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chapter two

The Morning of Creation

Commentary

WHEN THE NEBRASKA passed through the Golden Gates of San Francisco on March 29, 1868, John Muir had the sense that he had arrived home. Along with his fellow passenger, an Englishman named Joseph Chilwell, he set out immediately from San Francisco by foot towards the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The pair walked south, crossed the coastal mountains into the Central Valley over Pacheco Pass. At the top Muir paused. Below was the vast grass and flower-carpeted Central Valley and in the distance the majestic Sierra Nevada peaks rising on the horizon. This was Muir’s first view of the Sierras and the image that would remain forever etched in his mind. As one of his biographers said, “…suddenly there was come a glorious dawning, lighting up all previous obscurities, revealing that the apparently upward paths of his life led like a map to this place.”¹

Following the Merced River, passing through Coulterville, Chilwell and Muir reached the Yosemite foothills after a month of walking. They spent the summer working at odd jobs—breaking horses, shearing sheep, and serving as farm hands.

In l869 he became chief shepherd of Patrick Delaney’s flock of 2,000 sheep, and this is what Muir considers his first summer in the Sierra. Along with Carlo, a Saint Bernard dog, he and another shepherd followed the flock to green pastures high in the mountains and eventually into Yosemite and up to Tuolumne Meadows. Every day Muir explored the mountains and streams, the waterfalls and the huge variety of plants and birds. He learned to make sourdough bread that became the staple of his diet when he was tramping. He needed the job and its money; he was fond of Pat Delaney, but he was aghast at the damage done by the sheep. “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry…almost every leaf that these hoofed locusts can reach within the radius of a mile or two has been devoured. Even the bushes are stripped bare.”² Still, his job as a shepherd enabled Muir to get into the Sierra where he wanted to be. Here he had what was, by his own reckoning, an authentic conversion to the wilderness: “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. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is. In this newness of life we seem to have been always.”³

These Sierra years—1868–1874—were probably the happiest years of John Muir’s life and easily the most productive. Working for James Hutchins, one of the first white settlers in the Yosemite Valley, Muir operated a sawmill, using only fallen trees, and he utilized his carpentry skills to improve Hutchins’s rustic hotel. Having become knowledgeable about every aspect of Yosemite, its flora and fauna and its geological features, Muir was sought out as a guide. In this role he introduced a stream of visitors to the Valley, including Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1871.

From his first weeks in Yosemite, Muir wondered how the mountains and valleys had been formed. From observations throughout the terrain he became convinced that Yosemite had been shaped and molded by glacial action, slowly moving ice that carved away whole mountainsides and created the valleys and streams. This theory challenged that of the California state geologist, Josiah D. Whitney, who contended that Yosemite had been created as a result of earthquakes. Geologists later affirmed Muir’s slowly moving ice theory, but the dispute with Whitney pushed Muir to learn more by exploring the “living glaciers” of Alaska, where glacial action was more evident than in the Sierra.

During these halcyon years Muir found himself and his livelihood; he found his grounding and his sense of place; he found his sense of well-being and his home. He kept diaries and journals, which he handsomely illustrated; he wrote letters to his friends and notes to himself on scraps of paper. He recorded impressions of all he was learning, sensing, feeling, seeing, hearing, and tasting. These became the sources for most of his articles and books. His first published article, “Yosemite Glaciers,” appeared in the New York Tribune in December, 1871. By 1874 he had completed fifteen articles for the California literary magazine, Overland Monthly. Muir’s richly embroidered writings of these Yosemite years formed the basis for My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Mountains of California (1894), The Yosemite (1912), and, to some extent, Our National Parks (1901).

The passion and energy of these formative six years were the point of reference of Muir’s life. As he recorded in his journal one August evening during his first summer in the Sierra, “The Forests…and lakes and meadows and glad-singing streams.… I should like to dwell with them forever…a new heaven and earth every day.… Creation just beginning.… ”⁴

Arriving in the Enchanting World of the Sierra Nevada

JOHN MUIR WAS TO DRAW many times on this image of his first sight of the Sierra Nevada. It was a view that shaped his thinking and sustained him all his days to come. Of his three-month walk from San Francisco to this point, Muir wrote, “I followed the Diablo foothills along the San Jose Valley to Gilroy, thence over the Diablo Mountains to the Valley of the San Joaquin by the Pacheco Pass, thence down the valley opposite the mouth of the Merced River, thence across to San Joaquin, and up into the Sierra Nevada to the mammoth trees of Mariposa and the glorious Yosemite, thence down the Merced to this place.” The curtain was raised!

