June 1954 (age 55)

Sigurd's book manuscript (which would become The Singing Wilderness) was far enough along to submit a portion of it. (His daughter-in-law Yvonne had helped immensely. She had arrived in Ely in May to spend the summer, while her husband, Robert, was beginning a doctoral program in history at the University of Minnesota and looking for a place for them to live in Minneapolis. While a crew of carpenters sawed and hammered away, adding an enclosed porch to Sigurd's house, Yvonne pounded the typewriter, making fresh copies of Sigurd's essays, some of which dated back to the 1930s.) When Sigurd went to Washington, D.C., on National Parks Association busines, he sought advice from his friend and workplace neighbor Howard Zahniser (shown at right). The balding and bespectacled Wilderness Society executive secretary not only looked bookish, he was bookish. He had a huge personal library of nature books and rarely seemed to be without one. Theodore R. "Ted" Swem, a Park Service official and eventual Wilderness Society president who came to know Zahniser early in the 1960s, told me about a time in Denver when he was supposed to pick up Zahniser outside a downtown hotel. Zahniser was sitting on the sidewalk with his back resting against the hotel wall, so immersed in a book that he did not look up when Swem honked his car horn. Swem had to drive around the block three times before he caught Zahniser's attention. Seven years younger than Sigurd and a quiet, gently, and tremendously effective conservationist, Zahniser was a perfect source for the kind of advice Sigurd needed.

"Have just finished talking to Zahnie about the book," Sigurd wrote afterward to family members. "He is enthusiastic and thiks it might go big....He thinks it might be best to contact a good agent, because an agent can best decide the question of pre-book publication of chapters and can place them where they will do the most good as a sort of advance publicity stunt." Zahniser recommended Marie Rodell, a widely respected New York agent who, he said, had done great promotional work for the nature writings of scientists Rachel Carson and Durwood Allen. On June 10 Sigurd sent the introduction, four sample chapters, and the table of contents to Rodell. "These essays and sketches...might be the answer for many to the gnawing ennui of today," he wrote. "If they can bring some joy to those who seem to have lost their capacity to see the world of nature in a fresh, clear light, the book will be justified." Using words from a poem by Oscar Fay Adams, he called the book "The Pipes of Pan."

Rodell was interested but brought up an issue raised by others over the years. "There are some very pleasant passages in this sample material," she responded on June 16, but she wondered how much of the final version would be lively anecdotes and how much would be "straight lyrical appreciation." She said that Sigurd's wilderness adventures would interest readers more than "the more abstract pages of philosophy and feeling."

But Sigurd was not about to back down. For twenty years agents and editors had told him there was no market for his essays, but after six years of traveling the country as a professional conservationist, he was convinced they were wrong. Too many people had come up to him after his speeches and told him how much they enjoyed his discussions of the spiritual values of wilderness. By this time Yvonne had typed and retyped all of the essays (she told me that she and her father-in-law had some "royal battles" over punctuation) and Sigurd sent the rest of the manuscript to Rodell, saying:

There are many books of adventure and factual accounts of observations in the out of doors. It was not my wish to do another. The value of my book as I see it is in my interpretation of the wilderness, its meaning, and my reactions to it....You may not agree with me at all but I feel very strongly about this.

Rodell read the rest of Sigurd's manuscript in late June and early July, and on July 13 she said she wanted to try to sell it. "I'm not at all certain of the sort of reception it will get," she wrote, "since the essay type of writing is not too popular these days; but let's try and see what we can do."

June 1969 (age 70)

Nothing to report.