John Muir or On Finally Leaving California

A reflection upon, finally, leaving Silicon Valley

I used to live in California. I picked up this volume of John Muir from Library of America because his name looms so large in the state’s lore that I wanted to see what California had once been and what I had undoubtedly missed while living there.

I bet no one in history, including the LoA editor himself, has read every single page of this volume’s works with care. That goes for Muir himself, too.

By far the most arresting long piece here, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, published in 1913, a year before his death, is full of thrilling anecdotes of his journey from Scotland to Wisconsin as a young child, told in a Scottish brogue for which the writer gives us helpful phonetic patois pronunciation.

But it turns out he didn’t write it; he dictated it, at the request of a publisher, to a stenographer.

He did write most of the works herein, and, well, oh boy: this book contains hundreds and hundreds of pages of extremely detailed reporting on birds, trees, and glaciers. For surely nearly every person ever, they are not easy reading. More on that later.

There are gems in this volume, of course. Muir was one of the founders of the Sierra Club, and his fervent and intelligent environmentalism show up in a handful of essays.

The prize of these is The American Forests, which is as good a cause for patriotism as anything else you’re going to encounter. “The forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to G-d; for they were the best he ever planted.” Good, huh? And it continues as a call for astute, balanced conservation, not a this-or-that shutdown of development. We can surely credit him with giving us this idea.

And there are hidden, stunning reminders, from time to time, of what a giant Muir was in his own age, and of what a modest man he was nonetheless. We find Emerson happy to see him on tour in Yosemite while on vacation from Boston. We see the fingerprints of Yosemite’s eventual federal protection in Muir’s written advocacy. He briefly mentions Muir Glacier, noting it as one of the more minor special glaciers and declining to observe that it was named, while he was living, after him.

Muir tells us about G-d’s intent, which he finds in nature, and he asks us to treat everything as precious while no one thing too preciously, since nothing is singular. For example: “Most people who visit Yosemite are apt to regard it as an exceptional creation, the only valley of its kind in the world. But nothing in Nature stands alone. She is not so poor as to have only one of anything.” In this particular passage, he was advocating for the preservation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he thought rivaled and indeed surpassed Yosemite in many qualities. (He lost that battle.)

In one short essay, Muir admires a storm for its beauty as much as for its destructive power and imagines what it would be like to follow the life of a single drop of water.
Stickeen, his adventure-with-a-dog story, predates Call of the Wild by almost ten years and could well have been its precursor. He sounds an alarm in 1894 of what would later come to be called Global Warming or Climate Change, lamenting that “[e]very glacier in the world is smaller than it once was.” He writes squarely about his encounters with Native Americans, which often took place in remote areas and with few words exchanged. He has a gift for the turn of phrase that captures some enduring natural truth. “A sheep can hardly be called an animal; an entire flock is required to make one foolish individual.”

Muir makes great fun of trout fisherman in Yosemite who miss the natural “novel grandeur” of the mountains and “sublime rocks.” I found this observation especially satisfying, as I had recently finished a volume of Hemingway, whose obsession with trout fishing I found to be stultifying.

Muir’s detailed description of a sheep drive made me wonder if John Williams cribbed it for Butcher’s Crossing (which was, of course, about buffalo killing and hide-porting, but you will get the drift). He aspires, for all of us, that we become so enlightened one day that humanity turn to vegetarianism: “Surely a better time must be drawing nigh when godlike human beings will become truly humane, and learn to put their fellow animal mortals in their hearts instead of on their backs or in their dinners.”

One personally relatable experience was his encounter with an aggressive Canada Goose; it reminded me of my own such run-in, when I was a kid, in Connecticut, where I spent long days next to ponds and in woods finding animals, especially fish and frogs and tadpoles and salamanders, ankle deep or deeper in muck. One day, when I ventured too close to a goose nest, the mother goose chased me, flying fighter plane low at tushy height, nipping at my rear end.

Students of American Letters will find something Deliciously Old School about Muir. His remembrances of his childhood are all industry and religion and self-abnegation. Imagine someone writing a memoir like that today. John and his brother David taught themselves how to swim by mimicking frogs, as per their father’s suggestion. Whew. It has been years since I have read detailed, day-by-day accounts of breaking the land and turning it into a farm, as he did in Wisconsin, though this genre is a major constituent element of American frontier literature. It is hard not to be affected by his excitement upon seeing flocks of passenger pigeons — which went extinct in 1914 long after his childhood — so broad and long that they would block the sun, as they migrated overhead, for days on end.

Indeed, Muir loved, it seems, everything he observed in nature. More to the point, he found it all wondrous. When I shared with an old Scottish friend that I was reading his countryman’s works, he quickly replied to my email by saying “You can tell he nearly lost his sight. Was ever a man more grateful for just being able to see?”

But Muir, it seems to me, is one of those authors about whom it is better to read rather than actually to read. If you’re going to pick up this volume, you are better off if you REALLY like boblinks and meadowlarks and thrushes and song sparrows,
and also far better off if you love incense cedars and azaleas and manzanita and adenostoma fasciculata, and far better off still if you love glaciers. Muir loved glaciers. This volume contains over a hundred pages of exhaustively detailed description of glaciers, I’d estimate, at least.

The majority of the book is thorough naturalist anatomy, botany, & survey. Most of that is disorganized, poorly organized, or chronologically organized for no good reason. He ends his famous work The Mountains of California abruptly with an inconsequential note on beekeeping.

His editor Bill Cronon, recently retired from University of Wisconsin, deserves a medal for wading through all of it. (And I maintain my speculation that even he did not.) I love Library of America and am glad I finished this volume. Only a completionist or a naturalist maniac will do the same.

For me, reading Muir was part of my goodbye to the Golden State. I loved his commentary on California sheep owners, which could have been written yesterday about Silicon Valley personalities:

“The California sheep owner is in haste to get rich, and often does . . . . [L]arge flocks may be kept at slight expense, and large profits realized, the money invested doubling, it is claimed, every other year. This quickly acquired wealth usually creates desire for more. Then indeed the wool is drawn close down over the poor fellow’s eyes, dimming or shutting out almost everything worth seeing.”

A good reason, indeed, to live for a time in California and then, after all and finally, to leave.