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Into the Rose: The Pilgrimage of John Muir
by Will Hoyt

(Transcribed by Justin Nickelsen)

By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by my calling a homeless wanderer of humblest origin, roaming from place to place. My possessions consist of a knapsack with dry crusts of bread on my back and in my boson the Holy Bible. That is all!

These words, famous now the world over as the opening lines to the anonymously-penned nineteenth-century Slavic work The Way of the Pilgrim, could serve just as well as an introduction to the Russian peasant's contemporary, John Muir. Moreover, the introduction would be surprisingly complete.

During the fall of 1867, for example, Muir spent his time walking alone through a war-ravaged and often road-less American South toward Florida, a place Muir called "the land of flowers." He started in Indiana and walked thirty miles a day, living on tea leaves and crusts of bread when he could get them, and at other times simply on oats dried by hot stones. His possessions? Comb, towel, soap, and a copy of Paradise Lost. That is all! We know courtesy of a thief who unpacked Muir's pack somewhere on the west slope of the Alleghenies. In addition to his pack, Muir carried only a plant press. He did also carry a Bible, but he didn't really need that; thanks to a feat of memorization performed as a boy, he had the entire New Testament memorized line for line, Matthew to Revelation, in his head. Bands of Confederate guerillas mistook Muir for an herb doctor; others couldn't place him at all.

Once, upon asking for lodging at one of the few Cumberland Mountain cabins whose owners had not been driven away or killed during the war, Muir warned the woman of the house and her blacksmith husband that he had only "a five dollar greenback," and that if it was hard for them to make change he would rather go hungry. The blacksmith -- "hammer in hand, bare-breasted, sweaty, begrimed, and covered with shaggy black hair" -- hesitated, then turned on his heel and told his wife the stranger was welcome to eat their bread. Later, after asking a blessing on the frugal meal, the blacksmith turned to Muir, asked what he was doing in Tennessee, and learned that Muir was looking at plants. The blacksmith disapproved. "Surely you are able to do something better than wander over the country and look at weeds and blossoms," he said. "These are hard times, and real work is required of every man that is able. Picking up blossoms doesn't seem to be a man's work at all in any kind of times."

It was a dramatic moment, not least because the blacksmith was unaware of just how strong Muir's hand really was. The man didn't know, for example, that Muir could split one hundred rails of fence in a day. He didn't know that by age sixteen Muir could drive a breaking plow behind five oxen and turn two-foot furrows straight as an arrow without the need of steering or holding, or that Muir had the wherewithal to sink a well-shaft ninety feet through sandstone, and sink it straight and plumb, and build a fine covered top over it to boot. Yet Muir mentioned none of this. Rather than capitalize on prowess at skills a blacksmith would respect, Muir played an even stronger card. "You are a believer in the Bible, are you not?" he asked. "Oh, yes." "Well, you know Solomon was a strong minded man... and yet he considered it was worthwhile to study plants; not only to go and pick them up as I am doing, but to study them; and you know we are told that he wrote a book about plants; not only the great cedars of Lebanon, but little bits of things growing between the cracks of walls. Therefore, you see that Solomon differed very much more from you than from me in this matter. I'll warrant you he had many a long ramble in the mountains of Judea, and had he been a Yankee he would likely have visited every weed in the land. And again, do you not remember that Christ told his disciples to 'consider the lilies how they grow,' and compared their beauty with Solomon in all his glory? Now, whose advice am I to take, yours or Christ's? Christ says, consider the lilies. You say, don't consider them. It isn't worthwhile for a strong-minded man."

Needless to say, the good blacksmith was silenced. Like those who hosted the Russian pilgrim on his way, this mountain man, after encountering Muir and the strange authority with which he spoke, walked away changed.

