to their leafy hiding-places in the chaparral, the flowers open and straighten their petals as the dew vanishes, every pulse beats high, every life-cell rejoices, the very rocks seem to tingle with life, and God is felt brooding over everything great and small.
—The Mountains of California
In the Cool of the Evening
BY THE TIME JOHN MUIR wrote this letter, he had been discovered as a writer, and he spent several months each year in Oakland and San Francisco writing for various journals. He felt neither comfortable nor healthy living in the city and pined for the mountains. This extract from a long letter records his joyful return. Still, he had a presentiment that the intense Yosemite phase of his life might be over, for he wrote in the same letter, “No one of the rocks seems to call me now, nor any of the distant mountains. Surely this Merced and Tuolumne chapter of my life is done.”
In the cool of evening, I caught Brownie [his mule] and cantered across to the Tuolumne; the whole way being fragrant and golden with hemizonia [sunflower-like wildflowers of the Sierra foothills].… Few nights of my mountain nights have been more eventful than that of my ride in the woods from Coulterville, when I made my reunion with the winds and pines. It was eleven o’clock when we reached Black’s ranch. I was weary and soon died in sleep. How cool and vital, and re-creative was the hale young mountain air! On, higher, higher, up into the holy of holies of the woods. Pure, white, lustrous clouds overshadowed the massive congregations of silver fir and pine. We entered, and a thousand living arms were waved in solemn blessing. An affinity of mountain life. How complete is the absorption of one’s life into the spirit of mountain woods!
—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, SEPTEMBER, 1874
An Evening under the Stars and Moon
HERE IS AN ACCOUNT of an evening spent at the foot of Upper Yosemite Falls. Although Muir was thoroughly drenched in the spray, he was captivated by the beauty of the night, the waterfalls, and the stars.
In the afternoon I came up the mountain here with a blanket and a piece of bread to spend the night in prayer among the spouts of the fall.… Silver from the moon illumines this glorious creation which we term falls and has laid a magnificent double prismatic bow at its base. This tissue of the falls is delicately filmed on the outside like the substance of spent clouds, and the stars shine dimly through it. In the solid shafted body of the falls is a vast number of passing caves, black and deep, with close white convolving spray for sills and shooting comet shoots above and down their sides like lime crystals in a cave, and every atom of the magnificent being, from the thin silvery crest that does not dim the stars to the inner arrowy hardened shafts that strike onward like thunderbolts in sound and energy, all is life and spirit, every bolt and spray feels the hand of God. O the music that is blessing me now! …. The notes of this night’s song echo in every fiber and all the grandeur of form is engraved.…
—LETTER TO JEANNE C. CARR, [APRIL 3, 1871]
A Picturesque Snow Storm
MUIR’S EMBROIDERED WORDS draw images in our minds of what it was like being snowbound in Yosemite.
On November 28th came one of the most picturesque snow storms I have ever seen. It was a tranquil day in Yosemite. About midday a close-grained cloud grew in the middle of the valley, blurring the sun; but rocks and trees continued to caste shadow. In a few hours the cloud-ceiling deepened and gave birth to a rank down-growth of silky streamers. These cloud-weeds were most luxuriant about the Cathedral Rocks, completely hiding all their summits. Then heavier masses, hairy outside with a dark nucleus, appeared, and foundered almost to the ground. Toward night all cloud and rock distinctions were blended out, rock after rock disappeared, El Capitan, the Domes and the Sentinel, and all the brows about Yosemite Falls were wiped out, and the whole valley was filled with equal, seamless gloom. There was no wind and every rock and tree and grass blade had a hushed, expectant air. The fullness of time arrived, and down came the big flakes in tufted companies of full grown flowers. Not jostling and rustling like autumn leaves or blossom showers of an orchard whose castaway flakes are hushed into any hollow for a grave, but they journeyed down with gestures of confident life, alighting upon predestined places on rock and leaf, like flocks of linnets or showers of summer flies. Steady, exhaustless, innumerable. The trees, and bushes, and dead brown grass were flowered far beyond summer, bowed down in blossom and all the rocks were buried. Every peak and dome, every niche and tablet had their share of snow. And blessed are the eyes that beheld morning open the glory of that one dead storm. In vain did I search for some special separate mass of beauty on which to rest my gaze. No island appeared throughout the whole gulf of the beauty. The glorious crystal sediment was everywhere. From wall to wall of our beautiful temple, from meadow to sky was one finished unit of beauty, one star of equal ray, one glowing sun, weighed in the celestial balances and found perfect.
—“YOSEMITE IN WINTER,” New York Tribune, JANUARY 1, 1872
chapter three
The Power of Beauty
Commentary
JOHN MUIR NEVER CONSIDERED HIMSELF a trail-blazer; he did not take his many talents, or his sharp intellect, very seriously. He was kind and friendly but not effusive. He was neither a hermit nor a recluse, yet he carried little more than the clothes on his back. He was generous. He had time for people, and he enjoyed their company, but he was completely at home in the forests by himself. His companions were what he called “plant people,” and sometimes “plant saints,” “flower people,” and “animal people.” He felt a relationship between himself and the birds and mammals, even lizards and insects. He observed the order and integrity of their lives and how they cared for their young.
John Muir hadn’t planned the direction of his life, yet when he reached the Sierras he knew intuitively that he had found the path that was right for him. Reflecting back, he recorded in his journal, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”1
Going out and staying out day and night, season into season, through storms and sunshine, in driving rain and cold and searing heat, Muir was overpowered by the beauty and splendor of the natural world. Such grandeur, Muir reasoned, could only have been created by God, and it reflected God’s bounty. Like a perfectly tranquil pond with nary a ripple touching its surface as the sun approaches the horizon in the evening just before the still of night descends when every rock, every tree, every line of hills is piercingly reflected, so the creating God of the universe is reflected. Or, as John Muir paused and noted, “How wonderful the power of…beauty! Gazing awe-stricken, I might have left everything for it.… Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.”2 Furthermore, Muir saw the world as constantly being created, its forces moving in cycles, ever rising and falling. “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere, the dew is never dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth turns.”3
Raised as a Christian, Muir never renounced his orthodox roots. Many of his writings have biblical overtones, and he even borrowed some scriptural phrases in his writings. Still, Muir’s writings stress not a Trinitarian god, but God who is revealed in numberless ways. For John Muir the path to the Divine was a wide-open window; everything in nature was a source of Divine revelation. As he wrote in a letter to a friend in l872, “… fresh truth [is] gathered and absorbed from pines and waters and deep singing winds.… Rocks and waters are words of God and so are men. We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeks and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all.”4
Muir often capitalized the words nature, beauty, love, soul, and universe, just as he capitalized the word god. For him the perfect synonym for God was Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, in the star-filled night, or in crashing waterfalls,