The John McPhee Reader by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

Encounters with the Archdruid

The designer’s logo for this volume shows three delta triangles perched on a line above a fulcrum of one triangle: . That equation starkly depicts McPhee’s own plan for the book, to set a single figure against three adversaries, each time in a place appropriate to their “encounter.”

He developed this strategy before finding his protagonist, the archspokesman for wilderness preservation and former director of the Sierra Club, David Brower. After years of distinguished work as an outdoorsman and publisher, Brower had gradually turned to intense political activism—and in the process lost his majority support on the Sierra Club board. Ousted from his directorship, he formed two new organizations —the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, and Friends of the Earth—and continued to lobby for the curtailment of modern technology.

McPhee located three antagonists for Brower, each an advocate of his betes noires—mines, resorts, dams—and then arranged to have Brower meet the opponents on disputed turf, where they could argue while traversing spectacular scenery. The plan was a bit formulaic; it resembled Boswell’s jostling of Dr. Johnson into conversations of quotable prose. But McPhee surmounts that risk by adopting an air of absolute impartiality on the issues he dramatizes. For every point Brower scores on the beauties of wildness, his opponents respond with sensible defenses of progress. And the four personalities only rumple these issues, since Brower is no mere Druid, a worshipper of trees, nor are his adversaries simply out to exploit the land.

This selection is the third and final encounter, originally entitled “A River,” which pits Brower against Floyd Dominy during a voyage down the Colorado River. The story exemplifies how facts lend themselves to McPhee’s imaginative handling: the lake, river, dam, and raft become his emblems of rigidity or flexibility, expressing a scale of values without forcing him to “take a position” on these controversial issues.—WLH

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