that might become serious would further bind him to a locale that could hold nothing for him but more of what he already knew. Whatever it was he obscurely wanted, it was not here.
And doubtless what he had observed of marriage in his own home made him wary, he who identified so closely with his quiet, patient mother, he who had been compelled to watch her suffer under the same harsh tyranny as if she had been but one of the children. Was this what marriage meant: to be a commandant to one’s household? The young Muir could not but feel such a destiny intolerable for himself.
But as with the other choices he was now struggling to define, the cost was dear. It was a loneliness deep and perhaps at last irremediable. In avoiding the possibility of close companionship, Muir was constructing another sort of prison for himself, and at forty he would see its precise confines. For the moment, he could do nothing but shy from relationships that threatened to ensnare him in the bonds of emotional responsibility and the sustained commitment of his personal presence.
His growing sense of loneliness and estrangement was accentuated by his habit, begun about the end of the 1850s, of taking long, restless night walks when the weather permitted. These can only have intensified his sense of difference, not only in relation to his own family but in relation to all of the world with which he had made acquaintance. It was one thing to read of the solitary musings of the Romantics and quite another to be abroad in the night when all others were sunk in sleep.
In this tight local culture he was odd and seemed likely to become even odder. He knew, even as he pretended indifference, that others in the neighborhood considered him so. Many youngsters passed through the vale of adolescent estrangement, but Muir was now even more essentially estranged from his world at twenty-one than he had been at fifteen. He had shown a lessening interest in those things that interested his peers the more; had sparked no girls; had shown no interest in his personal appearance or in the way others might regard him. Probably he had never even shaved, his long, silky beard straggling into being on his cheeks and chin. He was still curiously involved with bees, birds, plants, and other natural phenomena that his contemporaries had long since banished to the unvisited world of childhood. Even his hilarious, outsized inventions in a way stigmatized him: they worked, all right, and they marked him as a sort of genius. But what sort of thing was this for a young man to be doing? Where could it possibly lead?
William Duncan continued to show interest in these inventions and to encourage him, stopping by the Muir house occasionally in the evenings to chat with John and to inspect his latest piece in the cellar workshop. And Mrs. Galloway too still believed in his star, still felt that he was destined for something out of the ordinary. But to others, even those who came around the farm to marvel at his whirring mills, ticking clocks, and gigantic sensitive thermometers, he must have seemed peculiar. In his debates with Daniel Muir he had developed a sharp and disputatious tongue, and he was capable now of using it on others, taking a certain pleasure in the very strife of verbal combat and in besting conversational opponents. Perhaps he would end by becoming a local crank: gifted in a wayward, impractical way, isolated, at last soured.
His mother wanted him to become a preacher, but he could hardly express to himself, let alone to her, all the misgivings he had developed about the practice of Christianity and its formal observances. He knew, however, that he had become more unsuited for that vocation than anyone could have guessed. He had vague thoughts of becoming a doctor, but if anything these seemed more unrealistic than his mother’s thoughts of the ministry. How indeed might he set out on this avenue without formal education, without connection to any academy?
About the only thing he could realistically see for himself was a position in a machine shop. The machine age had been a fact of life in Wisconsin even before the Muirs had migrated there, and now Case, Easterly, Rowell, Van Brundt, and other companies were in full production of various farm machines. In small villages throughout the state specialty manufacturers were turning out products to mechanize virtually all aspects of farm labor. No one had to tell Muir he was good with tools and machines; he had found this out for himself. But William Duncan did tell him that with his skills he would be assured a welcome at any shop in the country. Still Muir delayed. He knew times were tough in the wake of the national panic of 1857; perhaps what welcome he might have had would now be denied him as shop owners tightened their belts along with everyone else. Besides, he dreaded what he knew would be a painful scene with his father, who would refuse to bless the departure of his eldest son and best worker. And, once he had departed, how would the farm be managed by the others? Would he not be selfishly dumping an intolerable burden on his mother, Maggie, David, and the others left behind?
So he stayed on. Spring came once again to the rolling lands, and the young man observed his twenty-second birthday. There were increasing rumors from the southern states of secession. A man named Lincoln from a neighboring state was nominated for president by the new Republican party, and harvest time came with its heat… .
At the end of August 1860, William Duncan made one of his frequent calls at Hickory Hill, but this time he had something definite to discuss with John Muir. If Muir really wanted to get on in a machine shop, he ought to take his inventions to the State Agricultural Fair just about to open at Madison. Once people saw Muir’s work, Duncan reasoned, John would receive all kinds of offers. To Muir, hesitant, poised, this was obviously the moment. He determined to go.
As Muir had foreseen, Daniel Muir refused his blessing, and when Muir asked him whether he might count on money from home if the need should arise, this was refused too. Once you leave here, Daniel Muir told his son, you’re strictly on your own. Such, Muir reflected, was his reward for ten years of hard labor. He had about fifteen dollars he had saved and the gold piece Grandfather Gilrye had placed in his small hand so long ago. It was a slim chance he was taking, yet he would have to take it. Who could say when a better one would come?
He packed his hickory clocks, a thermometer, and the works for his early-rising device into a sack and said his good-byes. David was allowed to drive him the nine miles to Pardeeville, a place Muir had never seen, where he would catch the train to Madison. There at the tavern on the main street he and David parted, the younger brother turning the wagon sharply and then plodding slowly back down the street until at last he was gone from view.
John Muir stood on the porch of the tavern, a lean, shaggy-bearded man, with a sack beside him. He was setting out.
PART
II
Into His Own
Books of Life, Drums of Death
The shirt-sleeved farmer just off the train from the country and lugging an oddly shaped bundle was one of hundreds who arrived at the fair grounds in Madison that early fall day in 1860. Exhibitors, spectators, and officials mingled together on the spacious grounds downhill from the state university. A high fence ran around the perimeter, and the judges’ stands and the railings of the race course boasted new coats of whitewash.
The State Journal for September 25 listed the schedule of featured events, including a plowing contest, band performances, and the expected appearances of notables such as Professor James Hall of the state geological survey. Philip Waldron, it reported, would be showing a prize buck and six lambs; C. H. Williams of Sauk City, a shorthorned bull named Paris; Louis Woodworth of Bristol, apples, pears, sweet potatoes, and beets. According to the Journal there was still room for exhibitors in the Hall of Fine Arts. Already a variegated lot had assembled there, including one man all the way from Chelsea, Massachusetts, with a “patent portable hand printing and letter copying press.” Others were showing embroidery, fanning mills and other types of farm machinery, tobacco, mittens, and art work. Among the exhibitors in the hall was listed “John Miron, Millard, Marquette Co., 2 clocks, 1 thermometer.”