Traveling with John Muir
Traveling with John Muir February 6-9, 1999
My adventures in reading continue. For the past two weeks I have been traveling with John Muir as he helps herd 2,000 sheep into the High Sierra Mountains of Central California. The book is titled My First Summer in the Sierra. It is a journalized account of Muir’s life when he was 31 years old in the Yosemite area during the summer of 1869. For Muir it was more of a paid vacation than a job. For me it is pure pleasure, particularly as it is the middle of winter here and now. Outside, the cold world is mostly black and white, while inside the pages of Muir’s journal is a world rich in the colors of summer, brought to life by Muir’s words. He describes mountains, meadows, flowers, various pines, waterfalls, streams, clouds, ants, sheep, squirrels, co-workers, beans, coffee, bread, and encounters with a bear, a grasshopper, and a fly. Muir is part scientist and part poet. Each day brings him new discoveries, experiences, insights and adventures.
I think it worth noting several quotations from Muir in which he expresses feelings of great joy at being alive in the Sierra Mountains. On June 13, 1869, Muir writes:
Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
From June 14:
After dark, when the camp was at rest, I groped my way back to the alter boulder and passed the night on it—above the water, beneath the leaves and stars—everything still more impressive than by day, the fall seen dimly white, singing nature’s old love song with solemn enthusiasm, while the stars peering through the leaf-roof seemed to join in the white water’s song. Precious night, precious day to abide in me forever. Thanks be to God for this immortal gift.
From June 18:
Another inspiring morning, nothing better in any world can be conceived. No description of Heaven that I have ever heard or read of seems half so fine. At noon the clouds occupied about .05 of the sky, white filmy touches drawn delicately on the azure.
From June 30:
Half cloudy, half sunny, clouds lustrous white. The tall pines crowded along the top of the Pilot Peak Ridge look like six-inch miniatures exquisitely outlined on the satiny sky. Average cloudiness for the day about .25. No rain. And so this memorable month ends, a stream of beauty unmeasured, no more to be sectioned off by almanac arithmetic than sun-radiance or the currents of seas and rivers—a peaceful, joyful stream of beauty. Every morning, arising from the death of sleep, the happy plants and all our fellow animal creatures great and small, and even the rocks, seemed to be shouting, ‘Awake, awake, rejoice, rejoice, come love us and join in our song. Come! Come!’ Looking back through the stillness and romantic enchanting beauty and peace of the camp grove, this June seems the greatest of all the months of my life, the most truly, divinely free, boundless like eternity, immortal. Everything in it seems equally divine—one smooth, pure, wild glow of Heaven’s love, never to be blotted or blurred by anything past or to come.
And from July 26:
Ramble to the summit of Mount Hoffman, eleven thousand feet high, the highest point in life’s journey my feet have yet touched. And what glorious landscapes are about me, new plants, new animals, new crystals, and multitudes of new mountains far higher than Hoffman, towering in glorious array along the axis of the range, serene, majestic, snow laden, sun-drenched, vast domes and ridges shining below them, forests, lakes and meadows in the hollows, the pure blue bell-flower sky brooding them all—a glory day of admission into a new realm of wonders as if Nature had wooingly whispered, ‘Come higher.’
Later in that same journal entry Muir writes:
From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down into the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one’s body is all one tingling palate. Who wouldn’t be a mountaineer! Up here all the world’s prizes seem nothing.
Ultimately, Muir uses God language to describe his spiritual experiences of nature, a language beyond the limits of both science and poetry. Muir, who grew up listening to his strict, conservative, Christian-preaching father rant and rave about God, uses God language in ways his father never would have imagined. For Muir, nature is more than the creation of God, it is the way to directly experience God. Whereas Muir’s father believed the road to God was straight and narrow, Muir himself found a way that was curved and expansive, leading to a wilderness where God was everywhere.
Muir seemed to always find himself alone in the wilderness. There were not many others willing to travel into the wilderness to find God. Most of the others who were there were looking to get rich through the exploitation of nature.
During Muir’s time the wilderness was rapidly diminishing, being settled by farmers, ranchers, and city dwellers, and controlled by the railroad men, the dam builders, the miners, lumber barons, and the real estate developers. Muir’s voice was a lone voice calling for the protection of wilderness areas. It was he who influenced Congress to establish a National Parks system. It was Muir who started the Sierra Club in 1892 for the purpose of advocating for the wilderness. Thanks be to Muir that he was able to save some wilderness areas before they all vanished! Where would God be without him?
Where does one find God these days? Where can one experience God other than by direct involvement with nature? Through interactions with family, friends, or strangers? Through work? Through prayer, meditation, and scripture? Through money or materialism? Through sex? Through pain or sorrow? Through music, art, or literature? Through scientific or technological advances? In churches, temples, or man-made structures? I have experienced God in all these places and through all these encounters for moments at a time, sometimes moving into minutes, but seldom hours on end and never day after day. In my lifetime such encounters have been rare, brief, and unpredictable.
It has only been through nature that I have consistently met with God experiences. For me, God waits in the wilderness. When I go there, I always seem to find God. When I go there, I can stay as long as I like or am able to. It is these experiences that keep me alive. For Muir and me it is these experiences more than all others that endure the test of time and live forever. Immortality.
February 10, 1999
I finished reading about John Muir’s first summer in the Sierra. It's been a delightful adventure. I quote John Muir once again, this time from August 30, 1869:
This day just like yesterday. A few clouds motionless and apparently with no work to do beyond looking beautiful. Frost enough for crystal building—glorious fields of ice diamonds destined to last but a night. How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful.
Mr. Delaney arrived this morning. Felt not a trace of loneliness while he was gone. On the contrary, I never enjoyed grander company. The whole wilderness seems to be alive and familiar, full of humanity. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. No wonder when we consider that we all have the same Father and Mother.