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chapter one

Earth-Planet, Universe

Commentary

DANIEL MUIR MADE A GOOD LIVING operating a feed and grain store in Dunbar, Scotland, a fishing and farming town on the North Sea. He and his second wife, Ann Gilrye Muir, and their growing family first lived over the store, but when income permitted, they moved to a house next door. Perhaps most people would have rested content with a stable, a profitable business, and a solid family, but not John Muir’s father, Daniel.

Daniel was a complex man, driven by deep religious convictions and always seeking a better path of being faithful. From his Scottish Presbyterian roots, he sought a simpler expression of the faith more in keeping with early Christian communities. When he learned that the fledgling Disciples of Christ had established centers in Wisconsin, he decided in late l848 to emigrate. Canada, reported to have vast open prairies suitable for farming, was a possibility, but he chose Wisconsin because of the church and because there were other Scottish families in the area.

In February of l849 Daniel Muir set off on the six-week journey with John, age 11, Sarah, age 13, and 9-year-old David. They left behind Ann and the four other Muir children until Daniel could find suitable farmland and build a homestead.

The family sailed from Glasgow to New York City and then traveled to Buffalo where they continued their journey through the Great Lakes and then by wagon to Fountain Lake, near Portage, Wisconsin. For the next eight years, Daniel and his sons chopped away the oak and hickory forest, pulled out roots and rocks, built a simple house, planted winter wheat and corn for the draught animals and vegetables for themselves. In the winter the work was bone-chilling, and in the summer they baked under the blistering sun. As John Muir wrote in the memoir of his childhood, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, “I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy.… And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long lines of zigzag fences.… Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.”¹

Whether the children were sick or well, Daniel drove them to work from dawn to dusk. Twice John almost died—once from pneumonia and once when he was overtaken by toxic fumes from a well he was digging.

Believing that the Fountain Lake farm wasn’t fertile enough, Daniel bought Hickory Hill, a new half-section of land (320 acres) five miles from Fountain Lake. As John recalled, “…we began all over again to clear and fence and break up the fields for a new barn, doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking, chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building, barn-building, house-raising.… ”²

An insatiable reader, the young John Muir was constantly borrowing books from friends and neighbors, but farm work kept him from attending school in America until entering the University of Wisconsin in l861. Always fond of “wildness,” as he called natural areas, John dreamed of the planet’s most distant and wild places. Not surprisingly, the books that particularly influenced him were: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1795) by his fellow Scot, Mungo Park, and Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions of America (1814) by the German naturalist and explorer, Alexander von Humboldt.

The Muir children’s only free time was Sunday afternoon after church, Sunday School, and farm chores. Their only vacation days were Independence Day and New Year’s Day, but John and his brothers made the most of it. His father had built the boys a simple plank boat for fishing and swimming in Fountain Lake. John reveled in running through the oak groves and the grass-filled meadows. He delighted in springtime’s gift of wild flowers. He was particularly fond of lilies. He knew the identity of every bird, and he awaited the arrival of migratory birds that flocked to the Muir fields. His blood quickened to the haunting call announcing the loons’ return to the lake. The sights, the sounds, the music, and the scents of winter unfolding into spring were intoxicating to the naturalist-in-the-making.

For more than a decade John Muir worked his father’s farms. As a diversion he taught himself algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and, using scraps from the wood pile, he concocted all manner of inventions—clocks, door latches, water wheels, an automatic horse-feeder, a barometer, a thermometer, a hygrometer, a self-setting saw mill, and, most important to John, an “early rising machine.” This unique device would, at its appointed time, usually 1 a.m., tip Muir’s bed on end, rousing him to read, to study, to imagine, to invent, to dream. Muir’s inventions attracted the attention of his neighbors, especially William Duncan, who urged him to exhibit them at the Wisconsin State Fair in Madison in l860. Muir won the “Ingenious Whittler’s Award” and met Mrs. Jeanne C. Carr, wife of University of Wisconsin’s Professor Ezra Carr. It was a fortuitous encounter. Taken by Muir’s intelligence and creativity, she urged him to enroll at the university. Jeanne Carr, in a role similar to that of an older sister, was to encourage and guide John Muir for many years, both at the University of Wisconsin and in the wider, outdoor “university of the wilderness” where landscapes, waters, skies, and animals of the waters, lands, and air would teach him all he would need to know about the universe. But before he could enter full-time into the “university of the wilderness,” he had many hurdles to overcome and much to understand before finding his way to become, in his words, “joyful and free.”

