Outdoor Discoveries

A longer reading project

Over the years, I have been prone to buying books with good intentions and then hardly getting around to reading them. This has been known to apply as much to paper books as their digital counterparts, and I have been getting through a backlog of the latter since last autumn.

The reading material itself has been varied with travel writing from the likes of Dan Kieran, Bruce Chatwin and Jack Kerouac seeing inclusion along with other subjects covered by the likes of Clive Aslet and Christian Wolmer. Among these have been works from Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, with the latter featuring through every month from last November until this one.

What I have discovered is that reading nineteenth century prose takes more effort than what is found today. Sentences feel longer and have more packed into them. The same applies to paragraphs that spread from one page to another. Even so, there are rewards in revisiting observations from another time, for the sort of descriptive writing from centuries ago is more of a rarity today.

Returning to the Scottish naturalist and conservationist John Muir, my chosen task was to work my way through an extensive compendium of his collected works along with a volume in tribute, and it is that which is the main subject of this post. In the U.S.A., Muir remains a revered figure and someone who appears to have fitted much into his lifetime, too.

It was not just a childhood spent in Scotland prior to a move to Wisconsin, either. Still, that childhood was severe, with corporal punishment at home and school to go with schoolboy scrapping. Throughout all of this, there was a growing love of nature that was to define him. Engaging in that persuasion often got him punishment from his father yet he and his brother continued regardless. Such things were regarded as straying away from the path of Christian righteousness.

The hardship continued in North America, with lots of hard work to build up a block of farming land from what was wilderness. Still, the appreciation of nature grew, and there even was time spent inventing various clocks and other contrivances. That time was made by getting up part way through the night, an act that bewildered his own father.

The inventions were to see him heading away from home on an early trip to a fair, and that was followed by four years spent at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Though a degree was not gained, there was plenty of mental enlightenment that preceded a time of factory working that was ended by an accident that nearly blinded Muir.

It was after recovery from that incident that he began his long walk to Florida by way of Kentucky and Tennessee. Along the way, he had plenty of time for observing natural beauty before a bout of malaria laid him low. Though he made it as far as Cuba, the intended journey to South America had to be abandoned in favour of one to California that took him via New York.

It was his explorations of the High Sierra that would make his name. Yosemite, King’s Canyon, Hetch Hetchy and other such spectacular valleys would allow him to investigate the effects of glaciation. Mountain tops like Mount Shasta would see him climbing them, even when the weather was not that hospitable. One incident on Mount Shasta got a repeated telling. All the while, his health improved and his strength advanced as he observed grand fauna like the giant Sequoia trees endemic to California. Variations in weather were much experienced too, with storms being relished; when most of us would stay indoors, he would be heading outside. Quite what people must have made of this and his other exploits would have made interesting reading, not unlike what some write in our own times.

From California, he went north as far as Alaska, while also visiting Oregon and Washington State too. The Grand Canyon was another place that he visited, as was Yellowstone National Park. His trips to Alaska had him exploring glaciers with a view to seeing how their action related to what he saw in California. As well as Muir’s own published accounts, Samuel Hall Young also published his own tribute to the man with whom he too explored places such as Glacier Bay. Muir embarked on a summertime sea journey to the Arctic as well, so he got to know Alaska and neighbouring parts of Russia better than many at the time.

There was one trip back to Scotland later in life, and he also appeared to get to other parts of Europe, as well as Asia and South America. Before all this, he married and settled down to run a fruit farm, though that was not his real calling. His wife often sent him away to mountain country to get his fill of the wild places that he so cherished.

That love of nature must have turned him to conservation, for he was one of the founding members of the Sierra Club, an organisation that continues to exist today. It also was reflected in his writing, for he campaigned for National Parks and decried the effects of sheep grazing on wild meadows. Lumbering was not seen as a legitimate activity always, nor was the building of the railways. It was after an unsuccessful campaign to stop the building of a reservoir in Hetch Hetchy valley that he passed away.

His legacy has persisted, with people still reading works like My First Summer in the Sierra, A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf or The Story of my Boyhood and Youth. These are just a small selection of what I ended up reading over the last few months. There was some repetition along the way, but that probably can be found here too. The nineteenth century prose took some effort to read and things undoubtedly have changed since the times in which it was written, yet there was much to enjoy. In their own way, Muir’s books and other writings describe many parts of the world that I have yet to visit, and the effort was worth it for all that. The enthusiasm and alternative approach to life percolated through the narratives too, and the thinking has remained until our own time. Let’s hope that it does so into the future.