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career. Believing in the old maxim that the most dangerous thing to do with one’s life is to stand still, Matthiessen carefully studied wildlife in a dazzling array of remote habitats. The titles of his nonfiction books speak for themselves: The Birds of Heaven, Travels with Cranes, Tigers in the Snow, The Tree Where Man Was Born (which was nominated for a National Book Award), and The Snow Leopard (which won that prestigious award). He also helped Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall write The Quiet Crisis—a landmark environmental manifesto—in 1963.29

Among all the places Matthiessen visited, however, Arctic Alaska remained foremost in his memory. Whenever the chance presented itself, Matthiessen would tour the region north of the Arctic Divide, meeting with Gwich’in people, observing the musk oxen, and studying the drift timbers at the eastern end of Icy Reef. As a correspondent for the New York Review of Books, he wrote marvelous essays on beluga whales and even a white wolf.30 Whenever he was asked by a conservation group, such as the Audubon Society or the Alaska Wilderness League, to help preserve the Arctic, Matthiessen obliged. His 2003 essay “In the Great Country” (published in the photographic book Seasons of Life and Land) remains the most poignant essay ever written about the Arctic NWR. “I am outraged,” he wrote, “that the last pristine places on our looted earth are being sullied without mercy, vision, or good sense by greedy people who are robbing their fellow citizens of the last natural bounty and profusion that Americans once took for granted.”31

Chapter Twenty-Two - Rachel Carson’s Alarm

I

Strange to think that Walt Disney—who had done so much to help protect wildlife with Bambi, Seal Island, and White Wilderness—gave popular credence to the romantic thrust of what William O. Douglas and Jack Kerouac were arguing in the 1950s about ramblers’ rights. Among the most popular movie shorts of the late 1940s had been Disney’s film about Johnny Appleseed (starring Dennis Day). Suddenly Appleseed’s grave in Fort Wayne, Indiana, became a pilgrimage site for environmentalists. Everything about the historical Johnny Appleseed spoke of forest protection in an era of logging. Historical texts, often infused with folklore, reported that the footloose and fancy-free Appleseed always dressed in ragged clothes, wore ill-fitting shoes without socks, and willingly ate table scraps. In 1871 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine had portrayed Appleseed as a wandering mystic. A ninety-nine-year-old friend of Appleseed in Wells County, Indiana, remembered Johnny’s tramps along the Maumee River of Ohio-Indiana. Appleseed, he said, was “crazy as a loon,” always with “an apple in his hands, turning it over and over, wiping it off, and then picking out the seeds, and putting them in his pocket.”1

Disney also promoted the tramping tradition in the 1955 film Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier. The movie’s theme song—“The Ballad of Davy Crockett”—was known to virtually every kid in America. The words began: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee/Greenest state in the land of the free.” Kerouac, Whalen, Snyder, and Douglas also knew something about mountaintops—and wilderness lovers like themselves were suddenly in vogue among adolescents along with Disney’s Davy Crockett. When the film’s star, Fess Parker, went to Washington, D.C., he was mobbed by 18,000 to 20,000 fans at the National Airport. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and senators Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Lyndon Johnson of Texas took Parker to lunch and were overwhelmed by joyful cries of “We love you, Davy.”2

When it came to the promotion of Arctic Alaska, the last frontier, Disney also delivered for the wilderness movement. In 1956 Lois Crisler had published her popular memoir, Arctic Wild, about spending the winter and spring photographing wolves and caribou in the Brooks Range. Now it was time for the movie.3 “Disney’s focus on the ‘timeless’ frontier region of the Pacific Northwest, and particularly Alaska, as the setting for many True-Life Adventures