The years between 1860 and l867 were turbulent both for the nation and for John Muir personally. The North and the South had taken up arms against each other, and for Muir these were years of moral choices, decisions about which line of work to follow, and how to nourish his independent spirit while supporting himself.

The battle cry was rising. Muir’s companions from neighboring farms were enlisting in the military as were his fellow students at the University of Wisconsin. Muir was not drafted, but had he been, it is hard to say how he would have responded. Aside from some hunting he did as a farm boy, Muir had never carried a gun and he could not conceive of killing another human being. Whether wearing the blue or the gray, the end result would be the same. Killing is killing; death is death. War was an unconscionable loss of life. When Congress passed the Enrollment Act of l863, requiring all male citizens to enlist, Muir felt he couldn’t join. But where would he go and what would he do? He was 25 years old; most of his brothers and sisters had married, and his parents had moved into Portage. He was uncertain about which studies to pursue in Madison. Should he fulfill his parents’ dream and become a preacher? Or his own idea of becoming a doctor? Perhaps he could support himself as a country schoolteacher as he’d done for a few months in l862. He was certain he did not want to spend his life on a farm.

All his life, beginning in early childhood, John Muir was drawn to the wild, natural world. From the seashore of the Firth of Forth and its surrounding hills to Wisconsin’s lakes and forests, the natural world had been a source of wonder and refreshment. Now he needed the clarification of thought that only the wilderness could afford him. By this time he had acquired the skills of a botanist, so nothing pleased him more than the gathering and classification of plants. In l863 he took a long tour through the Wisconsin Dells and along the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi River gathering and identifying all kinds of plant species. Still, the gathering of specimens could not constitute his life’s work, and by this time the clock was ticking. He was balancing on a thin line between desire and duty without any clearly discernable direction to his life.

Though factory work was far from his first choice of employment, in light of his gifts for invention and innovation, Muir saw it as his only way forward. Consequently, he did three stints working in factories—each of them ending in disaster. His first was for an inventor he’d met at the Wisconsin State Fair. The invention was a steam-powered ice-breaking boat, and Muir was hired as the boat’s mechanic at the plant in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. When the boat broke up on its maiden voyage on the ice-filled Mississippi, the job abruptly ended.

In l864, Muir and his younger brother, Daniel, went to work in a Meaford, Ontario, factory making 30,000 broom handles. When a fire burned the factory to the ground, this job ended too. By this time the Civil War was winding down, and it was now safe for Muir to return to the United States. He headed to Indianapolis, at the time a thriving manufacturing city that had doubled its population during the war. He easily found employment in a factory that manufactured wagon wheels, staves, barrels, and plow handles. He was hired to increase the factory’s efficiency. As the plant’s productivity increased, so also did Muir’s sense of ambivalence. In May he wrote to his sister Sarah, “I feel something within, some restless fires urge me on in a way very different from my real wishes, and I suppose that I am doomed to live in some sort of noisy commercial centers. Circumstances over which I have had no control almost compel me to abandon my profession of choice [living in the natural, wild world] and to take up the business of an inventor.… ”³ Ten months later (March 5, 1867) while Muir was working late on the assembly line, a belt snapped, grazing the cornea of his right eye. By the time he’d struggled back to his boarding house he had lost sight in both his eyes. For weeks, condemned to a darkened room, Muir hoped and prayed that his sight would return. If his blindness continued, he feared a life in the shadow-lands, merely a bystander banished to the edge of society, never taking his full part or making his contribution, forever dependent upon the charity of others.

