Читать книгу John Muir - Frederick Turner - Страница 13

Terms of Challenge

The new homestead lay about five miles southeast of Fountain Lake, and the Muirs christened it Hickory Hill since the house site was atop a hill thickly studded with hickories. Here they raised a stout two-story frame house with a wing running off it in back. Behind the house they built a high, broad barn that backed up on the woods. The views on the other three sides were fine: the land’s gentle rolls lent variety to the eye, and here and there were heavy copses of virgin timber.

John Muir had already cleared the near fields in those months before the family moved, and when they did so the farm was already in production. Western land hunger had plunged the nation into a financial panic in this year of 1857, and the consequences of soil misuse were becoming evident throughout the Midwest. Still the Muirs were hoping to prosper on the new farm as they had not on the old, one family’s version of the national notion that somehow a new situation would inevitably be better than the one left behind.

But the new start began badly for John Muir, began, in fact, almost fatally. Unlike the old homestead, the new one was far from any surface water, and Muir was ordered to dig a well behind the house and a few yards from the barn. He soon tapped into a stratum of close-grained sandstone; the Muirs tried blasting through this, but they were unskilled at it, and so finally Daniel Muir gave his son mason’s tools and told him he must chip his way down to water.

The work went on at a painful, inching pace. Each morning Muir was lowered by bucket and windlass into the slowly deepening shaft and left to work in this cramped, airless place until he was hauled out again for the noon dinner. Then, back down again until supper and chores. One morning as he was lowered into the shaft—at this point about eighty feet deep—he was all but overcome by carbon dioxide that had collected overnight at the bottom. As the fatal fumes invaded his lungs and numbed his brain, he could faintly and confusedly hear his father shouting down to him to get into the bucket, but he was already so weak that it seemed easier to settle against a wall of the shaft and sleep. As his father continued to shout, frantically now, Muir somehow summoned awareness and strength enough to clamber into the bucket and was hauled out, unconscious and gasping for breath.

There was no more work that day or the next, and while he lay in the costly luxury of his sick bed, Muir was visited by William Duncan, who had been a miner and stonemason in Scotland. “Weel, Johnnie,” Muir recalled him saying, “it’s God’s mercy that you’re alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but none that I ever saw or heard of was so near death in it as you were and escaped without help.” Duncan taught Daniel Muir to air the shaft each morning with a splash of water and frequent stirrings with a bundle of brush and hay. Then the work went on.

Ninety feet down, Muir struck a “fine, hearty gush of water.” They had their well now but at a price Muir would feel all his life; later he claimed that a peculiar rasping feeling in his throat was a lifelong reminder of the incident.

Nor could Muir ever forgive the fact that his father “never spent an hour in that well.” The episode served to deepen his resentments against Daniel Muir’s tyranny. But whereas the boy had few effective defenses against that tyranny, the young man had been developing some in the last years at Fountain Lake, and he continued to do so now at Hickory Hill. Things had slowly been changing in the Muir family, and especially between the father and his eldest son. For one thing, Daniel Muir had now completely retired from active participation in the running of the farm and left things to John. He still gave the orders, of course, and supervised the work, but henceforth he would devote himself to his religious pursuits, attending every revival meeting in the vicinity, and traveling about two counties as a preaching elder of the Disciples of Christ. When at home, he would sit by a strategically located study window where, his Bible in his lap, he could watch his children at their labors in the fields below.

Sarah’s departure for her own household on the old acreage had also made a difference, for she had been a second, mediating mother in the household, and the loss of her counsel and helping hand was felt. Now John began to draw closer to Maggie, four years his senior and a sympathetic listener to whom he commenced to confide both his misgivings and vague ambitions.

The major difference, however, lay in the altered relations between Daniel Muir and John. This was not the boy who had been set to the plow in the spring of 1850. He had been seasoned and toughened by seven hard years in the fields, woods, and barnyard, and he had crossed the invisible divide into young manhood: lean, self-reliant, and increasingly thoughtful. He still deferred to his father and obeyed the orders so peremptorily given, but for some time now he had been freed of a particularly galling part of the paternal tyranny, for even Daniel Muir, so convinced of the spiritual necessity of corporal punishment, had come to feel it was unwise to continue beating John. The master-serf relationship between the two now became an undeclared battle between them. On the surface of it, there was the continuous crackle of verbal skirmishing in which the younger man often enjoyed an advantage, but beneath this lay John Muir’s mortal effort to preserve an essential part of his character as he had come to understand it.

His experiences with the natural world of his Scots childhood had given him a kind of psychic and spiritual base, and in his early years at Fountain Lake he had drawn sustenance from this during the apparently endless days of his servitude until the kinship he felt for nature had deepened into a genuine need. This was the boy—now the young man—who had successfully cheered himself in the frosty fields of midwinter Wisconsin by watching the brave peckings and chirpings of the nuthatches and chickadees. This was the young man who had become intensely interested in some of the very things that had made his life so hard: the thick, gnarled oak and hickory grubs, for instance, that would toss the plowshare out of its furrow when it ran up against them. But rather than cursing their existence (though he may have done this, too, on occasion), Muir made an informal study of the roots and marveled at what he discovered of their life history.

But the farm, and specifically the life he was forced by his father to lead on it, threatened this essential affinity and presented Muir with the first and perhaps the greatest psychic challenge of his life: how in this circumstance to preserve his love of nature. Placed in an adversary, exploitative relationship, an unremitting hand-to-hand combat with the land, he began in his adolescent years to imagine some way of being and thinking that would allow him to continue to love that with which he struggled.