The air was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels; every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook.

The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the Valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty, and they were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and colored and shaded with millions of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow; and hundreds of crystal rills joined songs with the larks, filling all the Valley with music like a sea, making it an Eden from end to end.

The scenery, too, and all of Nature in the pass is fairly enchanting, strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark canyons and high upon the rocky, sunlit peaks, banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh, what streams are there beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in the shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea; and hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty; and when at last, stricken with faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you, for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foot hills is laid a grand, smooth outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevadas. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea ruffled a little by the tree fringing of the river and here and there of smaller cross streams from the mountains.…

—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, JULY 26, [1868]

A New Earth Every Day

IT WAS JOHN MUIR’S VIEW that all of nature was a revelation of a dynamic God who is continuously creating the universe. Although Muir grew far beyond his father’s orthodox theology, he remained steeped in the language of the Bible, which he had memorized as a boy. “A New Heaven and a New Earth Every Day,” is an echo of The Revelation to John, Chapter 21, verse 1, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.”

Another glorious Sierra day, warm, crisp, fragrant, clear—On the way back to our Tuolumne camp, I enjoyed the scenery if possible more than when it first came to view. Every feature already seems familiar as if I had lived here always. I never weary gazing at the wonderful Cathedral [Peak]. It has more individual character than any other rock or mountain I ever saw, excepting perhaps the Yosemite South Dome. The forests, too, seem kindly familiar, and the lakes and meadows and glad singing streams. I should like to dwell with them forever. Here with bread and water I should be content.… Bathed in such beauty, watching the expressions ever varying on the faces of the mountains, watching the stars, which here have a glory that the lowlander never dreams of, watching the circling seasons, listening to the songs of the waters and winds and birds, would be endless pleasure.

And what glorious cloud-lands I should see, storms and calms—a new heaven and a new earth every day, aye and new inhabitants.… And why should this appear extravagant? It is only common sense, a sign of health, genuine, natural, all-awake health. One would be at an endless Godful play, and what speeches and music and acting and scenery and lights!—sun, moon, stars, auroras. Creation just beginning, the morning stars “still singing together and all the [creatures] of God shouting for joy.”

—JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 27, 1868

A Window Opening into Heaven

ALL OF JOHN MUIR’S FIRST SUMMER in the Sierra was an epiphany, and during his hike to Lake Tenaya he was close to ecstasy. As he recounted, “… every crystal, every flower a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator.… In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one’s body is all one tingling palate.”

Up and away to Lake Tenaya—another big day, enough for a lifetime. The rocks, the air, everything speaking with audible voice or silent; joyful, wonderful, enchanting, banishing weariness and sense of time. No longing for anything now or hereafter as we go home into the mountain’s heart. The level sunbeams are touching the fir-tops, every leaf shining with dew. Am holding an easterly course, the deep canyon of Tenaya Creek on the right hand, Mt. Hoffman on the left, and the lake straight ahead about ten miles distant, the summit of Mt. Hoffman about three thousand feet above me, Tenaya Creek four thousand feet below and separated from the shallow, irregular valley, along which most of the way lies, by smooth domes and wave-ridges. Many mossy emerald bogs, meadows, and gardens in rocky hollows to wade and saunter through—and what fine plants they give me, what joyful streams I have to cross, and how many views are displayed of the Hoffman and Cathedral Peak masonry, and what a wondrous breadth of shining granite pavement to walk over for the first time about the shores of the lake! On I sauntered in freedom complete; body without weight as far as I was aware; now wading through starry parnassia [evergreen] bogs, now through gardens shoulder deep in larkspur and lilies, grasses and rushes, shaking off showers of dew; crossing piles of crystalline moraine boulders, bright mirror pavements, and cool, cheery streams going to Yosemite; crossing bryanthus [red heather] carpets and the scoured pathways of avalanches, and thickets of snow-pressed ceanothus [a woody shrub]; then down a broad, majestic stairway into the ice-sculptured lake-basin.

The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bank-full, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains—beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.

—JOURNAL ENTRY, JULY 27, 1868

The Sun’s Glorious Greeting

THIS SELECTION COMES FROM John Muir’s first book, The Mountains of California, published in 1894 when he was 56 years old. Drawn from journals he never intended to publish, the book is an extended homage to the mountains, glaciers, forests, and valleys, flora and fauna of the Sierra. Some of Muir’s favorite flowers mentioned here were varieties of heather, reminiscent of the heather on the hills of his native Scotland.

