John Muir: Nature Writings (Loa #92)

cadeau

John Muir is one of my favorite authors and favorite people. I have read most if not all of his published writings. Everything he wrote is available free on line and in many individual volumes, compilations, and anthologies. Before going into details, I will give you my punchline: If I could only keep one Muir book in my library, this Library of America volume would be it. That is why I am posting my Muir review here.________________________________________________________________________________For someone new to Muir it is hard to know where to start, but the good news is that you can't go wrong - it is all good! * For newcomers it is useful to distinguish between books that Muir wrote by his own hand, books under his name that were prepared and published posthumously by others from his journals, and biographies written by others.In the first category are:"The Mountains of California" (1894)"Our National Parks" (1901)"Stickeen" (1909)"My First Summer in the Sierra" (1911)"The Yosemite" (1912)"The Story of My Boyhood and Youth" (1913)"Travels in Alaska" (Muir died before this manuscript was completed. It was finished by an assistant and published in 1915, one year after his death.)In the second category are three books prepared for publication by Muir's friend William Frederic Bade:"A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf" (1916)"The Cruise of the Corwin" (1917)"Steep Trails" (1918)Of the many biographies, here are three that I have read:"Son of the Wilderness," by Linnie Marsh Wolfe (1930) (See also "John of the Mountains - The Unpublished Journals of John Muir," by same author)"The Life and Letters of John Muir," by William Frederic Bade (1924)"A Passion for Nature - The Life of John Muir," by Donald Worster (2008)All of these biographies are good, and contain samples of Muir's writings, but I much prefer Muir's own books.Of the many collections and anthologies I mention three that I own:"The Wilderness World of John Muir," Edwin Way Teale (1954) This contains no complete works but is a nice anthology. If I remember correctly, this was my first taste of Muir's writings."John Muir - Nature Writings," The Library of America, selections and notes by William Cronon (1997) This contains complete text of "Story of My Boyhood and Youth," "My First Summer in the Sierra," "The Mountains of California," "Stickeen," plus a nice assortment of essays. Like all Library of America volumes, this one is lovingly prepared and of high production quality. If I could only keep one Muir book in my library, this would be it.Finally, there is a massive 2-volume Omnibus containing virtually everything that Muir wrote and more, but it appears to be Out of Print:I. "John Muir - The Eight Wilderness Discovery Books" (ca. 1000 pages)andII. "John Muir - His Life and Letters and Other Writings" (ca. 900 pages)If you want the whole shebang, get used copies of these two volumes. The production quality is not nearly as good as the Library of America volume. I found many typos and even entire pages that are out of sequence. But everything is here.A nice bonus is that II includes not only Bade's biography ("Life and Letters"), but also "Alaska Days with John Muir" by Samuel Hall Young who was Muir's companion on some of his Alaska adventures. Young is also a gifted writer. If you like Muir, you will definitely enjoy "Alaska days."Enjoy!__________________________________________________________* POSTSCRIPT ADDED ON FEBRUARY 9, 2021 I now regret writing that "you can't go wrong" with Muir's writings because "it is all good." In fact, it is not all good. In May 2020, I re-read "A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf" and was shocked at some of the things Muir wrote. I was even more shocked at myself. How could I have read this book years ago without remembering any of the racist passages? I considered deleting my review in its entirety, but instead decided to let the original review stand and add this long postscript.On my second reading of Thousand Mile Walk, I paid close attention to M.’s references to slavery and his depiction of African Americans that he met on his trip. Occasionally he says something complimentary about a black person, but more often he is dismissive – sometimes even contemptuous. Here are some examples:____________________________________________ “Cotton is the principal crop hereabouts, and picking is now going on merrily… The negroes are easy-going and merry, making a great deal of noise and doing little work. One energetic white man, working with a will, would easily pick as much cotton as half a dozen Sambos and Sallies.”____________________________________________ “The negroes here have been well trained and are extremely polite. When they come in sight of a white man on the road, off go their hats, even at a distance of forty or fifty yards, and they walk bare-headed until he is out of sight.”____________________________________________ “Toward evening I arrived at the home of Mr. Cameron, a wealthy planter, who had large bands of slaves at work in his cotton fields. They still call him ‘Massa.’ He tells me that labor costs him less now than it did before the emancipation of negroes.”____________________________________________ “The negroes of Georgia, too, are extremely mannerly and polite, and appear to be delighted to find opportunity for obliging anybody.”____________________________________________ “When within three or four miles of the town I noticed a light off in the pine woods. As I was very thirsty, I thought I would venture toward it with the hope of obtaining water. In creeping cautiously and noiselessly through the grass to discover whether or not it was a camp of robber negroes, I came suddenly in full view of the best-lighted and most primitive of all the domestic establishments I have yet seen in town or grove. There was, first of all, a big, glowing log fire, illuminating the overleaning bushes and trees, bringing out leaf and spray with more than noonday distinctness, and making still darker the surrounding wood. In the center of this globe of light sat two negroes. I could see their ivory gleaming from the great lips, and their smooth cheeks flashing off light as if made of glass. Seen anywhere but in the South, the glossy pair would have been taken for twin devils, but here it was only a negro and his wife at their supper. “I ventured forward to the radiant presence of the black pair, and, after being stared at with that desperate fixedness which is said to subdue the lion, I was handed water in a gourd from somewhere out of the darkness. I was standing for a moment beside the big fire, looking at the unsurpassable simplicity of the establishment, and asking questions about the road to Gainesville, when my attention was called to a black lump of something lying in the ashes of the fire. It seemed to be made of rubber; but ere I had time for much speculation, the woman bent wooingly over the blacl object and said with motherly kindness, ‘Come, honey, eat yo’ hominy.’ “At the sound of ‘hominy’ the rubber gave strong manifestations of vitality and proved to be a burly little negro boy, rising from the earth naked as to the earth he came. Had he emerged from the black muck of a marsh, we might easily have believed that the Lord had manufactured him like Adam direct from the earth. “Surely, thought I, as I started for Gainesville, surely I am now coming to the tropics, where the inhabitants wear nothing but their own skins. This fashion is sufficiently simple, – ‘no troublesome disguises,’ as Milton calls clothing, – but it certainly is not quite in harmony with Nature. Birds make nests and nearly all beasts make some kind of bed for their young; but these negroes allow their younglings to lie nestles and naked in the dirt.”_______________________________________________These passages challenge my hero worship of John Muir. Muir has more compassion for a man-eating alligator than he has for slaves and former slaves. His harsh judgment on the literally “dirt-poor” black family in the final passage suggests that M. was incapable or unwilling to acknowledge the degradation and dehumanization that occurred during two centuries of slavery. Nor is he capable of understanding the sequelae of slavery.Muir doesn’t consider the possibility that the family living in dirt and ashes might be more courageous and more free than the “well trained and extremely polite” negroes that he complimented earlier; the ones who “take off their hats at the sight of a white man, and walk bare-headed until he is out of sight.” He seems oblivious to the fact that, at the time of his trip, the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups were terrorizing blacks and enforcing their so-called “good manners.” All that Muir could see was “ivory gleaming from great lips”; – “a glossy pair of twin devils”; – a “black lump of something” lying in the dirt.These sad reflections have not caused me to burn any of my John Muir books. I still consider Muir's nature writing to be superb, and I still consider the LOA book to be the best one-volume collection of his writings. But from now on, I will always place a mental asterisk after his name.

