David Gessner - Leave It As it Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelts American Wilderness

ALSO BY DAVID GESSNER

Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth

All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

The Tarball Chronicles

My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism

Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond

The Prophet of Dry Hill: Lessons from a Life in Nature

Sick of Nature

Return of the Osprey: A Season of Flight and Wonder

Under the Devils Thumb

A Wild, Rank Place: One Year on Cape Cod

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Copyright 2020 by David Gessner

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition June 2020

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Interior design by Paul Dippolito

Maps by Alexis Seabrook

Jacket design by Matt Iacovelli

Jacket photography (top) by Bob Thomason / Getty Images; (bottom) by Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gessner, David, 1961 author. | Simon and Schuster, Inc.

Title: Leave it as it is : a journey through Theodore Roosevelts American wilderness / by David Gessner.

Other titles: Journey through Theodore Roosevelts American wilderness

Description: First Simon & Schuster Hardcover Edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster, 2020. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019051718 (print) | LCCN 2019051719 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982105044 (Hardcover) | ISBN 9781982105051 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781982105068 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism--United States--History. | National parks and reserves--United States--History. | Nature conservation--United States--History. | Forest conservation--United States--History. | Conservation of natural resources--United States--History. | Gessner, David, 1961---Travel. | Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919--Travel--California--Yosemite Valley.

Classification: LCC GE195 .G385 2020 (print) | LCC GE195 (ebook) | DDC 333.78/3160973--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051718

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051719

ISBN 978-1-9821-0504-4

ISBN 978-1-9821-0506-8 (ebook)

For Edmund Morris and Walter Jackson Bate, great biographers whose lives continue to inspire

PRELUDE Theodore on the Edge

He stands on the edge of the world, the great shimmering orange-red-and-bruise-colored chasm opening below him. Ravens lift off and ride the wind. He is bristling with energy at this moment. Which is to say it is like most of his waking moments.

Curious, always curious, he is a lover equally of the world and books about it. On the ride up here through the small juniper forest, always the show-off, he pointed out and named all the birds he saw to his companions. From his horse he studied the chickadees and towhees and pinyon jays and nuthatchestheir calls higher pitched than those back eastand stopped to listen to the sound of a woodpecker cracking open a pion nut. He knows these birds, knows their names, and he knows this canyon, too, though until today only through the words of others.

The president came to this place with expectations, like almost everyone else. The earliest explorers might not have known what to make of the canyon, and the first white settlers might have been surprised, and even angered, by what they saw as a colossal hole blocking their way west. But for more than a century now almost everyone who arrives here at the South Rim, who ascends out of the desert into the cool pine-scented air, does so knowing that something astounding awaits. Theodore Roosevelt is no different in this regard: even before he encountered the place, he had seen drawings and photos, and read plenty of descriptions. In fact he wrote most of the speech he will deliver an hour from nowwhen he will talk to the crowd of eight hundred gathering near the canyons edgewithout having ever laid eyes on the Grand Canyon itself. He did so, as he does many things, in a hurry, writing it this morning in his sleeping car as his train hurtled through New Mexico and into Arizona.

For the last month his life has been a paradox of speed and stillness, as he travels on his private train to some of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring places in North America, and then, after a few speeches, rushes off to the next place. It is 1903, and he is on a campaign tour for reelection, the first of its kind for a sitting president, during which he will travel more than a hundred miles a day, by train and car, and give close to two hundred speeches. An occasional insomniac and chronic coffee drinker (always with plenty of sugar please), he bristles with plans and schemes, ideas popping into his head at all hours, his famous enthusiasm bordering on, and perhaps sometimes slipping over into, mania. We humans are an elsewhere, the poet Reg Saner will one day write. Teddy is more elsewhere than most.

Except when he isnt. Because for someone so ambitious, so eager to get on with the next task, he is shockingly good at slowing down time, at what we might call, in a phrase he would no doubt find disagreeable, being in the now. Whether he is staring down a charging grizzly or diving into the bracing winter water of Washington, D.C.s Rock Creek Park or listening to the music of wind tinkling the cottonwood leaves, he seems to have the gift of becoming absorbed. This comes through most famously in his bouts of roughhousing with his children on the White House lawn. Even while burdened by the presidency, he has an enviable ability to slough off his heavy loads and simply enjoy himself.

Nothing quite takes him out of himself, nothing quiets his restless, fact-filled, febrile mind, like nature. He has already snuck off while camping at Yellowstone, walking eighteen miles alone to study a herd of elk. And in less than two weeks his fourteen-thousand-mile road trip will climax when he leaves his Secret Servicemen behind and embarks on a legendary excursion with the great prophet and protector of the natural world John Muir. That excursion in Yosemite will be long remembered as perhaps the most famous camping trip since Jesus spent his forty days in the desert. Think of it. The president of the United States sleeping outside under the stars with the countrys most famous lover of nature. Details from the night are sparse but we do know that the president was critical of the prophets bird knowledge and that the prophet questioned the morality of the presidents bloodlust as a hunter. But I wonder what else happened as they stared into the fire and talked? Perhaps a form of osmosis affected Roosevelt. Perhaps the idea that wilderness was vital, not just for any human purpose, but for itself, began to grow.