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David Brower
The Making of the Environmental Movement
By Tom Turner UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96245-3
CHAPTER 1
From Berkeley to the Sierra
AN OUTDOORSMAN IS BORN
I'd like to send Moses back up the mountain. He brought back the tablet with the Ten Commandments telling us how to treat one another. But he never brought back down a thing that tells us what to do about the earth.
In 1912, the year David Brower was born, the world was a vastly different place, and nature still held dominion in most parts of California, including his hometown of Berkeley. Back then, the town's population was just over forty thousand. Today, it's more than 110,000. During that same time, the U.S. population grew from 92 million to something over 300 million. California's population rose fastest: from 2.3 million to 37 million. Brower often bemoaned this rapid population rise and argued that it must be slowed and eventually reversed in order to avoid running out of air, water, and the other necessities of life — and to leave some space for the other beings that share the planet with us. "How dense can people be?" was one of his many quips, this one later turned into a lapel button.
Berkeley stretches from Grizzly Peak and its ridgeline down to the shore of San Francisco Bay, with the university campus at the base of the hills. The house David grew up in and lived in until the age of thirty is a handful of blocks from the university. Ross Brower, David's father, worked there for a time as an instructor of mechanical drawing, and David would attend classes there for a little more than a year.
In the earliest days, the Browers lived on Carleton Street in Berkeley. There were three kids (with a fourth, Joe, to come along a few years later). Edith, the only girl, was eldest. Ralph was two years younger. Then Dave, three years younger than Ralph, then Joe, born in 1920, when Dave was eight.
Ross Brower was born in Bath, Michigan, in 1879. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California and a master's from the University of Michigan and then taught in a high school in Oakland and at the university in Berkeley. He was a strict Presbyterian, and alcohol was banned in the house. Dave's mother, Grace Barlow, was born in Two Rock Valley, near Petaluma, California, in 1882. She earned degrees in English from Berkeley and Stanford and was a devoted mother, but tragedy would knock her sideways by the time she delivered her last child. Grace and Ross met at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley and married in 1906, ages twenty-four and twenty-seven — late by the standards of the day.
When David was about four, after brief stays at two other Berkeley addresses, the family moved to 2232 Haste Street, a half-dozen blocks from the campus of the university. Ross's mother, Susan B. Brower, owned a house on the lot, and Ross had built a second one on it in 1904. The family lived in one of the buildings and rented out apartment space in that building and in the other as well, mainly to students. Monthly rents ran from twenty-five dollars for a single bedroom with kitchenette and bath down the hall to forty dollars for a two-bedroom unit with bath and kitchen. Browers occupied the house until the 1960s, and it became an official Berkeley landmark in 2008.
When the First World War erupted, David took credit for his father's being exempted from military service: "One of my first achievements was keeping my father out of combat. They called him in for various physical tests, which he passed, but they did not want to draft the father of three."
When Joe came along, everything changed. Grace, who had mysteriously lost her sense of smell some years previously, abruptly went blind and lost the hearing in one ear as well. It was a crippling blow. She could no longer keep house or cook meals, and she began to have what the family referred to as fits. Much later, doctors surmised that she had had a brain tumor. To make matters worse, Ross soon was laid off from his job. He found a bit of part-time work here and there, but the family subsisted mainly on the income from the rental properties. And when they had vacancies, which, as Dave later wrote, was often, it was very difficult to make ends meet. Things would only get worse when the Depression hit eight or nine years later.
The kids all attended Berkeley public schools, first McKinley elementary (torn down in the 1960s), then Willard Junior High, then Berkeley High School, from which Dave graduated in December 1928. Traffic was light back then, and David and friends spent hours playing touch football (they called it "passball") in the streets.
DAMS, BUTTERFLIES, AND THE SIERRA NEVADA
Once the winter rainy season ended, and when they weren't in class or playing passball, Dave and Joe would spend hours building mud-and-stick dams across Strawberry Creek on the campus, then breaching them and watching the torrent race downstream. That ended in 1921 or '22, when a new football stadium was built where the Hayward earthquake fault intersected with Strawberry Creek. Dirt was sluiced away from the hillside using a technique that is now illegal. Some of the mud became the floor of the stadium. The rest gushed down the creek.
According to David, "It was no longer any fun to build a dam on it, or even possible. ... It was a mess." And, perhaps, the beginning of an environmental activist.
Although Mother Grace had lost her eyesight, she had not lost her love of walking. David would take long walks with her in the hills behind the campus, describing the landscape, the animals, birds, and butterflies they encountered, trying to help her enjoy the view based on her memory and his descriptions. There were no buildings up there then, and few roads. Much of the walking was cross-country, so David was his mother's guide dog as well as raconteur. He would later surmise that these walks had been the beginning of his ability to observe and to describe, which he would do with growing command and facility throughout his life.
