part of the team that relocated fifty-three musk oxen from Nunivak Island to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

A westerner who considered himself a kinsman of the far east, Matthiessen traveled to some of the most remote places on earth during his impressive literary