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.