How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest peaks burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks and spires caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through many a notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows. The majestic form of Ritter was full in sight, and I pushed rapidly on over rounded rock-bosses and pavements, my iron-shod shoes making a clanking sound, suddenly hushed now and then in rugs of bryanthus [red heather], and sedgy lake-margins soft as moss. Here, too, in this so-called “land of desolation,” I met cassiope [mountain heather], growing in fringes among the battered rocks. Her blossoms had faded long ago, but they were still clinging with happy memories to the evergreen sprays, and still so beautiful as to thrill every fiber of one’s being. Winter and summer, you may hear her voice, the low, sweet melody of her purple bells. No evangel among all the mountain plants speaks Nature’s love more plainly than cassiope. Where she dwells, the redemption of the coldest solitude is complete. The very rocks and glaciers seem to feel her presence, and become imbued with her own fountain sweetness. All things were warming and awakening. Frozen rills began to flow, the marmots came out of their nests in boulder-piles and climbed sunny rocks to bask, and the dun-headed sparrows were flitting about seeking their breakfasts. The lakes seen from every ridge-top were brilliantly rippled and spangled, shimmering like the thickets of the low Dwarf Pines. The rocks, too, seemed responsive to the vital heat—rock-crystals and snow-crystals thrilling alike. I strode on exhilarated, as if never more to feel fatigue, limbs moving of themselves, every sense unfolding like the thawing flowers, to take part in the new day harmony.

Now came the solemn, silent evening. Long, blue, spiky shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me one of the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed and waiting like devout worshipers. Just before the alpenglow began to fade, two crimson clouds came streaming across the summit like wings of flame, rendering the sublime scene yet more impressive; then came darkness and the stars.

—The Mountains of California

Deep Summer Joy

EVERY MOMENT IS AN OPPORTUNITY to be awake to the overpowering beauty of nature.

Go where you may, you everywhere find the lawn divinely beautiful, as if Nature had fingered and adjusted every plant this very day. The floating grass panicles are scarcely felt in brushing through their midst.… Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching of their shining stems, and note the marvelous beauty of their mist of flowers, the glumes and pales exquisitely penciled, the yellow dangling stamens, and feathery pistils. Beneath the lowest leaves you discover a fairy realm of mosses,…their precious spore-cups poised daintily on polished shafts, curiously hooded, or open, showing the richly ornate peristomas worn like royal crowns. Creeping liverworts are here also in abundance, and several rare species of fungi, exceedingly small, and frail, and delicate, as if made only for beauty. Caterpillars, black beetles, and ants roam the wilds of this lower world, making their way through miniature groves and thickets like bears in a thick wood.

And how rich, too, is the life of the sunny air! Every leaf and flower seems to have its winged representative overhead. Dragon-flies shoot in vigorous zigzags through the dancing swarms, and a rich profusion of butterflies…make a fine addition to the general show.… Humming-birds, too, are quite common here, and the robin is always found along the margin of the stream, or out in the shallowest portions of the sod, and sometimes the grouse and mountain quail, with their broods of precious fluffy chickens. Swallows skim the grassy lake from end to end, fly-catchers come and go in fitful flights from the tops of dead spars, while woodpeckers swing across from side to side in graceful festoon curves—birds, insects, and flowers all in their own way telling a deep summer joy.

—The Mountains of California

In the Morning

JOHN MUIR MAY HAVE CARRIED in his mind the hymn, written in 1848, by the Irish poet, Cecil Frances Alexander, “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Her words resonant with those of John Muir, “All things bright and beautiful,/all creatures great and small,/all things wise and wonderful: the Lord God made them all./Each little flower that opens,/each little bird that sings,/God made their glowing colors, and made their tiny wings./The purple-headed mountains,/the river running by,/the sunset and the morning that brightens up the sky.… ”

In the morning everything is joyous and bright, the delicious purple of the dawn changes softly to daffodil yellow and white; while the sunbeams pouring through the passes between the peaks give a margin of gold to each of them. Then the spires of the firs in the hollows of the middle region catch the glow, and your camp grove is filled with light. The birds begin to stir, seeking sunny branches on the edge of the meadow for sun-baths after the cold night, and looking for their breakfasts, every one of them as fresh as a lily and as charmingly arrayed. Innumerable insects begin to dance, the deer withdraw from the open glades and ridge-tops to their leafy hiding-places in the chaparral, the flowers open and straighten their petals as the dew vanishes, every pulse beats high, every life-cell rejoices, the very rocks seem to tingle with life, and God is felt brooding over everything great and small.