Most of us, when we hear the name John Muir, think "conservationist." And rightly so. After all, if it wasn't for Muir there might not be any national parks, Yosemite Valley might be owned by mining companies, and Grand Canyon might be the name of a vacation city perched along the real canyon's walls. Not for nothing are redwood groves, Alaskan glaciers, and Yosemite backcountry named after this man. Muir was, as the National Park Service brochures point out, a giant in the world of American environmentalism. World-class explorer, adviser and friend to Theodore Roosevelt, author of the learned Mountains of California, leading publicist and lobbyist for unspoiled wilderness, glaciologist, founder of the Sierra Club -- the list is long, and the titles are all earned. They are also misleading. Concentrate on this aspect to Muir's life and you stand a good chance of missing the real story, the true sense in which Muir is a giant -- in short, those other aspects to his life which have proved unsettling enough to cause many a student of Muir to run for the shelter of safe talk about how, if Muir could be said to have had a mission, it was to save wilderness "for future generations," or how, if Muir was like a prophet of God, it was because he liked to portray himself as a kind of John the Baptist in his eagerness to baptize fellow countrymen in nature's beauty, nothing more, a delightful eccentricity really, like Muir's ability to subsist on hoarflakes or his predilection for bounding toward rocks toppled by earthquakes instead of away from them. Muir's life, let it be said once and for all, is not chiefly a tale of adventure or selfless, founding-father-type heroism. It is, rather, a tale of call and response, of blindness and insight, of strange defaults and, in his thirty-first year, sheer Pascalian-caliber revelation.

Certainly it is possible to read the journal Muir kept of his first summer in the Sierra as an adventure story. Indeed you would have a grand time of it, as did the New York dinner party cognoscenti who used to listen, justly rapt, to the story of Muir and his noble canine friend Stickeen on that now-famous Alaskan glacier as night fell. But the journal deserves better. Read it closely, and gradually it becomes clear that Muir's entries are in fact mere coins for his lodging -- clues if you will, like traces of red mud or maps opened to a certain page. It is a stunning document, really; it belongs, when coupled with the journal of his walk through the South, on a shelf along side Merton's Seven Storey Mountain and Newman's Apologia. For Muir actually made it to a far country. While he was there he became lit up like a torch, and it is our profound good fortune to be able to look into his journals, uncover some of the light preserved there, and thereby illumine to at least some small degree our own dark way.

If he had been asked, Muir would probably have dated his wanderings from the time a small steel file pierced his right eye while he was adjusting a wheel-making machine in an Indianapolis factory in 1867. That accident temporarily blinded him: for four weeks the only light Muir knew was the voice of the children who read to him. When he regained his sight, he turned his back on technological pursuits and resolved to study only the handiwork of God. For our purposes, however, a somewhat earlier date would be better. I am thinking of the time Muir received a literal call to wake up.

Muir was sixteen years old then, still very much a prisoner on a Wisconsin farmstead ruled by an excessively stern Calvinistic father. As a young boy of Scotland, in the town of Dunbar on the Firth of Forth, Muir was the victim of many a thrashing for his irrepressible, rule-breaking interest in the wilds of bog and meadow; now, as a young man, books were the cause of trouble. Against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to read only Scripture, Muir had begun to thrill to literature in general -- Milton, Burns, Sir Walter Scott. He read (after working fourteen hours hauling logs or cultivating crops) during the five or ten minutes he could steal before his father told him to turn out his light and go to bed. One night, exasperated by young Johns wakeful persistence (church history this time), Muir's father said that if his son must read he should do it in the morning. Aha! A crack had appeared in the wall of the cell, light was passing through, there was hope. "That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence; and next morning to my joyful surprise I awoke before father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won, and when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen I found that it was only one o'clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day! 'Five hours to myself!' I said, 'five huge, solid hours!' I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of those five frosty hours." It was an embarrassment of riches.

At first he thought he'd go on with reading, but then, upon realizing that his father might object to the time it would take to replace the firewood he'd use to stay warm enough to read, Muir decided instead to go to the cellar and start constructing various mechanical devices he had designed in his head while harvesting corn. Within a week he had made the requisite saws and drills, and soon devices themselves started materializing: cogwheels and cams; then latches, thermometers, and lamplighters; finally a small saw mill and an "early-rising machine" designed to set one on one's feet at any given hour. This latter contraption was more for display than use, however, because Muir continued to listen "for the heavenly one o'clock call" and it "never failed."

