Landmarks (26 page)

Brilliant! Where anyone else would see greasy trousers, Muir sees an archive of the Sierra. He concludes his riff with a flourish: ‘Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance.’

There is little Muir does not perceive as significant – except the Native Americans of the Sierra Nevada, whom he is disturbingly unwilling to include in his vision of the wilderness. Otherwise, his prose is rich in generosity and precise of image. He sees a snowfield
‘as trackless as the sky’
(an image that tellingly pre-dates aviation), he exults in
‘the wild gala-day of the north wind’
, and he describes squirrels in their pines as
‘fiery, peppery, full of brag
and fight and show, with movements so quick and keen they almost sting the onlooker’. He enjoys existing technical language, especially dendrological (‘pistillate’, ‘bract’, ‘bole’, ‘taper’, ‘axis’), but delights also in his own coinages. He often refers to the sky as
‘cloudland
’, a terrain in its own right that contains ‘hills and domes of cloud’, and the topography of which is re-made every hour.

Muir’s joyfulness can, like Jefferies’, spills over into effusion.
‘How fine the weather is!
’ he cries; ‘Nothing more celestial can I conceive! How gently the winds blow! Scarcely can these air-currents be called winds! They seem the very breath of Nature, whispering peace to every living thing!’ E. M. Forster once compared the use of exclamation marks to laughing at one’s own jokes, but for Muir the exclamation mark was a means of notating rapture. The thousands of pages of his published prose demonstrate scant self-regard – the landscape is never tilted flatteringly to reflect his own image. One of his favourite adjectives was ‘showy’ – the
‘showy and fragrant’
azalea – but he used the word in its innocent form: to suggest gleeful extravagance rather than immodesty. Muir the writer was ‘showy’ in the best sense of the word.

Muir the man was exceptionally intrepid. Iain M. Banks once speculated on the leisure activities of the future: they would include, he imagined, lava-rafting and avalanche-surfing. He should have read Muir, who, a hundred years earlier, was already inhabiting Banks’s alternative future. In 1873 Muir surfed his first avalanche:

I was swished down
to the foot of the canyon as if by enchantment. The wallowing ascent had taken nearly all day, the descent only about a minute. When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking. Fortunately, though the grade of the canyon is very steep, it is not interrupted by precipices large enough to cause outbounding or free-plunging. On no part of the rush was I buried. I was only moderately imbedded on the surface or at times a little below it, and covered with a veil of back-streaming dust particles; and as the whole mass beneath and about me joined in the flight there was no friction, though I was tossed here and there and lurched from side to side. When the avalanche swedged and came to rest I found myself on top of the crumpled pile without bruise or scar. This was a fine experience. Hawthorne says somewhere that steam has spiritualized travel; though unspiritual smells, smoke, etc., still attend steam travel. This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced! Elijah’s flight in a chariot of fire could hardly have been more gloriously exciting!

There is much to admire here, whether it is that ‘veil of back-streaming dust particles’, or the ‘milky way of snow-stars’, or that trio of peculiar verbs – ‘outbound’, ‘free-plunge’ and ‘swedge’: typically Muirish neologisms for actions. What might, in another’s hands, have become a self-vaunting story of a life nearly lost is for Muir an experience midway between scientific experiment and sacred epiphany.

Reading Muir, I feel invulnerable. He gives me seven-league boots, lets me climb high mountains in a single paragraph. Rockfall, blizzard and avalanche cannot harm him. Even his metabolism is superhuman – when he goes off to attempt a big peak, he
‘fastens a hard, durable crust
to my belt by way of provision in case I should be compelled to pass a night on the mountain-top’. When a blizzard engulfs him at dusk on the summit ridge of the volcanic Mount Shasta, he survives by locating a fumarole from which
‘scalding gas jets’
hiss and sputter. He spends the night trying to avoid being frozen to death by the blizzard or burnt to death by the vent. And when an earthquake strikes the Yosemite Valley at night in March 1872, Muir is woken by the shaking, realizes what is happening, and responds remarkably:

The strange, wild thrilling motion
and rumbling could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, near the Sentinel Rock, both glad and frightened, shouting, ‘A noble earthquake!’ feeling sure I was going to learn something. The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, one had to balance in walking as if on the deck of a ship among the waves, and it seemed impossible the high cliffs should escape being shattered.

The cliffs escape their shattering, and Muir escapes his. Two years later he would publish his first article about the Sierra Nevada in a journal called the
Overland Monthly
. It was entitled ‘Mountain Sculpture’, and it began by comparing the form of the range to
‘a vast undulated wave’
. So started Muir’s late-onset writing life.

