As we traveled along the Sierra Nevada Mountains and up the Northwest Coast on this RV trip, one man’s name appeared more than any other’s: John Muir. His books are in the national park stores, his quotes on shirts and posters, and his name attached to landmarks, such as Muir Rock and the John Muir Trail. As I’ve learned more about the Scottish-American naturalist, I’ve grown to admire him even if I don’t fully share his philosophy.
Much of what I know about Muir’s life and writings I gleaned from a book that is on display in many a visitor center: The Wisdom of John Muir: 100+ Selections from the Letters, Journals and Essays of the Great Naturalist, compiled by Anne Rowthorn. The book organizes the quotations thematically in 200 pages and 12 chapters, with some context and commentary before each passage and an informative chronology of his life and work in an appendix.
Muir was born in Scotland in 1838 and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 11. He showed promise as a mechanic and engineer, but after suffering temporary blindness from an industrial accident as a young man in Indiana, he later wrote, “I bade adieu to mechanical inventions, determined to devote the rest of my life to the study of the inventions of God.” He came to the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California 1868 and made his life’s work to study nature and advocate for the protection of wilderness areas and the establishment of national parks. He wrote books, guided presidents on their visits to the West, and traveled the world, co-founding the Sierra Club in 1892. He died in December 1914, age 76.
Of all his quotes, my favorite is, “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” I’ve felt a similar pull to hit the trail, from our years in Colorado to the Appalachians and the high country we’ve passed through on our current RV adventure. What’s usually missing from Muir’s quote, from an 1873 letter to his sister, is the second part, “… & I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.” It shows a practical and disciplined side, reflecting his Scottish Presbyterian upbringing.
Besides our love of mountains, Muir and I have a few other things in common: He spent a part of his childhood in Wisconsin, on the family farm near Portage, and he studied at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. While at the university, he studied botany with a classmate named Milton Griswold (no relation that I know of). And we both see in nature the handiwork of God the Creator.
What I appreciate most about John Muir is his spirit of adventure and wonder. He would head to the mountains with only a small rucksack containing water, bread, and a notebook. He would sleep under the stars and climb trees during a storm to feel its full force. During an expedition along the slopes of Mount Shasta in April 1875, Muir records this harrowing night:
After we had forced our way down the ridge and past the group of hissing fumaroles, the storm became inconceivably violent. The thermometer fell 22 degrees in a few minutes, and soon dropped below zero. The hail gave place to snow, and darkness came on like night. The wind, rising to the highest pitch of violence, boomed and surged amid the desolate crags; lightning flashes in quick succession cut the gloomy darkness; and the thunders, the most tremendously loud and appalling I ever heard, made an almost continuous roar, stroke following stroke in quick, passionate succession, as though the mountain were being rent to its foundations and the fires of the old volcano were breaking forth again.
(p. 108)
Muir also had a gift for describing nature. Recalling a campfire in the forest, he wrote, “Grandly do my logs give back their light, slow gleaned from the suns of a hundred summers …” (p. 96) And in exploring the glaciers of North America, he marveled at the fact that these mighty rivers of ice that carved monumental valleys were formed by the accumulation of the tiniest and most delicate of creations: “Nature chose for a tool not the earthquake or lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent or eroding rain, but the tender snowflowers noiselessly falling through unnumbered centuries …” (p. 156)
Muir wasn’t just a poet of nature. He was a practical man who successfully ran his father-in-law’s farm in the Central Valley of California for much of the 1880s, growing grapes, apples, pears, and oranges. His farm was one of the first in California to ship fruit to Hawaii. He knew the names of myriad plants and animals and was up to date on the scientific thinking about geology and how glaciers in particular had shaped Yosemite Valley.
In one of my favorite passages, Muir described in colorful detail the forest heritage of North America, starting from the East through the Midwest and on to
the darkening multitudes of pines that covered the high Rocky ranges and the glorious forests along the coast of the moist and balmy Pacific, where new species of pine, giant cedars and spruces, silver firs and sequoias, kings of their race, growing close together like grass in a meadow, poised their brave domes and spires in the sky three hundred feet above the ferns and the lilies that enameled the ground; towering serene through the long centuries, preaching God’s forestry fresh from heaven.
(p. 49)
While Muir was a founder of the environmental movement, he was also an advocate of what today we would call “intelligent design.” In the words of the editor of the Muir anthology I read, “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.” (p. 33)
In the glacier-carved Yosemite Valley, Muir said he saw “a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds without leaving a single rocky angle exposed, as if the delicate fluting and ridging fashioned out of metamorphic slates had been carefully sandpapered. The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures.” (p. 36) As we’ve traveled from one end of this great country to the other, seeing the deserts and mountains and river valleys, I’ve challenged myself with the same questions that came to Muir in his study of Yosemite: “In particular the great Valley has always kept a place in my mind. How did the Lord make it? What tools did He use? How did He apply them and when?” (p. 153)
Where Muir leaves me behind is his belief that animals are on the same level as man. He often referred to the animals in the wild as “people” and looked down on using animals for food and livestock, writing that “… only human beings have the arrogance to assume that animals were created for them.” (p. 64) I would argue that a Christian can believe just that, and also believe that we should never be cruel to animals and should be good stewards of creation as a gift from God. As beings created in His image, we have a special responsibility to look after His creation while at the same time enjoying its bounty and beauty (Gen. 1:26-28).
Those theological differences aside, I am thankful that John Muir explored, described, and helped to preserve the magnificent wonders of nature he found here in the Western United States. I’m grateful to God that I can gaze up in wonder at the same sights, from Yosemite Falls to the giant sequoias, and see them just as the great naturalist saw them 150 years ago.
Daniel Griswold's Blog 