Though he harbored enormous powers of resolve, exhibited a streak of fierce independence, and was known, when young, to be "a gude fechter," Muir was in truth a home-loving boy, tender of heart and quite shy. Hence it is remarkable that his spirit was not altogether crushed under the weight of his father's joylessness and the physical and emotional abuse that stemmed from it. The farm Muir's father "homesteaded" was in fact built on the broken backs of sons, and John, being the oldest, carried the greatest weight. When a well needed to be dug through ninety feet of limestone, young John was the one chosen to do it, and do it he did, with nary a helping hand nor fatherly word of encouragement for three straight months. The experience -- and it is emblematic of his entire childhood -- nearly killed him. At sixty feet Muir unwittingly struck a vein of odorless carbonic gas, and when he was lowered into the well the next morning he lost consciousness; neighbors, after the fact, were shocked that he had found the presence of mind to hold onto his rope long enough to be pulled out and saved. Two days later, he was back in the now candle-tested shaft, and it is perhaps an even greater miracle that Muir found the presence of mind to survive this latter confinement. Muir's one comment on the episode -- "constant chipping wears away stone; it also wears away the chipper" -- speaks volumes. Yet he survived!

When he was a boy in Scotland a nurse loved to tell Muir that if he persisted in his wayward, nest-hunting ways he would be thrown into hell; Muir, picturing the dark, stone-walled dungeon of Dunbar Castel, always replied that he would be able to climb out. Well, he was right. He did climb out. One year after attaining legal independence, Muir collected several of his mechanical inventions, said good-bye to his mother and sisters, asked his father if he could turn to him for help should he ever need a loan ("no"), and walked down to the railroad station. What in the world, the conductor wanted to know, where those contraptions in the bag? "Inventions for keeping time, early rising, and so forth." After bending down and studying a clock the conductor's eyes widened and he walked up to the engine to speak with the engineer. "Charlie," he said. "Don't you ever take a passenger? I wish you would take this man on. He has the strangest machines in the baggage car I ever saw in my life. I believe he could make a locomotive. He wants to see the engine running. Let him on." When (at this point in the tale) the engineer finally relents and Muir climbs aboard -- headed for an exhibition at a country fair which proves to be a ticket to the University of Wisconsin -- one fairly weeps for the homespun, whimsical, wildly improbable glory of his deliverance.

It would make a good ending, this picture of a young man embarking for a county fair, and I will treat it as such, for Muir's life was soon to be marked by an altogether different sort of leaving.

Attending the university in Madison was roughly equivalent to attending paradise. Muir learned Latin and Greek, was introduced to Wordsworth and Emerson and Thoreau, studied geology, and followed Agassiz's theories about glacial activity as a land-shaping force. Every professor he met encouraged him, they all lived in houses overflowing with books, and whenever the weather turned cold everybody kindled hearth fires big enough to cheer a man's soul. Most important of all, Muir was introduced to botany. That a locust should be kin to a pea -- Muir saw in this not so immediately apparent fact a stunning instance of "essential unity with boundless variety," and from that moment forward a plant press became as important to him as a coat. In sum, Muir thrived in Madison and people began to expect big things of him. His sisters thought he would become an inventor, his mother figured he would wind up in the ministry, professors assumed he could become a professor. Muir, dutifully prompted by a desire to serve his fellow man, settled on medicine. And then a funny thing happened. Just as he was on the verge of professional advancement, and right as time became ripe for a proposal of marriage to a suitable young woman he very much liked, Muir stalled. He defaulted. He dropped out, went on a "geological and botanical excursion" along the Mississippi, and then, upon returning, formally quit the university without taking his degree. Back at home, working now for his brother-in-law, Muir was as confused as anyone by his inability to seize "success." He later wrote that he began to doubt in this period whether he was "full born," and clearly this status was to Muir a source of real pain. Then, sometime during the fall of 1863, he reached a pass in his thinking that was every bit as important as the one he crossed when he came upon the "five frosty hours."

In brief, he saw the glorious possibility of going for broke and crossing over, of turning the world on its head and simply becoming what everyone worried he could become -- namely, a tramp. Over the course of the winter, Muir set his affairs in order much as would a man dying. Then, as the first geese appeared (abandoned to divine providence and therefore heading north), Muir left. Like the man who turns not back to get his coat, like a rustle of wind in the grass, he leaped over a small wall and was gone. He aimed north, then east along the south shore of Lake Superior, and then, via islands strung out like stepping stones between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, into Canada. After that, he was for a long time traceable solely by virtue of flower pressings.

