Wisdom of John Muir: 100+ Selections from the Letters, Journals, and Essays of the Great Naturalist

The Wisdom of John Muir

100+ Selections from the Letters, Journals, and Essays of the Great Naturalist

1st EDITION 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Anne Rowthorn

Front cover photo: John Muir at Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park, California—John Muir Papers, Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific Library. © 1984 Muir-Hanna Trust

Cover design: Scott McGrew

Interior design: Annie Long

Editors: Susan Haynes and Donna Poehner

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ISBN 978-0-89997-694-5

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TABLE of CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: Earth-Planet, Universe

The Beginnings of Lifelong Wanderings

Everything New and Pure

Leaving for the University of the Wilderness

Joyful and Free

Life and Death in a Graveyard

Imperishable Impressions that Vibrate Our Lives

CHAPTER 2: The Morning of Creation

Arriving in the Enchanting World of the Sierra Nevada

A New Earth Every Day

A Window Opening into Heaven

The Sun’s Glorious Greeting

Deep Summer Joy

In the Morning

In the Cool of the Evening

An Evening under the Stars and Moon

A Picturesque Snow Storm

CHAPTER 3: The Power of Beauty

Nature’s Cathedral

The Power of Beauty

A Peaceful Joyful Stream of Beauty

Opening a Thousand Windows

Enduring Beauty

Illilouette Falls

A Beautiful Crystal Hill

One Grand Canyon of Canyons

Leaf Shadows

Reflections of the Creator

CHAPTER 4: Trees of Life

American Forests! The Glory of the World!

Pruning by Rain

Sugar Pines

King Sequoia

The Big Tree

Wind Storm in the Forest

Music of the Treetops

CHAPTER 5: Companions and Fellow Mortals

Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos

Kinship with the Oxen Team and Cows

Reflection after the Death of Nob

A Terrible, Beautiful Reptile

Lament for the Passenger Pigeon

The Bravest of all Sierra Mountaineers

Our Sympathy Is Widened

The Sure-Footed, Fearless Chipmunk

Deer—The Very Poetry of Manners and Motion

Master-Spirit of the Treetop

Look into Nature’s Warm Heart

CHAPTER 6: Renew Yourself in Nature

Nature Is a Good Mother

We Dream of Bread

The Influences of Pure Nature

No Pain Here

A Thousand Yellowstone Wonders Are Calling

Wander Here a Whole Summer

Reflections on a Nighttime Walk in the Thin White Light

Stand Beside Me

Renew Yourself in Nature’s Eternal Beauty

Emerson’s Visit to Yosemite

Softly Comes Night to the Mountains

CHAPTER 7: Storms, Danger, and Survival

A Dangerous Hike in the High Sierra

Nerve-Shaken on Mount Ritter

A Perilous Night on Shasta’s Summit

Stickeen: The Story of a Dog

CHAPTER 8: Nature’s Inexhaustible Abundance

A Heart Beating in Every Crystal and Cell

Nature’s Choicest Treasures

The Heart-Peace of Nature

Hundreds of Happy Sun-Plants

Clouds in the Sky-Fields

Nature’s Inexhaustible Abundance

Fresh Beauty at Every Step

Rejoicing Everywhere

Everything in Joyous Rhythmic Motion

The History of a Single Raindrop

Everything is Flowing

CHAPTER 9: Walking Lightly on the Land

Walking Lightly on the Land

Vain Efforts to Save a Little Glacial Bog

God’s First Temples

The Eternal Conflict between Right and Wrong

Dam Hetch Hetchy!

