by Peter Stark
Reaching Savannah, he boarded a coastal packet for a short passage past Georgia’s seaboard swamps, disembarking on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida. Sticking to the only dry ground he could find—a railroad line—he hiked across the entirety of Florida, reaching the Gulf of Mexico at Cedar Key. While waiting two weeks for a lumber boat to take him to Galveston, Texas, from which he hoped to sail to South America, Muir went to work temporarily at a Cedar Key lumber mill. After three days at the mill, a fever came over him “like a storm” and he collapsed into a deep coma.
“I awoke at a strange hour,” he wrote later, “on a strange day.”
He could hear the mill owner, Hodgson, standing over him and asking if Muir had spoken yet. Someone replied that he hadn’t.
“Well, keep pouring in the quinine.28 That’s all we can do.”
Somewhere in the swamps of Florida, Muir, unknown to him, had been bitten by an anopheles mosquito carrying the malaria parasite, which then surged through his blood and reproduced in stupendous quantities; it would be decades before researchers discovered that malaria is a parasitical, mosquito-borne disease. One wonders how this knowledge might have changed—if it would have changed at all—Muir’s harmonious perception of the natural world, for it was during this “Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico” and during his days in Florida, amid fever dreams and spectacular sunsets, that Muir underwent a religious conversion about the relation of God and Man and Nature.
He rejected his father’s severe Campbellite Christianity—that the world, and the human soul in particular, served as a battleground between God and the Devil, and that the victory of the former demanded intense and constant vigilance. Muir now asserted that God did not make the world for Man alone. Those who claimed to know God’s precise intentions were charlatans and the God that they presumed to know was a puppet of their own imaginations.
The world, we are told, was made specially for man29—a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men…have precise dogmatic insight of the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen idols. He is…as purely a manufactured article as any puppet of a half-penny stage.
Like John and William Bartram before him, Muir rejected conventional Christianity and speculated about a spiritual force in plants and minerals—beliefs held by many indigenous peoples including Native Americans. On he went in his journal, as he recovered from his malarial dreams in Cedar Key:
Nature’s object in making animals and plants30 might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of the one. Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small composing unit of the one great unit of creation?…The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
This, as Stephen Fox and other Muir biographers have noted, was the central insight of John Muir’s life. “Creation,” as Fox puts it, “belonged31 not to a manlike Christian God, but to the impartial force of Nature,” and Man, in Muir’s words, was only one “infinitely small” part of that Creation.
Muir’s was a revolutionary thought in mid-1800s America, as forests were chopped and prairies plowed and lands “gobbled, gobbled” up because God, in the conventional Christian thinking, had put Nature on Earth for the benefit of Man.
From Cedar Key, Muir took a schooner south to Cuba. Still feeling too weak to explore Cuba’s inland mountains—much less South America—he then decided to turn north to colder climates until his strength returned. He hopped aboard an orange boat bound for New York, landed there briefly in winter’s refreshing cold, but felt overwhelmed by “the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, and the immense size of the buildings.” On not much more than a whim, a young man at loose ends looking for some sort of a destiny, Muir booked passage to San Francisco. It was this whim that first brought him west. It would be home for the rest of his life, and the heart of his endless explorations—throughout the California mountains, to Nevada, to Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.
Three weeks in March 1868 took him by steamship from New York to Panama, by rail across the jungly isthmus, then via another steamer north to San Francisco’s harbor, surrounded by its steep hills. On their arrival in port, Muir was walking up Market Street with a Cockney shipmate when he asked a carpenter the best way out of town.
“Where do you wish to go?”32 asked the carpenter, in an exchange that has since become legend.
“Anywhere that’s wild,” Muir said.
In fact, he knew he wanted to go to Yosemite, as in the late 1860s it was already gaining attention for its powerful scenery, sheer cliffs, and groves of giant sequoias and had recently been named a state park. The carpenter directed Muir to the Oakland ferry as the way to start toward Yosemite.
If his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf and fever dreams in Florida served as a religious conversion for Muir, this walk to Yosemite was a kind of rebirth into a newly created world. To Jeanne Carr he wrote a detailed account. The air itself felt new. He and his companion were “new creatures, born again; and truly not until this time were we fairly conscious born at all.”
He first gazed on the Sierra Nevada Mountains33 from the top of Pacheco Pass. This young man from the rolling hills and small lakes of Wisconsin had never seen true mountains before nor vistas of such enormous breadth. He was stunned. One hundred miles away, across the airy space of the San Joaquin Valley, he could scan along an entire three-hundred-mile stretch of the snowcapped Sierras. Descending into the San Joaquin, Muir found himself wading in a thigh-deep sea of yellow and purple flowers. When he reached the Yosemite Valley itself, he felt himself somehow unworthy of such grandeur34 with its vast rock walls, arcing waterfalls, and nearby groves of “noble” sequoia trees.
After his first brief, weeklong stay in Yosemite, Muir picked up a series of odd jobs down in the California lowlands, harvesting grain, running a ferry, sheepshearing, but still entertained the notion of going to South America. He was thirty years old. He confessed to his sister Annie in a letter that he was always a little lonely and maybe the time had come “to put away childish things.”
