Ed Zahniser’s ‘Cabin Country’
If you have an idea for a book that explores some interesting aspect of Warren County history, Don Rittner would like to hear from you. As Executive Director of the Warren County Historical Society (WCHS), he has stepped up the organization's book-publishing capacity by moving to a "print-on-demand" model, which makes possible the printing of books in small quantities, even one at a time. That order could come from an individual who wants the book, a bookstore, or a non-profit organization such as WCHS. "POD" eliminates the need for storage and makes it easier for independent authors to publish their work, especially in niche or specialized content that might not have a large audience. WCHS now offers more than 20 books in this way.
It's thanks to this model that we can enjoy Ed Zahniser's latest work, Neighbor to Adirondack Wilderness: Howard Zahniser's 'Mataskered Cabin.'
I read it first as the prose sequel to Adirondack Cabin and Country Poems, Ed's collection from which we shared several pieces last year.
I also read it as a companion to Paul Schaefer's classic, Adirondack Cabin Country. It was Schaefer who in 1946 encouraged Ed's father Howard to buy a cabin about 200 yards from his own on the edge of the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. It was here that Howard and Paul conferred each summer first in waging their 11-year battle to save the Moose River Plains from a series of dam proposals, and then in fighting the eight-year battle to gain passage in Congress of the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Here's the chronicle of their friendship we published in Adirondac magazine in 2022. And here's the interview we did with Ed in researching that piece.
An initiative to install a historical marker in Bakers Mills to commemorate the Schaefer/Zahniser partnership is in the formative stages. In his new work, Ed greatly expands our understanding of this story, while entertaining us with wry observations.
Wilderness: A "Qualitative Condition”
Howard Zahniser took this photo on the Schaefer’s front porch using a time-release shutter. Seated in back from left to right are Howard and his wife, Alice, then Carolyn and Paul Schaefer. Seated in front are Mathias Zahniser, Evelyn Schaefer, Cub Schaefer, Esther Zahniser, Karen Zahniser and Mary Schaefer. Monica Schaefer may have been napping. Just one year old when this photo was taken in 1946, Ed was being cared for by relatives.
Ed opens with a meditation on wilderness, noting that it is not so much a place or resource as a "qualitative condition."
"Wilderness thinking anticipated our contemporary environmental concerns for natural systems and processes...This seed of thinking about wilderness not as real estate but as a condition -- wilderness character, wildness -- that inheres in the land and waters and flora and fauna has been in the background all along."
His narrative continues through the Black River Wars that his father and Paul Schaefer waged for eleven years, ultimately saving the Moose River Plains from a series of dam proposals. "When Zahnie jumped in it was a New York State controversy. Zahnie transformed it into a national conservation issue."
Following that fight, Schaefer made this declaration in a brochure: "We have been on the defensive too long. It is time to gather our forces and to accomplish things that heretofore have been but dreams."
That same year -- 1955 -- Zahniser successfully concluded his campaign to save Steamboat Rock from the Echo Park dam on Utah's Green River. That was the key turning point in the wilderness conservation movement that pointed the way eight years later to passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. This is when Zahniser began developing a plan for a federally managed wilderness preservation system modeled largely on the framework established by the "Forever Wild" clause inserted into the New York Constitution by an act of the New York Legislature in 1894.
A ‘Tenacity in Lost Causes’
Crane Mountain, with the “Acting Rock” in the foreground.
In my favorite of the 50 essays Ed offers in Neighbor to Adirondack Wilderness, he opens on an August morning at Mateskared, drinking coffee and enjoying "The View," the family's name for this panorama of Crane Mountain.
Contemplating the boulder in the foreground, called the "Acting Rock" in the family, Ed is struck by its similarity in shape to Steamboat Rock, which "looms massive inside a looping bend in the Green River in the Pat's Hole or Echo Park area of Dinosaur National Monument in Utah."
That takes us into Howard's fight to stop a dam on the Green River that would have submerged most of Steamboat Rock and obliterated Echo Park.
He writes:
"Steamboat Rock takes its name from how the motion of the great Green River, a major Colorado tributary, makes it appear as though the rock were chugging along through the waterway. Seen from on or across the river, Steamboat Rock looks like a great, archetypal Mississippi Queen triple-decker stern-wheeler putting its shoulder to the Green River's heady current … "In the 1950s, it would come to symbolize permanent protection of nature in the struggle over the proposed Echo Park Dam. “
Steamboat Rock, chugging like a “Mississippi Queen triple-decker stern-wheeler putting its shoulder to the Green River's heady current …
This was their great achievement, Ed writes: "The final settlement my father negotiated on behalf of the conservationists held National Park System lands to be inviolable."
The victory emboldened Howard and the Sierra Club's David Brewer to turn their anti-dam coalition to pursuing federal legislation to protect wilderness on vast reaches of federal public lands.
The projected Echo Park Dam was already being engineered, and its water and evaporation dynamics had been developed, when Zahnie and Brower started advocating stopping it.
As one close colleague observed, Zahnie had "an unusual tenacity in lost causes."
"That was a skill he learned in New York State from and with Paul Schaefer as they fought the dams proposed for the western Adirondacks," Ed writes.
"Think of 66 drafts of wilderness bills and 19 public hearings nationwide over eight years of struggle. The cause was wilderness preservation, which merely called into question the Great American Idea of Progress.
"This is an attitude of humility, to recognize that we do not know enough to manipulate the natural world, the more than human world of nature, without possibly untoward results. In 1955, Zahnie gave a speech preparatory to the introduction of the first wilderness bill in the U.S. Congress.
"It is characteristic of wilderness to impress its visitors with their relationship to other forms of life," Zahnie said. "In the wilderness it is thus possible to sense most keenly our human membership in the whole community of life on the Earth. And in this possibility is perhaps one explanation for our modern deep-seated need for wilderness.
"At Mateskared, these feelings are palpable. My father took inspiration from them for his thinking about wilderness and our human relation to it. Here the forest relentlessly overtakes former subsistence farmland. A feeling persists here, which Aldo Leopold articulated, that wilderness is the raw material out of which we have hammered this artifact called civilization. Historic Iroquois or Mohawk Indigenous peoples would no doubt have found Leopold's statement realistic and not hyperbolic.
"As Rachel Carson took pains to point out, it is far more important— particularly for human and Earth futures to feel this stake than to know it."
Neighbor to Adirondack Wilderness can be ordered for $29.99 plus shipping from Amazon or directly from the Warren County Historical Society for $29.95 plus $8 for shipping by using this Paypal link: paypal.me/wcnyhs. To order by credit card or check, connect with WCHS at mail@wcnyhs.org. Its postal address is 50 Gurney Lane, Queensbury, NY 12804
