WHA’S LIKE US? Visionary saw nature in a new light ... and kept it safe
OUR subject this week was ahead of the curve when it comes to conservation, ecology, oneness with nature. He was New Age ages ago.
Picture him – long beard, long legs, long stick, long ago – out among the trees and canyons, staring into the semidistance, where all truth resides. He believed nature superior to civilisation, but persuaded custodians of the latter to become guardians of the former, thus preserving the Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park in yonder United States.
Not unnaturally, it all started in Dunbar, where John Muir was born on April 21, 1838. The third of eight children, he had a typical Scottish upbringing: awful. His father was a religious fruitcake who leathered his bairns if they couldn’t recite the Bible. Still, at least they were taught to turn the other cheek – so he could leather that one as well.
Muir said his father made him read the Bible every day, much in the way you or I might read The Hobbit. The boy eventually memorised three-quarters of the Old Testament and all of the New Testament, without ever getting a chance to answer questions about them in a pub quiz.
The need to escape this didactic sadism led the boy to seek solace in Ms Nature. He loved the coastline and roly-poly landscape of East Lothian. But, in 1849, his father, finding the Church of Scotland insufficiently strict, took the family to the United States, where he hooked up with the Disciples of Christ, who weren’t nutters or anything (subs: please check for accuracy).
Bedtime stories
THE Muirs started Fountain Lake Farm, near Portage, Wisconsin, now a National Historic Landmark, where the children worked from dawn until dusk. His father wouldn’t let John read during working hours, but eventually the boy was allowed to rise earlier to study, inventing a contraption that turfed him out of bed in the wee and arguably small hours.
The boy a predilection for inventions and, in
1860, displayed this and others at the Wisconsin State Fair. However, soon he eschewed his own contraptions, turning instead to “the inventions of God”, i.e. all the doodahs found in nature. In 1861, he entered the University of Wisconsin to study science, becoming lifelong friends with Professor Ezra Carr and his wife Jeanne. Biographer Bonnie Johanna Gisel says the Carrs admired his “pure mind, unsophisticated nature, inherent curiosity, scholarly acumen, and independent thought”. Jeanne, in particular, shared his love of plants and, in later life, also helped him get published, and reassured him when his life seemed purposeless. In 1864, he visited his draft-dodging brother Daniel in southern Ontario, exploring the woods and swamps, and collecting plants on the shores of Lake Huron.
After working for a while at a sawmill, he returned to the States and got a job in a wagon wheel factory. Not the biscuit.
Second sight
HIS inventiveness saw him promoted to supervisor, but he didn’t see much after that when he was temporarily blinded in an accident. After six weeks, he was arguably relieved when his sight returned and he saw the world in “a new light”: from now on, his entire focus would be on nature.
In September 1867, as recounted in his book A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf, Muir perambulated from Kentucky to Florida, via the “wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find”.
At Cedar Key, he began working at another sawmill – he liked living on the edge – but, after only three days, took seriously ill with malaria, spending three months recuperating in the owners’ family home.
Muir said he owed his life to the Hodgsons.
After further adventures in Cuba, Nevada and Utah, Muir left on a weeklong trip to a place he’d often heard about: Yosemite.
He was knocked out by it, “whooping and howling at the vistas, jumping tirelessly from flower to flower”.
Soon after, he got a chance to return, even if it had a catch: he had to drive 2,050 sheep, many of them bleating, for mutton baron Pat Delaney.
That done, he constructed – as men did in those days – a little cabin beside Yosemite Creek, incorporating a stream in one corner to enjoy the sound of running water.
After several years in his hut, and a few breaks among the bright lights of Alaska, friends persuaded John to return to civilisation, which has women in it, one of whom – Louisa Strentzel, daughter of a Polish physician and owner of 2,600 acres of orchard – he married in 1880. He went into partnership, too, with his new
His father was a religious fruitcake who leathered his bairns if they couldn’t recite the Bible. Still, at least they were taught to turn the other cheek – so he could leather that one as well
father-in-law and, for 10 years, managed the fruit.
The fruit of his loins was two daughters, in among all of which he still took trips to Yosemite, spending his evenings under the stars with a mug of tea, slice of bread, and the latest bucolicnoir thriller by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Star attraction
HE soon became weel-kent in the valley, showing its wonders to scientists, artists and celebs of the day. Less welcome were domestic livestock, particularly sheep, which damaged the pristine grasslands.
Robert Underwood Johnson, of influential magazine The Century, agreed, inviting Muir to write two articles, which underpinned subsequent US legislation to protect the area.
In 1892, Muir and supporters founded the Sierra Club to preserve the new
Yosemite National Park and “make the mountains glad”. Today, the club has 2.4 million members.
John Muir died of pneumonia, aged 76, in Los Angeles in 1914. Though he became a US citizen, he never lost his Scottish accent and never forgot his roots, often speaking fondly of his East Lothian childhood. If it wasn’t Emerson in his satchel, it was Burns.
The family home in Dunbar is now a museum run by the John Muir Birthplace Trust, and the John Muir Way runs 134 miles from Helensburgh in the west to his hometown in the east.
Thus, a wee boy from Dunbar became “the patron saint of the American wilderness”. As the aforementioned Robert Underwood Johnson said: “The world will look back to the time we live in and remember the voice of one crying in the wilderness and bless the name of John Muir.”