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The Lessons of a Long-Distance Runner

In the space of twelve years Anne Muir bore her husband seven children. Margaret came first and then Sarah in 1836; two years later John was born on April 21, and he would be followed by brothers David (1840) and Daniel Jr. (1843), and by twin sisters, Mary and Annie (1846). An eighth child, Joanna, would be born in America. Amazingly, considering the region’s infant-mortality rates, all the children lived and were healthy in their young years.

At the time of John Muir’s birth the family still lived in the house to which Daniel Muir had moved following the death of his first wife. In January 1842, however, Daniel Muir, described in the deed as a “corn dealer,” bought the house next door. To the seller, Dr. Charles Wightman, he paid cash, suggesting either that he had been doing well in business or that he had been left a substantial sum by his first wife, or both. Immediately after obtaining the house and property, Daniel Muir made over the deed to Anne Muir “for the love, favor and affection he has and bears [her]. …”

John Muir’s childhood home in Dunbar was separated from the house in which he had been born by a narrow alley. Tall and broad, the new house had three stories topped by a slate roof out of which protruded three dormer windows, the fronts of which looked out on the high street, the rears looking beyond chimneys and gables to the country westward. Daniel Muir conducted business on the street-level floor while the family rooms were on the second. The older boys, John and David, lived in one of the third-floor rooms. In back was a long narrow garden, every inch of it in use. Flowers were banked the length of its high gray walls, and three elm trees were homes for robins. At the rear were several outbuildings and a combination laundry and stable in which a neighborhood widow had life-rent rights. Behind the Muirs’ property ran a street used by deliverymen and bordered by the sheds and warehouses of the shops on the high street; at the far end was an abattoir, and from their garden playyard the Muir children could hear the mortal screams of the doomed pigs.

Among the thousands of scraps of paper John Muir left, the littered accumulation of years of random writings and scribbled notations, was this: “My first conscious memory is the singing of ballads, and I doubt not they will be ringing in my ears when I am dying.” It is a rich and suggestive fragment and may indicate, among other things, that in John Muir’s early childhood years his father had not yet become so soured as to put utterly away his fiddle and his memories of those songs of his high moorland youth.

Whoever the singer(s) John Muir heard, he could have had no more direct introduction to his native culture and history than these stark, deceptively simple tunes, so wild you can almost smell moor and mountain and sea in them or glimpse the lonely vistas that went into their making. The narratives the tunes carry are wilder yet, and in them the somber Scots genius can be overheard brooding on the long dark tale that is the national history and that formed the tough national character so often remarked on—and too often misunderstood in caricature. Bright as Burns can be or Scott or James Hogg, still that brightness gains from its contrast with the hue and tone of Scots history, as these authors knew so well: Scott’s introduction to his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, for instance, is a skillful reduction of those gore-spattered chronicles that lie behind the minstrelsy he took such joy in collecting.

The themes of the ballads Muir heard and forever after carried in his head are variations on violence: murder, incest, fratricide, revenge, suicide. In “The Douglas Tragedy” the bride’s father, seven brothers, and groom are all slain in combat. In “The Bonny Hind” accidental incest leads to suicide. “Mary Hamilton” tells of infanticide, “Lady Maisry” of fratricide. In “Young Hunting” a woman kills the king’s son after she has gotten him drunk and seduced him; she herself is then burned at the stake: “An it took on her fair body/ She burnt like hoky-gren” (green wood). In “Gill Morice” a husband murders his wife’s presumed lover and presents her with the head for a football only to learn that this was no lover but the lady’s son.

There are also the border ballads celebrating the centuries of raiding and ambushing along the English-Scots border so close to Muir’s boyhood home. The heroes of these—Johnie Cock, Johnie Armstrong, Hobie Noble—are all men who live and die by the sword.

And of course the sea: surrounded on three sides by it, the Scots had sea in their history, their blood, their imagination. The Atlantic, the Irish Sea, the North Sea—none are smiling waters, and the North Sea merges itself at last into the dark waters of the Arctic Ocean. So in much of the balladry Muir would have heard the sea is a vengeful tyrant, taking, holding, disposing. In “James Harris,” for example, the shade of the dead lover returns from its watery grave to carry off the young girl to her destruction: only when they are well launched on the waves does she realize that the shade is really the Devil himself and those far shores to which they are hurrying the shores of Hell. The sea washes all through such wonderful ballads as “Kemp Owyne” and “The Lass of Roch Royal” and through what is arguably the greatest of all Scots ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens,” which ends on the swell of tragedy:

Have owre, have owre* to Aberdour,

It’s fiftie fadom deip,

And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,

Wi’ the Scots lords at his feit.

Such airs and the old but ever-current news they brought were part of the natural setting of Dunbar, exposed outpost on the North Sea with the Firth of Forth stretching to the northwest. The town seemed to drop directly off into the sea, and even in the most westward-lying sections you could smell it, salty in the nose, heavy with life and death. Running any of Dunbar’s west-to-east streets would have brought Johnnie Muir and his friends quickly to land’s end, where the waters gnawed at the town, its wharves and harbor walls. Here was the heart of Dunbar: the harbor with its old red stone walls whitened by the dung of the skimming gulls and cormorants and gannets whose cries punctuated the sea round of the day and rose to a shattering din at day’s end when the catch was brought in.

For centuries men had lowered boats here and women had waited for them to come in with holds full of herring, though in Muir’s time the herring had mysteriously disappeared and now the men went after whitefish, lobster, and crab. Here were the trim smacks riding at anchor or snubbed up to the dock, their decks salt-bleached, their bows, long oars, and masts battered. Dunbar children would quickly and easily have become familiar with the apparent jumble of the ropes, nets, and crates, able to identify their proper uses and the owners of the smacks and skiffs that were canted or laid hull-up on the shelly strand.

Amid all this were the weathered men, their eyes and faces screwed into an occupational squint against the North Sea winds and sprays, working at the ropes and sails with their rough, blunt hands, glancing up occasionally at the loitering boys, many of whom in their time might be expected to follow the sea. Every boy, Muir recalled of those harborside days, “owned some sort of craft whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite pains—sloops, schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships with their sails and string ropes properly adjusted and named for us by some old sailor.”

Evening called the children home, away from the excitement of the harbor and shore, as it called the boats home, too, the catch to be unloaded, shiny, smooth-bodied, lying in waiting heaps; and the harbor now a bobbing forest of masts above which the headlands rose clear and naked.

In Dunbar Johnnie Muir would have been certain to pick up his full complement of sea lore from the talk of the harbor, from those of his friends whose fathers followed the sea, as well as from the ballads. Hearing “Sir Patrick Spens,” for instance, a Scots boy on the North Sea would know that it was an ill omen for one of Sir Patrick’s sailors to have seen the new moon with the old moon in its arms. Not surprisingly, given the climate, much of that lore dealt with such ill omens. Sailors said that a fleecy, mackerel-backed cloud with a capful of wind in it presaged a coming storm. So did gulls flying inland or a halo around the sun. Creaking furniture or a scratching cat were signs of bad weather on the way. It was bad luck to be wished well on your way down to your boat. The boys were especially mindful of the shellycoats, supernatural creatures said to haunt coastal pools and believed by Muir and his friends to devour unwary beachcombing boys. They never waded into such pools without first thrusting a stick into the murky depths to see whether it might be snatched from their grasp.

In fair weather the boys would wander the rocky shore past Long Craigs toward Belhaven Bay, the town’s original harbor, where at the tide line there was a rich collection of shells—pelican’s-foot, venus, Iceland cyprina, and banded wedges—and beautiful stones with strange, apparently ahistoric etchings in them—fossils—that made you ponder the mysterious. About their heads swung a variety of shorebirds such as shags, herons, oystercatchers, waders, terns, and eiders. The boys constructed homemade guns of gas pipe, then bought gunpowder and fired clumsy lead slugs at gulls and geese.

In foul weather the noise of an angry sea was brought to Muir and his family up on the high street. Then the whole town might be enveloped in a swirling, smothering mist, half rain and half spray, whipped up off the waves lunging below the hill. The clouds would wholly merge with the gray, flotsam-flecked sea, and rain, raking the old town, would polish the slate or stone roofs that now reflected their chimneys and stain the stone walls a darker gray or red. In the harbor the crafts would bounce high and sway wide at their anchors. In the kirkyard the slim and slanting stones darkened, and the many markers there to men and ships that had gone down in the “fashes of the flood” might seem to warn with a renewed urgency.

At such times Muir was learning more than the lore of the sea. He was learning of the fathomless power of the natural world against which men might build houses and harbor walls that were puny indeed and ultimately powerless. It was an indelible lesson, one that could be borne in on him again at any time, and often in later years it would be at the odd moment when he happened to sniff salt air once more.

But whereas in so many of his countrymen this lesson tended to produce a gloomy pessimism, a silent sense of life’s rocklike necessities and swift, avenging accidents, in John Muir it produced quite the opposite: an imperturbable serenity and a natural unchurched reverence founded on an awareness that—storm or smiling sun—nature includes us; that like the fish or the gulls we too must be part of this world. Pessimism or, worse, fear was ignorance of this.

The more formal lessons began when he was not quite three. Scots parents did not coddle their children, a tendency partly the result of climate and culture and founded on a somewhat grim view of life’s prospects. It was best to prepare children early for the hardness of the way that lay ahead.

The school to which Muir was so early sent was a representative one: disciplined, thoroughly structured, innocently harsh. It lay at the foot of a sloping street called the Davel Brae that ran down to the sea off the high street past stone and white stuccoed houses with little gardens like the Muirs’ that spilled over walls topped with imbedded bits of broken glass to keep out intruders and passing schoolboys. Around the schoolyard ran a high wall appropriately made of the same materials as those protecting the harbor. For here, too, the sea was right below, and on stormy days its spit came flying into the yard or fell in admonitory taps on the roof of the schoolhouse. The master was one Mungo Siddons, who goaded his small charges to their tasks with a combination of threats, whippings, and encouragements, with rather more of the first two than the the last.

The Davel Brae schoolyard was an unsupervised, unofficial, but faithful extension of the school proper. Here too lessons for life were administered in the same harsh way: small boys were obliged to choose sides and fight each other like armies, using whatever ammunition was available—sand, sod, or snow. And there were individual battles: fistfights were daily occurrences, according to Muir, and there was no thought of avoiding them. For the great ambition of a small boy here was to become known as a good (that is, feared) fighter. Without understanding it consciously, the Davel Brae schoolboys were acting out a received vision of life as hard and relentless, as something from which one must not flinch but bear its greatest blows with a stolid countenance, and in their own way they were preparing themselves for this.

In every respect but Daniel Muir’s excessive religiosity the daily routine in the Muir household was probably as representative of that time and place as was the Davel Brae school. Breakfast in the still dark of that northern latitude consisted of oatmeal with milk or treacle, spooned out of wooden dishes.* Then the children were off to school, the stiff sea wind in their faces, their book bags slung over their shoulders.

At noon they ran home up the slope of the Davel Brae, and the father would come upstairs from his shop to preside over the main meal of the day: vegetable broth, a piece of boiled mutton, a barley scone—all this consumed in the sacramental silence that Daniel Muir insisted upon as proper for the reception of gifts from the Lord. Then back to school for the afternoon lessons, the postclassroom education of the schoolyard, and, if weather and the season’s daylight permitted, perhaps a cruise along the waterfront to the harbor.

A late afternoon snack at the Muir house consisted of a half slice of unbuttered white bread, a barley scone, and warm water with milk and sugar, a drink that was known, with characteristic Scots humor, as “content.” After this John and David would cross the high street to the Gilryes’, where in front of the ingle grandfather Gilrye would put them through their recitations. In the dark they would then come home to a mealy boiled potato, the inevitable scone, and family worship, in which Daniel Muir took the leading role, praying long and fervently that he and his should not fall into the many temptations. And then to bed. If this seems a cheerless routine, it is well to remember that the lot of many children in factories and on farms at this time was immeasurably worse, and soon enough the Muir children themselves would have cause in the Wisconsin backwoods to think fondly of these days of comparative luxury and idleness.

And they found their outlets, particularly John and David, not only on Saturday and holiday excursions along the shore and into the country to the west but also at night after they had been put to bed. In the high-ceilinged third-floor room the brothers played at voyaging under the bed covers, imagining themselves on tall-masted ships scudding before winds that took them to America or other outlandish places as they worked their ways farther down into the smothering warmth of the blankets.

They also played more adventurous and forbidden games of daring they called “scootchers.” John would formulate some tremendous scootcher such as dashing across the hall into the unused room where the first Dr. Wightman’s ghost was said to be eternally busy at his dusty, greening retorts. One night John climbed out of a streetside dormer window and scrambled up to the roof ridge, where he sat in triumph with his nightgown bellying like a sail in a sea breeze. David’s attempt to match this scootcher nearly ended in disaster, and he had to be rescued by his older brother.

