Landmarks (25 page)

Two of the greatest twentieth-century English poets of place, Ted Hughes and W. H. Auden, came late in their lives to resemble the landscapes they loved. One thinks of Hughes’s great granitic head, more tor than skull, and the Auden of the 1960s, his face creased and grooved like the limestone pavements of northern England, where so much of his early verse is grounded.

John Muir (1838–1914) also grew into likeness with his chosen terrain. One of the best-known photographs of the elder Muir – guardian of Yosemite, family man, influential essayist and memoirist – is a black-and-white image taken in 1907 that shows him perched on a boulder of Californian granite at the base of a rockfall, gripping a twisted staff of pale pinewood. In the background the curled branches and silver trunks of fallen trees can be seen among the rocks. Sunlight falls dappled through foliage. Muir – long-limbed, root-thin – has twists of grey hair that reach his collar, and a white beard that reaches his chest. His legs are crossed, his arms are folded, his hands are gnarled as timber, and his eyes are raised towards the canopy. He is part patriarch, part granite – and mostly tree.

Muir himself never knew quite what he was, and it delighted him not to know.
‘I am a poetico-
trampo-geologist-bot and ornith-natural, etc.!’ he wrote gleefully to a friend in 1889. Looking back over his long life, one sees why he had to weld together this compound description of himself, for there are many John Muirs. There is Muir the long-distance tramp, vagabondizing a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. There is Muir the pioneering mountaineer, stalking the high country of the Sierra Nevada and making first ascents of several of its biggest peaks. There is Muir the geologist, decoding the glacial origins of the Yosemite Valley. There is Muir the explorer, opening up unmapped regions of Alaska in his fifties. There is Muir the botanist, striding through the pollinous bee-meadows of the Sierra and counting the 10,000 flower-heads in a square yard of subalpine pasture. There is Muir the woodsman, worshipping in the crypt light of the sequoia groves. There is Muir the activist, successfully lobbying Congress for federal protection of the Yosemite region. And there is Muir the writer, honing his skill at epigrams:

The world is big
, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread
.

The clearest way
into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

Writing
… is like the life of a glacier; one eternal grind.

Muir expertly disguised the ‘grind’ of writing. His books prefer immediacy to reflection. They are lit by sunshine and starlight, and they ringingly communicate the joy of being outside. The chill air of the mountains and the resin-reek of conifer woods lift from his
pages. I can think of no other writer as astonished by nature as Muir. He lived, as he put it, in
‘an infinite storm of beauty’
, and to read him is also to be stormed.

In North America, Muir has achieved the status of sage. He is conventionally referred to as the ‘Father of the National Parks’.
Time
magazine elected him as one of the hundred Men of the Millennium for the revolution he brought about in environmental thought, for the inspiration he continues to offer to conservation, and for his founding of the Sierra Club. So many peaks, lakes and glaciers have been named after Muir that the U.S. Geological Survey has been obliged to issue a statement declaring that they would be unlikely to approve any further such commemorations. Three plants, a butterfly and a mineral have been christened in his honour, as well as a touring musical and – less expectedly – the John Muir Parkway, a four-lane freeway in Martinez, California, off which tired travellers can pull into the Best Western John Muir Inn. Apparently the beds there are not constructed according to Muir’s preferred specifications: gale-felled branches for a frame, pine needles for a mattress and a rock for a pillow.

‘Wildness is a necessity
,’ wrote Muir, ‘and … mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.’ He showed that certain landscapes might be precious not in terms of the economic or agrarian resources they provide, but in terms – far harder to measure, far harder to prove – of their effects upon the spirit and the mind.

~

Like all those who survive posterity’s prolific deletions, Muir’s life has the outline of a parable. At least as Muir told it, he underwent as
a young man a
‘glorious
… conversion’ that transformed him from son of a preacher to child of the universe.

