Wanderlust: A History of Walking (23 page)

Our own walk came out of the woods and proceeded across some beautiful meadows with streams running through them. Michael and Valerie had led some of the last High Trips the club held, in 1968, when “the old man of the mountains,” the legendary climber and curmudgeon Norman Clyde, still came by, but the impact of large-scale camps and expeditions was beginning to dismay the club, and soon afterward the tradition came to an end. As we approached Mono Pass, we came across the same wildflowers blooming here that I had seen in the Marin Headlands in March, not three hundred miles away. And then we reached the saddleback that the signpost announced as Mono Pass, 10,600 feet high, and sat down in the gravel and tufts of lupine. The crest of the Sierra Nevada is one of the few real borders in the world, besides the ebbing and flowing borders dividing land from water. These mountains scrape off the stormclouds sailing in from the west, and the clouds' bounty becomes snowmelt running westward again to water some of the greatest temperate forests of the world, the sequoia, ponderosa, and fir groves of the Sierra, and thence to the valleys and salmon-run rivers to the ocean—and farms and cities—below. Though a little of the mountain runoff flows down the east side of the Sierra, everything east of the peaks is desert. At Mono Pass, we were sitting facing a bright green meadow full of tender wildflowers, and a few miles behind us began a thousand miles of aridity. We were also sitting within view of the results of two great battles over land. Yosemite National Park's boundaries had been set in the 1890s, and John Muir had drawn them up. Mono Lake, the blue oval in the dusty east, had been saved in the 1990s when environmentalists, after many years of fighting, finally prevented Los Angeles from diverting some of the lake's tributaries into the vast hydraulic system that waters the city.

We fell to talking about the Sierra Club again. Although I admire the club's staunch work over the decades, I worry that equating the love of nature with certain kinds of leisure activity and visual pleasure leaves out those with other tastes and tasks. Walking in the landscape can be a demonstration of a specific heritage,
and when it is mistaken for a universal experience, those who don't participate can be seen as less sensitive to nature, rather than less acculturated to the northern European romantic tradition. Michael told me about a Sierra Club outing he led and Valerie cooked for in which some well-meaning members brought along two inner-city African-American boys who were totally bewildered. The wilderness alarmed them, and the point of exerting oneself in it escaped them. Only the man who took them fishing and the hamburgers Valerie made them every day redeemed the experience. Michael wrote about it in
The Pathless Way,
his book on Muir: “We were shocked to discover firsthand that the taste for wilderness was culturally determined, a privilege enjoyed only by the sons and daughters of a certain comfortable class of Americans. One could cultivate a sense of utopian community on the outings only by beginning with a group of people who already agreed closely about certain basic values.” (Since then, the Sierra Club and other organizations have sponsored “inner-city outings” better equipped to mediate the experience.) Afterward we left the trail and went cross-country, straying near a small lake tucked under a dark cliff face that seemed to increase its depths and then venturing through marshy green expanses of wild onion splashed with the scarlet of Indian paintbrush to a windswept slope above Bloody Canyon.

One of the monuments to John Muir—along with the John Muir Trail from Mount Whitney to Yosemite Valley and dozens of California public schools—is the expanse of redwoods called Muir Woods, on the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, a dozen miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Tamalpais is the small peak where Gary Snyder and friends instituted the Buddhist practice of ritual circumambulation, but there are other ways to interpret mountains and walking, and this one has had many interpreters. Above Muir Woods, there's an inconspicuous trail that runs for half a mile or so, then comes around a bend to a very different and disorienting monument on the steep slope above the woods. It looks like a perfect Alpine chalet, with its outdoor dance floor, pitched roof, and tiers of balconies made of pine planks cut out in folkloric designs, and it is one of the few surviving American outposts of the Austria-based organization Die
Naturfreunde. The Naturfreunde, or Nature Friends, was founded in Vienna in 1895 by teacher Georg Schmiedl, blacksmith Alois Rohrauer, and student Karl Renner, at a time when the Hapsburg monarchy and other elites still controlled access to most of the Austrian mountains. “Berg frei”—free mountains—was their slogan. They were socialists and antimonarchists, and they were immensely successful. Sixty people attended the organization's first meeting, and within a few decades there were 200,000 members, mostly in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Each local chapter bought land and built a clubhouse, which was open to all members of the Naturfreunde. They sponsored hikes, environmental consciousness, and folk festivals, and advocated access to the mountains for working people.