Barbarous Harvesting of Lumber

Any Fool Can Destroy Trees

The Slaughter of Walruses

Crimes in the Name of Vanity

CHAPTER 10: The Scriptures of Ancient Glaciers

Glorious Crystal Glaciers

Learning Every Natural Lesson

One Grand Wrinkled Sheet of Glacial Records

The Mighty Glaciers of the Sierra

Tracing the Yosemite’s Grand Old Glacier

Luxuriant Butterfly-Filled Glacial Meadows

Vanishing Glaciers

CHAPTER 11: Land of the Midnight Sun

My First Campfire in Alaska

The Discovery of Glacier Bay

Glorious Mountains, Glaciers, and Light

An Alaskan Midsummer Day

Though Made, The World Is Still Being Made

A Gentle Arctic Day

Long Nightless Days

A Baby’s Smile

Golgotha

The Midnight Sun

Sky Wonders of the Glorious Night

Midnight on Herald Island

CHAPTER 12: Peace to Every Living Thing

Morning Opens on a Field of Lilies

Daybreak and Sunrise

Nature’s Peace

Going Home

One Love-Harmony of the Universe

Streams of the River of Life

Peace to Every Living Thing

Appendix 1: Notes

Appendix 2: Chronology of John Muir’s Life and Work

Appendix 3: Selected Resources

About the Author

Dedication

KIERAN WILLIAM

AND

HANNAH ANNE,

WITH DEAREST LOVE

Acknowledgments

I AM FILLED WITH GREAT GRATITUDE to many people who have helped bring this book to fruition. First, of course, is John Muir himself, whose magnificent writings have inspired and informed my life. I am grateful to the host of Muir scholars and biographers, present and past, who have written on John Muir’s life, especially Linnie Marsh Wolfe and William Frederic Badè whose books still set a high standard of scholarship, and Muir’s most recent biographers, Frederick Turner and Donald Worster. I am grateful to the Sierra Club and the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific for making available online most of John Muir’s works.

Special thanks are due to my hiking companion and friend, Cynthia Shattuck, who urged me to stop talking about John Muir and to start compiling this book. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to three talented friends whose patient reading of the entire manuscript resulted in many valuable suggestions: David Bingham, inspired by John Muir, is a self-described tree hugger, the founder of Salem Land Trust, and serves on numerous volunteer boards and commissions involved with community participation in environmental protection, policies, and planning; Hilary Thimmesh, OSB, President Emeritus, and former professor of English at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota; and George Willauer, former professor of English at Connecticut College who taught courses on nature writers.

I am grateful to the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s University in Minnesota for providing accommodation, warm fellowship, and a beautiful natural environment to begin researching the book. Especially I would like to thank the Institute staff: Director Donald Ottenhoff, Carla Durand, and Elisa Schneider.

Librarians have helped immensely in locating sometimes difficult-to-find sources, and I am especially grateful to Bev Ehresmann at the Alquin Library at St. John’s University and Jackie Hemond of the Salem Free Public Library, in Connecticut. Bob and JoAnne Pokrinchak and Yuanjin Chen kept my temperamental computer going long enough to finish the book.

Hans Christoffersen, the editorial director of the Liturgical Press, helped me find the right publisher for this book. I have been hugely fortunate in all the support and encouragement I received from Wilderness Press, especially from editors Susan Haynes who was insightful and enthusiastic from the start, and Donna Poehner whose expertise and many fine suggestions improved the book; also for the artistry of designers Annie Long and Scott McGrew. Along with Molly Merkle, they have all been wonderful to work with.

As always, family members have provided inspiration and sanity, along with lots of laughter and joy, during the compiling of the book. They are: Virginia Rowthorn and her husband, Michael Apel, and their children, Anna and Nathaniel; Perry and Hayley Zinn-Rowthorn and their children, Jackson, Beckett, and Juliette; and Chris and Hiroe Rowthorn and their children, Kieran William and Hannah Anne.

As always, my greatest thanks are reserved for my husband, Jeffery, who first discovered John Muir with me on a weekend camping trip many years ago to Yosemite National Park. By coincidence, just last week a tattered brown paper bag dropped from that trip’s hiking guide with two John Muir quotations written on it: One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of nature…inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look at any of her operations, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty. I had scribbled those words, and on the same scrap, Jeffery had copied another Muir quotation, I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for I found, I was really going in.

We are still out for that walk, and I heartily thank all who have traveled with me along the way, those mentioned here and everyone else who has been part of this joyous journey.

Foreword

THIS BOOK IS INVALUABLE BECAUSE, among many other things, it reminds us what a talented writer John Muir was. In fact, his writing was in many ways his single greatest contribution. In that glorious first summer in the Sierra, he created a new grammar and vocabulary of wildness, a rhetorical engine that powered the environmental movement for a century. He is on fire with an ecstasy that still seems new and fresh to read. It is very hard for a writer to do this without slipping into sentimental mush, but Muir knew how to combine anecdote and exclamation in a way that lets you feel the sincerity of his love for this newfound world.

Muir’s writing could only explode in our minds, of course, because he was doing something so new at that time. The solitary hiking adventurer is a stock figure now, but not then. And Muir pushed it at every opportunity. Consider his accounts of climbing a whipping pine tree in the middle of a giant wind storm so he could be tossed like a sailor in a mast, or of running toward an earthquake in Yosemite Valley so he could see the sparks the boulders threw out as they descended. What excited him excited others, though most would doubtless have been too scared to emulate him.