Flowers, flowers, flowers. On the evidence of his journals Muir thought everywhere and always in terms of flowers. He breathed them, studied them, dreamed them. As a boy he chewed their seeds to stay awake during sermons. When he was in the high Sierra he chewed their leaves to fight off giddiness while climbing cliffs. He called them "companions," "plant people preaching," "glad children of light," and when he couldn't see them he found a way to see them anyway. Stars, in Muir's journals, are "sky lilies." Sea-coasts are "white-blooming shores" and clouds are "sky-gardens." Most of the time, of course, Muir saw actual flowers -- and in all their pedicled, racemed, involucred, stamened, and pistiled glory. Health, for Muir, really was a mind full of flowers. Thus Florida, by virtue of its name, figured in Muir's mind as a kind of promised land, a place "longed and prayed for and oft visited in dreams," and the difficulties he had getting there (losing his sight, overcoming the temptation to devote himself to designing machines) only increased his expectations.

Yet when he actually arrived, four long years after leaving Wisconsin, he was at a loss. Instead of "a close forest of trees, every one flowering and bent down and entangled to network by luxuriant, bright-blooming vines," he found "a flat, watery, reedy coast, with clumps of mangrove and forests of moss-dressed strange trees appearing low in the distance." In truth, this sense of alienation had been growing in him every since he walked seaward through Georgia. The cypresses were strange to him, the rivers were black, seemingly without current, and home to alligators, and near Athens he suffered from spells of "indescribable loneliness." Muir did find a kind of respite in Savannah where, owing to reduced means, he slept for a week in the Bonaventure graveyard. When he speaks of the oak-lined, sun-beamed, bird-full boneyard as "a center of life" and "so beautiful that almost any sensible person would choose to dwell here with the dead rather than with the disorderly living," Muir clearly finds a degree of pleasure in parading the practical benefits to the upside-down logic he made his own when he opted for the life of a wanderer. But in general Muir felt like a stranger in a strange land while travelling through Georgia, and therefore his disappointment, upon arriving in Florida, must have been acute. Muir concludes his first Florida journal entry by thanking God "for His goodness in granting me admission to this magnificent realm," and, though Muir is always sincere, these words of thanks are especially powerful owing to the bass note sounded just moments earlier: "Not a mark of friendly recognition, not a breath, not a spirit whisper of sympathy... I lay down on my elbow eating bread, gazing, and listening to the profound strangeness."

As it turned out, of course, the land of flowers was still to come. Would he have recognized it if he hadn't, first, failed to find it? All we know is that six months later Muir arrived in California almost by accident after a winter-long bout with malaria, that he walked south from San Francisco to Pacheco Pass and then, poor as he had ever been owning to his recent sickness and the loss of Florida-based hope, that he raised up his head and looked east. There, spread out before him like a map, he saw "a grand smooth outspread plain, watered by a river." There were salmon in the river, the river flowed form a veritable wall of mountains, and everywhere -- "side by side, petal to petal, touching but not entwined" for as far as the eye could see -- there were flowers. "Here, here is Florida!" he said. Though it was to take him a full year of lowland explorations before he found out, Muir was more right than he could possibly have known or perhaps even dreamed.

On May 24, 1869, exactly one week and three days after Major Powell committed the lives of himself and nine companions to the Colorado River on its course through the Grand Canyon, John Muir embarked for the high Sierra. He didn't go alone; he went as a shepherd in the employ of one Mr. Delaney along with another more experienced shepherd, a Chinese man, a Paiute Indian, and a St. Bernard named Carlo. Given that he was now following a well-travelled, even tourist-laden track to Yosemite Valley, Muir must at some level have known that the hiddenness of his call was in jeopardy and therefore he probably didn't even hesitate when invited to travel into the backcountry as a hired hand. Also, given that Muir was headed toward uninhabited country there was the problem of maintaining a bread supply; as an employee all that would be provided for him by others. And so he set out -- in a cloud of dust behind two thousand sheep. Luckily for us, Muir also had a notebook tied to his belt.

