"Encounters with the Archdruid"

I'm reading Encounters with the Archdruid: narratives about a conservationist and three of his natural enemies. Author John McPhee takes David Brower, former president of the Sierra Club, to meet a geologist, a developer and a commissioner of reclamation at sites threatened by the latter's idea of progress.

The third chapter is titled "A River," and Brower rafts down the Grand Canyon with Floyd Dominy, the man responsible for building dozens of dams. They hit Havasu Canyon.

"A bend to the right, a bend to the left, right, left — this stone labyrinth with a crystal stream in it was moment enough, no matter where it ended, but there lay beyond it a world that humbled the mind's eye."

"The walls widened first into a cascaded gorge and then flared out to become the ovate sides of a deep valley, into which the stream rose in tiers of pools and waterfalls.  Some of the falls were only two feet high, others four feet, six feet."

"There were hundreds of them."

 "The pools were as much as fifteen feet deep, and the water in them was white where it plunged and foamed, then blue in a wide circle around the plunge point, and pale green in the outer peripheries. Mile after mile, the pools and waterfalls continued. The high walls of the valley were bright red."

"This was Havasu Canyon, the immemorial home of the Havasupai, whose tribal name means 'the people of the blue-green waters.'"

"Dominy was waiting below. 'It's fabulous,' he said. 'I know every river canyon in the country, and this is the prettiest in the West.'"

This is what Encounters does: paint stunning scenes and juxtapose them with men supposedly who rather profit from a place than admire it. McPhee, however, gives these characters humanity and nuance. They know these lands better than Brower; they just don't think we can afford to preserve every inch of it.

At first, I disliked this book and then realized I actually disliked Brower, or at least the way he was characterized in the first part. He's consistently shown up on nature, knowledge and hiking by a geologist who wants to put a copper mine in the Cascade Mountains. In dialogue, the mining expert says something reasonable and Bower pipes up with something cliche like "population is pollution spelled inside out."

Later Brower mellowed out, and I found peace. It's a good story. There's definitely some stilted dialogue and an anemic amount of scenes and plots, but that's an issue with the concept. In just three parts, McPhee effectively shined light on the preservation -> conservation -> development gradient and challenged conceptions about each one.

So if that sounds like your kind of paperback, check out Encounters of the Archdruid by John McPhee, lent out at fine libraries nationwide. Maybe even bookstores! Definitely Amazon.