Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [138]
TWO EVENINGS LATER, Roosevelt lay high in Yosemite, on a bed of fragrant pine needles, looking up at the sky. On all sides soared the cinnamon-colored shafts of sequoia trees. He had the feeling that he was “lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hands of man.” Birdsong filled the arches as the sky darkened. He identified the treble tessitura of hermit thrushes, and thought it “an appropriate choir for such a place of worship.”
“A PLACE OF WORSHIP.”
Roosevelt at Glacier Point, Yosemite, May 1903 (photo credit 15.2)
His companion was John Muir, the glaciologist, naturalist, and founder of the Sierra Club. Since early youth, Muir had roamed Yosemite, carrying little more than “some bread and tea in an old sock,” returning to civilization as infrequently as possible. At sixty-five, he knew more about the park, and loved it more passionately, than any other American. Roosevelt had booked his exclusive services well in advance: “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days, and just be out in the open with you.”
The President was disappointed to find that Muir had no ear for bird music. He was Wordsworthian rather than Keatsian, revering only “rocks and stones and trees.” Garrulous, erudite, and wall-eyed, he talked a pure form of preservation that Roosevelt was not used to hearing. Muir had no patience with the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” policy of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the President’s very good friend. Conservation favored business at the expense of nature, and property rather than beauty. “The ‘greatest number’ is too often found to be number one.”
Whatever resonance such views found in the President’s own developing awareness of the “democracy” of national parks, he would have preferred to hear less of Muir and more of the hermit thrushes. Eventually he fell asleep, in the piney air. Another bird chorale saluted him at dawn.
For the next forty-eight hours, the boy in Roosevelt, never quite suppressed, reveled in his wild surroundings. “This is bully!” he yelled, when Muir burned a dead tree for him and the sparks hurtled skyward. After another night out, he awoke at Glacier Point, and was intrigued to find himself buried under four inches of snow. “This is bullier!”
On 17 May he came down from the peaks in dusty khakis, his eyes sparkling. “I never felt better in my life!” Muir, too, was elated, having confessedly fallen in love with the President’s “interesting, hearty and manly” personality. The substance of their camping conversations remained tacit, suggesting some philosophical difference on the subject of Gifford Pinchot. Muir won at least an immediate presidential order to extend the California forest through the Mount Shasta region, and a promise that Yosemite’s over-commercialized valley would be ceded back to the national park system. Roosevelt’s next conservation statement, on 19 May, was obstinately utilitarian, yet an eloquent plea later that day echoed the preservationist sentiments he had expressed at the Grand Canyon. Speaking in Sacramento, he begged Californians to preserve their “marvelous natural resources” unimpaired. “We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”
ON THE MORNING of 23 May, Roosevelt sailed across Puget Sound toward Seattle, the apogee of his great swing across the nation. “Well, thank heaven,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge, “tomorrow I turn my face toward the East.” He suddenly, with a returning traveler’s sense of anticlimax, felt as spent as the fireworks fizzling in the sun over Alki Point. “I am so jaded and nerve-weary and bored that it almost seems as if I could not go through the remainder of the speech-making.”
Seattle neither knew nor cared about the President’s tiredness.