But very few explorers of that type have done the other thing that Muir did—taking on the hard work of organizing to preserve the things he loved. Think about what an accomplishment the Sierra Club was: it basically set the template for the crusading nonprofit, fighting political battles for those who simply couldn’t. And think of what it produced: great heroes like David Brower, who followed in Muir’s footsteps as an adventurer but also a politico. Muir may have lost Hetch Hetchy, but he set up the group that saved the Grand Canyon!

Muir was one of those rare Americans who changed the way we see the world. He helped free our minds and our bodies—he was a liberationist par excellence, and the great wheeling freedom of his words shines through to this day. Pack a rucksack, grab an apple and a copy of this book, and go find someplace suitable to read it!

Bill McKibben

AN AUTHOR, EDUCATOR, AND ENVIRONMENTALIST, Bill McKibben is the founder of the grassroots climate-change campaign 350.org and the author of a dozen books, including The End of Nature, Earth, and The Global Warming Reader.

Introduction

NO SINGLE AMERICAN has done more to preserve our wilderness than John Muir. A self-taught botanist, inventor, glaciologist, geologist, ornithologist, and writer, Muir had already become the American wilderness’s most ardent defender by l903 when he guided President Theodore Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip in Yosemite. Roosevelt had read Muir’s book, Our National Parks, published in l901, and he wanted to experience the wilderness world of which John Muir wrote so eloquently. The President left behind his Secret Service agents and stepped into the wilderness with five mules, a cook, and John Muir. It was a turning point for the conservation movement: during his term of office, Roosevelt would go on to establish 148 million acres of national forest, five national parks, and twenty-three national monuments.

Until John Muir wrote about America’s mountains, valleys, deserts, forests, and canyons, wilderness was commonly considered something to be conquered, tamed, used, and exploited for commercial gain. It took Muir to promote the idea that nature had meaning, beauty, and value in itself. As Muir documented his adventures in his journals and letters to friends and turned them into articles and books, the idea of wilderness and its contribution to human health and wholeness began to change.

This book, in Muir’s own words with short comments by the compiler, illustrates John Muir’s tremendous appeal, including his rich and luminous images of the natural world, his sense of nature’s holiness beyond doctrine or creed, his passionate protest against the scourging and degradation of the environment, his belief that all creation is an interconnected web of life, and his conviction that immersion in the natural world will heal the weary, stressed, overworked urban dweller.

The Wisdom of John Muir is a compilation of more than 100 of John Muir’s most evocative writings drawn from his diaries, journals, and essays. It is designed for people who love the beauty of nature and want to read about it at its best. I hope this book will touch its readers wherever they are along the continuum of knowledge of John Muir and the natural world. It may serve as an introduction for those unfamiliar with Muir but who have grown up visiting our national parks. It will offer some close readings of Muir’s texts to those who have already been exposed to his thought. The casual reader can pick up The Wisdom of John Muir and turn to topics of interest, or read the book through from cover to cover:

Chapter 2 offers a picture of the pristine Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada Mountains before they were touched by human intervention.

If it is sheer adventure you are looking for, start with Chapter 7 to learn how Muir narrowly escaped death on frigid glaciers and icy mountaintops.

Go to Chapter 9 for John Muir’s fierce defense of the environment.

To renew your own desire to experience a sense of wonder in the natural world, start with Chapter 6.

To marvel at nature’s overflowing, inexhaustible abundance, read any essay in Chapter 8.

Chapter 11 opens to the reader fresh views of Alaska as experienced for millennia by First Nations peoples.

Wherever you begin or however you read this book, John Muir is bound to touch your imagination, kindle your heart, and renew your own love for Earth.

THE BOOK’S 12 CHAPTERS are arranged by themes that roughly follow the sequence of events in John Muir’s life. Highlights of his life introduce each of the chapters, and brief, reflective comments accompany the selections to explain or elaborate upon their particular contexts. All the section and selection titles are taken from John Muir’s own words.

