Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism

8. A Sand County Almanac

79 In early July 1941, Leopold flew to the Delta Waterfowl Station in Manitoba, Canada, where he conferred with his former student and station director, Al Hochbaum. As Meine details, Leopold and Hochbaum had for some time spoken informally about working together on a book of essays.1 Leopold was to provide the text, Hochbaum the drawings. By August 1941, plans for the book had become more definite, though the two men set no firm schedule. That fall, Leopold began crafting the first essays, drawing from his Shack experiences.2 About the same time, Harold Strauss, an editor at Knopf, approached Leopold about pulling together “a good book on wildlife observations . . . a personal book recounting adventures in the field.” Leopold turned the project down but offered that he was “focusing my effort on a series of ecological essays, illustrated, as a Christmas book for next year. The M.S. is well along. Are you interested by any chance?” Meine says, “Strauss replied that he was ‘emphatically interested’ . . . so much interested that I am not chap ter eight A Sand County Almanac 80 / A Sand County Almanac inclined to wait until the manuscript is altogether finished. Won’t you send me whatever material is in shape?”3 By April 1943, nearly eighteen months had passed since Leopold had corresponded with Strauss about the essay book. Strauss was in the army and his successor, J.R. de la Torre Bueno, said to Leopold he would be “very happy to hear from you about your work whenever you have anything to say.”4 As Leopold completed essays he would send them to Hochbaum . During the first half of 1944 they corresponded extensively. As Meine describes it, Hochbaum was a direct and honest critic, and Leopold responded quickly and openly to his sometimes personal suggestions. Both seemed to enjoy this literary give-and-take, which “would alter not only the flavor of Leopold’s essays, but also the process of self examination that went into them.”5 Considering the essays as a whole, Hochbaum wrote, “In many of these you seem to follow one formula: you paint a beautiful picture of something that was—a bear, crane, or a parcel of wilderness —then in a word or an epilogue, you, sitting more or less aside as a sage, deplore the fact that brute man has spoiled the things you love. This is never tiresome, and it drives your point deep.” Then Hochbaum expressed his biggest concern, “Still, you never drop a hint that you yourself have once despoiled or at least had a strong hand in it. In your writings of the day, you played a hand in influencing the policies, for your case against the wolf was as strong then as for wilderness now. I just read they killed the last lobo in Montana last year. I think you’ll have to admit you’ve got at least a drop of its blood on your hands.” Hochbaum then gives appropriate perspective to the situation: “You already sit in a circle which may never hold more than a dozen in the century. What you thought 20 years ago has small part in your influence. A Sand County Almanac / 81 Still, I think your case for wilderness is all the stronger if, in one of these pieces, you admit that you haven’t always smoked the same tobacco.”6 Leopold responded, though not initially, and not without some pushback, by penning, on April 1, 1944, one of his classic essays, “Thinking like a Mountain.” 7 That spring, while attending the Ninth North American Wildlife Conference in Chicago, Leopold met Wellmer Pessels, the editor of outdoor books for Macmillan. Like Strauss from Knopf, she expressed an interest and asked him to send her what he had. That summer, according to Meine, Leopold arranged his thirteen essays in the following order: “Marshland Elegy,”* “Song of the Gavilan,”* “Guacamaja,” “Escudilla,” “Smokey Gold,” “Odyssey ,”* “Draba,” “Great Possessions,” “The Green Lagoons,”* “Illinois Bus Ride,” “Pines above the Snow,”* “Thinking like a Mountain ,” and “The Geese Return.”8 Five (asterisked above) had been published before. Leopold called the collection Thinking like a Mountain—and Other Essays. On June 6, 1944 (D-day), he sent his essays and Hochbaum’s drawings to Macmillan. A month later, Pessels wrote back to say (“with real regret”) that although she thought they were “beautiful . . . we do not feel that we...