The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was a golden age of organizations. Some provided social cohesion for the displaced of a rapidly changing world; others offered resistance to industrialization's inhuman appetite for the time, health, energy, and rights of workers. Many were organized around utopian ideals or pragmatic social change, and all of them created communities—of Zionists, feminists, labor activists, athletes, charities, and intellectuals. Walking clubs were part of this larger movement, and each of the major political walking clubs was founded in some kind of opposition to the mainstream of its society. For the Sierra Club, this mainstream was the rampant destruction of a pristine ecosystem by a rapidly developing country. In most of Europe, the remaining open space was in more stable but less accessible condition. For the Austrian Naturfreunde as well as many British groups, the aristocratic monopoly on open space was the problem. Manfred Pils, the current Naturfreunde secretary general, wrote me, “The Friends of Nature were founded because leisure time and tourism was a privilege for upper class people at that time. They wanted to open up such opportunities also for common people . . . it was the Friends of Nature who campaigned against the efforts to exclude people from private meadows and forests in the Alps. The campaign was called ‘Der verbotene Weg' (the forbidden path). So the Friends of Nature achieved finally a legalistic regulation which guaranteed access by walking to forests and alpine meadows for everyone.” As a result, “the Alps are not a national territory, they stayed in private property but we (and all tourists) have access to all footpaths and generally to forests and alpine meadows.”

When German and Austrian radicals arrived in the United States, they
brought their organization with them. In San Francisco, immigrants who met at the German workers' hall on Valencia Street went forth in big groups to hike on Mount Tam. After the 1906 earthquake, local Naturfreunde historian Erich Fink told me, many more craftsmen arrived in the region, the number of weekend hikers mushroomed, and they decided to buy property to start their own branch of the Naturfreunde. Five young people bought a whole steep hillside on Mount Tam for two hundred dollars, and the members built themselves a rural outpost. Fink's wife told me that until the 1930s you had to show a union card to join. This Bavarian lodge perched above the redwoods provided a workers' alternative to the Sierra Club, a local place for people who had only the weekend in which to escape the city.

The Naturfreunde paid for its success. Its socialism provoked the Nazi regime to repress it in Austria and Germany, while the Germanness of the organization made it suspect in the United States during that era. After the end of World War II, socialism became an issue in the United States too. McCarthyism in the United States so traumatized the organization that one local leader was still reluctant to talk to me about the club's history. “They are very political today in Europe,” he said in a heavy Teutonic accent, “which we cannot be. We stay away from any politics because they almost took away what we built up through all the years.” During the years when being or having been a socialist or Communist was a dangerous offense, all the branches of the Naturfreunde in the eastern United States collapsed, and the clubhouses bought, built, and owned by the members fell into private hands. Only three California outposts survived by being adamantly apolitical, and a fourth one recently opened up in northern Oregon. Of the 600,000 Naturfreunde members in twenty-one countries, less than a thousand remain in the United States, and they are anomalies for their apolitical stance.

