How a New Yorker essay helped save a river from destruction — and one Penn alumnus from a career in law.
By Dennis Drabelle
It’s been almost 17 years since I left the law for a career as a writer and editor. The transition was rough: the predictable plunge in income, the inevitable floundering as you take up a new profession and fashion a new way of working (I am the best of bosses and the worst of bosses — my own), the dismay of relatives. My father, for one, could never understand why I “wasted” my law-school education at Penn (Class of 1969). Yet I also have a master’s in English from the University (Class of 1966), and he never worried about my wasting that.
I tried to tell him that practicing law proved to be less engaging than studying it with Paul Bender and Paul Mishkin and Robert Gorman and several other stimulating profs teaching at Penn in the late sixties. But Dad’s young manhood had coincided with the Depression, and he didn’t have much sympathy for “less engaging.” What I should have told him is that I’d always wanted to write and wasn’t sure why I enrolled in law school in the first place. Maybe I just wasn’t ready to start real life yet. Or maybe I sensed that immersion in the law’s rigors and practicalities would make me a broader, savvier writer, as I hope it has.
In law school I daydreamed of combining the two disciplines — law and literature, which was the title of a fat paperback I bought and dipped into as time permitted. It contained an excerpt from Holmes’s The Common Law, one of Rebecca West’s reports on the Nuremberg Trials, Auden’s poem “Law Like Love,” and much more. And it implied that you could be both a man of letters and a servant of the law. My chance came a few years after graduation, in a way I never expected.
During my time at Penn Law, the air was saturated with sixties idealism, and I interviewed only for jobs with the federal government (which, at least on the domestic front, was still widely considered a force for good). After graduation I went directly to Washington to work for the Federal Communications Commission and then the Interior Department, where, in 1974, I became counsel to the assistant secretary who supervises parks and wildlife: the incumbent was a conservation-minded Florida Republican named Nathaniel Reed.
One of the projects I inherited was a $100-million dam to be built on the Meramec River in Missouri (my home state), about 65 miles southwest of St. Louis. Our office was involved as the federal wildlife advocate: the impounded river would have drowned caves sheltering the endangered Indiana bat. As he handed over the case-file, the man I was replacing admitted he hadn’t made much headway with it. Federal agents were already buying up land, and “everybody” supported the dam: the Army Corps of Engineers, which was champing to build it; Governor Christopher Bond, who saw it as bully for business; and the state congressional delegation, which was keen to deliver it as pork. “Everybody” was on board, that is, but some stubborn local landowners and conservationists.
In today’s climate of budget-cutting and distrust of grandiose federal projects, it’s hard to remember that a generation ago mighty forces were lined up behind dam-construction — local boosters and land speculators, bacon-bearing politicians, empire-building engineers. (Jimmy Carter found this out the hard way. His 1977 list of environmentally-obnoxious projects, in which dams were heavily featured, riled up so many politicians of both parties that his presidency never quite recovered.)
The powers behind Meramec Dam touted it mainly as a flood-control project, but the list of its purported benefits was swollen with all the frolicing that people would do on the lake formed by the dam — speedboating, water-skiing, flatwater fishing, and the like. Never mind that the state was already splattered with dammed rivers and artificial lakes or that the Meramec was a swift, handsome river, flowing from the Ozarks east to the Mississippi, with its own whitewater thrills to offer. Souped-up sports were what the people craved — or so the Corps thought.
The threat to the Meramec struck a nerve in me, especially when I found out what would happen to Green’s Cave. As teenagers in the early 1960s, my buddies and I had fled the suburbs of St. Louis for parent-free weekends along the Meramec, and a highlight of those getaways had been merely standing under the stupendous, gaping entrance to Green’s Cave. If the dam were built, the cave would go under. In 1974, I was still young enough to sell myself a romantic notion: I was destined to save the Meramec and its caves.
This was a tricky mission. In an administration (the Nixon-Ford) that was generally pro-development, our office functioned as a kind of environmental safety-valve, but we had to proceed gingerly about undermining an official position. Though it’s safe to assume that neither president ever gave a thought to Meramec Dam, the project bore an imprimatur from the Office of Management and Budget, the president’s policy-setting bureau. This left us in a tight spot.
Yet we could surely speak out on behalf of the bat and perhaps, by extension, against the dam. We could invoke the Endangered Species Act, which strongly suggested that the project must stop in its tracks, though nobody on the other side wanted to read the law that way. We could raise tough questions in letters to the Corps — and leak these to the press. And we could call attention to the river.
While recovering from surgery in early 1975, I became intoxicated by the idea that a well-wrought essay extolling the river’s wild beauty would convert all but the most mule-headed reader into a dam opponent — that prose-style, in other words, could go forth and change policy. (And perhaps, on some symbolic level, I was hoping that my master’s in English could hold its own against my law degree.) I thought of Berton Roueché.
A New Yorker writer from the 1940s to the early 1990s, Roueché was famous for his elegant, clever mysteries. I don’t mean the four suspense novels he wrote but the dozens of reportorial essays on baffling symptoms and elusive diseases and the epidemiologists who sorted them all out. These pieces, which TheNew Yorker published under the rubric Annals of Medicine, won him several prizes, including a Raven from the Mystery Writers of America. I can’t speak to their science, though I’m told it’s impeccable, but as narratives they retain every cc. of their slightly morbid strength. (They were gathered periodically in such books as Eleven Blue Men and The Incurable Wound, and eventually in a pair of omnibus collections, The MedicalDetectives and The Medical Detectives Volume II.)