In 1924 a family named Furer rented one of the units on Haste Street. They were avid butterfly collectors. Albert Furer and his younger brother, Fred, took young David on butterfly-collecting expeditions in the hills above Berkeley, and by the time winter came they had netted about thirty different species, "or at least we thought they were different," wrote Brower.
This began an interest in butterflies that continued for years. David would look for which plants various species of butterfly preferred to feed on, what preyed on them, and how they looked in flight. Eventually, he became so familiar with local butterfly varieties that he could identify them by flight patterns, even at a distance of several hundred yards. Dave would later observe that this "kind of identification of living things [is] almost automatic in any people not so insulated from nature as city people ordinarily are."
The pinnacle of his lepidopterist career came on April 16, 1928, when he found and netted a previously unknown "tip" or "sport" (a mutation) of the common checkerspot, which he sold to a collector in Pasadena for ten dollars. The collector then named the subspecies anthotharsis sara Reakerti, transition form Broweri (Gunder).
The butterflies also taught young Brower hard lessons. He was raising some western swallowtails from eggs he had harvested from a wild anise plant. The eggs became caterpillars; the caterpillars, after careful feeding, wove themselves into chrysalids and began the magical transformation into butterflies.
Eventually the chrysalids began to split open as the butterflies strove to make their way out into the world. The exertion pumps fluid from the abdomen into the wings, which unfold and prepare to get airborne. David decided to help. He carefully widened the split so the butterfly could emerge more easily. They came out all right, and crawled to convenient twigs, but the wings never unfurled, not having had the exertion of fighting out of the chrysalids to pump fluid into them. The butterflies ran around helplessly for a little while, then died. "Freeing them, I had denied them their freedom." A lesson that would echo forever: it is a good idea to understand as much as possible about a situation before trying to help.
When David was six, his family took its first big trip into the Sierra Nevada, driving in their 1916 Maxwell. Ross had built an ingenious wooden box that attached to the running board of the car. It carried the camping gear and folded down to make a table for cooking and eating. The first day they got as far as Sacramento, the second to Colfax, still west of Donner Pass. They made camp and David went exploring and found a spring, "a wonderful thing to find." The next time they visited the spot a year or two later, the spring was gone, buried under debris from a clear-cut. "I was quite upset by that. I've never forgiven the Forest Service. And I don't intend to."
On the third day they reached Donner Lake, and on the fourth the south end of Lake Tahoe. After dabbling in the waters of the lake, chasing squirrels and boulder hopping, the Brower clan headed for Yosemite. They drove down into the Owens Valley, whose thin water supply had not yet been appropriated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and turned west at the tiny enclave of Lee Vining (named for a nineteenth-century miner named Leroy Vining) on the shore of the mysterious Mono Lake. The road up to Tioga Pass from the east is steep, and Grace and the kids had to get out and push to get the heavy Maxwell over the top. From there they wound down through Tuolumne Meadows, and eventually down into Yosemite Valley itself.
Dave, who would ultimately make first ascents of many Sierra peaks and pioneer routes up Yosemite Valley walls, was a late bloomer as a mountain climber. Although he claims credit for the first ascent of the west face of Founder's Rock (a rock at the northeast corner of the Berkeley campus that towers a good dozen feet high) at the age of about five, he was unenthusiastic about hiking and climbing on his first trip to Yosemite, preferring to chase squirrels or stay in the car while the rest of the family climbed to Vernal Fall and other sites.
The lessons of the temporary destruction of Strawberry Creek in the Berkeley hills, the backfiring of good intentions in his informal study of butterflies, and the needless loss of a beloved spring would stick with Brower forever. The Berkeley experiences certainly were important, but Dave's brother Joe insists it was this Sierra trip and others that followed that started Dave on his life's journey — a crusade to protect and preserve nature, especially wilderness.
UC BERKELEY VERSUS ECHO LAKE CAMP AND JOHN MUIR
After racing through grade school, junior high, and high school — Dave skipped three grades along the way — he enrolled in January 1929 as a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, where his parents and elder brother and sister had gone. He was seventeen. As a senior in high school, he said he "got quite a charge out of genetics. ... I dug through library shelves to find out all I could about the evolutionary course of things." With that and his love of butterflies, he expected to major in entomology and signed up for several science classes — pomology, botany, bacteriology, forestry, chemistry. He found them less than challenging, and with the urgent necessity to work to help the family pay the bills, he dropped out in his sophomore year.
He delivered the Berkeley Daily Gazette and telegrams for Western Union and worked as a clerk in the Bunte Brothers Candy Company and on an assembly line in the Merco-Nordstrom Valve Company. But his first love by now was the Sierra Nevada, and he escaped there as often as he could, usually with one or two friends.