I have said that the notes Muir took on his first trip to the Sierra constitute as strong a document of spiritual transformation as we have. But that doesn't mean the notes detail the kind of visions you find in the Book of Revelation. On the contrary (and this is one of the principal reasons why we can trust the notes) their province is the plain and the ordinary -- what Muir called "nature's open... sunny everyday beauty," be it rain "steeping" in "black meadow mold," or the "curved instep of trees bent from the weight of heavy snows," or the cultural benefits of small-scale, as opposed to large-scale, sheep farming. Muir always had an eye for the obvious, for looking at whatever was right in front of him and seeing it afresh, but here in these Sierran notes the talent is pronounced. Clothes, different kinds of light, smells, cultural idiocies, landforms--as long as it was real it interested him. The other chief reason for the authenticity of Muir's Sierran vision is that he was always in complete possession of his senses. Yes, in this journal Muir proves a mystic. But -- he didn't get that way by closing his eyes. Rather, those eyes were wide open, along with every other cell in his body. Some years later, while attending a party in Oakland, Muir was invited to participate in a session of "spirit-rapping" and Muir more than refused, he absolutely ruined the party. "I've been praying all my life, 'Open mine eyes that I may see,'" he said. "Now you tell me to close my eyes, or sit in the dark while somebody goes under the table... why, mon, if I'd make such a fool of myself I'd never be able to look a pine tree in the face again!"

At first all he saw on his Sierran journey were "hoofed locusts," as he called his charges. The damage two thousand sheep inflicted as they tumbled eastward astounded him. Soon though, other phenomena competed for attention: sugar pines, incense cedar, bluebirds, destructive methods of goldmining. At one point Muir describes a kind of lightening he'd never seen before ("white glowing cloud-shaped masses down among the trees and bushes... the spreading hair of the horses' tails and sparks from our blankets show how highly charged the air is"); at another, evidently while waiting for snows to melt in the high pastures, Muir catalogues a garden of lilies.

Then things changed. Driving sheep up onto the divide, the group forded Yosemite Creek -- the same creek that eventually plunges three thousand feet to the valley floor -- and set up camp in the high country on the other side.

For Muir, it was like walking onto the roof of the world. Leaving the sheep and his companions behind, he walked until he found a place from which he could view the entire snow-capped Sierra crest and then returned toward camp, this time walking along the precipice that defines the north wall of Yosemite Valley. "After a mile or so of this memorable cliff work I approached Yosemite Creek, admiring its easy, graceful, confident gestures as it comes bravely forward in its narrow channel, singing the last of its mountain songs on its way to its fate -- a few rods more over the shining granite, then down half a mile in showy foam to another world, to be lost in the Merced, where climate, vegetation, inhabitants are all different. Emerging from its last forge, it glides in wide, lace-like rapids down a smooth incline into a pool where it seems to rest and compose its gray, agitated waters before taking the grand plunge, then slowly slipping over the lip of the pool basin, it descends another glossy slope with rapidly accelerating speed to the brink of the tremendous cliff, and with sublime, fateful confidence springs out free in the air."

Clearly, the creek fascinated Muir. Indeed, it fascinated him so much that he took off his shoes and socks and worked his way down to the very brink just described, alongside the "booming" water. It turned out to be a false brink. The real brink was on the far side of a small brow "too steep for mortal feet." Even as he made this judgment, however, Muirseyes were picking out, on the very edge of the brow, a shelf three inches wide ("just wide enough for a rest for one's heels"), and as if drawn he crept down to this ledge too. There he obtained "a perfectly free view down into the heart of the snowy, chanting throng of comet-like streamers." On his way down he had found the presence of mind to note a plant growing in a crack, identify it ("artemisia"), and fill his mouth with its bitter taste.

It wasn't until he returned to camp that Muir fully appreciated the danger he had been in. But realize it he did--and to about the same extent that he realized he had no idea how long he had stayed on the edge or how he got back up. For several nights in a row he slept fitfully if at all; one time, he even woke up shouting. "This time it is real," he said. And: "All must die."

From that day forward, Muir's diary entries reflect what ought really to be called a change of authorship. Part of the difference, no doubt, is due to the fact that he quite literally changed elevations. Whereas before he was amongst sugar pines and ferns, now he was amongst tundra and glacial ice, in a land of sun and streams and stars. But the bigger difference is personal: he was no longer on the outside looking in.

Whereas before he described flowers form without, now he appeared to be in one. "The air widens in beauty -- like a flower." Like Dante's pilgrim, Muir had in some sense entered the rose.

"No pain here," reads an entry dated July 20, "No sense of dead stone, all spiritualized... No fear of the past, no fear in the future... Gift of good God." In the evening, after writing to his mother and a few friends: "They seem as near as if within voice reach or touch. The deeper the solitude the less the sense of loneliness." July 27, after "a run back to camp" of eight or nine miles: "The rocks, the air, everything speaking." At times, Muir himself is the one doing the speaking; like Melville, who also tracked the glacial whiteness of very God, Muir speaks occasionally in something like tongues, unleashing uncharacteristic torrents of joyous, clearly deranged, always intelligible speech. While considering the various courses available to raindrops, for instance, Muir doesn't just talk of how, "with blunt plap-plap and low bass drumming," some drops "fall on the broad leaves of veratrum, saxifrage, cypripedium." He also says: "creeping through invisible doors into the round room of cells." Most of the time, however, Muir lets landscapes and events do the talking, as when he observes the appearance of strangely red cloud around Cathedral Peak, or notes how the harmoniously related features of the Tuolomne watershed glow "like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm." August 2: "Sketching all day on the North Dome until four or five o'clock in the afternoon, when as I was busily... trying to draw every tree and every line and feature of the rocks, I was suddenly, and without warning, possessed with the notion that my friend, Professor J.D. Butler of the State University of Wisconsin, was below me in the valley, and I jumped up full of the idea of meeting him, with almost as much startling excitement as if he had suddenly touched me to make me look up." August 3: "Found Professor Butler as the compass needle finds the pole."

Muir stayed in the high Sierra for three years before returning to what most of us would call civilization, and on the evidence of letters and remembrances by friends Muir's line of communication with "very God," as he liked to say, remained unbroken. During the winter, the time of "fertile snowstorms," Muir holed up in one or another of several sugar pine shake cabins he made for himself on the valley floor and supported himself as a sawyer and a caretaker. Summers, he was back up on the "ice-ploughed" divide, hunting and then measuring what glaciers remained and in general exulting like Noah in the new earth so recently brought to light after a very great flood. Except for the company of a mule he was alone, when he came down to the valley floor it was usually only to replenish his supply of bread, and on those occasions when he did meet people they just flat out couldn't place him. Even friends had this problem. The aforementioned Professor Butler, upon seeming the rough-clad Muir approach, mistook him for the gardener, as it were. "Professor Butler," Muir said, when his face was only inches away. "Don't you recognize me?" It still took the professor quite a few long moments before he finally understood the identity of his questioner. This kind of thing happened all the time to Muir during those years. It wasn't just that Muir was a working man who also published articles with titles like "The Death of a Glacier." Nor was it that, owing to his need to protect himself against light in the higher altitudes, he often showed up with his face smeared with soot. It was his eyes. After seeing a picture of Muir taken in 1870, his brother wrote that the eyes "did not look natural" and it is true: the picture is still extant, anybody can see the uncanniness.

But the main way to appreciate how the wilderness put its mark on Muir is simply to trace his wonderings. In 1872 he wrote in a letter that he felt strong enough "to leap Yosemite walls at a bound" and, in truth, he appears to have done something very close to that (via antelope bounds?) on a shockingly regular basis. Perhaps it was the sheer joy in him. Journal entries show him to have travelled distances in a single day that seasoned mountaineers would raise an eyebrow at, and he had strange reserves of strength. On a solo (and ropeless) ascent of the east face of Mt. Ritter in October 1872 Muir got stuck half way up. He was at his weakest -- both arms outstretched -- and no new foothold was in sight. "Faith and hope failed," he later related. "Cold sweat broke out. My senses filled as with smoke. I was alone, cut off from all affinity. Would I fall to the glacier below? Well, no matter... Then as if my body, finding the ordinary dominion of mind insufficient, pushed it aside, I became possessed of a new sense. My quivering nerves, taken over by my other self, instinct, or guardian angel -- call it what you will -- became inflexible. My eyes became preternaturally clear, and every rift, flaw, niche, and tablet of the cliff ahead were seen as through a microscope." A short while later he was on the summit. That in November of this same year Muir did fall, that after coming down "off the mountain" for a two-week stay in San Francisco he returned to discover the Sierra silent and "untalkative," that for the rest of his life stones would "speak" only in proportion to Muir's talents as a writer and a naturalist -- all that is but further proof that Muir did indeed climb a holy mountain.