On his travels, John Muir’s pattern was to find a campsite after 15 to 20 miles of tramping, have his supper of black tea and hard bread, and in the campfire’s glow, record in his journal his impressions of the day just passed and write letters to friends. This accounts for the freshness and sense of immediacy and naturalness in Muir’s writing. His 60 journals and voluminous letters were solely meant for his own purposes and to share with a small circle of friends. He never intended that they would be published. His friends had other ideas. So impressed were they by Muir’s vivid descriptions of the mountains and lakes, flowers, and cascading waterfalls, they tried to persuade him to turn his letters into articles. Muir was resistant. Writing for friends and family was one thing, and he enjoyed it. Writing articles took a more self-conscious effort, and every time he started to write for a wider audience, Muir felt his creative energies drying up. He would laboriously weigh each word and phrase, continuously crossing out and revising again and again. But he persevered and in 1872 he published his first article.

Writing books, Muir felt, would be completely out of the question. In a Christmas day letter to a friend in 1871, he complained, Book-making frightens me because it demands so much artificialness and retrograding.… Moreover, I find that though I have a few thoughts entangled in the fibers of my mind, I possess no words into which I can shape them.… These mountain fires that glow in one’s blood are free to all, but I cannot find the chemistry that may press them unimpaired into booksellers’ bricks. True, I can proclaim that moonshine is glorious, and sunshine more glorious, that winds rage, and waters roar.… This is about the limit of what I feel capable of doing for the public. But for my few friends I can do more because they already know the mountain harmonies and can catch the tones I gather for them, though written in a few harsh and gravelly sentences.¹

The influential New York publisher, Robert Underwood Johnson, who had visited Muir in Yosemite, provided a breakthrough. Johnson assured him that writing books is easy! All Muir needed to do was select his best essays and arrange them in a logical order; each essay would become a chapter. Muir did just that, and his first book, The Mountains of California, came out in 1894. It is a gem in prose-poetry, and it almost immediately established Muir as a commanding spokesman for the earth, as a writer who described nature’s wonders so vividly, that many readers wanted to see for themselves the wild beauty Muir described so eloquently.

And now, almost 100 years after John Muir’s death, we need him more than ever. Our planet is in peril. There is so much despair and darkness in our world. Climate change is remaking the global village. Storms, fires, droughts, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, blistering temperatures, Arctic chill, the extinction of species—the earth is suffering severely. The future of human life on earth is becoming uncertain. Despite the host of scientists and ecologists exhorting us to pay attention to Mother Earth, for the most part, their warnings are ignored. We wonder why.

Have we as a people lost our link with the earth? Has our advanced technological society robbed us of the feeling of real soil under our feet or of the wind at our backs on a steep mountain trail? Have we become an indoor people? Are we more comfortable ensconced in front of the computer monitor than sitting on the beach watching the setting sun splash its dazzling palate of colors across the western sky? Have we become like Paul, the fourth-grader in San Diego referred to in Richard Louv’s book Last Child in the Woods, who plays indoors because … that’s where all the electrical outlets are.²

Richard Louv made the startling statement that this generation of children is the first to be raised inside, enticed to stay there by their indoor comforts and their huge array of alluring toys, most of them electronic. He has named the phenomenon nature deficit disorder which he defines as … the human costs of alienation from nature, among them: diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties, and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.³

Described in another way, Wendell Berry, the naturalist, writer, and organic farmer has said, Our children no longer learn how to read the Great Book of Nature from their own direct experience or how to interact creatively with the seasonal transformations of the planet. They seldom learn where their water comes from or where it goes. We no longer coordinate our human celebration with the great liturgy of the heavens.⁴

Living away from direct contact with nature, humankind severs the link that for millennia has kept us close to the earth. Away from regular contact with the earth, we don’t know the serenity of a dense redwood forest, neither its scents nor sounds. We don’t know earth’s countless species and creatures. Our children are more likely to see nature’s artifacts at museums of natural history than in actual nature where the deer and the antelope play. They visit the zoo to see captive animals that have been plucked from their native habitats, or they go to aquariums where whales and dolphins have been trained to follow human commands. They are more likely to see alligators wrestled at a reptile ranch than to observe an alligator swimming freely in the Florida Everglades. Children who still play out of doors typically do so in a manicured suburban yard or a city playground rather than in the woods or along a muddy brook.

Not only are children staying indoors with all its attendant perils, their parents and grandparents are inside with them. And we can see what this lifestyle is doing to us. Rates of depression are on the rise. In l933, when the Oglala Lakota writer Luther Standing Bear made his now well-known statement that … Man’s heart away from nature becomes hard, he could not have imagined how true his words would become.⁵

Turned away from the natural world, we are indifferent to the many ways earth is