As any farm child knows, it is easy enough to talk of the bucolic splendors of the country when one has never known the round of agricultural labor, and it is quite another to love nature when one has to work with it each day of the year. Hamlin Garland had to learn this lesson and later wrote about it in his story “Up the Coulee.” Here a man who had fled the Wisconsin farm of his youth returned to visit his mother and brother. Riding the train through the countryside toward his old home, he found the land beautiful, a serene and timeless garden of happiness. But then the train came to a halt at the little warped farm town, the man swung down, and the landscape stood still. In the barnyard of the homestead the city man was confronted by the mud puddles, the dung, and the spectacle of men and boys trying to milk the cows stamping and lashing under the pitiless attack of flies. And then he knew why he had left; only from the city or the rolling train could he love this land and its life.

Muir could not leave; he had nowhere to go. So if he was to keep intact his love of the natural world, he would have to find a way to do so in the very jaws of circumstance.

Perhaps inevitably, Muir’s earliest response to the challenge of the farm took the form of a desire to excel at his imposed tasks: to do the work better and faster than anyone else, especially his father. Doubtless such a response was in part a bequest to him from his Scots childhood, where a sort of heroic stoicism had been thrashed into him at the Davel Brae school. So at Fountain Lake Muir had sought to rise above the deadening affects of his labor by competing with himself and all others. “I was,” he remembered, “foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the time I was sixteen led all the hired men.” So too with plowing, where he strove to keep his share exactly trimmed and to draw a straighter furrow than anyone, and with rail splitting and stump grubbing. Even the digging of the well that almost became the digging of his grave was subsequently transformed into a source of stubborn pride, for he had sunk it straight and plumb and had built a “fine covered top over it, and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank many a day.”

This earliest response deepened into the character trait of a lifetime: Muir would actively, relentlessly seek out adversity and hardship, would relish almost any physical challenge, and would punish himself severely for real or imagined failures to be equal to any circumstance. He would also take boastful pride in his victories over himself, as he did in these years when, for instance, he spent hours one day diving over and over again from the stern of a boat in the deepest part of Fountain Lake to conquer his fear of drowning. Each time he plunged into the water, he addressed himself with “Take that!” Never, he reflected of this incident, “was a victory over self more complete. I have been a good swimmer ever since. At a slow gait I think I could swim all day in smooth water moderate in temperature.” Later he would see the connection between such behavior and the Scots Calvinism in his background, but this was the view from old age, and by that time he had spent half a century seeking challenges and meeting them successfully.

Soon enough, however, Muir felt the rub in this sort of response, for its main product was compounded misery. Without giving up his competitive attitude, he began to overlay it with another response, as if aware even so early that such behavior could not ultimately save him, and that as a way of being, of going through the world for the rest of his life, it had clear and stark limitations. Something more was needed.

About the age of sixteen, while still striving to lead all the hired men, Muir asked his father for a mathematics book, and Daniel Muir, normally suspicious of all learning other than the study of Scripture, warily consented. Perhaps it was understood between them that Muir’s study of it would be of use in the management of the farm. Whatever the spoken arrangement, Muir’s underlying motive was to bring to his living a dimension it had heretofore lacked: formal intellectual exercise. Thoughtful from an early age, he had been so cut off on the farm that he had no other tools than his native wits with which to think about life. The rote learning of the Dunbar days was dead, and his acquaintance with the Bible was not yet the sort that would allow him the grand vistas it opened onto history and myth, to say nothing of the thunderous music of its language.

Even among his peers Muir was singularly isolated by the regimen his father imposed, not only without books and schooling but without regular converse with others outside his household. He had his Sundays—or parts of them—to visit with neighboring boys and girls, and Independence Day and New Year’s, but otherwise he saw little of the rest of the world.

Comparing Muir’s life at this stage with those of two of his contemporaries—Samuel Clemens (born 1835) and William Dean Howells (born 1837)—is one way to understand how pitifully limited Muir’s outlets were, how much he was thrust onto himself and his inner resources, and what a far and lonely way he had to travel to come into his own. Clemens and Howells had also been middle-class midwestern boys and were almost his exact contemporaries. But they had been village boys from families of more liberal views, and their awareness of the world of their time and their access to it had been immeasurably greater than this backwoods youth whose pleasures were mostly those of his own devising, whose awareness of other American horizons was limited to occasional trips to Portage and to the casual talk of his immigrant neighbors in the minutes before the commencement of revival meetings.

But now he had the math book, and he took to it with a hunger that is the unmistakable sign of intellectual starvation. “Beginning at the beginning,” he was to recall, “in one summer I easily finished it without assistance, in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest- and the hay-fields. …” Then in quick succession he took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, satisfying himself that he had made some real progress in each.

It was not, of course, simply mathematics that gripped him, though he found that he was good at it. At bottom this was an effort to intellectualize his existence and so lift himself above its routines. Surely nothing can so deaden aspiration and imagination as the cheerless prospect of yet another lengthy chore ahead after having spent so much on the one at hand—another field to be worked that you can see from the one you are currently working. But now as he labored, Muir mulled over mathematical problems; soon he had other matters to ponder as well.

About the time he was racing through his math books he discovered the wonders of literature. His immediate guides were two neighboring Scots boys, farm kids like himself but from families who prized learning and books. David Gray and David Taylor, Muir learned to his astonishment, not only had access to good books but had actually committed favorite lines to memory. More than this, they wrote poetry of their own, and Davie Taylor even sang some of his own verses. To Johnnie Muir the fact that two boys so like himself and living so near could possess such privileges, develop such talents, was almost incredible.

