From Berkeley to the Sierra

AN OUTDOORSMAN IS BORN

I'd like to send Moses back up the mountain. He brought back the tablet with the Ten Commandments telling us how to treat one another. But he never brought back down a thing that tells us what to do about the earth.

In 1912, the year David Brower was born, the world was a vastly different place, and nature still held dominion in most parts of California, including his hometown of Berkeley. Back then, the town's population was just over forty thousand. Today, it's more than 110,000. During that same time, the U.S. population grew from 92 million to something over 300 million. California's population rose fastest: from 2.3 million to 37 million. Brower often bemoaned this rapid population rise and argued that it must be slowed and eventually reversed in order to avoid running out of air, water, and the other necessities of life — and to leave some space for the other beings that share the planet with us. "How dense can people be?" was one of his many quips, this one later turned into a lapel button.

Berkeley stretches from Grizzly Peak and its ridgeline down to the shore of San Francisco Bay, with the university campus at the base of the hills. The house David grew up in and lived in until the age of thirty is a handful of blocks from the university. Ross Brower, David's father, worked there for a time as an instructor of mechanical drawing, and David would attend classes there for a little more than a year.

In the earliest days, the Browers lived on Carleton Street in Berkeley. There were three kids (with a fourth, Joe, to come along a few years later). Edith, the only girl, was eldest. Ralph was two years younger. Then Dave, three years younger than Ralph, then Joe, born in 1920, when Dave was eight.

Ross Brower was born in Bath, Michigan, in 1879. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California and a master's from the University of Michigan and then taught in a high school in Oakland and at the university in Berkeley. He was a strict Presbyterian, and alcohol was banned in the house. Dave's mother, Grace Barlow, was born in Two Rock Valley, near Petaluma, California, in 1882. She earned degrees in English from Berkeley and Stanford and was a devoted mother, but tragedy would knock her sideways by the time she delivered her last child. Grace and Ross met at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley and married in 1906, ages twenty-four and twenty-seven — late by the standards of the day.

When David was about four, after brief stays at two other Berkeley addresses, the family moved to 2232 Haste Street, a half-dozen blocks from the campus of the university. Ross's mother, Susan B. Brower, owned a house on the lot, and Ross had built a second one on it in 1904. The family lived in one of the buildings and rented out apartment space in that building and in the other as well, mainly to students. Monthly rents ran from twenty-five dollars for a single bedroom with kitchenette and bath down the hall to forty dollars for a two-bedroom unit with bath and kitchen. Browers occupied the house until the 1960s, and it became an official Berkeley landmark in 2008.

When the First World War erupted, David took credit for his father's being exempted from military service: "One of my first achievements was keeping my father out of combat. They called him in for various physical tests, which he passed, but they did not want to draft the father of three."

When Joe came along, everything changed. Grace, who had mysteriously lost her sense of smell some years previously, abruptly went blind and lost the hearing in one ear as well. It was a crippling blow. She could no longer keep house or cook meals, and she began to have what the family referred to as fits. Much later, doctors surmised that she had had a brain tumor. To make matters worse, Ross soon was laid off from his job. He found a bit of part-time work here and there, but the family subsisted mainly on the income from the rental properties. And when they had vacancies, which, as Dave later wrote, was often, it was very difficult to make ends meet. Things would only get worse when the Depression hit eight or nine years later.

The kids all attended Berkeley public schools, first McKinley elementary (torn down in the 1960s), then Willard Junior High, then Berkeley High School, from which Dave graduated in December 1928. Traffic was light back then, and David and friends spent hours playing touch football (they called it "passball") in the streets.

DAMS, BUTTERFLIES, AND THE SIERRA NEVADA

Once the winter rainy season ended, and when they weren't in class or playing passball, Dave and Joe would spend hours building mud-and-stick dams across Strawberry Creek on the campus, then breaching them and watching the torrent race downstream. That ended in 1921 or '22, when a new football stadium was built where the Hayward earthquake fault intersected with Strawberry Creek. Dirt was sluiced away from the hillside using a technique that is now illegal. Some of the mud became the floor of the stadium. The rest gushed down the creek.

According to David, "It was no longer any fun to build a dam on it, or even possible. ... It was a mess." And, perhaps, the beginning of an environmental activist.

Although Mother Grace had lost her eyesight, she had not lost her love of walking. David would take long walks with her in the hills behind the campus, describing the landscape, the animals, birds, and butterflies they encountered, trying to help her enjoy the view based on her memory and his descriptions. There were no buildings up there then, and few roads. Much of the walking was cross-country, so David was his mother's guide dog as well as raconteur. He would later surmise that these walks had been the beginning of his ability to observe and to describe, which he would do with growing command and facility throughout his life.

In 1924 a family named Furer rented one of the units on Haste Street. They were avid butterfly collectors. Albert Furer and his younger brother, Fred, took young David on butterfly-collecting expeditions in the hills above Berkeley, and by the time winter came they had netted about thirty different species, "or at least we thought they were different," wrote Brower.

This began an interest in butterflies that...