In April, to his immense relief, his sight began returning and he started roaming the fields on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In case he had any setbacks, he wanted to gather enough flowers and sunlight, sylvan landscapes and streams to cherish for the rest of his life. As he gathered flowers and specimens, he gathered himself.

By the first of September, after finally regaining his sight during the summer at home in Wisconsin, Muir set out for his 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Leaving factory and farm, he was at last walking towards his destiny. His intention was to “make and take one more grand Sabbath three years long,”⁴ fulfilling a long-cherished dream of going to Cuba and South America and traveling to the sources of the Amazon to see for himself the great araucaria tree, a long-lived coniferous tree of the Southern Hemisphere. He carried only a plant press, a New Testament, a little food, and a new diary inscribed “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.”

Muir tramped through Kentucky, over the Cumberland Mountains, and then into Georgia, sleeping under the stars and accepting the meals and hospitality of the people he met along the way, some of them recently freed slaves.

By the time he reached Savannah, he was low in spirits and in cash. The money he’d asked his brother, David, to send from his bank account back in Wisconsin hadn’t arrived. Exhausted, Muir found a resting place in the Bonaventure cemetery a few miles from town, where he could spend a few days hoping the bank draft would arrive. Nights were hot, humid, and thick with mosquitoes. As soon as his funds from home arrived, Muir set off again on his journey. But he was feeling ill. Sickening more and more as he walked and feeling feverish by the time he reached Cedar Keys on the Gulf coast of Florida, he nonetheless obtained a job at a local saw mill. When a full-blown case of what was later identified as malaria—probably contracted in the cemetery—rendered him delirious, his kindly employers took him into their home and cared for him as his health slowly returned. As he was able, Muir worked a little but again became restless and anxious to continue his travels. When a small schooner docked at the port to pick up a load of lumber for Cuba, Muir talked to the captain and obtained passage.

Muir stayed a month on the boat anchored in Havana harbor, spending every day exploring the outskirts of the city, discovering its tropical plants, grasses, and cacti. But in the aftermath of the malaria he was still weak, and the heat and humidity dampened his desire to go further south. He dreamed of cool forests and clear crystal streams. When he saw a notice advertising $40 fares from New York to California, he boarded an orange boat in Havana for New York. Arriving in February, he had to wait two weeks for a southward-bound ship. He wrote, “I felt completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, the immense size of the buildings.”⁵ It was a relief when the steamer left for the Isthmus of Panama.

From Colón, Muir took a train through the dense jungle to Panama’s west coast, where he boarded the steamer, the Nebraska, among a “barbarous mob” of fortune-seekers, misfits, laborers, idealists, dreamers, and families seeking a better life.

The Beginnings of Lifelong Wanderings

FROM THE START, John Muir was drawn to “wildness,” as he called the natural world. Curious and imaginative by temperament, Muir couldn’t resist the urge to run away to the seashore, marsh, and fields where his soul was nurtured just as his identity as a naturalist was set on course. Escaping his father’s heavy-handedness wasn’t easy. The elder Muir believed that his son should stay home in his house and yard and learn his lessons well (Latin, French, English, spelling, history, and geography), especially his Biblical lessons. But Muir, who never rejected his Christian faith, found it more authentically expressed in the magnificence of creation gloriously displayed in every shining lake and towering tree. Throughout his writings, Muir frequently capitalized the “N” in nature, suggesting that to Muir, Nature was synonymous with the creative force of the universe, the impulse that calls all creation and all beings—both plant and animal—into life. By capitalizing nature, Muir animated it into a person by that name, one whose mountainous face changes expressions, whose streams “sing,” and even “shout.”

When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.…

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound—a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery.…

Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart’s content. Oh, the blessed enchantment of those Saturday runaways in the prime of the spring! How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams! We… were glorious, we were free—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness. These were my first excursions—the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.

—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Everything New and Pure

HERE JOHN MUIR INTRODUCES his idea of the university—the universe—as the primary teacher of life’s elemental lessons. His university was not books, classrooms, examinations, common rooms, and learned professors; all these paled in comparison with the education offered by immersion in the natural world.

