taught me that moss bloomed, my mom recalled, tears of gratitude and surprise and profound loss overtaking her.
Theodore Roosevelt was just such a man. After he passed on January 6, 1919, the journal Natural History devoted an entire issue in memoriam. Naturalists lined up to eulogize. “Never before in my life,” the great nature writer and Roosevelt pal John Burroughs wrote, “has it been so hard for me to accept the death of any man as it has been for me to accept the death of Theodore Roosevelt. I think I must have felt that his power to live was inconquerable.” Burroughs goes on to attribute his inexplicable sense to Roosevelt's unbounded energy and vitality, to the wellspring in him of the “perennial forces of nature.” We felt this way about my grandmother, too—she drew her substance from the creek waters and the wind in the walnuts, she was alive to the extent that she embodied nature, and she was alive in every sense.
Nature made Roosevelt young, as it makes most of us young. In his National Geographic tribute “TR's Wilderness Legacy,” John Eliot recounts how Senator Henry Cabot Lodge once had to call down the President, literally, shouting “Theodore! Theodore! If you knew how ridiculous you look at the top of the tree, you would come down at once.” Richard Louv, author of the surprise 2005 bestseller Last Child in the Woods, would delight at TR's childlike silliness. “In nature,” he reminds, “a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace.” Though remembered as a man of bombast and big stick, Roosevelt was, as Burroughs points out, more naturalist than sportsman, and, we should add, more peace-lover than warmonger, as his too-readily-forgotten 1906 Nobel Peace Prize attests.
It is said that when we are young, we are green—full of life force, of sap, of anticipation as palpable as any fern's unfurling. Thus it is that this collection celebrates, in Theodore Roosevelt's own, best words, the thrill, not of the hunt, but of Edenic contact with nature, of wide-eyed and clear-eyed natural enthusiasms both newly born and carefully nurtured across a lifetime. Had Roosevelt not occupied the office of the Presidency, with all of its enemy-making and partisan-baiting potential, notes TR scholar Paul Schullery, he would instead be memorialized as a