Response: “Encounters with the Archdruid”

John McPhee

To put it too plainly: I have mixed feelings about this book.

First, the good. It goes without saying that McPhee is a master of describing nature in a precise, no-hassle sort of way. He doesn’t need to douse his prose in flowery metaphors for it to be memorable, and I admire that. By the end of the book, I was definitely agreeing with the sentiment from our last class: I want to go on a hike with this guy, and I don’t even like hiking!

I also appreciated how McPhee managed his presence in Encounters with the Archdruid and how he characterized certain figures through their signature activities. There was Brower eating his every meal out of a Sierra Club cup—even a steak!—and Dominy’s cigar-smoking and Jim Beam-drinking. (My favorite was Park and his pick-swinging, for sure.) He really chose unique, compelling characters to follow and pit against one another.

Other positives: The way he clustered unattributed quotes (like the snippets of dialogue about Brower from the Sierra Club crowd) was interesting. I loved the ironic moment with the Forest Service guy who grouped up Brower, Park, and the rest as “wilderness-lovers.” On the whole, I feel like this book further complicated my views of conservation and development (in a good way).

But Encounters with the Archdruid did drive me crazy sometimes. On page 61, when this exchange happened . . .

Brower: “Logging follows mining.”
Park: “You can control that.”
Brower: “That’s what I’m hoping.”
Park: “Your idea of control is to keep it out.”

. . . I literally leaned back and started thumping my head off the wall behind my chair. The bickering was often painfully repetitive, and even when the characters happened to agree about something, I knew that they’d be back to arguing in a few paragraphs. But, okay—maybe it’s just me. I have a low tolerance for listening to people squabble, especially when they are so deeply entrenched in their respective camps that they can barely give an inch to one another. The lack of progression irritated me.

The constant back-and-forth also made me pretty impatient with the narrative, unfortunately. More than once I picked up my phone and searched the names of the potential development sites, just to hurry up and learn how things turned out. (FYI: Fraser was eventually pressured into selling Cumberland Island to the National Park Foundation. As for the Hualapai Dam, it’s still stalled in the proposal stages.)

I guess it’s a credit to McPhee that I cared enough, as a reader, to look up those places and check their status. And I appreciated that McPhee addressed the “I’m-not-quite-sure” majority later in the book, because that’s definitely where I’m situated. The ending of part one kind of summed up my frustrations:

Brower: “I just feel sorry for all you people who don’t know what these mountains are good for.”
McPhee: “What are they good for?”
Brower: “Berries.”
Park: “Copper.”

Part of me thought, “Ha, that’s a clever ending.” Another part thought, “75 pages later and you still completely disagree? I never would have guessed!”

Lava Falls

Themes, Messages, etc.

The most evident theme in this book was the pitting of beauty against utility. By wholeheartedly pursuing only one, you forfeit the other. There was a very interesting moment where Brower’s preoccupation with beauty was complicated by the fact that, in order to preserve it, not everyone could have access to it—is “ninety-nine-point-nine percent” enough?

In the end, though, what was the point of this book? There’s the exploration of very distinct, even divergent points of view and the dissonance they produce. There’s evidence in favor of conservation. There’s evidence in favor of (careful, environmentally-friendly) development. There's the idea of a man—in this case, multiple men—who live and breathe their subjects of interest. For me, there was no singular “message” to be found.

Also, I wondered which part of the narrative was really playing the supportive role. Were the descriptions of the hike and raft ride needed to hold up the debates? (Imagine if McPhee had invited them to sit down and chat over coffee, instead.) On the other hand, without the tension of those arguments, would the descriptions of the hike and raft ride stood on their own?

Process

Encounters with the Archdruid relies heavily on long, complicated quotations and highly detailed descriptions of the environment. McPhee mentions note-taking once, when he’s putting his papers away on the raft to keep them from getting soaked, so I suppose he did it all by hand. That’s just remarkable to me. I wouldn’t have the skill (or coordination) to keep solid notes while hiking along like that . . . Was anyone else impressed?