Where the wild things were
A life of John Muir, tireless explorer and explainer of nature
A PASSION FOR NATURE: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
Oxford University, 535 pp., illustrated, $34.95
Think you know the real John Muir? Think again.
Mountain man and hiker, visionary environmentalist, eloquent nature writer, champion of national parks, iconoclastic reformer, Sierra Club founder? Well, yes.
But how about Rube Goldberg-like inventor, pacifist, successful farmer-businessman, devoted husband and father, friend of railroad magnates and professors? He was all those things, too.
Never an organization man, Muir (1838-1914) emerged in the 1880s as a reluctant reformer. He preferred to stick to the great outdoors and his writing desk. Nor was Muir much of an iconoclast. He never, for instance, saw business and the environment as inevitable enemies. And at the Sierra Club, founded in 1892 largely by University of California academics, he was a figurehead president, more presiding elder than actual leader.
Donald Worster's "A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir" is an engagingly written, adroitly balanced appraisal that places its subject within the emerging environmental consciousness of the late 19th century. Drawing on a host of letters and journals, Worster, a highly regarded historian of environmental movements, composes a complete and completely appealing picture of a more complicated man than we thought we knew.
Though Muir could be perfectly content alone in the Sierra Nevada, he was also a great talker with a gift for making friends. Among the most important, Worster points out, were older, cultured women who served as mentors throughout his life.
Likewise, he was a prodigious walker. His most ambitious tramp took him from Indiana to Florida. Once settled in California, he thought nothing of trekking from San Francisco to Yosemite by foot.
Muir might never have become an American icon. He spent his first 11 years in a Scottish village, where his father was a prosperous grain merchant. But Daniel Muir was so taken by Campbellite Christian fundamentalism that he resolved to immigrate to America, where the sect was thriving. The family homesteaded a farm in Wisconsin.
Ground down by his father's tyrannical rule, Muir left home as soon as possible. At the University of Wisconsin, by contrast, he was nurtured by professor Ezra Carr and his wife, Jeanne. They introduced Muir to a scientific worldview, and discerned in him enormous untapped potential. Decades later, Jeanne would make it her project, in Worster's words, to turn "her protégé into a cultural force, a prophet leading people to value nature and to worship the spirit behind it."
Still, like a 21st-century slacker, young Muir took a while to find himself. During the Civil War, he dropped out of college and fled to Canada, at this point "an outsider, a man who would not fight for any nation . . . a man without any fixed identity or ambitions."
It was not until age 29, when he was back in the United States and hiking to Florida, that his true course was set. His notebook bore this revealing address: "John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe." His musings were revolutionary: "The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. . . . Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation?"
Once in Yosemite, where he first worked as a shepherd, his conversion to the religion of nature was complete. "I'm in the woods woods woods, & they are in me-ee-ee," he rhapsodized to Jeanne Carr. "I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer."
To make a living, he turned to writing. His initial aim was to pen a magnum opus on Yosemite's glaciation. That never happened. Instead fame came from articles, published in national magazines, seamlessly combining a reverence for nature with scientific detail. In this arena, Robert Underwood Johnson at the Century was Muir's goad as much as Jeanne Carr had been.
Initially, the focus of Muir's nature writing lay in extolling beauty, with emphasis on conservation an afterthought. Once into reform mode, Muir consistently pursued a nondoctrinaire pragmatism. Despite his earlier credo, Worster writes, he "did not argue that humans must always put nature's welfare above that of human beings."
Carr did more than prod her protégé into prophethood. She supplied him with a wife, Louisa Strentzel, whose father's vast orchards and vineyards Muir managed with great success. This job pulled him away, for a time, from his true vocation, but it granted him gentle rural pleasures complementing Yosemite's grandeur. Louisa, as Carr recognized, was perhaps the only woman who could have tolerated Muir's penchant for heading off for the hills. Right after their betrothal, and again after their wedding, Muir rushed away, without her, to his latest enthusiasm, the wilds of Alaska.
Worster, like Louisa, sees no need to judge harshly. Muir's mistress was always wilderness, never another woman. Whenever judgment is called for, this deft portrait settles for complexity.
Here is Muir, for instance, looking like a long-bearded Old Testament prophet. But what is this pragmatist doing? He's entertaining - with cigars and wine at his California estate - power brokers who might just save the planet. This scene, suggests Worster, exemplifies how Muir harmonized "the cultural and social contradictions of his time - uniting vision and achievement, simplicity and wealth, spirituality and pragmatism."
Dan Cryer is writing a biography of the Rev. Forrest Church, the preeminent Unitarian Universalist clergyman of our time. 