the steamer, the Nebraska, among a “barbarous mob” of fortune-seekers, misfits, laborers, idealists, dreamers, and families seeking a better life.
The Beginnings of Lifelong Wanderings
FROM THE START, John Muir was drawn to “wildness,” as he called the natural world. Curious and imaginative by temperament, Muir couldn’t resist the urge to run away to the seashore, marsh, and fields where his soul was nurtured just as his identity as a naturalist was set on course. Escaping his father’s heavy-handedness wasn’t easy. The elder Muir believed that his son should stay home in his house and yard and learn his lessons well (Latin, French, English, spelling, history, and geography), especially his Biblical lessons. But Muir, who never rejected his Christian faith, found it more authentically expressed in the magnificence of creation gloriously displayed in every shining lake and towering tree. Throughout his writings, Muir frequently capitalized the “N” in nature, suggesting that to Muir, Nature was synonymous with the creative force of the universe, the impulse that calls all creation and all beings—both plant and animal—into life. By capitalizing nature, Muir animated it into a person by that name, one whose mountainous face changes expressions, whose streams “sing,” and even “shout.”
When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.…
My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound—a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery.…
Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart’s content. Oh, the blessed enchantment of those Saturday runaways in the prime of the spring! How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams! We… were glorious, we were free—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness. These were my first excursions—the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Everything New and Pure
HERE JOHN MUIR INTRODUCES his idea of the university—the universe—as the primary teacher of life’s elemental lessons. His university was not books, classrooms, examinations, common rooms, and learned professors; all these paled in comparison with the education offered by immersion in the natural world.
This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Leaving for the University of the Wilderness
JOHN MUIR’S MOST ENDURING LESSONS during his university years were those gleaned from his classmate, a botanist, named Milton Griswold. Griswold introduced him to plant biology and classification, reinforcing what Muir knew intuitively—that the natural world is not a haphazard assembly of parts, but continuous, united, and harmonious links in the web of life. As Muir was to reflect later, “…I was always fond of flowers, attracted to their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.”
Although I was four years at the University, I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, and mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer. Anyhow I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty.
From the top of a hill on the north side of Lake Mendota I gained a last wistful, lingering view of the beautiful University grounds and buildings where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days. There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell. But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Joyful and Free
TRAVELING BY RAIL TO JEFFERSONVILLE, Indiana, John Muir set off on his 1,000-mile journey via “the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way.” But where was he going? His plan was to walk to Florida, board a boat to Cuba and, perhaps, like one of the heroes of his youth, Alexander von Humboldt, he might make it to South America and up to the mystifying sources of the Amazon River. Along the way Muir found shelter where he could, often outside under the stars, sometimes with white families and former slaves who generously shared their fare with him, however meager. He spent several nights in a cemetery in Savannah and even there he enjoyed the live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Everything he saw delighted him, even alligators and snakes. “They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family… cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth”
I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm South, and at last, all draw backs overcome, I set forth on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Crossing the Ohio at Louisville, I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to any one. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey. My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.
