As a law student in the 1960s, I dipped into an anthology called The Law as Literature, which included an excerpt from Rebecca West’s scintillating coverage of the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker. Her example made me wonder whether it would be possible to bring literature to bear on a pending policy issue and carry the day. In 1975, six years after getting my degree, I was hoping to answer that question in the affirmative by recruiting another New Yorker writer to a cause I espoused.
My target was Berton Roueché, who had gathered several of his environmental articles into a book called What’s Left: Reports on a Diminishing America (1968). The report of most interest to me was “A Day on the River,” about a canoeing trip Roueché had taken on the Current River in Missouri, now part of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways but in need of preservation at the time of his visit. Growing up in St. Louis, I had canoed frequently on the Current, and I knew that before joining the staff of The New Yorker, Roueché had been a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
In late February 1975, I wrote to him in care of his magazine about a threat to another Missouri river.
At the time, I was counsel to Nathaniel Reed, the assistant secretary of Interior who supervised the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency primarily responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Signed into law by President Nixon in 1973, the act sought to protect animal and plant species slipping perilously close to extinction. It mandated the compilation of an endangered species list and prohibited federal agencies from taking any action likely to jeopardize the continued existence of an endangered species or to destroy its critical habitat.
The Army Corps of Engineers had in the meantime zeroed in on the Meramec River, which flows northeast from the Ozark Mountains to join the Mississippi just south of St. Louis. For the purposes of flood control and recreation, the Corps wanted to dam the Meramec, creating a 13,000-acre lake that would consign to watery oblivion a plethora of farms, bucolic landscapes, caves, and canoeing routes. Some of the caves were habitat for Myotis sodalis, the Indiana bat, which was on the endangered list. Although local residents and weekenders from St. Louis tended to prefer the river as it was, the dam was championed by labor unions for the construction jobs it would create; by chambers of commerce for the revenue it would bring from devotees of flatwater recreation (speedboaters, water skiers, resort owners, and the like); by land speculators anticipating a regional boom; and by the Meramec Basin Association, a lobbying group touting the lake as a driving force for economic stimulus. There was no doubt that the dam’s construction and operation would further endanger some Indiana bats, but thwarting a project with so much support was a tall order.
Like the Current, the Meramec meant something to me. One summer afternoon in 1961, three friends and I were playing cards at a picnic table overlooking the river when a drizzle of small, pale insects started falling. A fisherman identified them as mayflies, which spend most of their lives underwater before taking to the air, mating on the wing, and dying—typically within a span of 24 hours. When the drizzle became a blizzard, we retreated to our tents. The insect storm elevated the Meramec in my mind from weekend getaway to year-round incubator of Nature’s profusion, and 14 years later, I couldn’t stand by while a long stretch of the river and its environs were transformed into a monotonous artificial lake.
Not long after the Meramec file landed on my desk at Interior, the outlook for the river worsened. The Sierra Club had sued the Corps of Engineers for writing a shoddy environmental impact statement, but a judge ruled in favor of the Corps. What’s more, for one federal agency to take potshots at the work of another was both unusual and brash.
My letter to Berton Roueché was forwarded to his home on Long Island, and I soon received his response: “The story you suggest interests me very much. … I intend to talk to the New Yorker’s editor when I am next in town.” Ten days later, Roueché wrote again, this time on New Yorker stationery, to say that he looked forward to meeting me in Missouri for the float trip on which the article would center. A few weeks after that, I rendezvoused with him at the St. Louis airport. He was a trim, easygoing man who described himself as in his 60s “but not too decrepit, I hope.”
The day set aside for our excursion dawned sunny and warm, and in midmorning our four-canoe flotilla—populated by two biologists, a geologist, a couple of local Sierra Club members, a guide, Roueché, and myself—set out on a Meramec tributary. The air was scented with spring blossoms; the stream, as Roueché later wrote, was “full and fast and a gleaming, glittering, almost Caribbean green.” Paddling on the tributary, and later on the Meramec itself, we were favored with sightings of a green heron, a kingfisher, a turkey buzzard, brown flycatchers, and … mayflies. We stopped at a feature with the promising name of Bat Cave but saw no bats, Indiana or otherwise.