The first time Muir heard his peers discussing literature, the “twa Davies,” as Muir called them, were talking of Dickens. They were in a swamp, discharging their families’ neighborhood civic duties by building a corduroy road across it, and there amid the mire and the sweat was a sudden music that transformed the whole scene into something utterly different. Davie Gray and Davie Taylor were now not just day hands mucking about in swampy waters, cutting logs and fitting them: they were artists, men of literature.

Muir had, of course, known both music and poetry: he had those old ballads running in his head and blood, and he had most likely also heard his father play the fiddle and sing the ancient airs in the days before that stern patriarch had put music away as an unseemly frivolity. After he had escaped the farm, he would write back to his sister Mary that there must be something at least mildly poetic in the family since “Mother made poetry when first acquainted with father and I think that father must have made some verses too. …” Still, belles lettres were hardly a part of the strait life of that household, where even casual talk at mealtimes was discouraged as sacrilegious. And as for frankly imaginative prose—novels—this was little less than lies.

Now with the help and examples of Gray and Taylor, Muir discovered lodes of inspiration and reflection. With an even greater avidity than he had displayed in taking to his mathematical studies, he plunged his mind and heart into literature, borrowing books, saving small sums to buy his own, forming part of a neighborhood lending library. He read Shakespeare, and the Romantic poets—Cowper, Thomas Campbell, Mark Akenside, and others. He saw the Bible with a new eye and heard its verses as treasures of sound. Perhaps closest to him was the great apologist Milton, whose lines in Paradise Lost he would remember forever. He memorized and savored images and whole passages, spoke them aloud to himself in the fields and woods or during some chore at the house, and applied them to the landscape through which he moved, learning, as Campbell had written, to “muse on Nature with a poet’s eye!’’

What Campbell and the others gave him was not an appreciation of the natural world; he already had that and better and deeper than almost any of them. It was rather their gift of reflection that was significant: reflection on the meanings of life as these were manifested in nature and, perhaps equally significant at this stage, the reflection of himself in their words. For in the pages of the poets he found expressions of that mystical affinity he had himself experienced since childhood when the “magic of Nature first breathed on my mind,’’ as his countryman Campbell had written. Here in print and bound between covers—and codified thus—were confirmations of his own deepest predilections and intuitions. There had been others like himself! And not only that, but some of them had been famous. The effect of this discovery on Muir can hardly be overemphasized, for it gave him a view of himself that had been utterly unobtainable before and that would prove a source of continuous encouragement. Campbell’s once-famous The Pleasures of Hope is only the most obvious example of the effect of the poets on this young farmer. In truth, all of them were hope bringers, as tangible as those sweet-songed bluebirds that announced spring.

Like Gray and Taylor, Muir now also began to write verses, though about what must remain a mystery since all but two specimens have been lost, and one of these survives merely as a reference to its subject matter. But the reference to his elegy on the death of an old tree in the neighborhood does indicate the influence of the Romantics for whom this subject was a favorite.

He read novels, too, but these had to be consumed in secret. Still, he managed to get through several of Scott’s, which he borrowed from William Duncan, smuggling them into the house under his clothing and turning their pages in moments almost as precious as the books themselves.

He also began to get his first sense of the vast reaches of history through his reading of Plutarch and Josephus as well as John George Wood’s then-standard Natural History. Ultimately this scale of vision would rival the Romantic humanism he was now imbibing and encourage a cosmic vision in which man himself was almost lost, a tiny, puny creature distinguished mainly by his outsized claims to dominion over the earth. But now literature and history harmonized to broaden Muir’s scope of thought and provide him with creative ways to think about the world and himself in it.

Once it became known in the neighborhood that Daniel Muir’s son, Johnnie, liked to read books, help and encouragement came to him from unsuspected sources. A number of Scots immigrants nearby were intellectually active and a few had brought with them modest but good libraries. Now they began to come forward with offers of help and, equally as vital, with words of encouragement, words that fell with the sweetness of benediction on ears long tuned to the rasp of criticism. In particular Mrs. Jean Galloway (David Galloway’s mother and a woman Muir was to remember as a second mother to him), William Duncan, and Dr. William Meacher took active interest in Muir’s development. Duncan had perhaps the largest library in that neighborhood, and he often suggested to Muir that he come by and browse in its treasures.

The neighborhood situation, so fortuitous to Muir, was not as extraordinary as might appear. The Scots had a proud and ancient intellectual tradition, and figures of the Scottish Enlightenment had been potent influences in the thought of the entire European community. In the New World, Scots immigrants had been conscious of the need to carry on that tradition, and so in the eighteenth century, while some Caledonians were blazing trails and creating homesteads in woodlands, others were maintaining intellectual ties with the Old World and vitalizing the life of the mind in the New. Cadwallader Colden, for example, became an active and systematic botanizer in upper New York State and kept close ties for years with the great Linnaeus. Moreover, his treatise on the Iroquois confederacy, The History of the Five Indian Nations (first published in 1727), is a mine of ethnographical information. Another who sent a steady stream of information about the New World to Linnaeus was the Charleston doctor Alexander Garden (for whom the gardenia is named). In addition to making important early studies of epidemics of yellow fever and smallpox, Garden was also interested in the medicinal properties of local plants and wrote Linnaeus of the vermifuge qualities of pinkroot. And John Lining of that same city made early observations on the relationship between forest clearances and regional climatic conditions, a relationship of which Wisconsin settlers in Muir’s century were still ignorant.

Nor was the keeping of the Scots intellectual tradition confined to formally educated immigrants. Travelers along the edges of the advancing American civilization constantly remarked on the presence of books, newspapers, and almanacs in the often rude homes of the settlers, and many of those on the very fringes were the hardy Scots. In Muir’s own reminiscences of his neighborhood there is further evidence, for the substance of the debate he described there on the whites’ treatment of the Indians shows the settlers were familiar with the arguments of such Scots philosophers as William Robertson and Adam Ferguson, who had addressed this same tangled problem.