It is said that Muir was a transcendentalist, that if one is to understand John Muir one must first of all understand the language of transcendentalism. I say: rubbish. No doubt Muir would have been content with the label; if he could be said to be a follower of any man that man would have been Ralph Waldo Emerson. And there can also be no doubt that Muir's outlook had a lot in common with the typical transcendentalist outlook. Both are characterized by a reaction against Calvinist emphases, an inclination to see the human body and the rest of nature as (in the Pauline sense) "without fault," and the belief that wilderness, per se, was not only not evil but in fact a field of grace -- a place where God's will gets done and His kingdom is triumphantly on view. Indeed, Muir probably epitomized the best transcendentalist perspective on this latter score, if for no other reason than that he was consistent. (Native Americans, Muir always claimed, were "not a whit more natural" than so-called "civilized whites" who savagely uprooted them.)

But there are other areas -- namely, Muir's instinctual sacramentalism (anti-transcendentalism?) and his propensity for speaking in explicitly biblical and devotional terms -- where Muir's outlook is markedly at odds with the transcendentalist one. Most students of Muir's life note that as Muir began to write for public consumption he increasingly substituted words like "Nature" or "Beauty" for "God" or "the Lord," and they take this to mean that Muir's thought gradually "matured."

But are we really sure that the Christian "phraseology" of Muir's younger years was just a "holdover" from his father's tutelage? I submit that even where Muir's transcendentalist rhetoric was sharp, Muir was never anything but a slightly reconstructed Christian, if he can be said to have been reconstructed at all. Wherein lies the false note: does it sound when Muir (in his journal) thanks "the Lord" with "all his heart"? Or when Muir (while writing an article) apes Emerson and writes that when you look at mountains "you lose consciousness of your own separate existence, blend with the landscape, and become part and parcel of nature"? The truth of the matter is that, his preference for tea over wine notwithstanding, Muir had a whole lot more in common with someone like Belloc than he did with Emerson. "Reason?" "Imagination?" Muir just isn't about stuff like that. As a writer, his strong suit isn't the Oversoul, its what is now called "deep ecology" -- his grasp not just of "the cosmic unity behind complex and disparate phenomena," but, as well, of the fundamental "brotherliness" of all flesh, all created life. Snakes, flowers, bears, alligators, trees -- to Muir they were all "fellow mortals," each as potentially glorious and deserving of respect as himself and his fellow man, and by taking this slant Muir shows himself to have more in common, at least implicitly, with Aristotelian-based Scholasticism than with any other school. In the end, though, it is Muir's own life -- the shape of it -- that speaks loudest. Servanthood, pilgrimage, a walk to a southern clime in a thirty-first year! Logos is written all over him. It's a remarkable thing. With most people, you have to hunt around a little to see spiritual structure. It's there, but you have to read between the lines a little to get at it. In Muir's case, however, you have the opposite problem. Here, the archetypal pattern is so obvious that you actually stand in danger of missing it simply because you don't expect the script to be that large, that plain, that visible. The letters are all capitals! All you need do, in order to read them, is give yourself over to a kind of glorious literalism and everything falls into place. No reading between the lines, no Jungian analysis, just events: climbing out of hell, wake-up calls, blindness then sight. And at journey's end? What else but a mountain called "Cathedral Peak." When Muir (in his journal) actually gets to the "roof" and starts admiring "the masonry" evident in "the gable on the northeast end", the reader is apt to feel that he or she has passed through a looking glass. And there are other, equally meaningful moments that I haven't even mentioned. I think, for example, of the baptism that occurred when Muir almost drowned in a pond. However, for sheer signifying power none of these moments quite matches what occurred on Muir's walk through Georgia. Something happened back there, something every bit as big as all the Sierran experiences combined. Listen: "The winds are full of strange sounds, making one feel far from the people and plants and fruitful fields of home. Night is coming on and I am filled with indescribable loneliness. Felt feverish; bathed in a black, silent stream; nervously watchful for alligators. Obtained lodging in a planter's house among cotton fields. Although the family seemed to be pretty well-off, the only light in the house was bits of pitch-pine wood burning in the fireplace." Exactly one week later, Muir was (freely) on his way to camp among the tombs at Bonaventure graveyard outside of Savannah. He had judged that, being penniless, he would find more peace there in the "weird and beautiful abode of the dead" than among the "disorderly" living. His approach? "A smooth white shell road." Despite the fact that malaria was alive and well in Savannah at that time, when Muir arrived at the cemetery he was thirsty, so he drank from "a dull, sluggish, coffee-colored stream." As darkness fell, he laid himself down under one of the great oaks. He found a little mount that served for a pillow, placed his plant press and his bag beside him, and went to sleep. Upon waking, he discovered that he had been lying on a grave.