Muir was born in Dunbar in Scotland, the third child of a fiercely Presbyterian farmer and lay preacher called Daniel Muir, who obliged his children to memorize the Bible in its entirety, and who thrashed them in the belief that he was beating the devil out. In 1849, when Muir was eleven, the family moved from Scotland to Wisconsin, where his father hoped to establish a new life as a farmer and homesteader. Trying to ripen arable land out of the Wisconsin earth was arduous work. Time was rigidly managed by Muir’s father – the family rose early, worked all day and went to sleep after evening prayers. When he was fifteen, Muir was set the task of excavating a well in the sandstone on which the farm stood. For several months, every day except Sundays, Muir was lowered alone in a bucket, with a single candle for light, to continue the digging work. At a depth of eighty feet, Muir passed out for want of oxygen and was hauled up barely alive. The next morning his father lowered him to the bottom again. Muir did not hit water until he was ninety feet down.

Muir left home at twenty-one, and soon afterwards enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied irregularly for several years. It was under a black locust tree on campus that Muir was given his first botany lesson: a fellow student picked a flower from the tree and explained to Muir how the towering locust was a member of the same family as the lowly pea plant.
‘This fine lesson charmed me
and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm,’ Muir remembered later.

After heading to Canada in 1864 to avoid the draft, he returned to America in 1866 and found work as a sawyer in a factory in Indianapolis. In March 1867 he slipped while using a sharp cutting tool,
and drove its point into his eye. Cupping a hand to his eye in agony, he felt the aqueous humour trickling through his fingers. When he took his hand away he could see only blackness. Hours later, the vision of his left eye also vanished in sympathetic reaction to the injury. For six weeks Muir lay bandaged in a darkened room, having been told he was unlikely ever to see again. But at last he recovered his sight, felt his eyes had been
‘opened to
… inner beauty’, and decided to dedicate himself to the study of trees and plants, and to the exploration of nature.

In this way, Muir’s childhood of labour made him at last a loafer. The virtues of diligence and time-hoarding drubbed into him during his adolescence – what he came to call his
‘old bondage days’
– would be unlearnt during a summer of ecstatic idleness in the Californian mountains. In 1868, aged twenty-nine, he arrived in San Francisco. He disliked the city and stopped a passer-by to enquire the nearest way out of town.
‘ “But where do you want to go?
” asked the man to whom I had applied for this important information. “To any place that is wild,” I said.’ So off Muir was sent to the Sierra Nevada, the range of mountains that spines central California.

The following May he took a job in the Sierra as a shepherd. He was to move a sheep flock
‘gradually higher
through the successive forest belts as the snow melted, stopping for a few weeks at the best places we came to’.
My First Summer in the Sierra
(1911) is Muir’s account of this time – exploring, sleeping out, botanizing, climbing – and certainly his finest book, based on the journal he kept from June to September that year. Reading it now, one is rushed back to those first months of ecstatic freedom, and to Muir’s drastic re-imagining of himself. This is his entry for 6 June:

We are now in the mountains
and they are in us … 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 … In this newness of life we seem to have been so always.

‘I’ has turned into ‘we’: the singleton of the Presbyterian soul has dissolved into the plurality of the pantheist’s. The ‘tabernacle’ of the chapel is now the tabernacle of the body, ‘transparent’ to beauty and sympathetic in the strongest sense of the word. Muir has become the mountains – and they have become him.

