When a fire burned the factory to the ground, this job ended too. By this time the Civil War was winding down, and it was now safe for Muir to return to the United States. He headed to Indianapolis, at the time a thriving manufacturing city that had doubled its population during the war. He easily found employment in a factory that manufactured wagon wheels, staves, barrels, and plow handles. He was hired to increase the factory’s efficiency. As the plant’s productivity increased, so also did Muir’s sense of ambivalence. In May he wrote to his sister Sarah, “I feel something within, some restless fires urge me on in a way very different from my real wishes, and I suppose that I am doomed to live in some sort of noisy commercial centers. Circumstances over which I have had no control almost compel me to abandon my profession of choice [living in the natural, wild world] and to take up the business of an inventor.… ”3 Ten months later (March 5, 1867) while Muir was working late on the assembly line, a belt snapped, grazing the cornea of his right eye. By the time he’d struggled back to his boarding house he had lost sight in both his eyes. For weeks, condemned to a darkened room, Muir hoped and prayed that his sight would return. If his blindness continued, he feared a life in the shadow-lands, merely a bystander banished to the edge of society, never taking his full part or making his contribution, forever dependent upon the charity of others.
In April, to his immense relief, his sight began returning and he started roaming the fields on the outskirts of Indianapolis. In case he had any setbacks, he wanted to gather enough flowers and sunlight, sylvan landscapes and streams to cherish for the rest of his life. As he gathered flowers and specimens, he gathered himself.
By the first of September, after finally regaining his sight during the summer at home in Wisconsin, Muir set out for his 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Leaving factory and farm, he was at last walking towards his destiny. His intention was to “make and take one more grand Sabbath three years long,”4 fulfilling a long-cherished dream of going to Cuba and South America and traveling to the sources of the Amazon to see for himself the great araucaria tree, a long-lived coniferous tree of the Southern Hemisphere. He carried only a plant press, a New Testament, a little food, and a new diary inscribed “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.”
Muir tramped through Kentucky, over the Cumberland Mountains, and then into Georgia, sleeping under the stars and accepting the meals and hospitality of the people he met along the way, some of them recently freed slaves.
By the time he reached Savannah, he was low in spirits and in cash. The money he’d asked his brother, David, to send from his bank account back in Wisconsin hadn’t arrived. Exhausted, Muir found a resting place in the Bonaventure cemetery a few miles from town, where he could spend a few days hoping the bank draft would arrive. Nights were hot, humid, and thick with mosquitoes. As soon as his funds from home arrived, Muir set off again on his journey. But he was feeling ill. Sickening more and more as he walked and feeling feverish by the time he reached Cedar Keys on the Gulf coast of Florida, he nonetheless obtained a job at a local saw mill. When a full-blown case of what was later identified as malaria—probably contracted in the cemetery—rendered him delirious, his kindly employers took him into their home and cared for him as his health slowly returned. As he was able, Muir worked a little but again became restless and anxious to continue his travels. When a small schooner docked at the port to pick up a load of lumber for Cuba, Muir talked to the captain and obtained passage.
Muir stayed a month on the boat anchored in Havana harbor, spending every day exploring the outskirts of the city, discovering its tropical plants, grasses, and cacti. But in the aftermath of the malaria he was still weak, and the heat and humidity dampened his desire to go further south. He dreamed of cool forests and clear crystal streams. When he saw a notice advertising $40 fares from New York to California, he boarded an orange boat in Havana for New York. Arriving in February, he had to wait two weeks for a southward-bound ship. He wrote, “I felt completely lost in the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, the immense size of the buildings.”5 It was a relief when the steamer left for the Isthmus of Panama.
From Colón, Muir took a train through the dense jungle to Panama’s west coast, where he boarded the steamer, the Nebraska, among a “barbarous mob” of fortune-seekers, misfits, laborers, idealists, dreamers, and families seeking a better life.
The Beginnings of Lifelong Wanderings
FROM THE START, John Muir was drawn to “wildness,” as he called the natural world. Curious and imaginative by temperament, Muir couldn’t resist the urge to run away to the seashore, marsh, and fields where his soul was nurtured just as his identity as a naturalist was set on course. Escaping his father’s heavy-handedness wasn’t easy. The elder Muir believed that his son should stay home in his house and yard and learn his lessons well (Latin, French, English, spelling, history, and geography), especially his Biblical lessons. But Muir, who never rejected his Christian faith, found it more authentically expressed in the magnificence of creation gloriously displayed in every shining lake and towering tree. Throughout his writings, Muir frequently capitalized the “N” in nature, suggesting that to Muir, Nature was synonymous with the creative force of the universe, the impulse that calls all creation and all beings—both plant and animal—into life. By capitalizing nature, Muir animated it into a person by that name, one whose mountainous face changes expressions, whose streams “sing,” and even “shout.”
When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I’ve been growing seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled together as one. We never thought of playing truant, but after I was five or six years old I ran away to the seashore or the fields almost every Saturday, and every day in the school vacations except Sundays, though solemnly warned that I must play at home in the garden and back yard, lest I should learn to think bad thoughts and say bad words. All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.…
My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound—a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery.…
Wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander in wildness to our heart’s content. Oh, the blessed enchantment of those Saturday runaways in the prime of the spring! How our young wondering eyes reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams! We… were glorious, we were free—school cares and scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in the fullness of Nature’s glad wildness. These were my first excursions—the beginnings of lifelong wanderings.
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Everything New and Pure
HERE JOHN MUIR INTRODUCES his idea of the university—the universe—as the primary teacher of life’s elemental lessons. His university was not books, classrooms, examinations, common rooms, and learned professors; all these paled in comparison with the education offered by immersion in the natural world.
This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature’s warm heart—how utterly happy it made us! Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson,