The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [71]
Later in the winter, once he was back at Harvard, word arrived that his father had died. Theodore took the grim news of February 10, 1878, as a body blow, and his grief was overwhelming. Bravely, he struggled to cope with the loss of “the one I loved dearest on the earth.”49 A curtain had fallen on his life. He had difficulties studying properly and felt haunted by his father’s visage. Roosevelt’s diary entries that winter and spring are full of lamentations: “Sometimes when I fully realize my loss I feel as if I should go wild.” “Oh Father, Father, how bitterly I miss you, mourn you and long for you.” The mainspring of Roosevelt’s life was gone. He prayed incessantly for his father, feeling terribly inferior to him in every way. Comparative anatomy and biology courses lost all appeal to Roosevelt. Slumping silently around Cambridge, he craved the recuperative powers of the wilderness.
Adding to Roosevelt’s depression, Hal decided to leave Harvard midway through his sophomore year, intending to learn law and increase the family fortune. Wasn’t it better, his friend hypothesized, to make big money and be a field ornithologist publishing popular books than to waste years in Harvard Square? Or to act like a New York dandy?
Discombobulated by his father’s death and Minot’s departure, restless beyond words, Roosevelt abandoned the notion of becoming a professional scientist. Years later, in An Autobiography, he explained how his disillusion with the professors at Harvard led him to set out on a different course. “I did not, for the simple reason that at the time Harvard, and I suppose our other colleges, utterly ignored the possibilities of the faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist and observer of nature,” he wrote of his defection, with a trace of contempt. “They treated biology as purely a science of the laboratory and the microscope, a science whose adherents were to spend their time in the study of minute forms of marine life, or else in section-cutting and the study of the tissues of the higher organisms under the microscope. This attitude was, no doubt, in part due to the fact that in most colleges then there was a not always intelligent copying of what was done in the great German universities. The sound revolt against superficiality of study had been carried to an extreme; thoroughness in minutiae as the only end of study had been erected into a fetish.”50
Like Minot, Roosevelt had come to the conclusion that a naturalist huntsman who lost daily communication with wilderness was inconsequential. Desperately he craved the tonic of the Adirondacks or Maine, where his mourning could be salved and his nerves steadied. Only fresh, unobstructed air would clear his head. Thoreau had left Concord and headed to Maine’s Mount Katahdin for a rebirth of vitality. To escape the institutional dourness of Harvard, Roosevelt was looking for his own Katahdin to climb. Even though he didn’t consider himself a Transcendentalist, he was thirsting for nature trails and the wide-open wilderness. And he found it in September 1878 near where Thoreau did—in the North Woods of Maine.51
As a faunal naturalist, Roosevelt was revolting against the uninspiring idea that Moosehead Lake or Mount Katahdin could best be understood by specialists studying pine cones under a microscope. Decades later, in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, he praised Thoreau for writing The Maine Woods but downgraded him for being “slightly anaemic” where hunting was concerned.52 Essentially, Roosevelt saw himself as a bridge figure between Darwinian naturalists and old-time explorers and big game hunters. A conduit between the often clashing fields of biology and the humanities. Not that he was going to bail out of Harvard as Minot had done. To the contrary. His rebellion was of the inner kind. Meanwhile, T.R. had inherited $125,000 (a fortune back then) from his father. Invested wisely, it would yield $8,000 a year, money he began spending on books, wilderness guides, and expeditions.53
On campus Roosevelt started