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GRAND TRAILBLAZER
Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. Lurry Anderson. 2002. 464 p., $45 cloth. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Benton MacKaye had an orderly mind. When he gazed at a landscape-natural or built-he saw points of convergence and dispersal, entrance and exit, movement and stasis. And with pen or pencil in hand, he would sketch out these lines, whether radiating from mountain top or river bottom, urban avenue or village railhead. He thought with a cartographical imagination that seemed intuitive to him. It makes sense, in any event, that the man who would dream up the remarkable Appalachian Trail-which snakes 2,169 miles, runs through 14 states, and is anchored by Maine's Mount Katahdin and Georgia's Springer Mountain-would as an adolescent think just as grandly. In 1893, 14-year-old Benton climbed the modest slope of Hunting Hill near his family's home in Shirley, Massachusetts, and observed: "As I sit looking off this [drumlin] only 542 feet high, taking in the beauty of the scenery, I have the country spread out like a map before me."
So opens Larry Anderson's superb and much-anticipated biography of Benton MacKaye. Rich in detail (a sign of Anderson's diligent research), and smart in its analysis (an indication of his supple intellect), the book brings the often-quirky MacKaye to life. In weaving together his subject's private worries and public activism, Anderson has given us the definitive and first full biographical treatment of MacKaye, a remarkable achievement.
At the heart of its success, the book establishes the many and varied cultural contexts through which this most peripatetic, and long-lived, man moved. There was, apparently, little in the intellectual ferment of the 20th century that MacKaye did not encounter or embrace. (And in that sense, the biography's subtitle is too short!)
At Harvard College, he hung out with budding socialists and free thinkers, and yearned to repair a broken world. But it was his youthful nature studies that landed him a profession and a real job. In 1905, after receiving Harvard's first graduate degree in forestry, MacKaye cruised private timber stands in New Hampshire as a Forest Service employee and subsequently taught in the Harvard program from which he had received his degree. In time, his work in academia and the...