For Muir the importance of the existence of the Scots intellectual tradition on the frontier is obvious, for without the help of its carriers, such as Duncan, Meacher, and the Gray and Taylor families, it is hard to see how Muir, wholly unaided, might have found his way into the life of the mind. What is less obvious is that through the help and example of these people Muir was making another crucial discovery: that the Scots had a parallel tradition of the intelligent, intellectually curious workingman. William Duncan, miner and stonemason, was perhaps the nearest example, but as Muir went on with his reading and his conversations with his neighbors, he discovered other examples, and all his life he was to continue to do so and to take a special, telling pride in them. Hugh Miller, the great Scots geologist of whom Jean Galloway spoke to Muir, had begun his career as an untutored laborer in a stone quarry, and one of his most important collaborators had been Robert Dick, a workingman from Thurso who gave Miller his own collections of fossil fish. David Douglas, whose explorations of the Pacific Northwest added so much to the fund of knowledge of the New World, had been the son of a stone mason and had begun his botanical studies as the apprentice to the head gardener at Scone Castle. So even now Muir began to see that a life of manual labor—if indeed this was to be his lot—need not mean a brutalized, mindless existence, that it might be possible to go on with one’s studies even as one wore the harness of repetitive chores.

But perhaps it was not absolutely given that a workingman remain fixed in that physical place where life had put him. For Muir was learning too in these days that his countrymen, those wandering Scots, had adventured in virtually every land on the globe. He had known in his Dunbar school days of the great Alexander Wilson, who traveled in the New World when it was yet a vast, unmarked wilderness, and doubtless he had heard tales of those hundreds of Scots who had fanned out through the breadth of the continent as trappers, scouts, and fur traders: Alexander Mackenzie, to take but one example, who explored an unimaginably vast area of the Pacific Northwest.

He read too of the exploits of Mungo Park, the Edinburgh surgeon who explored the Niger for eighteen months, during which he endured fabulous privation merely for the chance of “rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen.” Park’s heroism made a deep impression on Muir; it seemed wonderful to be willing to suffer and dare so much in so disinterested a cause. And there was buried in the midst of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa an episode that may well have given Muir much to muse on, not only on the Wisconsin farms but in after years. Park had just been stripped and robbed by a band of Foulahs who took his horse and compass, leaving him utterly destitute and alone. “I saw myself,” he wrote,

in the midst of a vast wilderness, in the depth of the rainy season—naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection, and I confess that my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no other alternative but to lie down and perish.

At this moment of almost terminal despair Park experienced an epiphany when his distracted eye happened to fall upon a small moss, the extraordinary beauty of which so compelled his admiration that his spirits suddenly soared. Could the Being, asked the marooned adventurer, who placed this magnificent little thing here in this obscure part of the world, “look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after His own image? Surely not!” The natural manifestation of divinity conquered despair and brought resolution, the will to survive, and Park struggled onward to a small village where two shepherd guides took him to safety. It is an odd occurrence in a narrative so crammed with adventures and suffering that almost all the incidents save this one cancel each other. The young man who read it had already been rescued often enough from his own homely despair by various manifestations of nature and the force that lived through it, and he would not have missed the parallel.

Muir read another book of travels that made a deep impression on him during these years and for a long time thereafter. Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels in the Equinoctial Regions described the young adventurer’s fearless probes into the heart of South America, searching along mosquito-blackened watercourses, mute amid a welter of unknown tongues, for the principle he felt must unify all flora, fauna, and geological formations.

One day excitedly—and unguardedly—talking to his mother of Humboldt and Park and describing to her some of their experiences in the jungles of places scarcely on any map, Muir heard her words of quiet encouragement. “Weel, John,” he recalled her saying, “maybe you will travel like Park and Humboldt some day.” In her necessarily careful way she would often so encourage her son in his nascent enthusiasms, usually when Daniel Muir was absent. But on this occasion her guard, like her son’s, must have been down, for Daniel Muir heard the exchange from his study and cried out what his son remembered as a “solemn depreciation, ‘Oh, Anne, dinna put sic notions in the laddie’s heed.’ ” In Daniel Muir’s mind, there was no thought of travel for his eldest son and still less of that son’s spiritual change. And yet, under his unforgiving gaze, this was what was happening.

Of course Daniel Muir sought to bully John about his reading. He himself read only Christian literature, little more than the Bible and rigorously screened commentaries on it, and he felt that other kinds of texts were less than useful. Occasionally John was able to talk his father into accepting the household presence of texts in no way related to Christian doctrine. Plutarch, for example, was allowed since Daniel Muir was persuaded the ancient historian might be able to shed further light on the question of proper diet, just then vexing the senior Muir because of the graham bread fad that had visited the Wisconsin backwoods. But Daniel Muir dug in his heels at Thomas Dick’s The Christian Philosopher. The offense was given in the title’s word, “Philosopher.” Philosophy in the father’s lexicon meant sophistry, but in truth Dick’s work was an earnest attempt to defend Christianity and reconcile it with nineteenth-century scientific advances. The effort was common at midcentury, and indeed Hugh Miller in his The Footprints of the Creator (1847) had recently framed a brilliant geologically buttressed refutation of fellow Scot Robert Chambers, whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) contained striking anticipations of Charles Darwin.

