seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life. Walked twenty miles, mostly on river bottom, and found shelter in a rickety tavern.
—A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
Life and Death in a Graveyard
JEANNE C. CARR, John Muir’s close friend who encouraged him to attend the University of Wisconsin and who served as something between a valued older sister and mentor, called this reflection a “prose-poem.” Such could be said for most of Muir’s writings.
I gazed at this peerless avenue [of trees] as one newly arrived from another planet, without a past or a future, alive only to the presence of the most adorned and living of the tree companies I have ever beheld. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, but its accidental graves are powerless to influence the imagination in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the cordial rejoicing of busy insects, the calm grandeur of the forest, make it rather one of the Lord’s elect and favored fields of clearest light and life. Few people have considered the natural beauty of death. Let a child grow up in nature, beholding their beautiful and harmonious blendings of death and life; their joyous, inseparable unity, and Death will be stingless indeed to him.
LETTER TO JEANNE S. CARR, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, 1867
Imperishable Impressions that Vibrate Our Lives
HAVING SURVIVED THE INTERMINABLE BOGS and alligator-filled swamps of interior Florida, John Muir finally reached Cedar Keys, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he experienced an epiphany. Just the sight of the shining waters and the sea breezes recalled his happy days as a boy exploring the seaside of his Scottish home. He learned what others since have noted, which is how impressions of childhood experiences of nature can remain throughout our lifetimes, nourishing and shaping our views of the natural world.
To-day I reached the sea. While I was yet many miles back in the palmy woods, I caught the scent of the salt sea breeze which, although I had so many years lived far from sea breezes, suddenly conjured up Dunbar, its rocky coast, winds and waves; and my whole childhood, that seemed to have utterly vanished in the New World, was now restored amid the Florida woods by that one breath from the sea. Forgotten were the palms and magnolias and the thousand flowers that enclosed me. I could see only dulse [a reddish-brown seaweed] and tangle, long winged gulls, the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, and the old castle, schools, churches, and long country rambles in search of birds’ nests. I do not wonder that the weary camels coming from the scorching African deserts should be able to scent the Nile.
How imperishable are all the impressions that ever vibrate one’s life! We cannot forget anything. Memories may escape the action of will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place. For nineteen years my vision was bounded by forests, but to-day, emerging from a multitude of tropical plants, I beheld the Gulf of Mexico stretching away unbounded, except by the sky. What dreams and speculative matter for thought arose as I stood on the strand, gazing out on the burnished, treeless plain!
—A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
chapter two
The Morning of Creation
Commentary
WHEN THE NEBRASKA passed through the Golden Gates of San Francisco on March 29, 1868, John Muir had the sense that he had arrived home. Along with his fellow passenger, an Englishman named Joseph Chilwell, he set out immediately from San Francisco by foot towards the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The pair walked south, crossed the coastal mountains into the Central Valley over Pacheco Pass. At the top Muir paused. Below was the vast grass and flower-carpeted Central Valley and in the distance the majestic Sierra Nevada peaks rising on the horizon. This was Muir’s first view of the Sierras and the image that would remain forever etched in his mind. As one of his biographers said, “…suddenly there was come a glorious dawning, lighting up all previous obscurities, revealing that the apparently upward paths of his life led like a map to this place.”1
Following the Merced River, passing through Coulterville, Chilwell and Muir reached the Yosemite foothills after a month of walking. They spent the summer working at odd jobs—breaking horses, shearing sheep, and serving as farm hands.
In l869 he became chief shepherd of Patrick Delaney’s flock of 2,000 sheep, and this is what Muir considers his first summer in the Sierra. Along with Carlo, a Saint Bernard dog, he and another shepherd followed the flock to green pastures high in the mountains and eventually into Yosemite and up to Tuolumne Meadows. Every day Muir explored the mountains and streams, the waterfalls and the huge variety of plants and birds. He learned to make sourdough bread that became the staple of his diet when he was tramping. He needed the job and its money; he was fond of Pat Delaney, but he was aghast at the damage done by the sheep. “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry…almost every leaf that these hoofed locusts can reach within the radius of a mile or two has been devoured. Even the bushes are stripped bare.”2 Still, his job as a shepherd enabled Muir to get into the Sierra where he wanted to be. Here he had what was, by his own reckoning, an authentic conversion to the wilderness: “Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is. In this newness of life we seem to have been always.”3
These Sierra years—1868–1874—were probably the happiest years of John Muir’s life and easily the most productive. Working for James Hutchins, one of the first white settlers in the Yosemite Valley, Muir operated a sawmill, using only fallen trees, and he utilized his carpentry skills to improve Hutchins’s rustic hotel. Having become knowledgeable about every aspect of Yosemite, its flora and fauna and its geological features, Muir was sought out as a guide. In this role he introduced a stream of visitors to the Valley, including Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871.
From his first weeks in Yosemite, Muir wondered how the mountains and valleys had been formed. From observations throughout the terrain he became convinced that Yosemite had been shaped and molded by glacial action, slowly moving ice that carved away whole mountainsides and created the valleys and streams. This theory challenged that of the California state geologist, Josiah D. Whitney, who contended that Yosemite had been created as a result of earthquakes. Geologists later affirmed Muir’s slowly moving ice theory, but the dispute with Whitney pushed Muir to learn more by exploring the “living glaciers” of Alaska, where glacial action was more evident than in the Sierra.
During these halcyon years Muir found himself and his livelihood; he found his grounding and his sense of place; he found his sense of well-being and his home. He kept diaries and journals, which he handsomely illustrated; he wrote letters to his friends and notes to himself on scraps of paper. He recorded impressions of all he was learning, sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing, and tasting. These became the sources for most of his articles and books. His first published article, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared in the New York Tribune in December, 1871. By 1874 he had completed fifteen articles for the California literary magazine, Overland Monthly. Muir’s richly embroidered writings of these Yosemite years formed the basis for My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894), The Yosemite (1912), and, to some extent, Our National Parks (1901).
The passion and energy