This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us. Oh, that glorious Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!

—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Leaving for the University of the Wilderness

JOHN MUIR’S MOST ENDURING LESSONS during his university years were those gleaned from his classmate, a botanist, named Milton Griswold. Griswold introduced him to plant biology and classification, reinforcing what Muir knew intuitively—that the natural world is not a haphazard assembly of parts, but continuous, united, and harmonious links in the web of life. As Muir was to reflect later, “…I was always fond of flowers, attracted to their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.”

Although I was four years at the University, I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, and mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer. Anyhow I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty.

From the top of a hill on the north side of Lake Mendota I gained a last wistful, lingering view of the beautiful University grounds and buildings where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days. There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell. But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.

—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

Joyful and Free

TRAVELING BY RAIL TO JEFFERSONVILLE, Indiana, John Muir set off on his 1,000-mile journey via “the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way.” But where was he going? His plan was to walk to Florida, board a boat to Cuba and, perhaps, like one of the heroes of his youth, Alexander von Humboldt, he might make it to South America and up to the mystifying sources of the Amazon River. Along the way Muir found shelter where he could, often outside under the stars, sometimes with white families and former slaves who generously shared their fare with him, however meager. He spent several nights in a cemetery in Savannah and even there he enjoyed the live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Everything he saw delighted him, even alligators and snakes. “They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family… cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth”

I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm South, and at last, all draw backs overcome, I set forth on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Crossing the Ohio at Louisville, I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to any one. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey. My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.

I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life. Walked twenty miles, mostly on river bottom, and found shelter in a rickety tavern.

—A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

Life and Death in a Graveyard

JEANNE C. CARR, John Muir’s close friend who encouraged him to attend the University of Wisconsin and who served as something between a valued older sister and mentor, called this reflection a “prose-poem.” Such could be said for most of Muir’s writings.

I gazed at this peerless avenue [of trees] as one newly arrived from another planet, without a past or a future, alive only to the presence of the most adorned and living of the tree companies I have ever beheld. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, but its accidental graves are powerless to influence the imagination in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the cordial rejoicing of busy insects, the calm grandeur of the forest, make it rather one of the Lord’s elect and favored fields of clearest light and life. Few people have considered the natural beauty of death. Let a child grow up in nature, beholding their beautiful and harmonious blendings of death and life; their joyous, inseparable unity, and Death will be stingless indeed to him.

LETTER TO JEANNE S. CARR, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, 1867

Imperishable Impressions that Vibrate Our Lives

HAVING SURVIVED THE INTERMINABLE BOGS and alligator-filled swamps of interior Florida, John Muir finally reached Cedar Keys, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he experienced an epiphany. Just the sight of the shining waters and the sea breezes recalled his happy days as a boy exploring the seaside of his Scottish home. He learned what others since have noted, which is how impressions of childhood experiences of nature can remain throughout our lifetimes, nourishing and shaping our views of the natural world.

To-day I reached the sea. While I was yet many miles back in the palmy woods, I caught the scent of the salt sea breeze which, although I had so many years lived far from sea breezes, suddenly conjured up Dunbar, its rocky coast, winds and waves; and my whole childhood, that seemed to have utterly vanished in the New World, was now restored amid the Florida woods by that one breath from the sea. Forgotten were the palms and magnolias and the thousand flowers that enclosed me. I could see only dulse [a reddish-brown seaweed] and tangle, long winged gulls, the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, and the old castle, schools, churches, and long country rambles in search of birds’ nests. I do not wonder that the weary camels coming from the scorching African deserts should be able to scent the Nile.

How imperishable are all the impressions that ever vibrate one’s life! We cannot forget anything. Memories may escape the action of will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place. For nineteen years my vision was bounded by forests, but to-day, emerging from a multitude of tropical plants, I beheld the Gulf of Mexico stretching away unbounded, except by the sky. What dreams and speculative matter for thought arose as I stood on the strand, gazing out on the burnished, treeless plain!

—A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf