depths to see whether it might be snatched from their grasp.
In fair weather the boys would wander the rocky shore past Long Craigs toward Belhaven Bay, the town’s original harbor, where at the tide line there was a rich collection of shells—pelican’s-foot, venus, Iceland cyprina, and banded wedges—and beautiful stones with strange, apparently ahistoric etchings in them—fossils—that made you ponder the mysterious. About their heads swung a variety of shorebirds such as shags, herons, oystercatchers, waders, terns, and eiders. The boys constructed homemade guns of gas pipe, then bought gunpowder and fired clumsy lead slugs at gulls and geese.
In foul weather the noise of an angry sea was brought to Muir and his family up on the high street. Then the whole town might be enveloped in a swirling, smothering mist, half rain and half spray, whipped up off the waves lunging below the hill. The clouds would wholly merge with the gray, flotsam-flecked sea, and rain, raking the old town, would polish the slate or stone roofs that now reflected their chimneys and stain the stone walls a darker gray or red. In the harbor the crafts would bounce high and sway wide at their anchors. In the kirkyard the slim and slanting stones darkened, and the many markers there to men and ships that had gone down in the “fashes of the flood” might seem to warn with a renewed urgency.
At such times Muir was learning more than the lore of the sea. He was learning of the fathomless power of the natural world against which men might build houses and harbor walls that were puny indeed and ultimately powerless. It was an indelible lesson, one that could be borne in on him again at any time, and often in later years it would be at the odd moment when he happened to sniff salt air once more.
But whereas in so many of his countrymen this lesson tended to produce a gloomy pessimism, a silent sense of life’s rocklike necessities and swift, avenging accidents, in John Muir it produced quite the opposite: an imperturbable serenity and a natural unchurched reverence founded on an awareness that—storm or smiling sun—nature includes us; that like the fish or the gulls we too must be part of this world. Pessimism or, worse, fear was ignorance of this.
The more formal lessons began when he was not quite three. Scots parents did not coddle their children, a tendency partly the result of climate and culture and founded on a somewhat grim view of life’s prospects. It was best to prepare children early for the hardness of the way that lay ahead.
The school to which Muir was so early sent was a representative one: disciplined, thoroughly structured, innocently harsh. It lay at the foot of a sloping street called the Davel Brae that ran down to the sea off the high street past stone and white stuccoed houses with little gardens like the Muirs’ that spilled over walls topped with imbedded bits of broken glass to keep out intruders and passing schoolboys. Around the schoolyard ran a high wall appropriately made of the same materials as those protecting the harbor. For here, too, the sea was right below, and on stormy days its spit came flying into the yard or fell in admonitory taps on the roof of the schoolhouse. The master was one Mungo Siddons, who goaded his small charges to their tasks with a combination of threats, whippings, and encouragements, with rather more of the first two than the the last.
The Davel Brae schoolyard was an unsupervised, unofficial, but faithful extension of the school proper. Here too lessons for life were administered in the same harsh way: small boys were obliged to choose sides and fight each other like armies, using whatever ammunition was available—sand, sod, or snow. And there were individual battles: fistfights were daily occurrences, according to Muir, and there was no thought of avoiding them. For the great ambition of a small boy here was to become known as a good (that is, feared) fighter. Without understanding it consciously, the Davel Brae schoolboys were acting out a received vision of life as hard and relentless, as something from which one must not flinch but bear its greatest blows with a stolid countenance, and in their own way they were preparing themselves for this.
In every respect but Daniel Muir’s excessive religiosity the daily routine in the Muir household was probably as representative of that time and place as was the Davel Brae school. Breakfast in the still dark of that northern latitude consisted of oatmeal with milk or treacle, spooned out of wooden dishes.* Then the children were off to school, the stiff sea wind in their faces, their book bags slung over their shoulders.
At noon they ran home up the slope of the Davel Brae, and the father would come upstairs from his shop to preside over the main meal of the day: vegetable broth, a piece of boiled mutton, a barley scone—all this consumed in the sacramental silence that Daniel Muir insisted upon as proper for the reception of gifts from the Lord. Then back to school for the afternoon lessons, the postclassroom education of the schoolyard, and, if weather and the season’s daylight permitted, perhaps a cruise along the waterfront to the harbor.
A late afternoon snack at the Muir house consisted of a half slice of unbuttered white bread, a barley scone, and warm water with milk and sugar, a drink that was known, with characteristic Scots humor, as “content.” After this John and David would cross the high street to the Gilryes’, where in front of the ingle grandfather Gilrye would put them through their recitations. In the dark they would then come home to a mealy boiled potato, the inevitable scone, and family worship, in which Daniel Muir took the leading role, praying long and fervently that he and his should not fall into the many temptations. And then to bed. If this seems a cheerless routine, it is well to remember that the lot of many children in factories and on farms at this time was immeasurably worse, and soon enough the Muir children themselves would have cause in the Wisconsin backwoods to think fondly of these days of comparative luxury and idleness.
And they found their outlets, particularly John and David, not only on Saturday and holiday excursions along the shore and into the country to the west but also at night after they had been put to bed. In the high-ceilinged third-floor room the brothers played at voyaging under the bed covers, imagining themselves on tall-masted ships scudding before winds that took them to America or other outlandish places as they worked their ways farther down into the smothering warmth of the blankets.
They also played more adventurous and forbidden games of daring they called “scootchers.” John would formulate some tremendous scootcher such as dashing across the hall into the unused room where the first Dr. Wightman’s ghost was said to be eternally busy at his dusty, greening retorts. One night John climbed out of a streetside dormer window and scrambled up to the roof ridge, where he sat in triumph with his nightgown bellying like a sail in a sea breeze. David’s attempt to match this scootcher nearly ended in disaster, and he had to be rescued by his older brother.
At the age of seven or eight John Muir went on to the grammar school, a high-gabled stone structure bearing a telling resemblance to a church. In fact, the Dunbar grammar school was a secular arm of a Calvinistic culture. Its values were those of the old, unreconstructed Covenanters: the sanctification of work as the only activity morally and spiritually justifiable; an institutional understanding of the inevitable individual failings; and the consequent necessity of punishment, in this case administered with the tawse, a multithonged whip that was Master Lyon’s only apparent indulgence.
The small scholars, Muir remembered, had to learn daily lessons in Latin, French, and English with additional obligations in spelling, arithmetic, and geography. All of this education was instilled with regular whippings. “We were simply driven,” Muir said, “pointblank against our books like soldiers against the enemy. … If we failed in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple, all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin excited the memory to any required degree.”
In addition to these punitively administered school lessons there were equally severe ones at home, where Daniel Muir forced John to memorize a certain number of Bible verses each day; there was a whipping at the end of the recitation if he faltered. By the time John was eleven he said he had “about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh.” It is another indication of the impress of Calvinism on the Scots mind that there seems to have been no thought there might be some strange incongruity between the motives of masters and parents and the methods they employed. It was simply assumed that a godly mind and an educated one would