“What shall I do?” he wrote in his journal.
“Where shall I go?”
He took work that winter as a sheep herder near Snelling, where the Sierras spilled down in foothills to the San Joaquin. He spent it in a smoky, leaky hut, learning to bake his own bread in the coals. In spring, the valley’s acres of flowers bloomed and he counted hundreds of mosses on a tiny patch of rock. He got news from Jeanne Carr. She and her family were moving to Oakland, where her husband had taken a new teaching job at the nearby University of California. Muir was still thinking about going to South America, he wrote his brother Dan, and maybe to Europe. He didn’t think he could ever really settle down into a normal working life except maybe to “preach Nature like an apostle,”35 although, if actually at a pulpit, he worried about being accused of blasphemy.
“I fear I should be preaching much that was unsanctified & unorthodox.”
You sense, through these letters and journals of Muir’s, just how strongly he was searching for his own chosen role in Creation.
In June, he helped an Irishman named Delaney move his herd of sheep from the dry lowlands on the eastern, desertlike side of the Sierras up into the rich, moist pastures of the mountains. With Delaney, who had attended college and studied for the priesthood before joining the Gold Rush and becoming a sheep rancher, Muir found intellectual companionship. This rugged, outdoorsy, priest-educated Irishman taught Muir the rolling cadences of preaching spiritual experience. As they followed the band of sheep, emerging from the crackling dry foothills into green alpine terrain, Muir suddenly knew he was home. He wrote with a sustained religious ecstasy in a journal of the trip, later to become My First Summer in the Sierra:
We are now in the mountains36 and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. 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.…In this newness of life we seem to have been so always.
John Muir, this first summer in the Sierras, in the great West, had discovered what he would do with his life.
He would become a “mountaineer.”
STACY DAVIES REMOUNTED HIS HORSE and eased into the bellowing herd of cow and calf pairs. I was free to walk around anywhere in the corral, he’d told me. I stuck to the rail fence at first, apprehensive to stray into the maelstrom of those tens of thousands of pounds of bellowing animal muscle and swirling dust. But, notebook and camera in hand, soon I slipped through the edge of the swirl, stepping across the pulverized dust to the branding fire at the far end.
From my post near the fire, I studied the dance that unfolded between horse and rider, cow and calf, branders and cutters. It was a ballet—delicate and precisely timed—yet heavy and muscular and dusty, an improvisation between animal and human that shifted from upright and poised en point and quickly dropped to thudding, sprawled floor work and moments later sprang back upright again.
Stacy joined the three or four other riders moving through the herd of mothers and their unbranded calves, born only this spring. Each guiding his horse at a walk, swinging their lariats in their free hands, they each tried to separate a calf from its mother and the rest of the herd. The pairs constantly shuffled or trotted away in an attempt to avoid the riders, giving the herd its swirling, flowing quality.
But here a calf separated a bit, and sidled out into an open space in the dusty corral. Swinging his lariat, Stacy threw down a loop on the ground in front of it. The calf stepped into the loop, and with a quick, precise bit of timing, Stacy tugged on the rope. The lariat loop closed around the calf’s hind legs, binding them together.
All in a matter of a few seconds, Stacy looped his end of the lariat around the saddlehorn of his horse, urged his horse forward, and the rope pulled tauter. The calf, its rear legs bound in the lariat loop, flopped to the ground, and Stacy’s horse dragged it through the dust out of the herd toward the branding fire about fifty or sixty feet away.
The fire flared bright orange whenever clouds scudded over the sun and the cold gusts of wind blew, kicking up swirls of dust. Long branding irons protruded from the coals, their wrought, curvilinear ends heating, their handles projecting into the air.
Stacy dragged the calf within twenty feet of the fire, and the vaqueros pounced so quickly I hardly followed the sequence. The pretty vaquera held him down, the young boy, Jeff, with a few deft strokes of his curved, scalpel-sharp knife castrated the calf, another of Stacy and Elaine’s sons injected a hypodermic of vaccine into its neck, and someone removed its horn stubs.
While all this was transacting in a few seconds, the third of Stacy and Elaine’s boys applied the hot branding iron to the calf’s thick hide. A plume of smoke and the smell of singed hair mingled with the cold, windblown blasts of dust.
I watched, fascinated.
A curtain of hail swept over the scene. Dust streamed from the shuffling hooves of the grunting herd, and out through the corral’s wooden fencing, out into the empty sagebrush. It looked like a sepiatoned photograph of the Old West. This is what excited me about “blank spots”—the sense of discovery—that far beyond the homogeneous nodes and exit ramps and strip malls, lay this other life in America, one tied closely to our national identity and history and destiny, that sense of America as a collection of self-possessed individuals, creating an individual destiny, in a vast land, with vast bounty, that has become swallowed up in the anonymity of the interstate exchange and frontage road, among the abstract transactions of hedge funds and mutual funds, among the ephemeral landscapes of cyberspace, the fantasized dramas of television, so that we forget about it, and we lose strength by not seeing it and touching it in its genuine incarnation—in the flesh. But it still blew on the wind, out here, in the flying dust and open sage.