Despite Daniel Muir’s objections, his son read Dick in secret, and the argument of this book must have been of more than casual interest, for John himself had entered a struggle with orthodoxy that was to continue well into maturity. His earliest efforts were directed toward defining for himself the tenor and tone of his own practice of the faith. He had been early immersed in Scripture, of course, and in childhood had been coerced into memorizing huge quantities of it. Nor did the gradual emancipation from paternal tyranny that was now in process include anything approaching a thorough rejection of so firm-set a heritage. But there are a few indications that Muir was now beginning to consider in an informal but nonetheless serious way just what sort of Christian he could continue to be. Such spiritual probings would find an uneasy coexistence with his acquired religious enthusiasm and Scriptural literalism, and it might be argued that he never really wrestled with his faith to the point where he felt finally blessed as Jacob had been by the departing angel. Perhaps he did not need such a contest.

In any case, available evidence suggests that in his young manhood Muir argued with himself about the quality and practice of his faith and that the argument was strenuous enough so that he projected it upon others. He could be in these years a jackleg preacher to his peers, zealous to bring the message of Christ’s love to those he sensed were slipping from rigor. He wrote several hortatory epistles on the subject to a friend named Bradley, one of which has survived.

It was written in the form of a parable of a young man, lost and freezing in a blizzard at night, who was taken in and befriended by a benevolent stranger. Now, Bradley, Muir wrote, wouldn’t you love and honor that kind man forever? Wouldn’t you hold his memory in the warmest corner of your heart? Then how much more do we owe Jesus for His eternal, unfailing love of us?

The letter, which dates from 1856, is of interest not only as it indicates how deeply Muir’s orthodoxy was set, but also because it indicates that he had been reading and responding to much more than religious literature. The prose is polished if stilted, and the imaginative evocation of the young man’s predicament is so convincing it seems as if the writer were unconsciously more interested in the composing of it than in the message it was to convey. Here is evidence of a mind beginning to range and to range away from that orthodoxy it yet professes.

The major problem Muir faced in his religion probings was that of reconciling Christianity as he had observed its practice with the way it appeared to him in Scripture. Perhaps it would also be necessary to find a way of reconciling the Old Testament with the New.

His father, of course, was a New Testament man who had taught all his children to love Jesus and to admire and emulate the greatest Apostle, Paul. And yet Daniel Muir’s behavior seemed decidedly un-Christian at times and was surely at variance with the mild and loving example of Christ. The elder Muir appeared to be more nearly the patriarch of the Old Testament: severe, implacable, capable of shocking acts. Angered at the way the boys’ Indian pony, Jack, would chase the cows in at sundown on the Fountain Lake farm, Daniel Muir had once ordered John to shoot Jack. He had relented then, but he had himself killed one of the boys’ favorite horses by relentlessly driving it twenty-four miles over hot, sandy roads to get to a revival meeting. Muir never forgot the way that doomed animal had lingered on in its suffering, how it would pathetically trail after the children, bleeding from the nostrils, gasping for breath, mutely pleading for some form of relief before it fell over and died. More than half a century later, when he detailed the episode in his autobiography, he used it to indict the Christian attitude toward the rest of creation. Looking back, he suggested that even then his attitude toward birds, beasts, and plants was radically different from the teachings of “churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and are made only for man. …” This is almost surely the superimposition of the developed view of maturity onto the earnest questionings of youth. But it would be a mistake to assume it is only that. By his teenage years Muir had evidently come to a deep feeling of kinship with the rest of creation, a feeling that took him beyond the confines of orthodox Christianity. Possibly he was led in this direction by his own sufferings and so came to see that the farm’s draft animals suffered too, that the brave chickadees and nuthatches also felt the sting of winter, and that even the plants had their seasonal joys and sorrows.

He got none of this from his father, whose view of the earth and of all earthly life was unrelievedly grim. Daniel Muir incessantly enjoined his children to regard themselves as soul-sick sinners in the eyes of an angry God and to view the world as a vale of sorrows and a place of snares through which the undeserving pilgrims were fated to pass on their way to judgment. Old-time Scots Calvinism had held that one sure way to recognize a sinner was that he delighted in looking at natural objects, for such objects were fated for eventual destruction, and so to delight in them was an offense against the Lord. The eyes, it was said, were prone to fifty-two divinely appointed ailments, one for each week of the year.

To a young man who had come to embrace the natural world, such a view would have been wholly inappropriate, even repugnant. Much more congenial was the outlook of those new-found Romantics whose exaltation of the self and of the divine sublimity of the natural world made such sweet sense to him after a childhood in the bleak barrens of crypto-Calvinism. The poets’ views as expressed, for example, in the lines of Mark Akenside (one of Muir’s youthful favorites) were much nearer his own than those he heard in his father’s voice and in the marathon prayers offered up in Sunday services. He, like Akenside, knew solitude and the calm healing of nature

When, all alone, for many a summer’s day,

I wander’d through your calm recesses, led

In silence by some powerful hand unseen.

Sitting through those Sunday meetings at which his own father often presided in awful solemnity, clad in ministerial blacks and praying with tight-shut eyes for almost an hour at a stretch, Muir chewed windflower seeds to stay awake and perhaps to fill his mind with a paradise of flowers instead of the smoke of brimstone. And in these hours he must have been thinking about how he might continue to believe and to practice Christianity in a way different from that he was in these Sabbath moments experiencing.

Was it possible that some central essence of Christianity could be segregated or extracted from Christianity as commonly practiced and preached? Was there a way of belief that ran in another direction than this strait one so hedged about with negations and clouded with doom and destruction? Lines from a poem that Muir wrote at this time suggest that the young man now viewed the local religious practices with a somewhat detached and critical eye. In an apostrophe to the old log schoolhouse whose patient walls have borne the “blasts of strong revival,” Muir wrote that human souls, too, have suffered these blasts, and that while souls were being saved, they were also being “pulled, and twisted/ All out of shape, till they no longer fitted/ The frightened bodies that to each belonged.”

