John Muir--Nature's Visionary

From Paris and Proust’s cork-lined room to Edward Abbey’s battered trailer in the desert, and finally, to John Muir hiking in Yosemite, this has been the summer of armchair travels for me.  It’s okay, though, because I did not have any funds to transport myself literally to those places.  I am a poor writer and teacher, so I stayed home and let my mind travel.  And what a trip it has been.

I found eight of the ten volumes of John Muir’s writings in the library and began my summer Muir odyssey with Volume I—Boyhood and Youth and Walk To The Gulf.  The first part of the volume was rendered in sepia-toned drawings and poignant memoir writing.  Muir’s father was a religious man whose treatment of his children was abusive, but later we learn that Muir went to his father’s bedside as he lay dying after having a premonition that his parent was near the end of his life.  The second part of Volume I details his walk from central Kentucky all the way to Florida, and later, Cuba.  It was a different America when Muir made his trek in the heart of the 19^th century post-Civil War scarred country.  He was on one of his first missions of discovery but he was also fleeing his past, his small town farm life.

Early on in his trek, he had been injured working at an Indianapolis wagon wheel factory when a tool slipped and struck him in the eye.  The doctors said he would not see again, and as a result of the accident, he began to lose sight in his good eye over the sympathetic strain of trying to read and write with limited vision.  To keep full blindness at bay, Muir was forced to bandage both eyes and stay in a darkened room for more than a month.  When he miraculously regained his sight completely, it changed the way he saw his world, and because of this change in vision, both literal and metaphysical, he decided to continue on his trek.  In the tropics, he contracted malaria and nearly died.  It took him a very long time to recover, but he persevered on his walk, and he continued making notes about the flora and fauna he saw in this new and strange region.  Muir wrote that “God has to nearly kill us sometimes to teach us lessons.”  This observation came from firsthand experience.

Muir became a committed walker of the country and the planet, covering the globe with his footprints:  Florida, Cuba, Alaska, California (what he is best known for), the Arctic, Utah, Oregon, Europe, the Grand Canyon, India, China, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Hawaii.  This is not a complete accounting of his travels, and if the list seems haphazard or random, it is.  That is the way Muir explored his world.  He would sign his name as “John Muir—Earth, planet, Universe.”

What books of Muir’s should one read?  All of them, and I would highly recommend a book by Gretel Ehrlich featuring incredible photography of the places Muir loved as well as family snapshots and other documents.  It is called John Muir: Nature’s Visionary (National Geographic Society, 2000).  Ehrlich gives an excellent overview and analysis of Muir’s life and his importance to the founding of our National Park System and his conservation work in those parks, especially Yosemite.  The series I found buried in the library was published circa 1917 by the Sierra Club, in organization Muir founded.  There are a still complete sets around, but they are pricey.

What comes through in all of Muir’s writing is his intense joy and optimism in nature, his reveling in the beauty of the birds and mammals and geological formations and abundant plant life.  He writes pages on different pine and evergreen trees.  He relishes the wind and the water and the orange sky at dusk.  His bed, many times, is a collection of fallen boughs under a sheltering sugar pine.  Yet when he does have a story to tell, about his childhood, or something that happened on one of his forays, he is a gripping, insightful writer.  It did not come naturally to him, this writing, turning various notebooks and notes into essay form, but he was gifted with more talent than he realized.  This shy, humble Scottish-American was a natural storyteller, and that comes through in everything he wrote.  His love and joy in the natural world had moral and ethical underpinnings.  He expresses quite strongly that he does not like killing animals.  He recognized from his place in the 19^th century that human beings, animals and plants share the world, and every act of every species affects every other and the great earth itself.  This consciousness is more common now in environmental movements across the globe; in Muir’s day, resources were considered unlimited and there to be taken.  He was an advocate for conservation, for preservation of those resources, and he tried to convert as many people to his way of thinking as he could in his lifetime, including presidents and philosophers.

The highlights of Muir’s life are many, but two that stand out are the time he spent three days alone in the wilderness with President Theodore Roosevelt, and the time Ralph Waldo Emerson came to Yosemite.  In the 1903 trip with Roosevelt, Muir made his case for a park system in America that would preserve the natural beauty and resources for future generations.  At all costs, Muir wanted this conservation and did not want rampant development and the depletion of resources that would ensue.  Emerson found Muir enchanting and believed that his new friend had found “an original relationship to the universe” in his work.

All his life, Muir was a student and recorder of natural history.  In his first journeys in the natural world, he did not know what he would do with his accumulating journals and specimens.  He kept copious notes in a battered notebook using ink made from sequoia sap, Ehrlich tells us.  He often presented himself looking gaunt and tattered, like a monk who spent too much time lost in the desert.  Ehrlich writes that “He used his body to understand intellectual problems and his intellect to discipline his body to go farther on less fuel,” usually a hunk of bread tied to his belt along with his notebook.