Go to any National Monument with John Muir's name on it, check out the displays, and you will undoubtedly come across the following deservedly famous Muir quotation: "The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness." What the park rangers don't tell you is that the trail leads straight to death. Muir's very life proves it. Having resolved after his blindness to "get as near the heart of the world" as he could, Muir chose the "wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way" he could find, and when he got there, when he passed through Kentucky and crossed over into Georgia river country, he found death: death in the form of homelessness as opposed to homecoming, death in the form of malaria, and deepest of all death in the form of death -- Gethsemane, Golgotha. Muir's Sierran testament, in other words, has less to do with vision than with resurrection. Did Muir know it? I think he did. I think one of the reasons Muir was so transfixed by Yosemite Creek on that summer afternoon in 1869 was that he saw in the creek the story of his own life, for prior to crossing the Ohio River and embarking for Florida he had written in his journal some highly revealing lines. "There are tides," he wrote at that time. "No only in the affairs of men, but in the primal thing of life itself. In some persons the impulse, being slight, is easily obeyed or overcome. But in others it is constant and cumulative in action until its power is sufficient to overmaster all impediments, and to accomplish the full measure of its demands. For many a year I have been impelled toward the Lord's tropic gardens of the South. Many influences have tended to blunt or bury this constant longing, but it has outlived and overpowered them all." A day later Muir was gone, "carried away of the Spirit into the wilderness", and within weeks he was a stranger in a very strange land. Surely then he cannot have been unaware of the parallels to his own life when he gazed down through the streamers of Yosemite Creek as it plunged "half a mile in showy foam to another world to be lost in the Merced," the river of mercy, "where climate, vegetation, and inhabitants are all different." Muir's name for the sound of the creek as it leapt? He called it a "death song".

A short while ago I said Muir reminded me in certain respects of Belloc. In point of fact, the personage with whom Muir shares most is St. Francis. There is, first of all, the matter of his genuinely prophetic ecological vision and his habit of speaking to flowers and bears as through they were peers. "Plant people," "fellow mortals" -- phrases like these blend seamlessly with the vision immortalized in Francis' Canticle of the Sun.

Too, there is the matter of Muir's passage through night. Like Francis, who was at one point consigned by his father to a lightless pit, Muir came into his own by walking out of caves -- both the well-shaft to which his father consigned him, and the darkened room in which he lay for four weeks while blind. Even their physiques appear to have been similar: not tall, slight in build, enormous vivacity and quickness. Mostly, though, I think of Muir's poverty -- "that uncompromising destitution" (I am borrowing from Merton here) "which alone can give joy because it flings one headlong into the arms of God." Like Francis, Muir inherited five frosty hours and counted himself rich! Muir, in other words, was the penultimate poor man, the man who ran on empty, burned his bridges, spent everything he had. Professional enterprise, money, respect, human companionship -- he let it all go. Everyone probably has their favored image of the man. Some see him standing next to Teddy Roosevelt across the valley from Yosemite Falls; others see him in Alaska on a glacier with the noble mongrel Stickeen. I see him on those first few days after he left Wisconsin as a twenty-five year old, loping east past the Apostle Islands along the south shore of Lake Superior. Alone, with only a compass to guide him; a few crusts of bread in his pack; plant press strapped on top. John Muir was poor then, and therefore free -- as abandoned to divine providence as the very geese overhead.

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