And yet, what were the alternatives? Clearly unbelief was out of the question. Not only was the force of all Muir’s training against this but, even more significantly, so were his own observations and inclinations. Already he had been touched by the profound mystery of existence, witnessing it in the springtime rebirth of plant life, in the intelligence and feelings of animals, in the wonderful regulation of the whole natural world. His readings of Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics had reinforced his conviction that divinity was the source of this mystery, though there was some difficulty in reconciling Milton’s views of that divinity with those of the Romantics, who were certain it was visible in the petals of a flower. No, unbelief was impossible for him, and it is unlikely he ever seriously considered it.

But such substitutes as spiritualism or phrenology were also impossible. Somewhere along the years to young manhood there had entered Muir a tough, knotty skepticism. He knew mystery and felt drawn to it. He also felt he knew the difference between mystery and humbug. And of the latter there was plenty along the advancing frontier of the Middle West in the years before the Civil War. Fredrika Bremer in her tour there in 1849 remarked that the hottest topics of conversation were spirit rappings and Jenny Lind. Muir’s reminiscences of his Wisconsin years make it clear that his neighborhood was visited in its turn by the crazes that swept the rest of the nation: phrenology, the graham-bread regimen for the repression of animal appetite, and so on. None left more than a negative trace on Muir and in a typical exchange between father and eldest son he was able to disabuse Daniel Muir of his new adherence to Sylvester Graham’s bread-and-vegetable diet by quoting Scripture. When the Lord hid Elijah from his enemies, Muir reminded his father, and sent the ravens to feed him, He did not send the prophet graham bread and vegetables but meat. And surely the Lord knew what was best for His own prophet in distress. Daniel Muir had to admit that He did.

So Muir was first and forever a Christian, and even if the fit of the faith was uncomfortable in places and had to be considerably altered to fit his own spiritual needs, it served well enough over time. Christianity might have its blindnesses, and he would define these sharply in coming years, but it was surely better than unbelief, better by far than any of the cults or splinter sects of his day. To say, as some of these did, that they dealt in the occult or the spiritual was not enough to interest him, and indeed he was to prove intolerant of San Francisco spiritualists when he was invited to their seances in the 1870s.

He believed in mystery and generally was content not to attempt to trace spiritual matters to their putative sources, recognizing that certain things could never be understood or explained. On the other hand, he was eager to solve certain kinds of mystery, to see how things worked. So in these farm years he made patient observations of animal habits and learned the secrets of the shrike, how it went about its fatal work of gopher hunting. He devised, too, an ingenious experiment to discover how the honeybees fixed the direction and distance of a food source from their hive. And still thousands of mysteries remained, for he could not feel that in seeing partway into any of them he had thereby exhausted and drained a phenomenon. His experiment with the bees provoked more wonder, not less. So in this way he was led from mystery to mystery with a deepening, widening religious awe, one that went far beyond the confines of conventional Christian practice. There would always be a certain amount of orthodox baggage that he carried within him, and in these years of coming into his own it was often burdensome enough—to himself and to others. But it would become lighter and lighter over the years so that in his late years some would call him a mystic or a pantheist.

The graham-bread episode gives another glimpse of that verbal skirmishing that was the exterior of the battle between father and eldest son. Behind its issue of proper diet there lurked the larger issue of who should define the terms of Muir’s life, and Daniel Muir saw to it, as much as he was able, that the terms were of his own devising. At Fountain Lake and then at Hickory Hill he ran his farm with a military regimentation that left no room for irregularities of behavior and that sought to proscribe those of thought. Muir had to squeeze his reading and nature investigations into whatever odd and stolen moments he could find after the chores had been completed.

The moments were few and precious. In winter when the short days and cold weather precluded any out-of-house activity, Muir had to read under the very eyes of his father, and there was almost no time for it. Daniel Muir’s strict rule in this season was that all should retire immediately after the end of family worship—presumably so that all would be fresh for the next day’s toil. Occasionally on retiring the elder Muir would fail to notice the rapt reader’s candle for perhaps five or ten minutes, “magnificent golden blocks of time,” as Muir remembered them, “long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods.”

One such evening as Muir hurriedly read at some text, his father called out to him from the darkness of his bedroom that John must go to bed along with the others, that he was tired of having to issue a separate order to John every night. If you must read, he added, get up early in the morning to do so. Here again the challenge, and Muir went upstairs into the cold dark, wondering how he could possibly meet it, how he might shake himself awake well before he and the other sleepers heard that stentorian voice from beneath the stairs summoning them to another day.

In the blackness of the bedroom Muir awakened hours later, how many he did not know, and, as he recalled it, “rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won. …” Holding his candle to the little kitchen clock, Muir read the incredible news its face gave back in the flickering light: it was only one o’clock. He had gained five hours on farm life. “I can hardly think,” he was to say, “of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of those five frosty hours.”

It was too cold in the night-and-winter-bound house for Muir to resume his reading, and he knew well enough that his father would begrudge him a fire, reasoning as the elder man would, that Muir would have had to take the time to chop the wood for it that he should have put in otherwise. No, it would all have to be done on his own time, every bit of it. So Muir went down into the mealy gloom of the cellar where, amid the potatoes and the cast-off, rusting tools, he set to work on an invention he had begun sometime previously: a self-setting sawmill. By the thin and wavering light of the candle he worked joyously through the remaining hours of night, hardly conscious of the cold or the damp or of the cramped and jumbled conditions of his shop. Here in this time and place and under the very floorboards of the paternal bedroom, he was again, if fleetingly, the arbiter of his own existence. Not merely a farm laborer, he was an inventor, at work on a device that in the very working at it would enhance his life. So he kept at it through the bleak winter mornings, rising with the incredible regularity that is the sure sign of a desperate determination to descend into the cellar and with his improvised tools fashion his inventions into realities.