Roueché’s article, which ran under the title “Countryside” in the October 27, 1975, issue of The New Yorker, turned out to be everything one could ask for. (It was later reprinted in his 1985 collection, Sea to Shining Sea.) His treatment evoked what was at stake, including “the feel of speed one gets on an Ozark float—the illusory power of natural movement that makes a galloping horse between one’s knees seem faster than a racing car.” A little later, his canoe “gave a sudden slide, like a slip on ice. [A] chute loomed—a sunken log, a bony snag, a tumble of rocks, a skin of seething water. We scraped, crunched, lurched, and were through. We skittered almost broadside into a pool.”
In his article’s final paragraph, Roueché made the case for preservation. From a bluff above the Meramec, he “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 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.”
It’s impossible to say how many minds the piece changed, but a diatribe from the Meramec Basin Association’s president, James Gamble, suggested that “Countryside” had him scared. In an article published in the Post-Dispatch on February 24, 1976, Gamble was quoted as accusing Nat Reed of “intra-office conspiratorial-type conduct with one of his employees, Dennis Drabelle. Mr. Drabelle is a former resident of St. Louis who is enamored with canoeing. … He was one of those on a float trip several months ago with a reporter of a national magazine—stating his opposition to the lake and, no doubt, contributing in every way he could to the opposition flavor of the … magazine article.” The Post-Dispatch piece made no mention of the Indiana bat, which Nat and I, as stewards of the Endangered Species Act, were duty bound to protect as best we could.
We managed to get in one more lick—not all that literary but, once heard, hard to forget. In February 1976, the Sierra Club’s Missouri and Illinois chapters invited Nat to speak at their annual dinner, to be held at a state park across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Writing his speech, I tried to pinpoint why damming the Meramec was a lousy idea by branding it an “environmental Edsel.”
That slur may not mean much today, but in the mid-’70s it had topicality. Named after a member of the Ford family, the Edsel car had rolled out in 1957 as a much-ballyhooed new model, but—homely from its “horse-collar” grille to its nondescript rear end—it sold poorly and was discontinued after a couple of years, bequeathing its name as a synonym for fiasco. “Meramec Plan Called an ‘Edsel’ ” was the headline of a Post-Dispatch story published the day after Nat spoke. And in the May 5, 1976, edition of The Washington Star, an article headline mused, “Meramec Dam: An Environmental Edsel?”
Missouri’s U.S. senators, Democrat Thomas Eagleton and Republican John Danforth, were at loggerheads on the Meramec project—Eagleton for it and Danforth against—but agreed to put the issue to a referendum in the affected region: St. Louis, St. Louis County, and the counties along the river. On August 8, 1978, eligible Missourians voted the dam down by a 2–1 margin. Though nonbinding, the referendum marked the beginning of the end of Meramec Dam, which was deauthorized three years later.
Like many species of bat, the Indiana variety is today in direr shape than ever, but that’s another story. The American damming era has all but come to an end; the trend now is toward razing existing dams, not building new ones. And I submit that the question that first engaged me as a law student—is it possible to bring literature to bear on a policy issue and carry the day?—can be answered in the affirmative, at least for that one case. Not to take anything away from the Sierra Club and other local anti-dam advocates, but I’m convinced that it’s largely due to the kinetic prose of Berton Roueché that the Meramec still flows free.
In today’s fragmented information ecosystem, could a similar campaign stop a project like Meramec Dam? I’m no soothsayer, but I would argue that at least one journalistic truth still holds: Nonfiction writers are always looking for good stories to pitch, and editors on any media platform are always seeking good stories to publish. A little sloganeering doesn’t hurt, either.
