Muir was a walker first, a writer later. He had walked away from various oppressions and austerities: an impoverished farm in Wisconsin; a brutal, Calvinistic father; the deadening rigors of physical work with no intellectual interludes. The rupture with his family was on-and-off-again. It meant leaving the sisters and brothers he loved and work he had gained recognition for as well. He cold-hammered his destiny by the seat of his pants. He matriculated at the University of Wisconsin with no prior schooling under his belt, found his niche as a mechanical wizard, of sorts, before slipping over the border into Canada as a draft-dodger from the Civil War. The “call of the wild” was the persistent call from the beginning, and finally, he left the family, the farm, the university, and the machine shop for good. In a letter to Jeanne Carr on the eve of his departure he wrote: “I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness,’ I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.”
John Muir was no ordinary drifter. Except for his short stay at the University of Wisconsin, he was self-taught in botany, geology, biology, and Latin. He had long legs, an indefatigable memory for physical detail, and a ravenous longing to ramble freely in the wilds. In natural fact he knew he would find human meaning. He walked from Indiana to Florida, suffered a bout of malaria, beachcombed in Cuba, and travelled by steamer through the Panama Canal to California in just one year. Like all seekers in self-exile (D.H. Lawrence, Rockwell Kent, and Basho come to mind), his “calling” made for a strenuous pilgrimage, and he continued with no particular destination, tirelessly. He sounded almost serendipitous when he wrote: “Between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life.”
My First Summer in the Sierra is the exultant, rhapsodic journal not of going, but of arrival. In these mountains Muir found his “true north,” the point on the compass always magnetizing to him, his place of nourishment, home. It begins in June, 1869. Muir was short of money (as usual) and hired on to help move a band of sheep to summer pasture at the headwaters of the Tuolumne and Merced Creeks near Yosemite. Muir hated the sheep, but found in his employer, an Irishman named Pat Delaney, a mentor and friend. Muir’s duties as overseer of the sheep operation were minimal. Delaney, aware of the young man’s talents, urged him to sketch, hike, and botanize in the mountains quite freely. How could Muir refuse?
From the foothills of California’s blistering central valley, Delaney, a Saint Bernard named Carlo, and John Muir started up with the sheep, and with each step, what in Muir was stern, solitary, and floundering quickly disappeared. Nothing went unnoticed or unappreciated along the way. He made notes about wild rose and manzanita, azaleas and incense cedars, poison oak and mariposa lilies, saxifrage, oak, and ferns. He made acquaintance with lizards (“... one soon learns to love them as they dart about on the hot rocks, swift as dragonflies...”) and ants (“... fearless, restless, wandering imps...”) and the Douglas squirrel (“... a hot spark of life...”), mused about sheepherders and sheep, camp life and camp cooking, especially the beanpot and sourdough bread.
When writing of the landscape, his prose took on grace. On June 5 he wrote: “The sculpture of the landscape is as striking in its main lines as in its lavish richness of detail; a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds...” And later, he wrote: “We are now approaching the region of clouds and cool streams. Magnificent white cumuli appeared about noon above the Yosemite region – floating fountains refreshing the glorious wilderness...” And, “The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine, tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.”
At the end of the first camp on Brown’s Flat where they stayed with the sheep for a month, Muir wrote tenderly: “Never while anything is left of me shall this first camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike.”
By the end of the first eighty-five pages of My First Summer in the Sierra, we know what is important and endearing about John Muir. It is not his bravado (though his courage and energy puts almost all of us to shame), but his acts of surrender. He came into the mountains light as a banty rooster, and with what might be called an empty mind. He was a clean slate on which each detail of Sierran beauty (which, I know from my own wanderings there, is limitless) was cleanly etched. He could only absorb and absorb, and the capaciousness of his spirit was such that it knew no surfeit.
Up from Brown’s Flat the caravan walked, from high desert into timber and lushly flowered meadows, and with each vertical foot gained, Muir’s rapture increased. As the wilderness became wilder, more exotic, more overpowering, he felt more and more at home. He proposed to trace the history of a single raindrop, he rejoiced at each “splintering stroke” of thunder and lightning and the “extravagant grandeur” of hard, downpouring rain. He teetered on a precipice above a Yosemite waterfall, he scoffed at the “so-called solitude” of the wilderness where he regarded “the plant people,” the streams, and populous animals as friends.