Muir’s commitment to sympathy was part of his broader enmity to egotism:
‘Most people are
on
the world
, not in it – having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.’ His own experiences of ‘diffusion’ came close to the Greek concept of ‘metempsychosis’, the transmigration of the spirit – or, to give it its beautiful German name,
Seelenwanderung
, ‘soul-wandering’.
‘One’s body seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal,’
he records in a journal entry: the mountains were mineralizing him. In a letter to a friend, Muir put his address down as
‘Squirrelville, Sequoia Co.
, Nut time’. ‘I’m in the woods woods woods,’ the letter began, ‘& they are in
me-ee-ee.
’

~

The Sierra Nevada is home to some of the most remarkable woods in the world: it is
‘indeed
… the tree-lover’s paradise’, as Muir put it. From the dwarf willow that makes a
‘silky gray carpet
, not a single stem or branch more than three inches high’, to the giant sequoia,
the
‘forest kings
’ whose crowns can reach ‘over 300 feet in height’, Muir studied them all. His writing about mountaineering inspires me in its commitment to action; his writing about trees amazes me in its commitment to attention. He sketched trees as well as describing them: some of these sketches are tiny, set among the words on the pages of his notebook, such that the branches of the trees reach out and join the serifs and descenders of his handwriting.

For true
‘knowledge
’ of trees, Muir noted in an essay called ‘The Forests’, ‘one must dwell with the trees and grow with them, without any reference to time in the almanac sense’. He did so, living in Yosemite for years after his first summer there. Arboreal study was for Muir a full-body experience. He touched, tasted and smelt the trees he met, in an effort to distinguish the character of each species. He pried apart pine cones, noting the
‘silvery luster
’ of the ‘fine down’ that coats the cone of
Abies magnifica
, the ‘Silver Pine’, and the ‘rosy purple’ tints of its scales and bracts. He tore ‘long ribbon-like strips’ of ‘cinnamon-colored’ and ‘satiny’ bark off the Sierra juniper. He tried to interpret the
‘wind-history
’ and ‘storm story’ of individual trees, based upon their growth and form. He liked to sleep
‘beneath the interlacing arches
’ of the ‘Dwarf Pine’,
Pinus albicaulis
, the needles of which ‘have accumulated for centuries, [and] make fine beds, a fact well-known to other mountaineers, such as deer and wild sheep, who paw out oval hollows’. And he loved tree-climbing both as sport and as research. When a big winter storm hit the valley in December 1874, Muir clambered to the top of a hundred-foot-high Douglas spruce in order to experience the wind as a tree might. The
‘lithe, brushy top
’ of the tree was ‘rocking and swirling’ in the gale’s ‘passionate torrent’. Muir ‘clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed’, taking ‘the wind into my pulses’ as the spruce bent and swirled ‘backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of … curves’. From that ‘superb outlook’ he could ‘enjoy the excited forest’:

Young Sugar Pines, light and feathery as squirrel-tails, were bowing almost to the ground; while the grand old patriarchs, whose massive boles had been tried in a hundred storms, waved solemnly above them, their long … branches streaming fluently on the gale and every needle thrilling and ringing and shedding off keen lances of light like a diamond … But the Silver Pines were the most impressively beautiful of all. Colossal spires 200 feet in height waved like supple goldenrods chanting and bowing low as if in worship, while the whole mass of their long, tremulous foliage was kindled into one continuous blaze of white sun-fire.

This delicate discrimination between species is typical of Muir. He was a distinctive looker, who always discovered miscellany where others would see uniformity. Up on Mount Hoffman he found a
‘broad gray summit
’ that seemed ‘barren and desolate-looking in general views’. But on ‘looking at the surface in detail, one finds it covered by thousands and millions of charming plants with leaves and flowers so small they form no mass of color … Beds of azure daisies smile confidingly in moist hollows, and along the banks of small rills, with several species of eriogonum, silky-leaved ivesia, pentstemon, orthocarpus, and patches of
Primula suffruticosa
, a beautiful shrubby species.’ His books are full of word-lists, embedded glossaries whose language records natural richness with relish. One of my favourite passages of Muir comes when he turns his attention to the trousers of his fellow shepherd, during his first summer in the Sierra. The shepherd is an old-timer, and his trousers have seen
decades of wear. Muir notices that they carry a sheen of grease and tree-sap, which causes them to:

become so adhesive
… that pine needles, thin flakes and fibers of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc., feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects … flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded.