John Muir - present and future reading

John Muir’s memoir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) is a treat, packed with curious incidents and close observations of nature, but it is a simple book.  Muir dictated his history and then fixed it up for publication, and I could tell.  It is a charming and instructive book, but not a complex one.  I mean, not complexly written.  Budding twelve year-old nature lovers could, and should, read it.

Same goes for Muir’s most popular work, the 1909 Stickeen, which is only nineteen pages long in the Library of America Nature Writings collection.  It describes “the most memorable of all my wild days” (559), when Muir and an adorable dog were caught in a storm while exploring an Alaskan glacier.  Again, an all ages story.

My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) is a more complex book, as I tried to argue yesterday, multi-purpose, rhetorically complex, artistically varied, surprisingly funny.  Do not miss the passage in which Muir describes his greasy fellow shepherd, so “oleaginous” that he involuntarily collects natural specimens, “pine needles, thin flakes and fibres of bark, hair, mica scales… feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings,” all of this adorning his “precious overalls” which “in their stratification have no small geological significance” (227).

Muir, even here, is less complex than his intellectual mentor Henry David Thoreau, less imaginative in his metaphors, less endlessly ironic, or, as Thoreau-haters might think, more honest.  Muir’s actively worshipful attitude toward nature is his own, not Thoreau’s.

What more should I read?  The Library of America collection includes an additional 260 pages of essays, plus one more book, The Mountains of California (1894).  This book seems to resemble My First Summer in the Sierra in its descriptive and scientific passages, while sacrificing the diaristic narrative.  Kevin at Interpolations just wrote about an outstanding fragment of The Mountains of California, a single excellent metaphor, describing a little cluster of ten small lakes as “like eggs in a nest.”  Kevin is familiar with the area, and has seen the lakes himself, so the passage has a less abstract meaning to him than to me.  Yosemite National Park is, I think, my number one American Humiliation.

The Sierra Club has a nice site devoted to their co-founder,  including a list of and links to “favorite passages.”  I haven’t read any of them!  A chapter from Mountains, “The Water-Ouzel,” is “one of the finest animal biographies ever written,” while another chapter describes Muir’s experience of a massive wind-storm from the top of a Douglas fir.  John Muir was a lunatic.

All right, I should read The Mountains of California someday.  Absolutely.  Maybe before a visit to Yosemite.  What else?  If you know, please share.

Muir reads the grand mountain manuscript, and writes his own books

John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) is three books in one.  The base of the book is the 1869 journal of Muir’s trip into the Sierra Nevadas as a shepherd, a succession of incidents and adventures – the night the bears discovered his sheep, for example.  The incidents are not especially exciting, although they have their moments.

Muir reworked the journal for publication forty years later, creating books two and three.  My First Summer is a genuine work of scientific description, but I suspect much of the scientific matter was added or polished later.  Here Muir is describing “a typical glacier meadow”:

The showy flowers are mostly three species of gentian, a purple and yellow orthocarpus, a golden-rod or two, a small blue pentstemon almost like a gentian, potentilla, ivesia, pedicularis, white violet, kalmia, and bryanthus.  There are no coarse weedy plants.  Through this flowery lawn flows a stream silently gliding, swirling, slipping as if careful not to make the slightest noise.  (288)

I included the last line to undermine the impression that Muir’s scientific prose is merely technical.  Metaphor are necessary tools for science writers.  That list of flowers, though, is daunting; useful, presumably, but not without additional assistance.  The passage suggests a hypothetical edition of the book, one filled with color photos of each species mentioned, and multiple photos of each tree.  Muir spends a lot of space describing trees – silver firs, Sierra junipers, and so on.  He gives the trees a lot of personality, actually – the juniper is:

A thickset, sturdy, picturesque highlander, seemingly content to live for more than a score of centuries on sunshine and snow; a truly wonderful fellow, dogged endurance expressed in every feature, lasting about as long as the granite he stands on. (248-9)

Muir is a fine science writer.  The question is just how much information a reader wants on heights and diameters, soil conditions, and percentage of cloud cover.  It’s all easy enough to skim if too tedious, I guess.

And the details about tree bark and insects and glacial activity provide the necessary foundation for the third book, the extended metaphor of the Church of Nature.  Muir alternates his thick description of nature with wild religious effusions.  Nature, or something more specific – a meadow or mountain or sky – is an altar or “the grandest holiest temple” (he’s writing about frost crystals) or a “grand mountain manuscript.”  Muir repeats that idea incessantly.  He is always reading nature.  All of this is a form of worship:

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion.  I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built; and rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again. (309, last sentence)

Long before this point, I had understood that Muir was only employing the religious metaphors as a piece of his attempt to do something difficult, to accurately describe his genuine spiritual response to the wild, and to give some idea of how his reader can experience the same feeling.  Or (now I have thought of book #4) why even a spiritually blighted reader should want to preserve the wilderness, perhaps as a National Park, for those who do have that sort of response.

