The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [75]
Back at Harvard that spring, a self-confident Theodore acted a bit like a roughneck weaned on frozen rivers. The gloves had come off. Bile stirred in his stomach when he thought about all his anti-outdoors naturalist professors. The wilderness had been so intoxicating. One day he was in Cambridge, feeling hemmed in; the next day he was gazing at an ice-sheeted blue lake looking for moose. The North Woods had toughened him, or so he believed. The convivial ways of Sewall and Dow also lingered in him. No longer was he content behaving like an adolescent rajah collecting bird feathers and speckled eggs. Primitive Maine had knocked some of the tameness out of him, significantly. He now considered his asthma an ugly by-product of civilization’s stresses. Reading the Old Testament in Maine by a roaring fire, Roosevelt felt like an American Adam, uncontaminated by the corruptions of Tammany Hall politics or Harvard’s pecking orders. Once again Island Falls—even in a blind frenzy of snow—had redeemed his despair and fixed his determination to marry Alice Lee. “I never have passed a pleasanter two weeks than those just gone by,” Roosevelt wrote to his mother. “I enjoyed every moment. The first two or three days I had asthma but, funnily enough, this left me entirely as soon as I went into camp. The thermometer was below zero pretty often, but I was not bothered by the cold at all.”68
Just as bathing in Walden Pond had been a baptism for Thoreau, Roosevelt now felt the cleansing effect of the horizontally blowing snow in the Mooseleuk Range. It was as if Roosevelt’s worries about asthma had been stolen away by the blanket of icy whiteness. “I have never seen a grander or more beautiful sight than the northern woods in winter,” he wrote. “The evergreens laden with snow make the most beautiful contrast of green and white, and when it freezes after a rain all the trees look as though they were made of crystal. The snow under foot being about three feet deep, and drifting to twice that depth in places, completely changes the aspect of things.”69
VI
No sooner had the spring semester at Harvard begun than Roosevelt started plotting for a return visit to Maine. The spell of the North Woods had fallen over him. Some of his classmates, however, snickered that all Roosevelt learned in Maine was the art of manly bragging. Even though he would spend June and July in Oyster Bay, tending to family obligations, come August he was going to climb the peak that Thoreau had written about, the 5,268-foot Mount Katahdin. Even with Sewall as principal guide, that would be quite a mountaineering feat for a first-timer. Make no mistake about it—this was a big mountain. When a wall of white clouds hovered in the sky, you couldn’t even see the pinnacle from base camp. Mountain climbing, Roosevelt knew, was a far trickier endeavor than hiking in river valleys.
While guests at Oyster Bay were having tea and crumpets, Roosevelt was purchasing camping gear from Greenville Sanders & Sons. His private diaries list a flannel shirt, duck trousers, long underwear, a parka, wool socks, bandannas, a thick blanket, and a bag of “necessaries.” The plan was to make camp at the eastern hinge of Mount Katahdin and climb the narrow ridge among the blackflies and ticks. He hoped plenty of bull moose would be encountered around ponds and lakes as they dined on aquatic plants—Roosevelt desperately wanted a moose’s palmate antlers for his trophy collection, and he wanted to eat a moose steak. In The Maine Woods Thoreau maintained that moose meat was “like tender beef with perhaps more flavor, sometimes like veal.”70 Because