At the age of seven or eight John Muir went on to the grammar school, a high-gabled stone structure bearing a telling resemblance to a church. In fact, the Dunbar grammar school was a secular arm of a Calvinistic culture. Its values were those of the old, unreconstructed Covenanters: the sanctification of work as the only activity morally and spiritually justifiable; an institutional understanding of the inevitable individual failings; and the consequent necessity of punishment, in this case administered with the tawse, a multithonged whip that was Master Lyon’s only apparent indulgence.

The small scholars, Muir remembered, had to learn daily lessons in Latin, French, and English with additional obligations in spelling, arithmetic, and geography. All of this education was instilled with regular whippings. “We were simply driven,” Muir said, “pointblank against our books like soldiers against the enemy. … If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”

In addition to these punitively administered school lessons there were equally severe ones at home, where Daniel Muir forced John to memorize a certain number of Bible verses each day; there was a whipping at the end of the recitation if he faltered. By the time John was eleven he said he had “about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh.” It is another indication of the impress of Calvinism on the Scots mind that there seems to have been no thought there might be some strange incongruity between the motives of masters and parents and the methods they employed. It was simply assumed that a godly mind and an educated one would have to be thrashed into the children. This method was, as Muir said, the traditional Scots one “of making every duty dismal.”

Naturally, the yard of the grammar school reflected the values of the school proper and the national culture. And as the demands and punishments of the school were more severe than those of the primary school, so were the schoolyard games. The individual fights were now often serious fistfights that resulted in bloody noses and black eyes. The evidence of the former, said Muir, could always be washed off in a fountain before going home. But the latter mark was more lasting, and it was no good to tell his wrathful father that the other boy had struck first. Whatever the case, Daniel Muir struck last, and so the boy was likely to suffer two beatings on any given day—three if Master Lyon had occasion to punish him.

Kindred diversions of the schoolyard included a game in which two boys would stand toe to toe and thrash each other’s bare legs with limber switches, the object being simple, sober-faced endurance. The boy who winced or showed the least bit of discomfort was the loser and the object of savage ridicule. “Wee Willie Wastle,” a game in which a boy would defend his sandhill against one challenger after another until knocked off it, was also popular. The game had its genesis in Cromwell’s siege of the Castle Hume in 1651, during which he indeed knocked Willie Wastle off his castle.

Still, after all these thrashings at home and school, John Muir was later able to find some redeeming quality in it all, for, he said, the thrashings had been “admirably influential in developing not only memory but fortitude as well.” Here, whatever the origins, were two qualities Muir was to need and display abundantly in those solitary adventures of his mature years for which he was now unconsciously preparing.

Cromwell and his defeat of Willie Wastle were facts of history, and as such Johnnie Muir and his fellows were compelled to learn them. But it is doubtful that such book facts were as exciting to them as that wider, more immediate history text that was their surroundings. Dunbar, geographical outpost though it was, had been a historic crossroads, and the crumbling hulk of Dunbar castle was both fact and metaphor of just how much history had been enacted here. A thousand years old, the castle lineaments were almost shapeless now, and little lawns of flowers and sod had grown in places where the masonry had at last grown tired of the centuries of effort and had sunk down to sleep. Through its remaining sagging arches the boys could see Bass Rock lumping up out of the Firth of Forth while the sea surged and ebbed through what once had been lower rooms but were now dangerous, sucking grottoes the boys dared each other to enter.

They knew in a general way the highlights of the castle’s history, and in later life Muir could recite these: his college roommate recalled Muir scaring the Wisconsin youths with ghostly tales of the castle and its inhabitants. They might have known, for instance, that Edward I had besieged the castle in 1296 while its defenders hurled insults at the invading “Sassenachs,” calling them long-tailed curs after the Scots belief that the English actually did have tails. And as good Scots boys aspiring to become soldiers themselves and perhaps recapture some of Scotland’s lost glory, they would have known that it was this campaign that had ended in Edward’s theft of the Scots stone of possession, the Stone of Scone, an action that launched the career of the great William Wallace. On the castle heaps the boys played Wallace, whose legend, Muir was later to note, was a sort of Scots Bible. They relived his great victory at Stirling Bridge, his single-handed slaughter of the Sassenachs as recounted in legend and ballad, and lamented his betrayal to the English, after which, said Holinshed in his famous Chronicles, the patriot chief was drawn and quartered and parts of him dispatched to various public places as a warning to potential Scots troublemakers.

