man swung down, and the landscape stood still. In the barnyard of the homestead the city man was confronted by the mud puddles, the dung, and the spectacle of men and boys trying to milk the cows stamping and lashing under the pitiless attack of flies. And then he knew why he had left; only from the city or the rolling train could he love this land and its life.
Muir could not leave; he had nowhere to go. So if he was to keep intact his love of the natural world, he would have to find a way to do so in the very jaws of circumstance.
Perhaps inevitably, Muir’s earliest response to the challenge of the farm took the form of a desire to excel at his imposed tasks: to do the work better and faster than anyone else, especially his father. Doubtless such a response was in part a bequest to him from his Scots childhood, where a sort of heroic stoicism had been thrashed into him at the Davel Brae school. So at Fountain Lake Muir had sought to rise above the deadening affects of his labor by competing with himself and all others. “I was,” he remembered, “foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men.” So too with plowing, where he strove to keep his share exactly trimmed and to draw a straighter furrow than anyone, and with rail splitting and stump grubbing. Even the digging of the well that almost became the digging of his grave was subsequently transformed into a source of stubborn pride, for he had sunk it straight and plumb and had built a “fine covered top over it, and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank many a day.”
This earliest response deepened into the character trait of a lifetime: Muir would actively, relentlessly seek out adversity and hardship, would relish almost any physical challenge, and would punish himself severely for real or imagined failures to be equal to any circumstance. He would also take boastful pride in his victories over himself, as he did in these years when, for instance, he spent hours one day diving over and over again from the stern of a boat in the deepest part of Fountain Lake to conquer his fear of drowning. Each time he plunged into the water, he addressed himself with “Take that!” Never, he reflected of this incident, “was a victory over self more complete. I have been a good swimmer ever since. At a slow gait I think I could swim all day in smooth water moderate in temperature.” Later he would see the connection between such behavior and the Scots Calvinism in his background, but this was the view from old age, and by that time he had spent half a century seeking challenges and meeting them successfully.
Soon enough, however, Muir felt the rub in this sort of response, for its main product was compounded misery. Without giving up his competitive attitude, he began to overlay it with another response, as if aware even so early that such behavior could not ultimately save him, and that as a way of being, of going through the world for the rest of his life, it had clear and stark limitations. Something more was needed.
About the age of sixteen, while still striving to lead all the hired men, Muir asked his father for a mathematics book, and Daniel Muir, normally suspicious of all learning other than the study of Scripture, warily consented. Perhaps it was understood between them that Muir’s study of it would be of use in the management of the farm. Whatever the spoken arrangement, Muir’s underlying motive was to bring to his living a dimension it had heretofore lacked: formal intellectual exercise. Thoughtful from an early age, he had been so cut off on the farm that he had no other tools than his native wits with which to think about life. The rote learning of the Dunbar days was dead, and his acquaintance with the Bible was not yet the sort that would allow him the grand vistas it opened onto history and myth, to say nothing of the thunderous music of its language.
Even among his peers Muir was singularly isolated by the regimen his father imposed, not only without books and schooling but without regular converse with others outside his household. He had his Sundays—or parts of them—to visit with neighboring boys and girls, and Independence Day and New Year’s, but otherwise he saw little of the rest of the world.
Comparing Muir’s life at this stage with those of two of his contemporaries—Samuel Clemens (born 1835) and William Dean Howells (born 1837)—is one way to understand how pitifully limited Muir’s outlets were, how much he was thrust onto himself and his inner resources, and what a far and lonely way he had to travel to come into his own. Clemens and Howells had also been middle-class midwestern boys and were almost his exact contemporaries. But they had been village boys from families of more liberal views, and their awareness of the world of their time and their access to it had been immeasurably greater than this backwoods youth whose pleasures were mostly those of his own devising, whose awareness of other American horizons was limited to occasional trips to Portage and to the casual talk of his immigrant neighbors in the minutes before the commencement of revival meetings.
But now he had the math book, and he took to it with a hunger that is the unmistakable sign of intellectual starvation. “Beginning at the beginning,” he was to recall, “in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest- and the hay-fields. …” Then in quick succession he took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, satisfying himself that he had made some real progress in each.
It was not, of course, simply mathematics that gripped him, though he found that he was good at it. At bottom this was an effort to intellectualize his existence and so lift himself above its routines. Surely nothing can so deaden aspiration and imagination as the cheerless prospect of yet another lengthy chore ahead after having spent so much on the one at hand—another field to be worked that you can see from the one you are currently working. But now as he labored, Muir mulled over mathematical problems; soon he had other matters to ponder as well.
About the time he was racing through his math books he discovered the wonders of literature. His immediate guides were two neighboring Scots boys, farm kids like himself but from families who prized learning and books. David Gray and David Taylor, Muir learned to his astonishment, not only had access to good books but had actually committed favorite lines to memory. More than this, they wrote poetry of their own, and Davie Taylor even sang some of his own verses. To Johnnie Muir the fact that two boys so like himself and living so near could possess such privileges, develop such talents, was almost incredible.
The first time Muir heard his peers discussing literature, the “twa Davies,” as Muir called them, were talking of Dickens. They were in a swamp, discharging their families’ neighborhood civic duties by building a corduroy road across it, and there amid the mire and the sweat was a sudden music that transformed the whole scene into something utterly different. Davie Gray and Davie Taylor were now not just day hands mucking about in swampy waters, cutting logs and fitting them: they were artists, men of literature.
Muir had, of course, known both music and poetry: he had those old ballads running in his head and blood, and he had most likely also heard his father play the fiddle and sing the ancient airs in the days before that stern patriarch had put music away as an unseemly frivolity. After he had escaped the farm, he would write back to his sister Mary that there must be something at least mildly poetic in the family since “Mother made poetry when first acquainted with father and I think that father must have made some verses too. …” Still, belles lettres were hardly a part of the strait life of that household, where even casual talk at mealtimes was discouraged as sacrilegious. And as for frankly imaginative prose—novels—this was little less than lies.
Now with the help and examples of Gray and Taylor, Muir discovered lodes of inspiration and reflection. With an even greater avidity than he had displayed in taking to his mathematical studies, he plunged his mind and heart into literature, borrowing books, saving small sums to buy his own, forming part of a neighborhood lending library. He read Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets—Cowper, Thomas Campbell, Mark Akenside, and others. He saw the Bible with a new eye and heard its verses as treasures of sound. Perhaps closest to him was the great apologist Milton, whose lines in Paradise Lost he would remember forever. He memorized and savored images and whole passages, spoke them aloud to himself in the fields and woods or during some chore at the house, and applied them to the landscape through which
