Last week, while Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy met to discuss the debt ceiling, Carole King walked through the rain to the Capitol to make her case for the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, a bill that would designate millions of acres in the West as wilderness and put an end to logging in these areas. “You can get members of Congress when they’re walking out,” she said of the south entrance to the Capitol. “When I came here with Representative Carolyn Maloney”—the main sponsor of the bill—“she brought Mark Meadows over to me, and he said, ‘I’ll take a look at your bill.’ I knew he wouldn’t.” King, who carried a LeSportsac backpack and an umbrella from MOMA, has periodically ventured to the Capitol over the past few decades to lobby for her conservationist bill. “In the nineties, I came here with these mountain guys from Montana who just put suit jackets on with their jeans,” she said. “My last husband lived in a tepee.”
King has lived in Idaho since 1977. “The first time I drove from L.A. into Idaho, I knew I was home, which is an odd thing for a Jewish girl from New York to think,” she said, walking up the Capitol steps. “My first cabin was wilderness-adjacent, which meant no running water except for a hot-spring pool. It was only accessible by snowmobile or skis in winter. I kidnapped my daughter—she was mine to kidnap—and said, ‘You’re coming to live with me till you’re eighteen.’ When she turned eighteen, my then husband, the fourth one, the last one, said he would snowmobile my daughter’s stuff out, and then she and I cross-country skied twenty-six miles to meet him.”
King’s first meeting was with Josephine Amusa, the policy adviser for the House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. King took out a pamphlet. “The grizzly bear is an umbrella species, and they’re not doing well,” King said. “How many more minutes do I have?”
“Twelve,” Amusa responded.
King continued, “The Forest Service is not what people think it is. It’s arm in arm with the timber industry. The forest is under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because they consider trees a crop!”
“My boss has to remain as neutral as possible,” Amusa said. “But I’ll take a look.” She asked for a photo with King, for her mother. “I’ll take off my mask for the photo but won’t inhale,” King said.
With a bit of downtime, King and her entourage traipsed around the Capitol. “I feel reverent,” she said. She reached out and touched a statue of Rosa Parks. Colleen Corrigan, an environmental advocate who was accompanying King, briefed her on their next meeting, with Gen Z’s first member of Congress, Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democrat: “He’s twenty-six, he was a rideshare driver, he’s big on gun control.” They took the stairs to the second floor. King removed a pair of heels from her bag. Frost came out to welcome King. A framed Boygenius record hung on the wall.
King took out her brochure to indicate where wildlife corridors would be protected under her bill. “If the animals can’t get between the ecosystems, they become inbred,” she said.
“What’s been getting in the way?” Frost asked. “Do you need Republican support?” They talked strategy. “Maybe get a New York Republican member on board to prove themselves to that more progressive part of their constituency?” he said. Then he suggested, “Maybe just find the five biggest Carole King fans who are Republican.”
Frost brought out a copy of “Tapestry” for King to sign. “My first Broadway show was ‘Beautiful,’ ” he said.
“The story is mostly true,” King said.
“Mostly?”
“The long-haired guy at the end was a composite of one of my husbands and James Taylor,” she said. “I finally went to see it in disguise.”
They took a photo together. “Can you AirDrop it to me?” he asked.
The group took an underground tunnel to the office of Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was waiting in his bandanna. “I’m thrilled you’re here petitioning the government for redress of grievance, and without hitting police officers over the head with a Confederate battle flag,” Raskin said to King.
She showed him photos of national forest that had been clear-cut. “A forest knows how to restore itself,” she said. “It’s evolution.”
Raskin frowned. “This is bad. So this is about the timber industry’s capture of the forest service.”
“Yes. That’s exactly it,” she said.
“I hate to use this phrasing,” Raskin responded. “But it’s too late.”
Her final stop was with the sole Republican congressman she was visiting, Ralph Norman, of South Carolina. He was in a meeting for the House Rules Committee, but he came out to take a photo with King. He didn’t sign on to the bill. “But my wife and I saw your musical, and we just loved it,” he told her. ♦
An earlier version of this article misidentified Hakeem Jeffries’s position in Congress.