At Fountain Lake, where the nocturnal work was first begun, and then at Hickory Hill, the sound of that subterranean hammering and the patient rasp of the homemade saw told Daniel Muir that his challenge had been accepted.

The self-setting sawmill was, to be sure, only a small-scale model, hardly of practical use. And in any case, it was not a device that would benefit Muir in the exercise of his daily tasks. But that was not the real goal, anyhow. The sawmill served the same purpose as his mathematical studies and his reading in elevating him above the circumstances of his life. Damming a small brook, he positioned his device and saw it work.

To Muir the act of arising so early and for such a purpose was almost equal in significance to the work he would then undertake, for it was a triumph of the will over the fiesh, of himself—John Muir—over his circumstances. With that pride that often comes from such lonely efforts and that in him could occasionally come close to braggadocio, Muir looked back years later on this act of sustained heroism: “Many try to make up time by wringing slumber out of their pores. Not so when I was a boy, springing out of bed at one o’clock in the morning, wide-awake, without the shadow of a yawn, no sleep left in a single fiber of me, burning and bright as a tiger springing on its prey.” Eventually he developed an ingenious sort of clock which would (had he needed it) assist him in his risings. At its appointed hour the contraption would cant the bedstead forward and noisily dump the sleeper onto the floor. Doubtless here, as with many other of his inventions, Muir was simply amused by the idea of the thing, its practical value being a secondary consideration.

Once fairly started on this course of inventing various wooden devises, Muir felt himself powerless to stop, and at an ever-increasing rate he fashioned waterwheels, door locks, latches, hygrometers, pyrometers, a barometer, an automatic horse feeder, and a huge thermometer with a scale of such amplitude it could easily be read from the barn where it rested to where Muir plowed in the fields below the house. He also devised a kind of guillotine for decapitating the farm’s ravenous gophers, though, as he wrote his brother David in 1870, he was satisfied to remember this invention as his least successful.

Now his mind ran on clocks. He had taught himself the time laws of the pendulum by reading about them, and during his daily tasks he imagined how they might be applied to the construction of a clock. He began to whittle the works from pieces of hickory he carried with him as he did the mending and fencing and carpentry about the place, stealing minutes to do so whenever he was out of sight of the man who sat all day in the corner room poring over Scripture.

When the machine was almost completely assembled and hidden amid the tools and lumber of a spare bedroom, Maggie Muir came upon her father on his hands and knees regarding the strange thing he had accidentally discovered while looking for a tool. That evening at supper when Daniel Muir broached the subject, John had reason to fear he would be ordered to destroy his invention before he could complete it and discover whether it worked. But Daniel Muir contented himself with nothing more than another severe lecture in which he said that he wished John to follow the example of Paul, who said “that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and Him crucified.” On this occasion, anyway, Muir prudently refrained from engaging his father in debate and soon thereafter finished his clock. Like his other inventions, it worked.

Now that his clockmaking was out in the open he went on with it in a kind of joyous fury. He made one with a pendulum bearing an inscription pleasing to Daniel Muir, “All flesh is grass”; and another so huge its two-second pendulum was fourteen feet long. Here as with his other inventions he was unwittingly manifesting larger impulses at work in the nation. The pace of American life had measurably quickened in recent decades, and the country had taken as an article of faith Ben Franklin’s maxim that time is money. On the Muir farms, it was not, but Daniel Muir was determined every minute of it should count. John Muir was determined it should be improved.

There were other reasons why Muir was preoccupied with time as the decade of the 1850s closed. His own life, he had come to feel, was passing. His recent arrival at young manhood had made him aware of his own mortality, and this was further encouraged by his reading of the Romantics, who dwelt so lovingly on this theme. Then too the juxtaposition of his time of life with the apparently endless round of farm labor made him feel that his span of years was not only short but that it was even now growing shorter—as it so tragically had for some other newcomers who like himself had entered the New World full of bright hopes but who now lay beneath the kirkyard sod, all hopes stilled. Soon it might be too late for him. Too late for exactly what he did not know; only that he knew now and perhaps had suspected for years that he was not meant for this.

Such feelings of personal crisis are a predictable psychological feature of this passage of life—which is one reason why they could be so prominent a theme in Romantic literature. And yet in Muir’s case the feelings were more than the predictable ones of a young man troubled about his destiny or the apparent lack of one. They were rooted instead in a realistic assessment of his predicament, and they were the more acutely felt since he could hardly express them to anyone, not Maggie, nor his mother, nor David. Here he was, of age, and still stuck on his father’s farm and under a regimen that threatened the very center of his being. He had, so far as he knew, no prospects for anything different, no formal education, no training, no credentials of any sort, and no contact with the outside world other than his Scots immigrant neighbors.

But he was no ordinary farmer, and he knew it. His impulses and inclinations had been different almost, so it seemed, from that very moment he had plunged himself so joyously into the new earth of Wisconsin, and he had strengthened and nurtured these impulses and inclinations through the solitary and partially defensive exertions of his late teenage years.

He passed through those years almost wholly unafflicted with what he would a few years hence call the “colt & calf” exchanges between girls and boys. While his peers and even his younger brother David were engaging in the prim and terribly earnest rituals of rustic courtship, Muir appears to have maintained an almost scornful indifference to the entire business and regarded such behavior as frivolous. Perhaps, half in daydream, he had thought of himself as a Park or Humboldt, solitary, unwived, free, moving toward great adventures unencumbered by emotional commitments. Perhaps too he understood that to enter here into a relationship that might become serious would further bind him to a locale that could hold nothing for him but more of what he already knew. Whatever it was he obscurely wanted, it was not here.

