The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [483]
Medora, North Dakota, wasn’t a village to Roosevelt anymore, but an entire world unto itself, a time and place of magic. Memory is selective, and Roosevelt’s seemed to fasten on the pleasant shade, tranquil skies, and meadowlarks of summer, and to excise the long, cold Dakota winters. In fact, Roosevelt was arguably as proud of his exploits at Elkhorn Ranch as he was of any other chapter in his biography. After killing a buffalo in Montana, he had rushed home to New York City to cofound the Boone and Crockett Club along with his friend George Bird Grinnell. According to Forest and Stream, that was the opening salvo of the conservation movement. Now, in mid-May of 1908, President Roosevelt was scheduled to hold a summit at the White House on conservationism, with most of America’s governors present (a few states, including Texas, sent their lieutenant governors instead). To clear his mind of clutter, and prepare himself for the challenging conference ahead, Roosevelt, together with Edith, escaped to Pine Knot. Usually, at this retreat, Roosevelt liked to live strictly by himself with Edith. But now the Roosevelts’ houseguest—the only nonrelative ever invited to sleep at the cabin in Albemarle County—was Oom John. It had been a last-minute invitation, and Burroughs had accepted.
At Pine Knot both Roosevelt and Burroughs enjoyed the first appearance of new organisms springing up from the old Virginian earth. Soon the cicadas would descend on the trees and the lightning bugs would take to the air. The land was clothed in new plants and wildflowers. Earthworms were plowing the soil, and the naturalists admired these lowly creatures with new eyes. But it was bird-watching that most pleasantly consumed their energy at Pine Knot. Owing to the spring migration, the two companions were able to identify seventy-five species.46 Always wearing a scrunchy suit, Burroughs was quicker to spot the birds; the more casually attired Roosevelt was better at identifying them by their twitters.47 The president was hoping to show Oom John a passenger pigeon, but that sighting never occurred. They did see a swamp sparrow, and rare warblers only four and a half inches long. Some of the warblers had migrated more than 3,000 miles from Canada to wintering spots in South America, and they were resting in Virginia for a few days on their return. Likewise, some of the blackpolls Roosevelt and Burroughs saw had just made a nonstop flight of 2,300 miles over water, perhaps from Venezuela or Cuba. “It was really remarkable,” Burroughs later recalled, “how well [Roosevelt] knows the birds and their notes.”48
What a fine time the two naturalists had, poking around the countryside, marveling at migratory birds whose flight was directed, often, by the magnetic field of the earth. Oom John came to appreciate Roosevelt’s fair-mindedness and skill as a raconteur even more than he did during their Yellowstone trip of 1903 or their wanderings in the Catskills or their jaunts on Long Island. “The President is a born nature-lover, and he has what does not always go with that passion—remarkable powers of observation,” Burroughs wrote in Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt. “He sees quickly and surely, not less so with the corporeal eye than with the mental. His exceptional vitality, his awareness all around, gives the clue to his power of seeing. The chief qualification of a born observer is an alert, sensitive, objective type of mind, and this Roosevelt has to the preeminent degree.”49
But Roosevelt’s penchant for turning everything into a competition grated on Burroughs, who was proud of his humility—proud that he didn’t boast. Roosevelt’s ego, by contrast, would have made Napoleon flinch. As if engaged in a footrace, Roosevelt challenged Oom John over who would see the most species of sparrow or woodpecker, or who would first spot an eastern bluebird. Talking incessantly, Roosevelt would quote poetry