Books: What Mountains Are Good For

OF MEN AND MOUNTAINS (338 pp.)—William O. Douglas—Harper ($4).

"We had gone only a hundred yards or so when [my horse] Kendall (for a reason which will never be known) reared and whirled, his front feet pawing the steep slope ... I ended on a narrow ledge lying on my stomach, uninjured. I started to rise. I glanced up. I looked into the face of an avalanche. Kendall had slipped, and fallen, too ... rolling down over the same thirty precipitous yards I had traversed . . . Sixteen hundred pounds of solid horseflesh rolled me flat. I could hear my own bones break in a sickening crescendo ... I lay paralyzed with pain—twenty-three of twenty-four ribs broken."

When U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas, 51, suffered his near-fatal accident on Washington's Crystal Mountain (TIME, Oct. 10), he was no Eastern greenhorn in search of a thrill, but a mountain-climbing veteran who could trace his experience all the way back to his Yakima, Wash, boyhood. "Peanuts" Douglas took to climbing the sagebrush-covered foothills after a childhood attack of infantile paralysis left him a puny, spindly-legged weakling. In a few years the boy whose physique had barred him from strenuous sports was spending long weeks wandering over the sheer Cascades, sometimes toting a pack 40 miles in a single day. He had found his legs.

"Mountains," says proselyting Bill Douglas, "have a decent influence on men." Of Men and Mountains is his story of a spare-time lifetime spent in climbing and fishing the Cascades of Washington and the Wallowas of Oregon. It is also an original and winning statement of a hand-hewn personal philosophy.

Naked & Alone. Washington's Mount Adams was his first love and "its memory has been the most haunting of all." At five, young Douglas was standing choked with tears at the new grave of his father, a Presbyterian minister, when he happened to notice mighty Mount Adams (elev. 12,307 ft.) in the distance. His tears stopped; from that moment "Adams subtly became a force for me to tie to, a symbol of stability and strength."

While riding the rods East in 1922 to work his way through Columbia Law School, the homesick Northwesterner was tempted to turn around and go home when he talked with a mountain-loving hobo in the Chicago freight yards. A quarter-century later, in 1948, Douglas left his judicial robes behind him and took his annual trip to the Cascades. On top of Old Snowy, "the froth of life seemed to blow away." He thought of every nation's "beehives of intrigue," where "the strength of one man becomes the source of insecurity of another" and the "destruction of a man becomes a profession." He remembered "those who whispered that F.D.R. was insane" and "the man who was paid $100,000 to fill the papers with smears on me when I was in the midst of my Wall Street reform program." On Old Snowy, every man was equal, standing "as ,1 imagine he stands on Judgment Day—naked and alone, judged by the harmony of his soul, by his spiritual strength, by the purity of his heart."