fiftie fadom deip,
And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,
Wi’ the Scots lords at his feit.
Such airs and the old but ever-current news they brought were part of the natural setting of Dunbar, exposed outpost on the North Sea with the Firth of Forth stretching to the northwest. The town seemed to drop directly off into the sea, and even in the most westward-lying sections you could smell it, salty in the nose, heavy with life and death. Running any of Dunbar’s west-to-east streets would have brought Johnnie Muir and his friends quickly to land’s end, where the waters gnawed at the town, its wharves and harbor walls. Here was the heart of Dunbar: the harbor with its old red stone walls whitened by the dung of the skimming gulls and cormorants and gannets whose cries punctuated the sea round of the day and rose to a shattering din at day’s end when the catch was brought in.
For centuries men had lowered boats here and women had waited for them to come in with holds full of herring, though in Muir’s time the herring had mysteriously disappeared and now the men went after whitefish, lobster, and crab. Here were the trim smacks riding at anchor or snubbed up to the dock, their decks salt-bleached, their bows, long oars, and masts battered. Dunbar children would quickly and easily have become familiar with the apparent jumble of the ropes, nets, and crates, able to identify their proper uses and the owners of the smacks and skiffs that were canted or laid hull-up on the shelly strand.
Amid all this were the weathered men, their eyes and faces screwed into an occupational squint against the North Sea winds and sprays, working at the ropes and sails with their rough, blunt hands, glancing up occasionally at the loitering boys, many of whom in their time might be expected to follow the sea. Every boy, Muir recalled of those harborside days, “owned some sort of craft whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite pains—sloops, schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships with their sails and string ropes properly adjusted and named for us by some old sailor.”
Evening called the children home, away from the excitement of the harbor and shore, as it called the boats home, too, the catch to be unloaded, shiny, smooth-bodied, lying in waiting heaps; and the harbor now a bobbing forest of masts above which the headlands rose clear and naked.
In Dunbar Johnnie Muir would have been certain to pick up his full complement of sea lore from the talk of the harbor, from those of his friends whose fathers followed the sea, as well as from the ballads. Hearing “Sir Patrick Spens,” for instance, a Scots boy on the North Sea would know that it was an ill omen for one of Sir Patrick’s sailors to have seen the new moon with the old moon in its arms. Not surprisingly, given the climate, much of that lore dealt with such ill omens. Sailors said that a fleecy, mackerel-backed cloud with a capful of wind in it presaged a coming storm. So did gulls flying inland or a halo around the sun. Creaking furniture or a scratching cat were signs of bad weather on the way. It was bad luck to be wished well on your way down to your boat. The boys were especially mindful of the shellycoats, supernatural creatures said to haunt coastal pools and believed by Muir and his friends to devour unwary beachcombing boys. They never waded into such pools without first thrusting a stick into the murky depths to see whether it might be snatched from their grasp.
In fair weather the boys would wander the rocky shore past Long Craigs toward Belhaven Bay, the town’s original harbor, where at the tide line there was a rich collection of shells—pelican’s-foot, venus, Iceland cyprina, and banded wedges—and beautiful stones with strange, apparently ahistoric etchings in them—fossils—that made you ponder the mysterious. About their heads swung a variety of shorebirds such as shags, herons, oystercatchers, waders, terns, and eiders. The boys constructed homemade guns of gas pipe, then bought gunpowder and fired clumsy lead slugs at gulls and geese.
In foul weather the noise of an angry sea was brought to Muir and his family up on the high street. Then the whole town might be enveloped in a swirling, smothering mist, half rain and half spray, whipped up off the waves lunging below the hill. The clouds would wholly merge with the gray, flotsam-flecked sea, and rain, raking the old town, would polish the slate or stone roofs that now reflected their chimneys and stain the stone walls a darker gray or red. In the harbor the crafts would bounce high and sway wide at their anchors. In the kirkyard the slim and slanting stones darkened, and the many markers there to men and ships that had gone down in the “fashes of the flood” might seem to warn with a renewed urgency.
At such times Muir was learning more than the lore of the sea. He was learning of the fathomless power of the natural world against which men might build houses and harbor walls that were puny indeed and ultimately powerless. It was an indelible lesson, one that could be borne in on him again at any time, and often in later years it would be at the odd moment when he happened to sniff salt air once more.
But whereas in so many of his countrymen this lesson tended to produce a gloomy pessimism, a silent sense of life’s rocklike necessities and swift, avenging accidents, in John Muir it produced quite the opposite: an imperturbable serenity and a natural unchurched reverence founded on an awareness that—storm or smiling sun—nature includes us; that like the fish or the gulls we too must be part of this world. Pessimism or, worse, fear was ignorance of this.
The more formal lessons began when he was not quite three. Scots parents did not coddle their children, a tendency partly the result of climate and culture and founded on a somewhat grim view of life’s prospects. It was best to prepare children early for the hardness of the way that lay ahead.
The school to which Muir was so early sent was a representative one: disciplined, thoroughly structured, innocently harsh. It lay at the foot of a sloping street called the Davel Brae that ran down to the sea off the high street past stone and white stuccoed houses with little gardens like the Muirs’ that spilled over walls topped with imbedded bits of broken glass to keep out intruders and passing schoolboys. Around the schoolyard ran a high wall appropriately made of the same materials as those protecting the harbor. For here, too, the sea was right below, and on stormy days its spit came flying into the yard or fell in admonitory taps on the roof of the schoolhouse. The master was one Mungo Siddons, who goaded his small charges to their tasks with a combination of threats, whippings, and encouragements, with rather more of the first two than the the last.
The Davel Brae schoolyard was an unsupervised, unofficial, but faithful extension of the school proper. Here too lessons for life were administered in the same harsh way: small boys were obliged to choose sides and fight each other like armies, using whatever ammunition was available—sand, sod, or snow. And there were individual battles: fistfights were daily occurrences, according to Muir, and there was no thought of avoiding them. For the great ambition of a small boy here was to become known as a good (that is, feared) fighter. Without understanding it consciously, the Davel Brae schoolboys were acting out a received vision of life as hard and relentless, as something from which one must not flinch but bear its greatest blows with a stolid countenance, and in their own way they were preparing themselves for this.
In every respect but Daniel Muir’s excessive religiosity the daily routine in the Muir household was probably as representative of that time and place as was the Davel Brae school. Breakfast in the still dark of that northern latitude consisted of oatmeal with milk or treacle, spooned out of wooden dishes.* Then the children were off to school, the stiff sea wind in their faces, their book bags slung over their shoulders.
At noon they ran home up the slope of the Davel Brae, and the father would come upstairs from his shop to preside over the main meal of the day: vegetable broth, a piece of boiled mutton, a barley scone—all this consumed in the sacramental silence that Daniel Muir insisted upon as proper for the reception of gifts from the Lord. Then back to school for the afternoon lessons, the postclassroom education of the schoolyard, and, if weather and the season’s daylight permitted, perhaps a cruise along the waterfront to the harbor.