These were anything but comfortable trips: On one of them, Brower and two friends left Berkeley at 3:45 in the afternoon and reached Merced by 8:00 P.M. They stopped for pie and coffee and pressed on, stopping at Bear Flat for the night. "Fate had destined little sleep for that night, though," recalls Brower. His friend George slept in the backseat. Vernon and Dave, each more than six feet tall, made do in the front seat, sleeping "for 17 1/2 minutes all told." They listened for passing cars, heard all of four, and spent the rest of the time listening to frogs and "wondering why the moon didn't move a bit faster."
In his diary, Dave admitted to a minor larceny the next day: "I herewith confess that I took a little sign off the trail [to Bridalveil Fall] for my room: 'Horses have the right of way. Avoid any act that will startle them.' It was weather stained and dirty, anyway." A few pages later, he wrote of a surprise: "Sunday dawned fairly fair. We found we had been sleeping next to the sewage disposal system, and decided that we would not breakfast there, but a little way down the river. ... A dozen eggs, 2 quarts of chocolate, and a half pound of bacon furnished our meager breakfast."
An important break came when Brower landed a job at a family camp run by the city of Berkeley at Echo Lake in the Sierra several miles west of and a thousand feet higher than Lake Tahoe. He did various chores around camp and, despite his inherent shyness, led campers on hikes into Desolation Valley and up surrounding peaks. He kept meticulous records of his climbs and hikes and wrote letters home, many on a typewriter; he kept carbons.
He wrote of a "gala hike," leaving camp in the dark of 3:00 A.M. with two friends and walking around Echo Lakes, up the Tamarack Trail, and along the entire eastern side of Desolation Valley, where they headed east around Heather, Suzy, and Gilmore Lakes up to the summit of Mt. Tallac at 9,785 feet elevation. "I don't think I ever climbed the Tamarack trail under more beautiful conditions, and I have gone over it 53 times." They ascended three more peaks (Dick's, elevation 10,015 feet; Jack's, 9,910; and Pyramid, 10,020) before returning to camp, having logged forty-two miles. His brother Joe says that David knew the elevation of every major peak in the Sierra and kept track of all his hikes and climbs.
The following May, Brower got welcome news: he would be hired for another summer at Echo Lake Camp. In his second summer at the camp, Brower became acquainted with a camper who suggested that, since he so loved the mountains, he investigate the Sierra Club and consider joining it. As part of the investigation Brower visited the club's headquarters in San Francisco and began collecting and devouring back issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin, then published annually; it had been started in 1893, a year after the club's founding in 1892. He wouldn't get around to joining the club for another two years.
He also began reading the works of John Muir, the Scotsman who arrived in San Francisco in 1868 and wrote volumes about his travels in the Sierra, Alaska, and many other places. Muir's favorite spot was Yosemite Valley and surroundings, and he and the publisher of Century Magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, for whom Muir frequently wrote articles, hatched the idea of expanding the Yosemite Reserve — the valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant redwoods set aside by Congress and President Lincoln in 1864 — to include nearly a million acres, temporarily leaving responsibility for the valley and the Mariposa Grove to California. There was little resistance, and the park was created in 1890. Yosemite National Park was born. This seemed to have caught some commercial interests by surprise, and shortly loggers, miners, and sheep-ranchers, who sought to whittle the park down by a considerable fraction, mounted an attack. To counter this assault, Muir and several friends and acquaintances from the Bay Area founded the Sierra Club to defend the new park. A major battle ensued, in which the Sierra Club largely prevailed. Minor boundary adjustments were made, and in 1906, the state conveyed the valley and the grove to the federal government.
One of Muir's better-known essays concerns his penchant for climbing high in tall trees during storms to enjoy the full power of the wind and rain. Brower, during his first summer at Echo Lake Camp, decided to try this stunt himself, with somewhat disappointing results. "I was rather disillusioned in my tree-climb. ... The most fun was had in talking about it afterwards. In the tree I found plenty of pitch and on the descent very prettily scratched my arm. However, if I find another easy tree I'll do it again."
Brower worked at Echo Lake for three summers, 1930–32, and became thoroughly addicted to high country. He also became addicted to climbing mountains, but the technical climbs he would become well-known for would wait a while. Tallac, Dick's, Jack's, Pyramid, and the others require no ropes or pitons. But here was the thing: David Brower was scared of heights. Just as he would overcome his shyness by teaching himself to be comfortable speaking to audiences from one to ten thousand or more, he overcame his fear of heights by learning to climb mountains. It was a character trait that led him to confront challenges head on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from David Brower by Tom Turner. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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