The River of the Mother of God: and other Essays by Aldo Leopold

The River of the Mother of God [1924]

The River of the Mother of God [1924] The Yale Review, a literary magazine, turned down this most poignant of Leopold's wilderness essays. It remained in his desk as a yellowed, slightly edited typescript evoking the mystery of unknown places. I am conscious of a considerable personal debt to the continent of South America. It has given me, for instance, rubber for motor tires, which have carried me to lonely places on the face of Mother Earth where all her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. It has given me coffee, and to brew it, many a memorable campfire with the dawn-wind rustling in autumnal trees. It has given me rare woods, pleasant fruits, leather, medicines, nitrates to make my garden bloom, and books about strange beasts and ancient peoples. I am not unmindful of my obligation for these things. But more than all of these, it has given me the River of the Mother of God. The river has been in my mind so long that I cannot recall just when or how I first heard of it. All that I remember is that long ago a Spanish Captain, wandering in some far Andean height, sent back word that he had found where a mighty river falls into the trackless Amazonian forest, and disappears. He had named it el Rio Madre de Dios. The Spanish Captain never came back. Like the river, he disappeared. But ever since some maps of South America have shown a shon heavy line running eastward beyond the Andes, a river without beginning and without end, and labelled it the River of the Mother of God. That shon heavy line flung down upon the blank vastness of tropical wilderness has always seemed the perfect symbol of the Unknown Places of the earth. And its name, resonant of the clank of silver armor and the cruel progress of the Cross, yet carrying a hush of reverence and a murmur of the prows of galleons on the seven seas, has always seemed the symbol of Con123 124 The River of the Mother of God quest, the Conquest that has reduced those Unknown Places, one by one, until now there are none left. And when I read that MacMillan has planted the Radio among the Eskimos of the furthest polar seas, and that Everest is all but climbed, and that Russia is founding fisheries in Wrangel Land, I know the time is not far off when there will no more be a short line on the map, without beginning and without end, no mighty river to fall from far Andean heights into the Amazonian wilderness, and disappear. Motor boats will sputter through those trackless forests, the clank of steam hoists will be heard in the Mountain of the Sun, and there will be phonographs and chewing gum upon the River of the Mother of God. No doubt it was "for this the earth lay preparing quintillions of years, for this the revolving centuries truly and steadily rolled." But it marks a new epoch in the history of mankind, an epoch in which Unknown Places disappear as a dominant fact in human life. Ever since paleolithic man became conscious that his own home hunting ground was only pan of a greater world, Unknown Places have been a seemingly fixed fact in human environment, and usually a major influence in human lives. Sumerian tribes, venturing the Unknown Places, found the valley ofthe Euphrates and an imperial destiny. Phoenician sailors, venturing the unknown seas, found Carthage and Cornwall and established commerce upon the earth. Hanno, Ulysses, Eric, Columbus-history is but a succession of adventures into the Unknown. For unnumbered centuries the test of men and nations has been whether they "chose rather to live miserably in this realm, pestered with inhabitants, or to venture forth, as becometh men, into those remote lands." And now, speaking geographically, the end of the Unknown is at hand. This fact in our environment, seemingly as fixed as the wind and the sunset, has at last reached the vanishing point. Is it to be expected that it shall be lost from human experience without something likewise being lost from human character? I think not. In fact, there is an instinctive human reaction against the loss of fundamental environmental influences, of which history records many examples. The chase, for instance, was a fundamental fact in the life of all nomadic tribes. Again and again, when these tribes conquered and took possession...