I began to grow hungry for real knowledge - John Muir on how to read

John Muir was born in Scotland.  When he was eleven, his father moved the family into the wild Wisconsin forest, which ended Muir’s formal schooling.  Instead, “when I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age, I began to grow hungry for real knowledge,” and he became obsessed with reading.  This is all from Chapter VII of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913).

What did a hard-laboring farm boy read in the five or ten minutes a day he had for reading?  Math books, religious books (approved by his father), Scott’s novels (hidden from his father), poetry:

I remember as a great and sudden discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure; and I became anxious to know all the poets, and saved up small sums to buy as many of their books as possible…  I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines, but there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings – only a few minutes stolen now and then.  (119)

I did not make that discovery until I was eighteen, or later.  Mmm, smack, smack.  That’s some gooood poetry.  And so on.

Muir is nothing if not a problem-solver, and he solves the problem of his limited time by ingeniously exploiting a promise of his father’s:

“If you will read, get up in the morning and read.  You may get up in the morning as early as you like.” (120)

Young Muir begins awaking at one o’clock in the morning, which gives him plenty of time (“Five hours to myself… five huge, solid hours!”) to read and do all sorts of other things, including making a homemade saw, inventing clocks (having “learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book”),  inventing a clock that “could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, etc.”

This is pretty much what we all did when we were fifteen, yes?  Working in the fields, or chiseling an eighty foot well from sandstone, from dawn to dusk, going to bed at eight, and then, in the middle of the night, reading Shakespeare and inventing clocks.  Yes, pretty much.

Like the autobiography of E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994) I read a couple of years ago, the primary task of The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is to give some sense of how John Muir (boy) became John Muir (famous naturalist).  And then there is the corollary:  why have I not become a famous naturalist?  Muir’s memoir (Wilson’s, too) is an admirable success.   It decisively answers that question.

Page numbers from the Library of America collection of Muir's work, Nature Writings.

John Muir reads nature - the pro-Transcendentalist Butcher's Crossing

But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness. (John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 1913, last sentence)

Something about Butcher’s Crossing was nagging at me.  Something about the young man heading into the mountains under Emersonian principles; something about the date, the early 1870s.  A glance at the Chronology section of the Library of America edition of John Muir’s Nature Writings (1997) confirmed my hunch.

Muir’s historic first trip to the Yosemite Valley, recounted in My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), took place in 1869.   Muir actually met Emerson in Yosemite in 1871 – Emerson was there as a tourist – and acted as his guide to the area.  So I began to read My First Summer in the Sierra.

John Williams had certainly read it.  Muir is in Yosemite as a transhumant shepherd, leading the “hoofed locusts” up to their summer pastures; Andrews, in Butcher’s Crossing, is after buffalo hides, not wool; wild wool, not domestic.  Andrews begins the book knowing nothing about nature, and ends the same way; Muir is extraordinarily knowledgeable from the beginning, yet learns more.  Andrews hopes that his encounter with wildness will erase his personality; Muir is overspilling with personality.  Yet they are both up in the mountains because Emerson wrote “Nature” and Thoreau wrote Walden.  One disappears into the emptiness of the West; the other becomes the greatest American naturalist.

The young John Muir was as committed to the authentic experience of nature as his fictional counterpart.  Muir, though was extraordinarily, almost superhumanly knowledgeable.  An intense experience of the natural world was not incompatible with learning, but instead required it.  A key lesson for Muir is his lack of knowledge (he is surveying the view from eleven thousand feet, atop Mount Hoffman):

What questions I asked, and how little I know of all the vast show, and how eagerly, tremulously hopeful of some day knowing more, learning the meaning of these divine symbols crowded together on this wondrous page. (LOA, 240)

The metaphor occurs repeatedly.  Nature is a book, or a manuscript.  Nature is something to read.  Muir was a capacious reader – see the hilarious Chapter VII of My Boyhood and Youth – and an energetic, prolific writer.  Andrews has deliberately rejected reading and writing.

I don’t know that John Williams had Muir in mind at all while composing Butcher’s Crossing.  But Muir provides an alternative to the facile ideas, such as they are, of Andrews.  Butcher’s Crossing is not an attack on the Transcendentalists and their ideas about nature, but a warning about the dangers of a narrow and hasty attraction to them.  John Muir’s experience of nature, which includes sketching, scientific names, technical descriptions of plants and minerals, and not-so-technical descriptions of animals (“A Douglas squirrel, peppery, pungent autocrat of the woods”), is also authentic and powerful.  To Muir, it is explicitly a religious experience, his direct contact with the works of God.  But it requires time: observation and study, writing and reading.

Perhaps I am returning to the ideas of this post.

Today is, the Library of America blog Reader’s Almanac informs me, the centennial of the publication of My Summer in the Sierra.  What a pleasant coincidence.

I may return to Muir soon, but I have other things to do tomorrow.  Tune in for the announcement of what I believe to be the greatest readalong opportunity in book blog history.