He wrote: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass and the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory of old bondage days left...”
The conversion he spoke of was not to God – he was already a deeply religious man – but to unimpeded joy. My First Summer in the Sierra chronicles an initiation, a rite of passage for Muir. The more widely he wandered in the Sierra and the more painstakingly he scrutinized nature’s bounty, the more ubiquitous his god became. Godliness was everywhere and up through the soles of his feet came the divinity of grasshoppers and granite, raindrops and water ousels, earthquakes and lichens, waterfalls and chipmunks – a divinity he knew better than to look for in the nave of his father’s stultifying, dark church.
In these young years, Muir was a truant from society, from nearly every social convention. He had no money, almost no clothes, no female friends, no discernable ambition at all. Ingeniously, he put some of his father’s qualities (from which he had fled) into good use. He was monkishly frugal, uncomplaining, self-effacing, and reverent. There seemed to be no such thing as discomfort for Muir. He willingly went jacketless, blanketless, and spent long nights huddled over sputtering fires. At daybreak, he brewed his tea and chewed his tough, Dutch oven-made bread, then he was off, his long legs gobbling up the Sierran steeps, devouring all that came under his gaze.
Yet Muir was no self-proclaimed hero. He never even hinted at the idea. Instead, he called himself “an unknown nobody in the woods.” He was as unself-conscious about his obscurity as he was later about his fame. Nor did he think of himself as a literary man. There was no pull between “living,” on the one hand, and “writing” on the other. The books didn’t come into existence for twenty years. Like any good naturalist, he took notes and made sketches of what he saw. Though his self-taught specialty was botany, his expertise moved fluidly from plants to rocks, from animals to birds, from glaciers to waterways and weather. Yet he was no dry reporter, but rather, a rhapsodist, a maker of odes.
By the time Muir reached the topmost peaks of the Sierra his prose was lilting and breathless. The fluency of his long-legged stride had become a descriptive fluency as well. He wrote: “From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drift 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 – 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.”
Forty-one years after that first summer, John Muir pieced together his rapturous notes to make the book. He had come down from the mountains, returned, and come down again many times. By 1911 he was down for good. That winter he wrote in the upstairs room of a friend’s Los Angeles home in what is now a ghetto. Even at age seventy-three he struggled with the translation of experience into language. He preferred to talk, enchanting listeners with stories of his adventures until his wife, Louie, or a friend shunted him upstairs into the grim solitude of the writing room. He was a more convincing prose stylist than he imagined. On reading an excerpt from the book, his editor at The Atlantic Monthly proclaimed, “I felt almost as if I had found religion.”
My First Summer in the Sierra is the most purely refreshing, savory, and lyrical of all John Muir’s books. At times one is reminded of the Spanish mystics – Saint Theresa and Saint John the Divine; at other times, of Basho’s quiet lines. Muir’s later work as a conservationist, though immensely important, seems almost an afterthought. What he was after from the beginning was a sense of union between himself and nature; a seamless bond that could not be torn; a true equality. In My First Summer in the Sierra, the reader feels Muir surging towards the mystery he sought to understand, mile after mile, mountain after mountain. Near the end of the book he wrote: “I should like to live here always. It is so calm and withdrawn while open to the universe in full communion with everything good.” And in so speaking of the place he loved best, described himself.
Gretel Ehrlich
THE PENGUIN NATURE LIBRARY
General Editor: Edward Hoagland
MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA
John Muir (1838-1914) was born in Scotland. In 1849 he emigrated with his family to the United States, and later enrolled in courses in chemistry, geology, and botany at the University of Wisconsin. Muir made extended journeys throughout America, observing both scientifically and enthusiastically the beauties of the wilderness. The Mountains of California was published in 1894, and A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) chronicled his trip on foot from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. He eventually settled in California, where he became an impassioned leader of the forest-conservation movement. His writings include Our National Parks (1901), My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), The Yosemite (1912), Travels in Alaska (1915), and Steep Trails (1918).
Gretel Ehrlich is a native Californian who began writing full time in 1979. Her prose pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Northern Lights, and New Age Journal. She is the author of The Solace of Open Spaces (available from Penguin), a book of narrative essays which won the Harold B. Vurcell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She has also published two books of poetry and a story collection. Ehrlich lives with her husband on a ranch in northern Wyoming.