Roueché also reported on small towns and wild America, and it was that side of him that appealed to me most. He flourished in an era when The New Yorker‘s contents were governed less by hot buttons or headlines than by the eclectic tastes of its superb writers. Its pages were thick with Genet and Rebecca West, Cheever and Stafford, Perelman and White, Liebling and Mitchell, and you might pick up an issue almost wholly given over to Capote or Salinger. Roueché never took up that kind of space. His forte was the miniature, not the mural: the longest continuous work he published was his second novel, The Last Enemy, a sylph of a book at 224 pages. But he appeared regularly in the magazine, where he had few equals at the Conradian feat of making you see and feel a landscape.
Or a riverscape. A Missourian by birth, Roueché had canoed the streams that later became the Ozark National Riverway, and then had commemorated the experience in an elegiac piece, “A Day on the River,” which contains this kinetic description of rapid-running: “There was a spume of white water up ahead. Then, with a thump, we were in it. The boat shot forward like a sled on ice. We slicked over a sunken log. We skinned past a seething snag. We slapped and shuddered down a corrugation of bowling-ball boulders. And emerged in a long, placid, sun-swept pool.”
I was familiar with those rivers, I loved that essay and that passage, and I wrote Roueché out of the blue, appealing to his roots in Missouri and proposing that he meet me there and lend the river his voice. He replied almost at once: “The story you suggest interests me very much … I intend to talk to the New Yorker’s editor when I am next in town … I am hopeful that he will approve.”
The great prospect was confirmed in a follow-up note 10 days later: the legendary William Shawn had given his O.K. The canoe-trip was a go as soon as I was feeling up to it.
Roueché turned out to be an affable, unassuming man in his sixties, with a nostalgic gusto for country cooking and a prodigious capacity for taking notes, complete with quick sketches of scenes he wanted to remember. And our spring day on the water was flawless — sunny and fresh, with a rakish current and herons and kingfishers posing on branches overhead. There was one mishap. Roueché and his guide tipped over; writer and notebook got drenched. Not only did he take this in stride; later, back home at his typewriter on Long Island, he played it up as a self-joshing vignette.
I made sure we stopped at Green’s Cave. Roueché seemed impressed — but left it out of the piece he wrote. At first I was astonished. But we’d visited two other caves, and a writer has to make choices. On the other hand, seeing the river for the first time, Roueché homed in on things I took for granted, like the bucolic scene, viewed from a cliff-top, that gave his story its climax:
“The river, winding in from behind a point of woods on the right, was wide and slow and a shining bottle green. Across the river, beyond a brushy island and the brushy farther shore, stretched a rolling pasture with a scatter of grazing cattle, and beyond the pasture was a long hedgerow, and beyond the hedgerow were a tiny house and a barn and sheds, and then another pasture rising in the dimming distance to a lift of wooded ridge. I … looked out across the wide green river and the wider, greener fields. It was the loveliest countryside I had ever seen in America — the loveliest and the most serenely peaceful and fulfilling. I wondered if I would ever see it again. I wondered … how long it would be here for anyone to see. I knew … that when or if they built the dam this would all be lake — the whole of this fruitful valley, from halfway down the cliff almost to the beginning of the ridge on the far horizon.”
(If there’s a secret to Roueché’s energetic style, by the way, I believe it’s his penchant for conveying action with verblike nouns and nounlike verbs: a “scatter” of cattle, a “corrugation” of boulders, a canoe that “slicked” over a log.)
Appearing in the fall of 1975, the article had its intended effect — especially that liftable quote about “the loveliest countryside I had ever seen in America.” The sophisticated New Yorker had made a fuss over the little-known Meramec, and Roueché’s rhapsody started the river’s long, slow reversal of fortune. Anti-dam pressure kept building, in Missouri and around the country: on weekends I saw STOP MERAMEC DAM bumper stickers along the East Coast music-festival trail. Finally, the governor agreed to hold a referendum. In 1978 the voters rejected the dam by a 2-1 margin, and Congress cancelled it.
As long as I was at Interior, Roueché and I had an understanding. From my wide-angled federal viewpoint, I would supply him with story ideas, and he would try to give imperiled natural areas the visibility they deserved. For one reason or another, though, my other suggestions didn’t work out. Then I left the government and the law, started writing for a living, and reckoned I’d better hang on to my story ideas.
“Countryside,” Roueché’s essay on the river, can be found in his 1985 book Sea to Shining Sea. By the time of his death, in 1994, The New Yorker had stopped publishing his kind of piece. But just that once was enough. It took a battery of approaches to stop Meramec Dam — attacks on the Corps’s numbers and geological assumptions, close readings of the Endangered Species Act, a timely leak from a study that showed a shortage of whitewater recreation in Missouri — but I’m convinced that the Meramec owes its free flow above all to Berton Roueché’s vigorously beautiful prose. Neither Penn nor any other law school I’m aware of taught environmental law in the 1960s, so I can’t draw an unswerving line from my coursework to those canoes on the river. But I’m grateful that my law-school training and serendipity helped put me in a position to bring that book title to life: Law and Literature.
Dennis Drabelle, G’66, L’69, received the National Book Critics Circle’s 1996 citation for excellence in reviewing. He lives in Washington, D.C.