It’s difficult to capture the feelings elicited by Nature. It’s too much, like looking at the sun. Some are better than others in depicting her. Today we’ll explore one of those fellows, John Muir. Please enjoy today’s post: Hiking With John Muir.
Can I Tell You a Silly Story?
My folks are pretty rad people, but hey, I’m probably biased. Over the years, they’ve done zillions of projects, gigs, jobs and even had careers.
In a magical, fanciful time called the nineties, my mom took an “interpreter” position at a nearby historical location.
What the heck is that? You might be asking yourself.
If you visited Plimouth Plantation or Old Sturbridge Village for a field trip, like many a young school child in the Commonwealth have at least once, you encountered interpreters. They’re the people who dress weird, talk weird and churn butter. Those folks.
I’m messin’ around.
Interpreters are super interesting people. They are historians, artists, craftsmen, educators and/or just enthusiastic about our country’s heritage and want to share it with others.
Anyway, enough of the background. So, Mom was pretty well connected with the folks-who-dress-from-a-few-hundred-years-ago community, right?
Naturally, when someone decided to shoot an low budget film the area about John Muir, mom got a tap on the shoulder.
“Could you be an extra?” As, I fictitiously imagine the casting person asked.
“Late 19th century? Please… I survived the massacre of 1704 and I’ve never even been to Canada!” My mom fictitiously responded.
(these jokes… these jokes are getting really bad, anyway)
Next thing child me knows, I’m standing next to my brother wearing weird clothes in the basement of an old building filled with a bunch of other people wearing weird clothes and my mom is talking like she doesn’t even know me.
Frankly, I was confused
Steep Trails - Hiking with John Muir
Despite this early exposure to John Muir, as a historical figure, I never read any of his writing over the years. Not a word. Like many folks, recent developments have afforded me the opportunity to read more whilst “hunkahd in da bunkah.”
I figured it was high time to get lost in the literature and history surrounding Muir, his hiking adventures and the founding of the Sierra Club.
A simple blogpost, nor this simple(ton) (hey!) blogger could possibly capture the depth of the topic succinctly in short prose. And, importantly, I do not profess to be anything other than a curious character (hmmmnnn, think I’ll keep that). So, for our purposes today, I’ll delve into the first book about John Muir’s life that I read: Steep Trails.
The book is not a book. It’s a collection of letters and essays corresponding to Muir’s travels from Puget Sound to the Grand Canyon. To be clear, it’s not a tale of him hiking from Seattle to Arizona (although that would be pretty narly), instead it’s snippets along the way, profound, poignant descriptions of “points of interest,” the mountains, the rivers and all the flora and fauna in between. (I put that in quotes because Muir is likely turning over; I imagine he’d say something like: “everything is a point of interest”)
The collection spans about three decades of Muir’s life from the 1870’s. For whatever reason, probably because I’m a weirdo, I likened Muir to my dad. As I read, I heard a familiar paternal voice telling me the tale. I pictured pops, as a young man, sauntering through pastures, gazing up at mountains in reflective awe or sitting under a tree, scribbling away in a journal, pursed lips, eyes intent.
Giggling to myself as I page-turned, hippy dad’s bell-bottoms disappeared and Pantalooned Poppy emerged…
“Hey, J. Come hither! Clad thy breeches and hiking boots! I want to show you something.”
Favorite Excerpts
John Muir on Nature
Wit and enthusiasm gush from the pages, but it’s Muir’s sound scientific undergirding that makes his contribution to Western canon invaluable, timeless. Artful and vivid are his descriptions of the natural world:
Thus, by forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive, Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs–now a flood or fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life–forest and garden, with all their wealth of fruit and flowers, the air stirred into one universal hum with rejoicing insects, a milky way of wings and petals, girdling the newborn mountain like a cloud, as if the vivifying sunbeams beating against its sides had broken into a foam of plant-bloom and bees.”
I found myself releasing that shallow sigh of contentment after reading certain passages. And, at some point, momentarily transported through time and space to his side, I went hiking with John Muir…
At times, and unabashedly, he exhorts the reader to indulge in Nature’s offerings:
Take a course of good water and air, and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
John Muir on People
Muir can be critical, even condescending… to mankind, not Nature, of course. His letters, interspersed with characterizations and critiques of man’s relationship with Nature, sometimes simply discuss the interconnection, and at other times, harshly rebukes man’s foibles.
The mountains are fountains not only of rivers and fertile soil, but of men. Therefore we are all, in some sense, mountaineers, and going to the mountains is going home. Yet how many are doomed to toil in town shadows while the white mountains beckon all along the horizon! Up the canyon to Shasta would be a cure for all care… None may wholly escape the good of Nature, however imperfectly exposed to her blessings. The minister will not preach a perfectly flat and sedimentary sermon after climbing a snowy peak; and the fair play and tremendous impartiality of Nature, so tellingly displayed, will surely affect the after pleadings of the lawyer. Fresh air at least will get into everybody, and the cares of mere business will be quenched like the fires of a sinking ship.
Muir leaves little room for interpretation when speaking on Mormonism, however: “At any rate it is unspeakably offensive to any free man.”
The sentiment extends further:
No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in the way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains to wildness as that which regards the world as made especially for the uses of man. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.
I have nothing to add to that.
John Muir on Description
Known for his beautifully crafted descriptions, from the grandest mountains to the smallest of insects, Muir breathes life into the pages. I love his description of a squirrel:
But there is a little airy, elfin animal in these woods, and in all the evergreen woods of the Pacific Coast, that is more influential and interesting than even the beaver. This is the Douglas squirrel (Sciurus Douglasi). Go where you will throughout all these noble forests, you everywhere find this little squirrel the master-existence. Though only a few inches long, so intense is his fiery vigor and restlessness, he stirs every grove with wild life, and makes himself more important than the great bears that shuffle through the berry tangles beneath him. Every tree feels the sting of his sharp feet. Nature has made him master-forester, and committed the greater part of the coniferous crops to his management. Probably over half of all the ripe cones of the spruces, firs, and pines are cut off and handled by this busy harvester. Most of them are stored away for food through the winter and spring, but a part are pushed into shallow pits and covered loosely, where some of the seeds are no doubt left to germinate and grow up. All the tree squirrels are more or less birdlike in voice and movements, but the Douglas is pre-eminently so, possessing every squirrelish attribute, fully developed and concentrated. He is the squirrel of squirrels, flashing from branch to branch of his favorite evergreens, crisp and glossy and sound as a sunbeam. He stirs the leaves like a rustling breeze, darting across openings in arrowy lines, launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the trunks, now on his haunches, now on his head, yet ever graceful and performing all his feats of strength and skill without apparent effort. One never tires of this bright spark of life, the brave little voice crying in the wilderness. His varies, piney gossip is as savory to the air as balsam to the palate. Some of his notes are almost flutelike in softness, while other prick and tingle like thistles. He is the mockingbird of squirrels, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like a blackbird or linnet, while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay. A small thing, but filling and animating all the woods.
Just a lil’ squirrel…ahh.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, for us, we can’t go hiking with John Muir physically, but through his work, we walk by his side and see through his eyes.
So, be safe, and get out there! You’ll be glad you did.
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