Nate Schweber - This America Of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild

For Kristen, emphatically

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Willa Cather

THE YOUNG WOMAN CLUTCHES THE CYLINDER and rushes through New York City as it is swallowed by darkness and lacquered in sleet on Wednesday, March 3. The city is in a state of emergency because a postal employee has found an unmarked envelope with five hand-scribbled pages that say 150 bombs will explode at rush hour. Hundreds of law enforcement officers, fearing Russian attack, slop through Times Square, Pennsylvania Station, the Staten Island Ferry terminal. They stop cars, tear through baggage at Grand Central Terminal, trace rat paths through dank subway tunnels. After the young woman sloshes up the steps of the Beaux-Arts postal service building in Midtown Manhattan and slips through the Corinthian colonnade, FBI agents stop her.

What have you got there, miss?

Powder, she replies.

In her trembling hands is the address for Bernard and Avis DeVoto, one of the most consequential couples of the twentieth century, whose business with whatever is in the cylinder alarms the agents. They detain Jeanne-Marie Kranich and tear open her parcel, revealing a tin. Kranich pleads that she is only running an errand for her boss. Agents pop open the tin and from it wafts a savory-smelling ochre plume that no one can identify. A daring man touches finger to tongue, taps the substance, and darts it back. He grimaces, shakes his head like a dog, and suffers no ill effect. When rush hour ends without carnage, the letter is deemed a false alarm. Agents escort Kranich to have the parcel rewrapped at a stationery store and addressed to 8 Berkeley Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of the DeVotos.

On March 5, Avis DeVoto fails to find the Vencatachellum Madras curry powder she asked for from her friend, a food writer who, with terrible timing, sent his secretary to the post office. Sometime after the curry was mailed, it was inexplicably removed from the package and replaced with one pound of peanuts, still shelled. An insomniac crime reporter puts the strange tale in the New York Times on May 22. A Curry Mystery... Great Powder Disappearance Involves Seizure by FBI of Lovely Secretary declares the headline. There is a chance that J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has it.

The Times reporter is the first to postulate that the nations foremost law enforcement officer is interested in the DeVotos.

Around the DeVoto breakfast table where eggs, newspapers, and Chesterfield cigarettes are devoured, the article delivers bombs of laughter. As a bonus, it is Aviss forty-fourth birthday. Having sent her foodie friend, Fletcher Pratt, a sarcastic thank-you for the peanuts, she mails the Times reporter, George Horne, a rollicking bravo. Bernard DeVoto, fifty-one, a writer, historian, and conservationist, tucks the article in his files. His crusading for public lands is dovetailing with his defense of the Bill of Rights, and he is collecting details about increasingly intrusive and opaque government investigations. He fears their potential co-option by land despoilers with intent to target, harass, smear, censor, and persecute.

A shared righteous sense of humor still draws the DeVotos together as it did when he was a misunderstood twenty-five-year-old who found in a radiant eighteen-year-old kindred spirit from Michigans Upper Peninsula the courage, faith, certainty that quelled his thoughts of suicide. Now, laugh lines and two sons testify to the longevity of their union, one fused by symbiosisshe loves to cook, he loves to eat, he loves to write, she loves to edit, he loves attention, she cherishes her privacy. As the marriage enters its climactic act, Avis remains in awe of her husbands Promethean mind. He could surprise me to the day he died, she will say of Bernard, pronounced BERN-ard, whom she dresses down at home as DeVoto, B., and damn genius. He holds scholarly accolades but she is more emotionally intelligent. An empath, Avis usually better interprets overtones of a situation. But where she falters, he develops intuitions and understandings quite beyond mine. Their intellects are as simpatico as their souls. They both feel the ramifications of the accusation from Wyoming.

On June 1 in the tiny, windy High Plains town of Douglas, some of the Wests largest cattle ranchers, dressed in suits and Stetsons, discuss how to dispense with Bernard DeVoto. The elite Wyoming Stock Growers Association seethes because in Harpers Magazine Bernard exposed and thwarted a secret plot by its leaders to force the sell-off of as much as 230 million acres of Americas public lands, including national parks, monuments, forests, and grasslands. The DeVotos uncovered the plot on an epic 1946 cross-country road trip, and in his 1947 blockbuster expos The West Against Itself, Bernard wrote (paraphrasing Woody Guthries fresh folk classic) this is your land we are talking about. In retaliation, a Cheyenne newspaper printed the associations statement saying that Bernard should have a hammer and sickle over his desk. Bernard joked that until reading that he had no idea he was a Communist. Hoover, missing the humor, keeps the quote underlined with an arrow pointing to it in the same classified Washington, DC, file where he stashes a synopsis about the curry.

Meanwhile in Cambridge, Bernard studies arcane congressional reports through the spring of 1948 and his blood chills when he sees that the National Park Service faces a new existential crisis. It is the scariest threat to the services integrity since Congress created it in 1916 with a mandate to protect land unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations. Bernard discovers that the Bureau of Reclamation plans to dam an awesome, ancient sandstone chasm carved by the Green River inside Dinosaur National Monument. That wild canyon country, straddling the border of Colorado and his home state of Utah, is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. If the Bureau of Reclamation can smash down the legal barrier protecting Dinosaur National Monument, it will expose all national parks and level a path for plunderers of all public lands. Like guillotine blades, more dams will fall on national parks: Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yellowstone in Wyoming, Glacier in Montana, Kings Canyon in California, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Ultimately, as many as 75 percent of the acres inside the nations parks, monuments, forests, and grasslands could be thrown open to clear-cutting, livestock grazing, mining, real estate developmentand closed to the public. Bernard considers this not only as a lover of pristine, open country, but as a social historian extrapolating how environmental devastation and monopolization of natural resource wealth in the West will spark factional war and threaten the union. He receives an alarming June 10 letter from National Park Service director Newton Drury confirming that the parks are on very thin ice.

Most responsible is Patrick McCarran, Democratic senator from Nevada, whose paranoia is eclipsed only by his parliamentary genius. McCarran withholds appropriations from the National Park ServiceOne can raise merry havoc with these departments by the control of their purse strings, he has boastedand showers his favorite bureaus with money and power. One is the Bureau of Reclamation. Another is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While nurturing Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, McCarran tacitly conscripts the FBI as the vigilante arm of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.