And doubtless what he had observed of marriage in his own home made him wary, he who identified so closely with his quiet, patient mother, he who had been compelled to watch her suffer under the same harsh tyranny as if she had been but one of the children. Was this what marriage meant: to be a commandant to one’s household? The young Muir could not but feel such a destiny intolerable for himself.

But as with the other choices he was now struggling to define, the cost was dear. It was a loneliness deep and perhaps at last irremediable. In avoiding the possibility of close companionship, Muir was constructing another sort of prison for himself, and at forty he would see its precise confines. For the moment, he could do nothing but shy from relationships that threatened to ensnare him in the bonds of emotional responsibility and the sustained commitment of his personal presence.

His growing sense of loneliness and estrangement was accentuated by his habit, begun about the end of the 1850s, of taking long, restless night walks when the weather permitted. These can only have intensified his sense of difference, not only in relation to his own family but in relation to all of the world with which he had made acquaintance. It was one thing to read of the solitary musings of the Romantics and quite another to be abroad in the night when all others were sunk in sleep.

In this tight local culture he was odd and seemed likely to become even odder. He knew, even as he pretended indifference, that others in the neighborhood considered him so. Many youngsters passed through the vale of adolescent estrangement, but Muir was now even more essentially estranged from his world at twenty-one than he had been at fifteen. He had shown a lessening interest in those things that interested his peers the more; had sparked no girls; had shown no interest in his personal appearance or in the way others might regard him. Probably he had never even shaved, his long, silky beard straggling into being on his cheeks and chin. He was still curiously involved with bees, birds, plants, and other natural phenomena that his contemporaries had long since banished to the unvisited world of childhood. Even his hilarious, outsized inventions in a way stigmatized him: they worked, all right, and they marked him as a sort of genius. But what sort of thing was this for a young man to be doing? Where could it possibly lead?

William Duncan continued to show interest in these inventions and to encourage him, stopping by the Muir house occasionally in the evenings to chat with John and to inspect his latest piece in the cellar workshop. And Mrs. Galloway too still believed in his star, still felt that he was destined for something out of the ordinary. But to others, even those who came around the farm to marvel at his whirring mills, ticking clocks, and gigantic sensitive thermometers, he must have seemed peculiar. In his debates with Daniel Muir he had developed a sharp and disputatious tongue, and he was capable now of using it on others, taking a certain pleasure in the very strife of verbal combat and in besting conversational opponents. Perhaps he would end by becoming a local crank: gifted in a wayward, impractical way, isolated, at last soured.

His mother wanted him to become a preacher, but he could hardly express to himself, let alone to her, all the misgivings he had developed about the practice of Christianity and its formal observances. He knew, however, that he had become more unsuited for that vocation than anyone could have guessed. He had vague thoughts of becoming a doctor, but if anything these seemed more unrealistic than his mother’s thoughts of the ministry. How indeed might he set out on this avenue without formal education, without connection to any academy?

About the only thing he could realistically see for himself was a position in a machine shop. The machine age had been a fact of life in Wisconsin even before the Muirs had migrated there, and now Case, Easterly, Rowell, Van Brundt, and other companies were in full production of various farm machines. In small villages throughout the state specialty manufacturers were turning out products to mechanize virtually all aspects of farm labor. No one had to tell Muir he was good with tools and machines; he had found this out for himself. But William Duncan did tell him that with his skills he would be assured a welcome at any shop in the country. Still Muir delayed. He knew times were tough in the wake of the national panic of 1857; perhaps what welcome he might have had would now be denied him as shop owners tightened their belts along with everyone else. Besides, he dreaded what he knew would be a painful scene with his father, who would refuse to bless the departure of his eldest son and best worker. And, once he had departed, how would the farm be managed by the others? Would he not be selfishly dumping an intolerable burden on his mother, Maggie, David, and the others left behind?

So he stayed on. Spring came once again to the rolling lands, and the young man observed his twenty-second birthday. There were increasing rumors from the southern states of secession. A man named Lincoln from a neighboring state was nominated for president by the new Republican party, and harvest time came with its heat… .

At the end of August 1860, William Duncan made one of his frequent calls at Hickory Hill, but this time he had something definite to discuss with John Muir. If Muir really wanted to get on in a machine shop, he ought to take his inventions to the State Agricultural Fair just about to open at Madison. Once people saw Muir’s work, Duncan reasoned, John would receive all kinds of offers. To Muir, hesitant, poised, this was obviously the moment. He determined to go.

As Muir had foreseen, Daniel Muir refused his blessing, and when Muir asked him whether he might count on money from home if the need should arise, this was refused too. Once you leave here, Daniel Muir told his son, you’re strictly on your own. Such, Muir reflected, was his reward for ten years of hard labor. He had about fifteen dollars he had saved and the gold piece Grandfather Gilrye had placed in his small hand so long ago. It was a slim chance he was taking, yet he would have to take it. Who could say when a better one would come?

He packed his hickory clocks, a thermometer, and the works for his early-rising device into a sack and said his good-byes. David was allowed to drive him the nine miles to Pardeeville, a place Muir had never seen, where he would catch the train to Madison. There at the tavern on the main street he and David parted, the younger brother turning the wagon sharply and then plodding slowly back down the street until at last he was gone from view.

John Muir stood on the porch of the tavern, a lean, shaggy-bearded man, with a sack beside him. He was setting out.