Glorying in Nature : Self-Taught Naturalist Finds Excitement in the Outdoors
Surrounded by the wind-swept majesty of the San Gabriel Mountains, Elna Bakker talked nonstop about one of her favorite places in the world--the heart of Angeles National Forest.
The warm September air, carrying the sweet hint of sage, blew her shock of white hair every which way. The self-taught naturalist is the author of “An Island Called California,” a respected ecology book published in 1971.
From a cliff-side vantage point on a recent jaunt along the Angeles Crest Highway, the tall woman of 70 surveyed a spur of mountain that included 5,558-foot-high Josephine Peak and the canyon below. To the south, foothills disappeared into the smog above Pasadena and La Canada Flintridge.
“You can stand here and point out five or six different natural communities,” she said, ticking off the categories such as coastal sage scrub, riparian forest and moist slope woodland. “You can’t do that anywhere in Kansas.”
A smile spread across her face and her blue eyes widened. “That’s what so exciting here, the diversity! And it’s in my own back yard,” she said.
A Los Angeles native and a Mt. Washington resident since 1956, she has written two hardcover books, has co-written two others, and has contributed to several other books and pamphlets.
She wrote an essay for “Angeles National Forest,” a book published this summer. With at least four other book manuscripts written, in the works or in the planning stage, she aims to make nature accessible to ordinary people.
Whether she is talking about differences in 90-million-year-old San Gabriel Mountain rocks versus those 1.7 billion years old, or explaining why big-leaf maples grow on certain rocky slopes, she exudes enthusiasm, gliding back and forth across the scientific names and common names of natural things.
Pointing to an area below Josephine Peak, she said: “That line of vegetation is directly due to the presence of the San Gabriel Fault.” As she waxed eloquent about her latest love, geology, she explained that the movement of subsurface rocks has caused underground strands of water to migrate closer to the ground. This, she said, has provided more water to nurture an abundant growth of plants and trees above the fault.
Despite Bakker’s lack of a doctorate or formal training, “an awful lot of people respect her work,” said a longtime family friend, retired UCLA geography professor Richard F. Logan.
Bruce Carter, chairman of Pasadena City College’s physical sciences department, said there are probably better books than Bakker’s if, for example, someone wants to know every species of tree or bird in a particular California terrain such as chaparral. But, he said, “if you want to get a sense of the interplay of natural history, I don’t think there is a better source than (‘An Island Called California’).”
Glen Owens, president of the Arcadia-based Big Santa Anita Historical Society, said he admires Bakker because she can still be surprised and delighted. “She will go out and see a wildflower she hasn’t seen in a while and just turn into a little girl again,” he said.
Last week, on the tree-shaded deck beside her split-level Mt. Washington house, Bakker spoke of what environmentalism means to her and recounted how she became a naturalist.
Describing herself as “a middle-of-the-road Sierra Clubber,” she said she sometimes gets angry “at people’s refusal to see what is staring them in the face.” As she spoke, she suddenly slammed both fists against her chair arm. “We do need to control population growth. We need to do something to control mindless development, and to manage our resources.”
Her own environmental sensitivity, she said, resulted from voracious reading and studying outside of a formal academic setting.
“I asked lots of dumb questions of a lot of smart people,” she said. “I learned the hard way, through my mistakes.”
One of those smart people, she said, was her late husband, Gerhard Bakker, who for more than three decades was a life sciences professor at Los Angeles City College. Her husband sometimes illustrated her writing with his nature photographs and line drawings.
“If I wanted to have photosynthesis explained to me for the 10th time, I’d just say, Gerhard! “
They met in 1947, shortly after both had graduated from UCLA, on a weeklong outing to Monument Valley along the Arizona-Utah border. The trip was sponsored by the university’s life sciences club.
He was a zoology and botany graduate in love with nature, and she was an education and geography graduate with little knowledge of the natural world who decided to go on the outing at a friend’s urging.
“That was a life-changing trip,” she said. “I met my future husband and I got into this whole magnificent thing called nature.”
When Richard Logan describes each of the Bakkers, he uses the same phrase: “quite a character.” They were, he said, “adventurous explorers.”
Long before the age of the motor home, interstate highways and convenient jet travel, the childless Bakkers made their way around the globe to marvel at the Earth’s diversity. Going to all the continents and throughout the United States, they journeyed to such places as Outer Mongolia, the Galapagos Islands, the Caribbean, Africa and, of course, the mountains of Southern California.
“We were kind of pioneers in a way,” she said, “because life has changed so drastically in the last 30 years.”
In 1950, they drove their “car,” a World War II personnel carrier nicknamed “the Walrus,” to Alaska. They went beyond the Arctic Circle and then loaded themselves onto a steamer ship, filled with Alaskan king crab that was bound for Southern California. In 1957, they drove to Costa Rica.
For eight months in 1953 and 1954, they sailed on a freighter to southern Africa and there bought a beat-up Buick and bounced cross-country. “We were going from one animal reserve to another,” Bakker said. “Animals. Animals. Animals.”
After dropping off the car, they made their way by ship and boat along the rivers and lakes. “In Africa, we were in the middle of two uprisings,” she said.
The couple survived bouts of malaria, dengue fever and other tropical ailments that sometimes landed them in hospitals.
For more than a decade starting in 1950, they lived for weeks at a time with Navajo families in Monument Valley after becoming friends with a medicine man. “Oh, did we have some experiences,” Bakker said as the sound of mockingbirds, scrub jays and finches filled the trees and native plants along her terraced hillside.
“I’ve done an awful lot of hat-changing,” she said before giving a rapid-fire list of jobs: training teacher for elementary education students at UCLA, teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, founding member of the Committee for the Preservation of the Tule Elk, 12 years as executive secretary of the Southern California chapter of the Nature Conservancy, documentary nature photographer and travelogue lecturer.
Eight years ago, her husband died. She said, “I’m probably one of the very few modern-day American widows of a husband who was killed by a whale.”
While whale-watching off Baja California, Gerhard Bakker and a friend were killed by a whale that struck their tiny boat.
It took her a year, Bakker said, to recover from her grief. “We were such a great team,” she said.
Recovery came, she said, through the study of geology. One day she said to herself: “Elna Bakker, how dare you call yourself a naturalist? You don’t know a thing about the new geology.”
Since 1984, she said, she has spent weeks at a stretch in Caltech’s geology library “crying my way through” difficult tomes.
Today, in her blue, 1986 four-wheel-drive truck, she drives all over California to search out geological phenomena and other marvels of nature.
She no longer ranges as far as she did when Gerhard was alive. Then they would schedule their journeys to travel through Monument Valley before returning to Los Angeles. “Even when we were coming back from Alaska, we would come back via Arizona,” she said.
When Elna Bakker dies, she said, she wants her remains to be cremated and the ashes cast over Monument Valley, that amazing place of skyscraper shafts of rock that rise above deep canyons, the place where she first got to know the man who would become her husband and where she first fell in love with the world of nature.