Dunbar castle had also been the place of Edward II’s retreat after the Scots had defeated him at Bannockburn, and this event, too, was transformed into a schoolyard and castle game. Indeed, so many battles had been waged here that the boys believed that every bone they found about the ruins was the last relic of some ancient warrior, martyred in Scotland’s cause.

Daniel Muir did not approve of these informal lessons of the castle, the harbor, or the seashore. To him they could not prove anything but destructive, for in such random, unsupervised freedom John and David might easily learn bad words (which they did) and worse ways. He attempted to make a sort of prison-playground of the high-walled back garden and keep the boys in it whenever they had time on their hands. He was, of course, unsuccessful, and at some point he must have given up in all but a pro forma way. For when spring came to the Lothians and the birds—larks, mavises, and robins—began to call from the westward-lying meadows, the boys could not be kept home.

With their friends, Willie Chisholm, Bob Richardson, and others, they would go out into the countryside to hear the singers, run the country roads, snatch turnips from farmers’ fields, whittle wood into whistles, perhaps catch a young lark and bring it home to a cage in defiance of the children’s rhyme that warned against such behavior:

The laverock and the lintie,

The robin and the wren;

If ye harry their nests,

Ye’ll never thrive again.

Perhaps they would go south out of town past the mysterious standing stone set alone in its field, an indecipherable reminder of ancient races who had inhabited this place before the old castle had ever been built; past Doon Hill, where Cromwell had littered the sward with the bodies of Leslie’s Covenanters, and on to Brunt Hill. Then down its far side and on to High Wood and the meadowlands along Elmscleugh Water. Or they might go out Bob Richardson’s way by Belhaven and then westward to Beesknowe and Grangemuir.

Whatever the route, whatever the consequences for a late return home, for John Muir the disobedience was creative and absolutely essential. Considering the ways in which his father’s severity compounded the confining regimen of the Dunbar schools, these long runs and rambles into the heart of that landscape were mental and spiritual escapes as much as they were physical ones. Here the boy developed the intuitive ability to take instruction, comfort, and deep pleasure from the natural world, an ability that did so much to convert his childhood in Dunbar and in Wisconsin from blight to lasting spiritual treasure. The runs began, as he would later recognize, a lifelong pattern of personal salvation. Whenever the deadening or seductive routines of settled life threatened his inmost nature; whenever he felt the shadows of traditional obligations and ways of thought spreading into his mind, then John Muir would contrive some escape as now he did on the days of spring and summer when with brother and friends he raced on out of the old town.

Thus the real locus of his Dunbar memories is not the sea, wild and wonderful as it was in its moods, but the hill country he could see from his back window: the long, broad folds of the Lammermuirs, the deep greens, the copses like shadows, the brown, regular lines traced by the stone walls. And as if in prefiguration of his whole life—emigration, peregrination, and solitary explorings—it was westward he was drawn, like his later hero, Thoreau, who claimed that unconsciously his steps always tended westward.

Outward he and the others would go, first down the sloping street under the kirkyard hill, outward into the Lammermuirs sung by Scott and shepherds and birds. The land rose steadily away from the coast, the roads bending inward, inward to the slopes, following their imperative contours, hedges, stone walls, or just the trees bordering them. On the ridges there were rows of beeches, their massive, smooth and green-iced trunks standing separate while their spreading branches interlaced into a dense braid with their neighbors. Waiting out a shower in the shelter of these beeches, they would listen to a burn gurgling into fullness at the foot of the hill, the grasses deep or cropped close where a flock of sheep browsed, looking like stars amid the greenness. There were the bird calls, too, the larks in the fields and the woodier notes of the copse singers. Then, the rain ended, they would run on again, passing the farm folk with their reddened hands and faces and shapeless dark clothing, hearing their threatening calls fading behind, smelling the hay in the ricks, the dung in the barnyards.

And among his fellows John Muir was perhaps a bit more given to moods. Sitting under the trees or running the roads or walking the meadows, he might have heard something more than they did, something inside the raindrops, inside the leaves upon which they fell: a larger music, even a call … something that urged and compelled. A vision commenced here of life in its fullness, of a way of living that held infinitely more promise of excitement and mystery and enjoyment than that he was learning in town: books, school, prayers, and “content.” There was something out there in the Lammermuirs, and like the name of the hills it was part of him, too.

*Half over.

*In a reference to Scotland’s historic poverty, Dr. Johnson in his famous dictionary defined “oats” as “A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”