The calf hopped to its feet and trotted away, looking for its mother. The new, raw brand was emblazoned on the hair on its flank. “FG,” it read, for “Frenchglen.”
IN APRIL OF 1871, two years after he’d decided to become a mountaineer, John Muir, the Wild Man of Yosemite, then in his early thirties, received the startling news that the venerable and aging Sage of Concord himself, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would soon visit Muir’s spectacular valley.
“I was excited,” Muir later recalled, “as I had never been excited before.”
In his time at Yosemite, Muir had worked seasonally running a small sawmill. In his spare time and off-seasons he hiked and climbed Sierra peaks with his homemade gear, developing theories that glacial action had cut the sheer walls of the Yosemite Valley, collecting plant specimens, writing, and indulging in almost orgiastic couplings with Nature, reporting them in detail by letter to Jeanne Carr. On the full moon of April 337 that year he spent the night on a cliff ledge beside the torrent of Yosemite Falls and at midnight, as the moon cast a rainbow through the cascade, Muir inched along the ledge until he’d crept behind the veil of moonlit water, suspended over a drop of hundreds of feet. A wind-driven quiver of the waterfall knocked torrents onto his head and back, nearly knocking him from the ledge, but he managed to escape and built a fire to dry himself on his ledge.
He recounted these details to Jeanne, who was living in Oakland with her husband and children. She replied with the news of Emerson’s imminent visit, in the company of a party of Bostonians touring the West.
Emerson called on Jeanne and Ezra Carr in Oakland, his old friends from Boston, and then with his party headed toward Yosemite, arriving on horseback at the crude hotel called Leidig’s. Muir hung around the premises, too shy or awed at first to introduce himself. When he heard that Emerson was staying only for a few days, and visiting only the well-traveled places of the valley, he personally slipped him a note with an impassioned invitation:
Do not thus drift away with the mob,38 while the spirits of these rocks and waters hail you after long waiting as their kinsman.…I invite you to join me in a month’s worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown beyond our holy Yosemite.…in the name of all the spirit creatures of these rocks and of this whole spiritual atmosphere Do not leave us now. With most cordial regards I am yours in Nature, John Muir.
While Emerson seemed open to the idea of a camping ramble into the high backcountry, his Bostonian companions decidedly were not. They refused to entertain the notion of letting their literary eminence spend even a single night in the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias with Muir.
“No, it would never do to lie in the night air,”39 replied one of them. “Mr. Emerson might catch cold.”
And thus the Bostonians—“full of indoor philosophy,”40 Muir ruefully said—nixed Muir’s ecstatic plan to introduce the author of the seminal essays “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” to true wilderness, where he’d never been. Emerson, nevertheless, was intrigued enough by Muir—Jeanne Carr had mentioned the Nature-besotted young man to him—that the old philosopher visited the peculiar sawmill and climbed a rickety ladder to Muir’s nestlike bedroom suspended over the creek. On repeated visits to the sawmill over the next few days, Emerson asked questions as Muir showed him his botanical collections and sketches, explained his theories of Nature and of the glaciation that he speculated had shaped the Yosemite Valley.
“Muir is more wonderful than Thoreau,” Emerson remarked later. “[He is] the right man in the right place—in [his] mountain tabernacle.”
And so the connection was made between the Sage of Concord and the Wild Man of Yosemit
e. If there were a passing of the torch, the handoff occurred obliquely. Muir sent Emerson, then back in Concord, a series of long letters furthering their Yosemite discussions of Nature. Emerson finally replied, inviting Muir to join his circle of thinkers and edit the works of Thoreau, who had died a few years earlier at age forty-four of tuberculosis.
Jeanne Carr, too, had been urging Muir to come out of the wilderness and live with her family in Oakland. For his part, Muir had been wrestling for several years with the decision of what to do with his life. He argued to himself in his journals that of the eight children in his family, seven were “useful members of society”—doctor, schoolteacher, merchant, farmer’s wife. As for the eighth:
“Surely, then…one may be spared for41 so fine an experiment,” he resolved. “As long as I live, I’ll hear waterfalls and birds and winds sing. I’ll interpret the rocks, learn the language of flood, storm, and the avalanche. I’ll acquaint myself with the glaciers and wild gardens, and get as near the heart of the world as I can.”
He declined both Jeanne Carr and Emerson. His immediate passion was glaciers. He embarked on a grand detective investigation over broad swaths of the Sierra spine to confirm his theory that glaciers were born in shaded spots, and had carved the cliff walls of the Yosemite Valley. A scientist from the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. C. L. Merriam, visiting Yosemite, heard Muir’s theories and urged him—as did Jeanne Carr—to write them down for publication. Muir, at first, resisted.
“What I have nobody wants,”42 he said. “Why should I take the trouble to coin my gold?…There is no market for it.”