Walkabout

Jan McCutcheon
English 48B
Journal for Muir


Author Quote: “This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming , on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls” (Lankford 145).

Internet Quote: “the world will look back to the time we live in and remember the voice of one crying in the wilderness and bless the name of John Muir. . . . He sung the glory of nature like another Psalmist, and, as a true artist, was unashamed of his emotions" (Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century Magazine).


Summary: John Muir was born in Scotland in 1838. At age ten, the family moved to Wisconsin. He developed a talent for whittling clocks, which he earned a prize at the state fair, and later a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin where he studied nature writers such as Thoreau and Emerson. He hiked extensively, including walking from San Francisco to Yosemite. At 42, he married and had two daughters then spent the next eight years managing his wife’s family fruit farm. Eventually his wife realized he needed to go back to the mountains, hiking and writing and sent him on a summer vacation to Lake Tahoe. Seeing the devastation of Tahoe due to the lumber industry and seeing that forests could be saved with careful stewardship, convinced him to get involved in conservation. In his fifties, he started the Sierra Club and worked with politicians and land barons to set up National Parks. He hoped to create a Tahoe National Park but that was never accomplished. He did manage to have land set aside as the Lake Tahoe Forest Reserve putting the land under federal and state protection.


Response: Because of his special connection to nature, John Muir realized how important it is for people to be able to spend time in the wilderness. Because of his work, we in the Bay Area, have access to some of the best wilderness areas in the world. It’s sad that he did not accomplish all he hoped and it makes me wonder if he might have accomplished more if he had started sooner, but I also admire the fact that he re-invented himself in his fifties instead of taking the traditional path and then slowly going crazy managing a fruit farm. He also had a special wife to realize that he needed to take a “summer vacation” which sounds like it extended for about 20 years. Like the Walking Woman, who seemed to find herself by walking through the desert, John Muir realized the value we get from walking in the woods. Without this insight maybe all our forests would be lost by now and people would never have the chance to experience nature in this profound way.