The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilderness, Wildlife, and Wild Places
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The Green Roosevelt: Theodore Roosevelt in Appreciation of Wilder ...

Chapter :  Introducing the Green Roosevelt
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of nature, so too did their father, some of whose old sentimentality—the very same he decried in the nature faker controversy—found fresh and often fun-loving expression. Describing an animal spectator to the family tennis match, Roosevelt registers paternal bemusement:

For three or four years a chipmunk—I suppose the same chipmunk—has lived near the tennis court; and it has developed the rather puzzling custom of sometimes scampering across the court while we are in the middle of a game. This has happened two or three times every year, and is rather difficult to explain, for the chipmunk could just as well go round the court, and there seems no possible reason why he should suddenly run out on it while the game is in full swing. If he is seen, everyone stops to watch him, and then he may himself stop and sit up to look about; but we may not see him until just as he is finishing a frantic scurry across, in imminent danger of being stepped on.69

On occasion, Roosevelt could be both “emphatic” and “refined,” challenging the false dichotomy applied by latter-day critics. In fact, he often turned to lyrical prose to describe the places, people, and animals with which he was most intimate, including such passages as this from Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography, in which Roosevelt describes the wildlife of Sagamore Hill:

Many birds dwell in the trees round the house or in the pastures and the woods nearby, and of course in winter gulls, loons, and wildfowl frequent the waters of the bay and the Sound. We love all the seasons; the snows and bare woods of winter; the rush of growing things and the blossom-spray of spring; the yellow grain, the ripening fruits and tasseled corn, and the deep, leafy shades that are heralded by “the green dance of summer”; and the sharp fall winds that tear the brilliant banners with which the trees greet the dying year.70

Theodore Roosevelt's great gift as a writer of the natural world, a talent first manifest in the fables and field diaries he penned as a child and adolescent—proved the ability to see both nature's warm romance and its cold ambivalence, to detach or attach as occasion demanded, and to