—The Mountains of California

In the Cool of the Evening

BY THE TIME JOHN MUIR wrote this letter, he had been discovered as a writer, and he spent several months each year in Oakland and San Francisco writing for various journals. He felt neither comfortable nor healthy living in the city and pined for the mountains. This extract from a long letter records his joyful return. Still, he had a presentiment that the intense Yosemite phase of his life might be over, for he wrote in the same letter, “No one of the rocks seems to call me now, nor any of the distant mountains. Surely this Merced and Tuolumne chapter of my life is done.”

In the cool of evening, I caught Brownie [his mule] and cantered across to the Tuolumne; the whole way being fragrant and golden with hemizonia [sunflower-like wildflowers of the Sierra foothills].… Few nights of my mountain nights have been more eventful than that of my ride in the woods from Coulterville, when I made my reunion with the winds and pines. It was eleven o’clock when we reached Black’s ranch. I was weary and soon died in sleep. How cool and vital, and re-creative was the hale young mountain air! On, higher, higher, up into the holy of holies of the woods. Pure, white, lustrous clouds overshadowed the massive congregations of silver fir and pine. We entered, and a thousand living arms were waved in solemn blessing. An affinity of mountain life. How complete is the absorption of one’s life into the spirit of mountain woods!

—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, SEPTEMBER, 1874

An Evening under the Stars and Moon

HERE IS AN ACCOUNT of an evening spent at the foot of Upper Yosemite Falls. Although Muir was thoroughly drenched in the spray, he was captivated by the beauty of the night, the waterfalls, and the stars.

In the afternoon I came up the mountain here with a blanket and a piece of bread to spend the night in prayer among the spouts of the fall.… Silver from the moon illumines this glorious creation which we term falls and has laid a magnificent double prismatic bow at its base. This tissue of the falls is delicately filmed on the outside like the substance of spent clouds, and the stars shine dimly through it. In the solid shafted body of the falls is a vast number of passing caves, black and deep, with close white convolving spray for sills and shooting comet shoots above and down their sides like lime crystals in a cave, and every atom of the magnificent being, from the thin silvery crest that does not dim the stars to the inner arrowy hardened shafts that strike onward like thunderbolts in sound and energy, all is life and spirit, every bolt and spray feels the hand of God. O the music that is blessing me now! …. The notes of this night’s song echo in every fiber and all the grandeur of form is engraved.…

—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, [APRIL 3, 1871]

A Picturesque Snow Storm

MUIR’S EMBROIDERED WORDS draw images in our minds of what it was like being snowbound in Yosemite.

On November 28th came one of the most picturesque snow storms I have ever seen. It was a tranquil day in Yosemite. About midday a close-grained cloud grew in the middle of the valley, blurring the sun; but rocks and trees continued to caste shadow. In a few hours the cloud-ceiling deepened and gave birth to a rank down-growth of silky streamers. These cloud-weeds were most luxuriant about the Cathedral Rocks, completely hiding all their summits. Then heavier masses, hairy outside with a dark nucleus, appeared, and foundered almost to the ground. Toward night all cloud and rock distinctions were blended out, rock after rock disappeared, El Capitan, the Domes and the Sentinel, and all the brows about Yosemite Falls were wiped out, and the whole valley was filled with equal, seamless gloom. There was no wind and every rock and tree and grass blade had a hushed, expectant air. The fullness of time arrived, and down came the big flakes in tufted companies of full grown flowers. Not jostling and rustling like autumn leaves or blossom showers of an orchard whose castaway flakes are hushed into any hollow for a grave, but they journeyed down with gestures of confident life, alighting upon predestined places on rock and leaf, like flocks of linnets or showers of summer flies. Steady, exhaustless, innumerable. The trees, and bushes, and dead brown grass were flowered far beyond summer, bowed down in blossom and all the rocks were buried. Every peak and dome, every niche and tablet had their share of snow. And blessed are the eyes that beheld morning open the glory of that one dead storm. In vain did I search for some special separate mass of beauty on which to rest my gaze. No island appeared throughout the whole gulf of the beauty. The glorious crystal sediment was everywhere. From wall to wall of our beautiful temple, from meadow to sky was one finished unit of beauty, one star of equal ray, one glowing sun, weighed in the celestial balances and found perfect.

—“YOSEMITE IN WINTER,” New York Tribune, JANUARY 1, 1872