~

In the final pages of
The Mountains of California
(1894), Muir describes exploring the San Gabriel range to the north of Los Angeles. Having made an afternoon ascent of a
‘knife-blade
’ peak, he returns through the chaparral to a canyon whose lower reaches hold ‘boulder pools, clear as crystal, brimming full, and linked together by glistening streamlets’, their margins adorned by ten-foot-high lilies in full bloom, as well as larkspur, columbines and ferns. A single old Mountain Live Oak spread its boughs over the pools, and Muir camps beneath it, ‘making my bed on smooth cobblestones’. Having evoked this miniature Eden, he ends the book by denouncing the
‘destruction of the forests
’ of California, ‘now rapidly falling before fire and the ax’.

Seven years after its publication, a copy of
The Mountains of California
found its way into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1901 had been sworn in as President of the United States following the assassination of William McKinley by an anarchist in Buffalo,
New York. Roosevelt was a naturalist, outdoorsman and explorer as well as a politician, and an admirer of Muir’s writings. He was in sympathy with Muir’s belief in the spiritual value of nature, and his conviction that wild landscapes should be estimated in terms of not only what they might do for us, but also what they might do to us. So he wrote to Muir to see if he would be willing to meet in Yosemite to discuss conservation in person. Muir proposed a three-night camping trip, and on 14 May 1903 Roosevelt arrived in the Sierra Nevada dressed in rough hunting clothes. The next day he and Muir set out, and they camped that first night at the Mariposa Grove, near the south entrance of the valley, among the 500 or so giant sequoias of the grove. The two men had talked as they walked, and their conversation continued around the campfire of
‘rosiny logs
’, which released in their flames ‘the light slowly sifted from the sunbeams of centuries of summers’. The next night was spent near Sentinel Dome, during a late-season snowstorm that added five inches of fresh snow to the five feet of lying snow: Roosevelt kept himself warm by burrowing into a pile of forty woollen blankets. The third campsite was under the shelter of the pines that fringe Bridalveil Meadow in the heart of the valley. That night Muir urged the president to take Yosemite Valley under federal control as a national park, and to include within its area the Mariposa Grove.

Muir spoke and Roosevelt listened. Or, as Muir would have had it, the trees spoke and Roosevelt listened.
‘Few are altogether deaf
to the preaching of pine trees,’ Muir had said in 1895. ‘Their sermons on the mountains go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.’ Certainly, this worked with Roosevelt. After leaving Yosemite, he stopped in Sacramento and gave a speech in which he exhorted the
citizens of California to preserve the natural wealth of their state, and to use their forests and rivers wisely. Three years after his trip with Muir, he signed the Yosemite Recession Bill, which placed the valley and the sequoias of Mariposa under federal protection. He also legislated decisively to proclaim certain landscapes as monuments in the public interest: in 1908 800,000 acres were set aside as the Grand Canyon National Monument, the first such designation. In the course of his presidency, Roosevelt would sign into existence 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 national bird sanctuaries and 150 national forests.

In her fine
Hope in the Dark
(2007), the Californian writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reflects on the nature of social and political changes, and especially those brought about by literature and art. Hope, she suggests, is a function of uncertainty, of not-knowing. It is a longing for change, experienced in necessary ignorance of when that change will come or what form it will take.
‘A lot of activists expect
that for every action there is an equal and opposite and
punctual
reaction,’ Solnit writes, in a passage to which I find myself often returning:

and regard the lack of one as failure. But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect … Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences …

Writers need to understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might just rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire.

Among those trees whose reproduction is fire-dependent is the lodgepole pine, the cones of which are sealed with a resin that is melted away by fire, releasing the seeds for dispersal. The giant sequoia also requires fire to burn gaps in the canopy, letting in light that allows their seedlings to compete with the shade-tolerant seedlings of other species. But I think that the specific seeds Solnit has in mind are those of the bristlecone pine, whose wood glows orange and gold, and the oldest living specimens of which are nearly 5,000 years old – having begun their growth when the Pyramids were under construction. The seeds of the bristlecone lie dormant in the soil profile until their germination is triggered, usually by the blazing passage of wildfire, which also clears the terrain of competitors. Muir loved the bristlecone for its extravagantly torqued and gnarled form, and for its extreme resilience to the adversities of gale, avalanche and flame that the mountains threw at it. He was a bristlecone himself in that respect, and though his words lay dormant for decades, they would eventually germinate and grow with astonishing consequence.