The Ken Burns NP documentary (which includes commentary from the editor of this book, Historian William Cronin) is what inspired me to learn more about Muir, a truly "Great American" from the formative years of our country. Not only a conservationist but an inventor, adventurer, etc. He clearly embodies the notion of "The American Spirit" or "American Renaissance Man" as it's explained to us in idyllic terms from the time we're little kids (by movies and books alike).This book has not disappointed, giving the reader a true sense of the man through his own writings of childhood and beyond, and fairly entertaining as well at times. It's amazing just how different the world is that most readers will have grown up in, compared to Muir's childhood in Scotland, then Wisconsin, then journey to the west as a young man and beyond. This book could certainly be considered a kind of "frontiersman history lesson" as well and auto-biographical. You learn just how much toil and hard work it was to have that "perfect cabin on the edge of the woods with the lake." Modern people are badly spoiled in what we have / take for granted.Simultaneously I am reading a book about another great (if flawed) American, Teddy Roosavelt, as they were both instrumental in building the system of National Parks, and preserving our most beautiful places for all generations. Roosavelt, by modern standards is a sort of "strange bedfellow" for the environmental movement as we now think of it. But it shows how progress can be messy and chaotic. Just because we can't put everyone and everything that happened in a neat little box with simplistic labels (something today's Americans attempt way too often), doesn't make it bad or mean we have to denounce a person, else we're bad too. Looking forward to the convergence in both books when the two men finally meet and begin to discuss the importance of conservation, hunting, etc. I want to learn something, not put labels on those things so I can wring my hands about how "I would've done it differently, goody for me."The quality of this book's printing is quite nice. Very thin paper, similar to what you find in soft-bound "travel bibles" (probably not an accident), including a nice sewn-in silk (?) book marker. Muir himself being a devoutly religious man (this reviewer is not) also draws an incongruous parallel to today's right-wing stereotype where most environmentalists are considered "Godless hippies" who don't understand that nature was put here to be ruled over by men, for their own purposes. Yet Muir saw what is more likely the truth, if one believes in God and creation by God, that he built us these wonders and put us here to protect them, not to leverage them for commercial gain. We are guardians, not owners, one might say. Both Muir (would be considered a leftist today for his views on nature alone) and Roosavelt (would be considered right-wing) both understood this clearly.Whether you're a "liberal left" or "righteous right" type, there is historical value and understanding in this book to be had by both sides. Every American should know something substantive about this man, without whom most likely the National Parks would not exist in their current form (or fewer of them would exist, specifically in the Yosemite and Redwood areas). To read every page would be a challenge as it gets to be a little redundant at points, but reading even half of this book and retaining it gives one a better understanding of the man, our parks, nature, and conservation in general and why it matters on a very common sense level.

