The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [286]
When Justice Douglas heard about the Arctic NWR, he was elated. His dream of a National Wilderness Preservation System was coming to fruition. Nobody knows what he thought that December day as rain turned to snow.* After performing his duties at the Supreme Court, he retreated to his low-ceilinged study on Hutchins Place to work on his new book for young readers, Muir of the Mountains. If My Wilderness could help save the Brooks Range, imagine how the wilderness movement could flourish with John Kennedy in the White House and old John Muir reintroduced to a new generation of readers. Also, receiving bigger headlines than the Arctic NWR that December 7 was the news that Douglas’s friend Stewart Udall had been officially chosen to replace Seaton as secretary of the interior. “Stewart and Bill were extremely close,” Cathy Stone, Douglas’s fourth wife, recalled. “They hiked the C&O Canal together. They’d wear old clothes and just take off down the towpath. Once they got soaked in the rain and were mistaken for hoboes.”36
That Christmas season, while other insiders in Washington, D.C., were attending parties, Douglas sat quietly at his desk composing Muir of the Mountains (to be published in June 1961 by the Sierra Club). Working with the children’s illustrator Daniel San Souci, Douglas reviewed Muir’s life from the Scottish Highlands to his death from pneumonia in Los Angeles on Christmas eve 1914 (around the time Hetch Hetchy was turned into a reservoir). He gave great attention to Muir’s memoir Travels in Alaska. Douglas, in fact, had broadened his own knowledge of glaciation with Muir as his teacher. Writing a chapter about Muir’s “short-legged, rather houndish, and shaggy” dog, Stickeen, Douglas was comforted that his own best friend—Sandy, the border collie—was curled up by his side. “Muir learned much about glaciers on this trip with Stickeen,” Douglas wrote. “What he saw of the workings of these gigantic Alaskan icefields confirmed many of his theories about glaciation in the Sierra. Yet he learned more than this. He now knew how warm and joyous the friendship between a man and a dog can be. He learned that dogs as well as men can rise to heroic heights when danger threatens. He learned that a man and his dog, working as a team, can sometimes make a contribution to human knowledge.”37
If Douglas had a philosophy, it was his dauntless belief that freedom of thought and freedom of expression were unalienable rights of all Americans. He tirelessly stated that at all costs these fundamental principles of individual freedom, protected by the Constitution, had to be preserved. Against all odds, bucking huge powerful blocs like the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate, the Harding administration, McCarthyism, and the industrial-military complex, the wilderness movement had doggedly persevered. Some battles—a lot, actually—had been lost. But in Alaska the land skinners and despoilers had been checkmated in a number of important instances. Like trickster ravens, the Muirian preservationists often outwitted big business. The enlightened pro-wilderness minority, promoting kinship with all animal life, had a knack for pulling rabbits out of hats. Groups like the ACS, Douglas believed, were essential in a democracy. “We need Committees of Correspondence to coordinate the efforts of diverse groups to keep America beautiful and to preserve the few wilderness alcoves we have left,” Douglas wrote. “We used such committees in the days of our Revolution, and through them helped bolster the efforts of people everywhere in the common cause. Our common cause today is to preserve our country’s natural beauty and keep our wilderness areas sacrosanct. The threats are everywhere; and the most serious ones are often made in unobtrusive beginnings under the banner of ‘progress.’ ”38
Starting with Muir, a noble