Wisconsin wilderness! Everything new and pure in the very prime of the spring when Nature’s pulses were beating highest and mysteriously keeping time with our own! Young hearts, young leaves, flowers, animals, the winds and the streams and the sparkling lake, all wildly, gladly rejoicing together!
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Leaving for the University of the Wilderness
JOHN MUIR’S MOST ENDURING LESSONS during his university years were those gleaned from his classmate, a botanist, named Milton Griswold. Griswold introduced him to plant biology and classification, reinforcing what Muir knew intuitively—that the natural world is not a haphazard assembly of parts, but continuous, united, and harmonious links in the web of life. As Muir was to reflect later, “…I was always fond of flowers, attracted to their external beauty and purity. Now my eyes were opened to their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of God, and leading on and on into the infinite cosmos.”
Although I was four years at the University, I did not take the regular course of studies, but instead picked out what I thought would be most useful to me, particularly chemistry, which opened a new world, and mathematics and physics, a little Greek and Latin, botany and geology. I was far from satisfied with what I had learned, and should have stayed longer. Anyhow I wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma or of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty.
From the top of a hill on the north side of Lake Mendota I gained a last wistful, lingering view of the beautiful University grounds and buildings where I had spent so many hungry and happy and hopeful days. There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell. But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.
—The Story of My Boyhood and Youth
Joyful and Free
TRAVELING BY RAIL TO JEFFERSONVILLE, Indiana, John Muir set off on his 1,000-mile journey via “the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way.” But where was he going? His plan was to walk to Florida, board a boat to Cuba and, perhaps, like one of the heroes of his youth, Alexander von Humboldt, he might make it to South America and up to the mystifying sources of the Amazon River. Along the way Muir found shelter where he could, often outside under the stars, sometimes with white families and former slaves who generously shared their fare with him, however meager. He spent several nights in a cemetery in Savannah and even there he enjoyed the live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Everything he saw delighted him, even alligators and snakes. “They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family… cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth”
I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm South, and at last, all draw backs overcome, I set forth on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. Crossing the Ohio at Louisville, I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to any one. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey. My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.
I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life. Walked twenty miles, mostly on river bottom, and found shelter in a rickety tavern.
—A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
Life and Death in a Graveyard
JEANNE C. CARR, John Muir’s close friend who encouraged him to attend the University of Wisconsin and who served as something between a valued older sister and mentor, called this reflection a “prose-poem.” Such could be said for most of Muir’s writings.
I gazed at this peerless avenue [of trees] as one newly arrived from another planet, without a past or a future, alive only to the presence of the most adorned and living of the tree companies I have ever beheld. Bonaventure is called a graveyard, but its accidental graves are powerless to influence the imagination in such a depth of life. The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the cordial rejoicing of busy insects, the calm grandeur of the forest, make it rather one of the Lord’s elect and favored fields of clearest light and life. Few people have considered the natural beauty of death. Let a child grow up in nature, beholding their beautiful and harmonious blendings of death and life; their joyous, inseparable unity, and Death will be stingless indeed to him.
LETTER TO JEANNE S. CARR, SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER, 1867
Imperishable Impressions that Vibrate Our Lives
HAVING SURVIVED THE INTERMINABLE BOGS and alligator-filled swamps of interior Florida, John Muir finally reached Cedar Keys, on the Gulf of Mexico, where he experienced an epiphany. Just the sight of the shining waters and the sea breezes recalled his happy days as a boy exploring the seaside of his Scottish home. He learned what others since have noted, which is how impressions of childhood experiences of nature can remain throughout our lifetimes, nourishing and shaping our views of the natural world.
To-day I reached the sea. While I was yet many miles back in the palmy woods, I caught the scent of the salt sea breeze which, although I had so many years lived far from sea breezes, suddenly conjured up Dunbar, its rocky coast, winds and waves; and my whole childhood, that seemed to have utterly vanished in the New World, was now restored amid the Florida woods by that one breath from the sea. Forgotten were the palms and magnolias and the thousand flowers that enclosed me. I could see only dulse [a reddish-brown seaweed] and tangle, long winged gulls, the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth, and the old castle, schools, churches, and long country rambles in search of birds’ nests. I do not wonder that the weary camels coming from the scorching African deserts should be able to scent the Nile.
How imperishable are all the impressions that ever vibrate one’s life! We cannot forget anything. Memories may escape the action of will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place. For nineteen years my vision was bounded by forests, but to-day, emerging from a multitude of tropical plants, I beheld the Gulf of Mexico stretching away unbounded, except by the sky. What dreams and speculative matter for thought arose as I stood on the strand, gazing out on the burnished, treeless plain!
—A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
chapter two
The Morning of Creation
Commentary
WHEN THE NEBRASKA passed through the Golden Gates of San Francisco on March 29, 1868, John Muir had the sense that he had arrived home. Along with his fellow passenger, an Englishman named Joseph Chilwell, he set out immediately from San Francisco by foot towards the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The pair walked south, crossed the coastal mountains into the Central Valley over Pacheco Pass. At the top Muir paused. Below was the vast grass and flower-carpeted Central Valley and in the distance the majestic Sierra Nevada peaks rising on the horizon. This was Muir’s first view of the Sierras and the image that would remain forever etched in his mind. As one of his biographers said, “…suddenly there was come a glorious dawning, lighting up all previous obscurities, revealing that the apparently upward paths of his life led like a map to this place.”1
Following the