John Muir Was Awesome

After chuckling through Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, shivering through Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, meandering through Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, and thirsting for more of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, I've decided to build a library of great outdoor books. 

Most recently placed into the stacks is The Wild Muir: Twenty-two of John Muir's Greatest Adventures, selected and introduced by Lee Stetson, illustrated by Fiona King, published by the Yosemite Association, ISBN: 0-939666-75-8. 

Lee Stetson is an actor who has dedicated his career to the study and reenactment of Muir's life. I imagine he has a bushy beard, and I imagine he's a strange fellow, in no small part due to the fact that he's likely spent many of his evenings in front of Yosemite campfires acting like a crazy Scot who talks to wildflowers. (To an Alaskan wildflower: "Ah! My blue-eyed darlin', little did I think to see you here. How did you stray away from Shasta?")

John Muir's insanity is what made him so effective. Muir was a fearless man, a man so honed into competence by his life experience that there was no situation in which he found himself powerless. Muir did not hesitate to commit insane acts because, for him, they were perfectly rational. A young man who wished to climb a mountain with Muir was told, "These foolish adventures are well enough for Mr. Muir, but you have a work to do, you have a family...and you have no right to risk your life on treacherous peaks and precipices.". Muir would argue, like Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, that the risk-taking lifestyle of the naturalist is far saner than that of "civilized society". 

Muir's tolerance of danger stemmed from his sense of capability, which he forged through years of challenges and misadventures beginning in childhood. Muir grew up in Scotland in an austere farming family. For excitement, the young Muir and his friends would turn to what they called "good scootchers"; games of brinksmanship that would make Johnny Knoxville grin. Muir writes of one scootcher that involved trying to nearly--but not quite--fall off the roof of a two-story farmhouse. When Muir's family moved from Scotland to Wisconsin as homesteaders, Muir's father asked the 19-year old to dig a 90-foot deep well with a shovel, pickax, hammer, and chisel. Muir spent an entire summer moving earth and chiseling through bedrock until he was nearly suffocated by carbon dioxide gas that filled the bottom of the well. Muir later taught himself to swim by rowing into the middle of a lake and jumping in. Danger was the young Muir's calling.

So when he decides to climb the sheer rock face behind Yosemite Falls, we're unsurprised that, upon reaching a pitch "dangerously smooth and steep", Muir "concludes not to venture further, but does nonetheless". When Muir becomes stranded in a blizzard atop Mt. Shasta (without a jacket), he lays flat on some geothermal vents, sometimes holding his breath to avoid billowing clouds of acidic vapors, until the skin on his back scalds and blisters and a set of barometric instruments freezes to his face. We're awed, but not surprised, when Muir hikes off the mountain alive, though badly frostbitten. 

The Wild Muir presents 22 riveting adventures in beautiful succession, building to the climax in which it offers two versions of Muir's cliffside rescue of a young pastor in Alaska; one from Muir himself and one from the pastor. The pastor slides down a gravelly slope and barely catches himself to prevent a 1,000 drop off a cliff and onto a glacier. He dislocates both arms. Muir recounts the rescue plainly, pulling the man off the cliff, the difficulty of re-setting the man's arms in their sockets, a long trek back to camp. The pastor's account is not so plain and it is from him we learn that Muir hoisted the man off the cliff by clenching his collar in his teeth. 

Unlike many of today's outdoor heroes, Muir reserved his glorious description for his surroundings instead of for himself. Muir is often credited as the father of Yosemite and the American National Park System, but Muir is underappreciated. Muir's towering ability and selfless love of nature was the spearhead that killed the old European view of nature as enemy, igniting a passion in the American West for nature as playground, as source of renewal.

A parting image of Muir the botanist from the young pastor: "With all his boyish enthusiasm, Muir was a most painstaking student; and any unsolved question lay upon his mind like a personal grievance until it was settled to his full understanding. One plant after another, with its sand-covered roots, went into his pockets, his handkerchief and the "full" of his shirt until he was bulbing and sprouting all over, and could carry no more... Then he began to requisition my receptacles. I stood it while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity, that Muir had found."