Encounters With the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies

“Brower, who hiked in twill shorts and a T-shirt and soft gray Italian boots, put on a long plaid shirt, trousers, and a pair of basketball shoes. Although he was out of shape, Brower was a prepossessing figure. He was a tall man. He had heavy bones, thick wrists, strong ankles. And he had a delicate, handsome, ruddy face, its features all finely proportioned but slightly too small, too refined, for the size of his frame, suggesting delicacy. His voice was quiet and persuasively mellifluous. He had an engaging smile and flashing white teeth. He was in his late fifties, and he had a windy shock of white hair. Brower had dropped out of college when he was nineteen, and disappeared into the Sierra Nevada. He had spent his life defending mountain ranges and what, by extension, they symbolized to him, and one of the ironies of his life was that his love of the mountains had long since drawn him away from them and into buildings impertinently called skyscrapers, into congressional corridors, into temporary offices in hotel rooms, into battle after battle, and out of shape.”

Throughout the book, McPhee uses detailed physical description and juxtaposition to explore the complex character of David Brower. Here, the contrast between Brower’s rugged, outdoorsy past and his current life spent in urban environments highlights the irony of his commitment to preserving nature while being removed from it.

“It was called Hart Lake and was fed by a stream that, in turn, fell away from a high and deafening cataract. The stream was interrupted by a series of beaver ponds. All around these free-form pools were stands of alder, aspen, Engelmann’s spruce; and in the surrounding mountains, just under the summits, were glaciers and fields of snow. Brower, who is an aesthetician by trade and likes to point to beautiful things, had nothing to say at that moment. Neither did Park. I was remembering the words of a friend of mine in the National Park Service, who had once said to me, ‘The Glacier Peak Wilderness is probably the most beautiful piece of country we've got. Mining copper there would be like hitting a pretty girl in the face with a shovel. It would be like strip-mining the Garden of Eden.’”

McPhee uses detailed imagery to emphasize the pristine beauty of Hart Lake and its surroundings, describing the natural elements with precision to create a vivid mental picture. The silence of Brower and Park in response to the scenery underscores the profound impact of the landscape, suggesting that its beauty transcends words. The simile likening copper mining to “hitting a pretty girl in the face with a shovel” conveys the brutality and sacrilege of industrializing such an untouched and magnificent wilderness, highlighting the moral and environmental stakes at play. However, this simile also underscores an outdated mode of thinking about gender: Brower equates natural beauty to feminine beauty, which must be protected by man, who has the power to do so.