Muir was committed to living in nature for long periods of time.  This often involved leaving his family in Martinez, California on his father-in-law’s farm lands and fruit orchard, but his wife, Louisa Strentzel, understood this and supported her husband’s disappearances into the wilderness.  Muir, himself, wrote that in nature, time slowed almost to a stop.  For someone like himself, he wrote, when he was on his hike observing the trees and mountains and roaring waterfalls, “One day is a thousand years, a thousand years is as one day, and while yet in the flesh you enjoy immortality.”  There is a rhythm to the world in nature that human beings would do well to adopt.  “Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing,” he writes, “allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another.”  Even natural disasters, in Muir’s mind, had a higher purpose.  Torrents and earthquakes—he witnessed several while camping in Yosemite—were simply “convulsions of nature,” and were “harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.”  Some of the sequoias Muir studied were 4,000 years old, relics of history and a living calendar going back eons.

What comes through so strongly in Muir’s work is the inter-relatedness of all things, natural and human.  His contemporary, the biologist Louis Agassiz, once said that “Facts are stupid until brought into connection with some general law.”  Muir, in his writings, demonstrated this concept time and again.  The planet is healthier for the unspoiled, unpolluted Eden of places like Yosemite.  This is his undiminished lesson today as we watch the Amazon burning and the melting ice of Greenland and the Arctic.  It is all connected, and our children will be living with the consequences of our actions, or lack thereof, for generations.

John Muir’s first published writing appeared in the New York Tribune of December 5, 1871.  In his lifetime, he would go on to publish twelve books and a host of essays numbering in the hundreds.  If the entire Sierra Club collection of his writings in the ten volumes is not available, there is a Library of America edition that contains his greatest hits, or the series volumes can be found individually.  Whatever way one accesses John Muir, his message is ever more inspiring and important today.  He remains our saint of Yosemite, a true spirit of nature, wandering the meadows and scaling the granite in his endless quest to understand the divine in the natural world, the heaven on earth.

Desert Solitaire With Edward Abbey

In our culture, the Loner always gets the bum rap.  People doing very bad things are often labeled Loners.  Someone seeking solitude is running away from society; he is antisocial, prone to mental illness, existing outside the boundaries of what is wholesome and proper.  He does not play by the rules or cultivate friendships.  He forsakes his parents and siblings.  He was always a difficult child, according to those who once knew him.  Not a team player.  A puzzle, a person not easily read or figured out.  A wild card participant in the human endeavor, he is elliptical and ethereal, lofty and arrogant.

Today, we do not have Loners because we live in an age of communication and instant gratification, right?  Don’t be so sure.  When I get on the overfilled elevator at the college, I ride with five to ten people in dead silence except for the motor raising us up through the Humanities Building.  No one says a word; they are all looking down at their phone screens, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.  We are all together alone.  My students struggle with social skills, making small talk, making eye contact for that matter, and when I speak with them, they are hesitant to open up.  We are all not in a good place, socially, especially in an environment where engagement is necessary, required even, to pass a class.  But to engage may bring conflict, and we have been taught from an early age to avoid conflict.

A Loner may not be lonely, but he or she might crave solitude.  Loneliness and solitude are not the same thing.  One can be lonely with a crowd of people; someone who seeks solitude may not be a misanthrope.  Edward Abbey in his book, Desert Solitaire (Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1968 and 1990) is someone who decides to live his life deliberately, as Thoreau commanded, and experience Nature with a capital N in a pure, unadulterated form.  So he went to the Arches National Monument in southeastern Utah near the town of Moab three seasons running to work as a park ranger and revel in the silence, the heat, and of course, the incredible beauty of such an austere landscape.

Edward Abbey

Deserts play an intricate part in the history of humankind.  Great figures in human history sought the desert:  Moses and his people; Jesus, alone with evil; Mohammad receiving his revelations; Buddha and his asceticism; and Brigham Young, the American Moses, leading his people through the deserts of this country to the Promised Land of Utah, very close to Abbey’s stomping grounds over those three summers.  Deserts have a long tradition of purification for those who brave the heat, the animals, the lack of water.  They contain elements of the divine, the mystic, the hermitage.

Edward Abbey was born in 1927 in Pennsylvania.  He was drafted into the war in 1945, and although he applied for a clerical position, he wound up as a military police officer.  What followed were a series of promotions and demotions over the next two years.  He was honorably discharged and went to college on the G.I. Bill.  He became a sharp critic of culture and society, and advocated for a banishment of the draft.  His Master’s thesis focused on the morality of violence, and over the course of his life, Abbey advocated anarchy as a way to social change.

In the late 1950s and 60s, Abbey worked as a ranger in the National Park System.  Although the book focuses mainly on his adventures in and around the Arches National Monument, he served in other parks as well.  He not only spent a considerable portion of his life in the deserts and harsh landscapes of the western United States, he was buried there in Arizona.  It was a fitting end for a man who could be cantankerous, angry, and yes, often mystical.  He challenged oil companies and mining corporations who wished to destroy what he considered divinely sacred.  He fought to preserve these monuments and parks, and made their defense his life’s work.

