| Chapter : | Introducing the Green Roosevelt |
Roosevelt would later mitigate his scientific “desideratum” with literary, even poetic, studies of wildlife and wild places, drawing from the exuberant, wonder-filled narratives that thrilled him as a child. For Roosevelt, the well-written word served as a kind of scientific instrument, itself every bit as great in revelatory power as the microscope. He fancied well-wrought prose a kind of heuristic—a way of seeing—that sharpened and amplified and transformed ordinary eyewitness. To essay, after all, is quite literally to go forth, to track the migration of thought across an interior landscape of recollection and observation, much as Roosevelt the young ranchman traced the wanderings of wildlife across the cutbanks and copses and coulees of the Great Plains. And, as with the most ecstatic nature writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Muir—Roosevelt acknowledged and even celebrated the limitations of the written word to capture nature's splendor. “There are no words,” he opines in African Game Trials, “that can tell of the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, its charm.”54
Words, however inadequate, formed the instrumental, indispensable map, an appreciative, exacting topography of close affection. As the Bull Moose puts it in his essay “Indoors and Outdoors”: “There are men who love out-of-doors who yet never open a book; and other men who love books but to whom the great book of nature is a sealed volume, and the lines written therein blurred and illegible. Nevertheless among those men whom I have known the love of books and the love of outdoors, in their highest expressions, have usually gone hand in hand.”55 For TR, the usual antimonies—writer and participant, pragmatist and idealist, scientist and naturalist—disappear with proper balance achieved on the page and off. Nature, he felt, was mistranslated at every turn, both by sportsmen, who “seemed incapable of seeing anything except as a trophy,” and by scientists, those “stay-at-home systematists who never saw anything at all except skins and skulls.”56 Because Roosevelt's interaction with the land mobilized both sportsmen and scientists, he understood too well the liability of exclusive association with either. Caught in the middle, he endeavored to articulate to himself just what he brought to his respective affiliations. “I never grew,” TR reflects, “to have keen powers of