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 19th 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 19th 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.