The German youth movement, the Wandervogel, did not survive World War II, but its history demonstrates that no ideology had a monopoly on walking. A reaction against the authoritarianism of the German family and government, it began inauspiciously enough in a suburb of Berlin in 1896, where a group of shorthand students began to go on expeditions together to the woods nearby and then farther away. By 1899 they were setting off for weeks at a time to wander in the mountains. The most charismatic member of that circle, Karl Fischer,
transformed the organization, formalizing its behavior and spreading its ideas. When the Wandervogel Ausschuss für Schulerfahrten (Wandervogel Committee for Schoolboys' Rambles) was founded on November 4, 1901, it was a Romantic rambling society.
Wandervogel
means a magical bird; a word taken from a poem, it suggests the free and weightless identity the members would seek. Medieval wandering scholars were the first role models for the thousands of boys who joined up, and rambling on long excursions together was their principal activity. There were other cultural activities—the lasting legacy of the Wandervogel, and, according to historians, its only first-rate cultural contribution, was the revival of folk songs. Most of its members were in the throes of adolescence's heady idealism, and heated philosophical debates as well as music filled their evenings. The movement seemed to be forever splintering over some minor point or other. “On the main thing—rambling—we are in complete agreement,” concluded a Wandervogel statement.

Theirs was an odd antiauthoritarianism, since the Wandervogel was exclusive, hierarchical, organized into small groups giving unquestioning obedience to a leader, with semiformal uniforms (usually shorts, dark shirts, and neckerchiefs) and initiation rituals of various degrees of difficulty and danger. Though the Wandervogel was detached from practical politics, most members subscribed to an ethnic nationalism, and so the folk culture that meant working-class culture for the Naturfreunde meant ethnic identity for the Wandervogel. The members were almost exclusively middle-class; girls were admitted to some groups after 1911 or encouraged to form their own groups. “The Jewish problem” meant that Jews—and often, Catholics—were generally unwelcome (though certainly one prominent Jew, Walter Benjamin, was involved in a radical splinter group of the youth movement in his own youth). At its height, the Wandervogel had about sixty thousand members. The Wandervogel seems to have started out as a real rebellion against German authoritarianism, and to this extent it was a political club, but it had neither the strength nor the insight to truly oppose its country's slide toward fascism.

There were other organizations for young people to join, church groups and the Protestant Youth Movement and, after 1909, a German version of the Boy Scouts, while working-class youths had Communist and socialist youth clubs. The Boy Scouts, like the Wandervogel, like so many situations in the history of walking, raise the question of when walking becomes marching. Most walking
clubs were groups come together to celebrate and protect individual and private experience, but some embraced authoritarianism. Marching subordinates the very rhythms of individual bodies to group and to authority, and any group that marches is marching toward militarism if it is not already there. The scouting movement was adapted by the Boer War veteran Sir Baden-Powell from ideas of his own and ideas plagiarized from the Anglo-Canadian Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton's goal had been to introduce boys to outdoor life with a strong focus on Native American skills and values, and he is sometimes credited with starting the pagan revival among adults instead. Baden-Powell brought a more militaristic, conservative sensibility to the idea of living in the woods. Even now, each scouting group seems to have its own style; some teach outdoor skills, some train the boys as little soldiers. After World War I, the Wandervogel collapsed, but the German Boy Scouts—the Pathfinders, they were called—rebelled against their adult leaders and largely replaced the original movement.

Werner Heisenberg, the physicist most famous for his uncertainty principle, became the leader of one of these New Pathfinder troops. Playing at adventure must have been a relief to him after the war, during which he and his brother had undergone real risks smuggling food into besieged Munich. Like many other Germans, he had a tradition of hiking and love of mountains to draw on: his paternal grandfather had gone on the “wander year” that was a rite of passage for young artisans, and his maternal grandfather was an avid hiker who went on long walking tours. But the Pathfinder movement, with its idealism and its camaraderie, had other attractions. The movement instilled in him a love of his country and close ties to his peers that made him deeply ambivalent and deeply troubled during World War II, when he was in charge of the Nazi program to develop an atomic bomb. “After 1919, the militant dictatorships in Russia, Italy, and Germany built up youth organizations of their own,” writes one historian of the era. “The Hitler Youth took over many of the symbols and rituals of the original Youth Movement, but it was no more than a caricature.”