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Show 509 was the promise of the Sierra Club, and of Muir's kind of Sierra Club Outing p o l i t i c s . Americans could sense, for a while, what i t meant to be at home in Nature, and then they would write to t h e i r Congressmen. The dream of the Sierra Club Outings had always been part and parcel with Sierra Club p o l i t i c s , but the r e a l i t y suggested something e l s e . People sometimes d i d n ' t get along with each other, and there were frequent moral conflicts between the younger crew and the older campers over precisely the question of what constituted the " r i g h t manners of the wilderness." Further, on one t r i p we i n v i t e d two boys, nine and eleven years old, from the Oakland ghetto. Duke and John. They were miserable. They missed the t e l e v i s i o n set, and even the noise of traffic. They could not understand why sane adults would want to spend any time out in that wilderness. We were shocked to discover f i r s t - h a n d that the t a s t e for wilderness was culturally determined, and a priviledge enjoyed only by the sons and daughters of a c e r t a i n comfortable class of Americans. One could only c u l t i v a t e a sense of Utopian community on these outings by beginning with a group of people who already agreed closely about c e r t a i n basic values. Mountain thinking and mountain p o l i t i c s were not l i k e l y to become a ground swell in the evolution of American c u l t u r e and p o l i t i c s . The Sierra Club Outing had always been designed to appeal only to middle and upper class people. And i t worked effectively only within that realm. The most popular crew members, not surprisingly, were the young men who had gone to e l i t e prep schools like |