Desert Solitaire gives us the difficulty Abbey encountered in his first foray into Arches.  He was not far from Moab, but he was isolated and had to rely on his wits to get by between deliveries of water, food and supplies.  He had several encounters with wild life:  desert mice in his dilapidated trailer; a rattlesnake who camped out right under the steps down from that trailer’s door; and, while off duty, livestock that needed herding and protecting to avoid predators.

He is not shy in the book about his point of view.  He speaks of the “solitary confinement of the mind,” as a theory that “solipsism, like other absurdities of the professional philosopher, is a product of too much time wasted in library stacks between covers of a book, in smoke-filled coffeehouses (bad for the brains) and conversation-clogged seminars.”  His prescription for all that ails humankind is a foray into Nature, a deep, immersive interaction that restores the perspective and the respect that should be afforded the natural world.

His observations are sharp and clear, and when he tells a story, especially the one about discovering a dead body with a crew searching for a lost person, he is riveting.  One does not need to decipher Abbey’s positions on environmental issues, and he does not romanticize the harsh landscape in which his story is set.  We taste the grit and sand in the wind; we see creatures, strange and delicate, as they flee the sun.  Throughout, Abbey is clear and factual in his rendering of the desert and his place in it.  He is a Loner here who opens the door for us and allows us insight into the nature of this universe.

In a time of climate change, and climate change deniers, we need to read Edward Abbey.  Through his pages, we access the natural world and discover our place in the universe.  We are but small fragments of star dust and fluid, part of the great Oversoul of which Emerson so nobly spoke.  Abbey’s story is set against the harsh and Martian-like landscape of Arches National Monument, a mystical and deeply moving world of evolved species that can survive the difficult environment where they live.  It is a world of plants that retain water from limited rains, and the bones of those who have dried out and turned to fossil or dust.

This book opened a door for me.  It changed the way I see the world, as all literature and art should.  However, what I am most thankful for, Edward Abbey led me to another great environmental writer and scientist:  John Muir.  More on him shortly.

Arches National Monument

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

Evocation:  the act of bringing or recalling a feeling, memory or image to the conscious mind; the action of invoking a spirit or a deity.

This is the summer I decided to read Proust.  Any reader worth his or her salt must face down this classic multi-volume behemoth.  Marcel Proust is one of the greatest novelists in all of literature, and In Search of Lost Time is his grand masterpiece.

Why now?  Why this summer?  Because I am aware that time is passing, that places I have come to know and love are gone, and no one lives forever.  In Proust, I hoped to find the way memory shadows us and enriches us and our experiences.  I wanted to find a way to provoke, and invoke, my own memories of what has gone or been lost to the years.  I read the first two volumes and was not disappointed:  the Madeleines, the sepia-colored scenes of 19^th century Paris, the memories, dreams and reflections—all there.

Proust was a 38 year-old man when he began writing the novel.  He had been a sickly child who grew up to be a fragile adult, and much of his work was done in bed at night while all of France slept.  Ultimately, the novel was published after his death in 1922, and he did not get to do the extensive revisions that he performed on the early volumes even when they were typeset and in printer’s proofs.  Long sentences abound throughout, but it is quite simply exquisite writing.  I will probably not finish the 4,300 pages for a while, so this is really a discussion in progress and on-going.

At heart, Proust is a mystical atheist with loose ties to the Catholic Church, a faith he did not practice.  It is in his writing about memory and what triggers us to fall into the past that he excels.  His writing is beautiful, haunting, moving, and at times flowery and serpentine.  The characters and plot running through all the volumes is boilerplate Victorian drawing room drama with a touch of humor and a hint of sex.  The evocative nature of his work is what casts the golden beams of autumnal reflection on the past.  With close to 2000 characters, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of one when he or she may appear in the first volume and may not come back again until the fourth or fifth.  But these are minor complaints and not relevant to the longer journey of the books.  Reading Proust is its own reward for any reader with the gumption to see it through to the end.

Proust’s gift is to show us that memories, as we age, are our prized possessions.  They console us and make the present more bearable.  Through memory, we keep those who have passed on alive.  We remember holidays and food and the way things used to be, often a romanticized notion of how we wish they were.  In shaping our memories, we comfort ourselves; these seemingly innocuous moments in our lives—the smell of fresh bread baking, the perfume of our mothers, the scent of evergreen in December—remind us of the days we’ve lived and the strands of experience we embody.

Memory, though, often comes with a twin, the yin and yang of us:  regret.  Can we remember the past without regret?  Why is it that human beings always see the past as better than it was?  If only we could do things over again.  Yet, when asked, no one wants to go back to their teenage years, or feel the shame and embarrassment over saying the wrong thing or acting foolishly in youth.

Memories are the things we carry.  They give us a sense of linear time, even though time may not be constant or linear.  In present moments are the moments of the past and the future, like mirrors reflecting each other through eternal prisms that go, back and forth, to infinity.  Proust in his cork-lined bedroom, scribbling away, knew the persistence of memory.  He wrote against the day he would be gone and only his novel would remain.  In this way, his memory is incandescent and always with us.  He inspires us to catch the scent, the touch, the warmth of a voice, and remember.

Proust's notebook pages