TO JEANNE C. CARR, [APRIL 3, 1871]
A Picturesque Snow Storm
MUIR’S EMBROIDERED WORDS draw images in our minds of what it was like being snowbound in Yosemite.
On November 28th came one of the most picturesque snow storms I have ever seen. It was a tranquil day in Yosemite. About midday a close-grained cloud grew in the middle of the valley, blurring the sun; but rocks and trees continued to caste shadow. In a few hours the cloud-ceiling deepened and gave birth to a rank down-growth of silky streamers. These cloud-weeds were most luxuriant about the Cathedral Rocks, completely hiding all their summits. Then heavier masses, hairy outside with a dark nucleus, appeared, and foundered almost to the ground. Toward night all cloud and rock distinctions were blended out, rock after rock disappeared, El Capitan, the Domes and the Sentinel, and all the brows about Yosemite Falls were wiped out, and the whole valley was filled with equal, seamless gloom. There was no wind and every rock and tree and grass blade had a hushed, expectant air. The fullness of time arrived, and down came the big flakes in tufted companies of full grown flowers. Not jostling and rustling like autumn leaves or blossom showers of an orchard whose castaway flakes are hushed into any hollow for a grave, but they journeyed down with gestures of confident life, alighting upon predestined places on rock and leaf, like flocks of linnets or showers of summer flies. Steady, exhaustless, innumerable. The trees, and bushes, and dead brown grass were flowered far beyond summer, bowed down in blossom and all the rocks were buried. Every peak and dome, every niche and tablet had their share of snow. And blessed are the eyes that beheld morning open the glory of that one dead storm. In vain did I search for some special separate mass of beauty on which to rest my gaze. No island appeared throughout the whole gulf of the beauty. The glorious crystal sediment was everywhere. From wall to wall of our beautiful temple, from meadow to sky was one finished unit of beauty, one star of equal ray, one glowing sun, weighed in the celestial balances and found perfect.
—“YOSEMITE IN WINTER,” New York Tribune, JANUARY 1, 1872
chapter three
The Power of Beauty
Commentary
JOHN MUIR NEVER CONSIDERED HIMSELF a trail-blazer; he did not take his many talents, or his sharp intellect, very seriously. He was kind and friendly but not effusive. He was neither a hermit nor a recluse, yet he carried little more than the clothes on his back. He was generous. He had time for people, and he enjoyed their company, but he was completely at home in the forests by himself. His companions were what he called “plant people,” and sometimes “plant saints,” “flower people,” and “animal people.” He felt a relationship between himself and the birds and mammals, even lizards and insects. He observed the order and integrity of their lives and how they cared for their young.
John Muir hadn’t planned the direction of his life, yet when he reached the Sierras he knew intuitively that he had found the path that was right for him. Reflecting back, he recorded in his journal, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”1
Going out and staying out day and night, season into season, through storms and sunshine, in driving rain and cold and searing heat, Muir was overpowered by the beauty and splendor of the natural world. Such grandeur, Muir reasoned, could only have been created by God, and it reflected God’s bounty. Like a perfectly tranquil pond with nary a ripple touching its surface as the sun approaches the horizon in the evening just before the still of night descends when every rock, every tree, every line of hills is piercingly reflected, so the creating God of the universe is reflected. Or, as John Muir paused and noted, “How wonderful the power of…beauty! Gazing awe-stricken, I might have left everything for it.… Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.”2 Furthermore, Muir saw the world as constantly being created, its forces moving in cycles, ever rising and falling. “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere, the dew is never dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth turns.”3
Raised as a Christian, Muir never renounced his orthodox roots. Many of his writings have biblical overtones, and he even borrowed some scriptural phrases in his writings. Still, Muir’s writings stress not a Trinitarian god, but God who is revealed in numberless ways. For John Muir the path to the Divine was a wide-open window; everything in nature was a source of Divine revelation. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in l872, “… fresh truth [is] gathered and absorbed from pines and waters and deep singing winds.… Rocks and waters are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeks and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all.”4
Muir often capitalized the words nature, beauty, love, soul, and universe, just as he capitalized the word god. For him the perfect synonym for God was Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, in the star-filled night, or in crashing waterfalls, all was Beauty. He said everything in Nature, “From form to form, beauty to beauty, ever changing, never resting, all are speeding on with love’s enthusiasm, singing with the stars the eternal song of creation.”5 Transformed by the power of beauty himself, John Muir wanted others to be also. “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer.… I care only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness.”6
Nature’s Cathedral
ON THIS LATE SUMMER DAY, John Muir had hiked across the Tuolumne River, over meadows, and through heavily wooded forests to Cathedral Peak, which to him was more wondrous than the finest of Europe’s Gothic cathedrals.
How often I have gazed at it [Cathedral Peak] from the tops of hills and ridges, and through openings in the forests on my many short excursions, devoutly wondering, admiring, longing! This I may say is the first time I have been at church in California, led here at last, every door graciously opened for the poor lonely worshiper. In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars. And lo, here at last in front of the Cathedral [Peak] is blessed cassiope [mountain heather] ringing her thousands of sweet-toned bells, the sweetest church music I ever enjoyed. Listening, admiring, until late in the afternoon I compelled myself to hasten away.…
—JOURNAL ENTRY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1868
The Power of Beauty
JOHN MUIR RECORDED IN HIS JOURNAL this description of the Merced Valley during his first week of working as a sheepherder. He had no interest in pursuing sheepherding, but “… money was scarce and I couldn’t see how a bread supply was to be kept up. While I was anxiously brooding on the bread problem, so troublesome to wanderers, and trying to believe that I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds, berries, etc., sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage, Mr. Delaney, a sheep-owner, for whom I had worked a few weeks, called on me, and offered to engage me to go with his shepherd and flock to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers—the very region I had most in mind. I was in the mood to accept work of any kind that would take me into the mountains whose treasures I had tasted last summer in the Yosemite region.” Dazzled by the beauty of the Sierra Mountains, Muir said, “Gaze-stricken, I might have left everything for it.” He did just that!
… a magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came full in sight—a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down-sweeping slopes, feathered
