Arthur Carhart: Wilderness Prophet

7: Hog Wild on Recreation

129 Introduction: The Quitter? Carhart’s stint in the U.S. Army showed that he could serve a cause. His later federal work showed that he could function in a bureaucracy, although never smoothly. After he left the Forest Service, he spent the next fifty-six years serving the cause of conservation with honor and distinction—and a fierce sense of independence. As George Carhart had warned his son, leaving the Forest Service would exact a pound of flesh. Carhart paid this price in terms both emotional and financial. The Carharts, for example, did not move into their own house in Park Hill until June 1927. Always mercurial, Carhart began his final year with the Forest Service by exploring other ways to serve the cause of conservation. A return to private Hog Wild on Recreation Other districts, I am told, consider this one “hog wild” on recreation. And all we are trying to do is to get a regional plan started before there is necessity of doing any work. Just the other day the District Forester told me that he was certain that if I was turned loose on this work without the restraint imposed by the foresters of the organization that I would run riot on recreation and carry it far beyond any reasonable bounds. Perhaps I do seem aggressively radical to many of them but it is because I have to scrap continually and in a somewhat radical fashion to get any consideration whatever. I am not done with recreation in National Forests when I leave. I will not be muzzled by censorship that exists in the department and while I am not going to do any “muckraking” I will be free to tell my ideas and views without restriction. —Arthur Carhart, 19221 C h a p t e r s e v e n Hog Wild on Recreation 130 practice in landscape architecture seemed to offer the best possibilities, and Carhart’s correspondence with American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) dignitaries like James Pray took on a tone at once personal and professional . Sensing that he could no longer trust Carl Stahl or E. A. Sherman, Carhart sought mentors in Pray, Irvin McCrary, and Frank Culley. After some agonizing, he found what he was looking for at the end of 1922, when he resigned from the Forest Service to become the junior partner with the new landscape architecture firm of McCrary, Culley, & Carhart. In the meantime, Carhart had to manage his transition out of the Forest Service. It was not easy, for both Carhart and his Forest Service colleagues nurtured an ambivalence that lasted more than half a century. Toward the end of Carhart’s career, when the doctrine of Multiple Use had come under fire and the Forest Service found it expedient to write its own history to counter critics , Forest Service historian Frank Harmon recruited the eighty-one-year-old Carhart to the cause. Donald Baldwin’s book had just appeared, and Harmon gave a copy to former Forest Service chief Richard McArdle, who said: I suppose I should enter a protestation of my own. I knew and liked Art Carhart. We first met in 1935 when I moved to Colorado. We continued our friendship over the years. Carhart quite the FS [Forest Service] after about 3½ years because he was impatient with official acceptance by the FS of all his ideas and proposals. He wanted immediate action, now, at once and no quibbling about it. I never heard any disagreement in the FS about Carhart’s ideas or philosophies but I can understand why the FS could not immediately and at once drop everything else and put all of these into effect everywhere. For one thing there was neither money nor legislative authority for recreation. There were other obstacles. When I was in the FS I never could do all the things I knew should be done as quickly as possible. We did do most of them eventually. Carhart was never vindictive. He maintained his good relations with FS people. But I often wondered how much more would have been done and how much faster recreational use would have developed if Carhart had curbed his impatience and stuck with the job. He quit just as the times began to be on his side. Which I always thought was a loss to Carhart as well as to the FS.2 I Feel in Need of Advice and Grave Counsel Carhart spent the winter of 1921...