John Muir was a visionary figure - a self-taught inventor, artist, and botanist, he was the driving figure behind the creation of Yosemite National Park and co-founder of the Sierra Club. This collection of essays is indispensable for understanding this man who transformed American conservationism. A powerful and deeply motivated writer, Muir produced many articles in his quest to preserve the unique places in the West. This book contains a good variety of the best of them, most about the Sierra Nevada, but also includes his autobiographical essay about his childhood and his description of visits to the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. Before Muir transformed American conservationism, he himself was transformed through his encounters with nature. His strong religious background is evident in his rhapsodic, joyful descriptions of nature as God's handiwork. These essays are therefore incredibly inspiring. However, I also found them sad. Accompanied by numerous sketches of landscapes and plants and full of incredible detail about the flora and fauna of the areas he visited, Muir's writings also make clear how much of the wilderness he experienced has already been lost. Much of what he saw we can now only experience through reading what he wrote about it.

I hesitated buying this complete works book by Muir as I wondered if it would be more than I wanted. Did I really care about his youth or was I just looking for some of his more famous writings? To my delight, I have enjoyed this book from the start. I found his essays about his childhood in Scotland and about his family's move to America to be a nice foundation for understanding how he became the man he was and the impact he had on nature writing and on conservation. I came to live in the Maine woods not because of the job opportunities (ha) or for the Starbucks on the corner (not) but to be in a quiet place surrounded by streams, woods, mountains, lakes and all of the recreational and contemplative opportunities these afford us. I am no stranger to nature writing, but honestly, I came to John Muir a bit late. In a way, I am glad as I think his words have spoken to me now in a way that I can really appreciate. I recommend this body of essays to anyone who lives in nature or doesn't but wish they did. His writing provides a nice escape.