Cathedral Peak, Tolumne, by Matt Smith
“It is easier to feel than to realize, or in any way explain, Yosemite grandeur.”
“My notes and pictures, the best of them printed in my mind as dreams.”
“I scrambled home through the Indian Canyon gate, rejoicing, pitying the poor Professor and General, bound by clocks, almanacs, orders, duties, etc., and compelled to dwell with lowland care and dust and din, where Nature is covered and her voice smothered, while the poor, insignificant wanderer enjoys the freedom and glory of God’s wilderness.”
John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra,
My First Summer In The Sierra, by John Muir reads like On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. It is however, calm, serene, and enlightened. A sequel and companion piece to Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. Kerouac, the “Beat Hipster” had Muir’s joy and focus on the here and now, but focused on the characters: Neal Cassady, Alan Ginsberg, himself; their mad rushes between New York and San Francisco. Muir, the naturalist, focuses on the Sierra; the trees, flowers, brush, insects, lizards, bears, dear, dogs, humans, and on the rocks, mountains, and waterfalls that more than set the stage are players in the drama. The only mad rushes in My First Summer In The Sierra are those of the sheep into and out of streams, and Muir has little use for sheep, shepherds, or even the money shepherding can bring. While the beat hipster wrote about meditating, he lacked the naturalist’s serenity, perspective, and comfort in the wilderness. Kerouac’s pursuit of intoxicants and stimuli may have indicated a lack of comfort in his own skin, his own self. Muir’s intoxicant was life and the Sierra. He was comfortable in his own skin – as comfortable editing it in 1904 as he was writing it in 1869.
Muir may have envied the Indians for their comfort without coats and blankets, their knowledge of wild and edible leaves, roots, nuts, and berries, their uncanny and almost mystical ability to appear silently, unnoticed by the sheep, the dogs, and the humans. Yet he criticized an Indian woman as a typical human for wearing dirty clothes.
As a naturalist, Muir understood the difference between burning wood and coal – the energy in sunlight that is stored recently and stored eons ago. He also understood the effects of volcanoes and glaciers on the landscape, and what we now call the biosphere. He could have taught biology, geology, ecology.
Muir’s tales of his climb of the Great Tissiak, of the oblivious tourists, and of Billy and his pants are terrific. My First Summer In The Sierra
reads like an adventure novel, complete with drama, danger, supernatural events and comic relief. Billy the shepherd never changes or washes his pants. Instead of wearing out they become thicker absorbing grease, resin, sap, leaves, bugs. Muir first talks of a hunter killing bears, not exactly foreshadowing his encounter: “I had been told that this sort of bear … always ran from his bad brother man, never showing fight unless wounded or in defense of young. … I thought I should like to see his gait in running, so I made a sudden rush at him, shouting and swinging my hat to frighten him, expecting to see him make haste to get away. But to my dismay he did not run or show any sign of running. On the contrary, he stood his ground ready to fight and defend himself … looked sharply and fiercely at me. Then I suddenly began to fear that upon me would fall the work of running…. We stood staring at each other in solemn silence within a dozen yards or thereabouts…. With magnificent deliberation /he/ turned and walked leisurely up the meadow, stopping frequently to look back over his shoulder to see whether I was pursuing him, then moving on again, evidently neither fearing me very much nor trusting me.” The bears return after developing a taste for mutton.
He describes the dog Carlo not as more human than Billy the shepherd, but certainly wiser and more sentient. We are first introduced to Carlo on page 5, “I was fortunate in getting a fine St. Bernard dog for a companion. His master, a hunter with whom I was slightly acquainted, came to me as soon as he heard that I was going to spend the summer in the Sierra and begged me to take his favorite dog, Carlo, with me, for he feared that if he were compelled to stay all summer on the plains the fierce heat might be the death of him. ‘I think I can trust you to be kind to him,’ he said, ‘and I know he will be good to you.’ … Carlo knew we were talking about him, watched our faces, and listened so attentively that I fancied he understood us. Calling him by name, I asked if he was willing to go with me. He looked me in the face with eyes expressing a wonderful intelligence, then turned to his master, and after permission was given by a wave of the hand toward me and a farewell parting caress, he quietly followed me as if he perfectly understood all that had been said and had known me always.”
“Our shepherd is a queer character …. His bed is a hollow made in red dry-rot punky dust beside a log … breathing not only the dust of the decayed wood but also that of the corral, as if determined to take ammoniacal snuff all night after chewing tobacco all day.” “I have been trying to get him to walk to the brink of Yosemite for a view, offering to watch the sheep for a day, while he should enjoy what tourists come from all over the world to see. But though within a mile of the famous valley, he will not go to it even out of mere curiosity. ‘What,’ says he, “is Yosemite but a canon – a lot of rocks – a hole in the ground – a place dangerous about falling into – a d-d good place to keep away from.’”
“Such souls,” Muir concludes, “are asleep, or smothered and befogged beneath mean pleasures and cares.”
Muir and Billy share a similar dim view of the tourists in Yosemite. However, while Billy thinks they waste their money, they might as well stay home, Muir thinks they miss the best views, they come all this way, yet they stay in the valley.
My First Summer In The Sierra is much easier to read than Walden. Both are critical of the path society is taking. But where Thoreau is arrogant, harsh, pompous, and pessimistic; Muir is humble, gentle, optimistic. Thoreau criticizes a farmer, “you say you can’t build bones by eating grains, yet your ox has stronger bones and eats nothing but grass and grain.” Muir, on the other hand, repeats “I am blessed,” he says. “Join me.” Thoreau may have been comfortable in the wilderness, but only because he tamed it and needed very little. Muir was comfortable on the mountains and under the stars. Because he knew how much money he needed to live well, Muir considered himself wealthier than Edward H. Harriman, the railroad magnate.
As he says, “I scrambled home through the Indian Canyon gate, rejoicing, pitying the poor Professor and General, bound by clocks, almanacs, orders, duties, etc., and compelled to dwell with lowland care and dust and din, where Nature is covered and her voice smothered, while the poor, insignificant wanderer enjoys the freedom and glory of God’s wilderness.”
Neither Muir nor Thoreau would understand the fervent religious-like passion with which most suburbanites toil to farm their lawns; so heavily fertilized and pest-controlled with petrochemicals they are practically artificial. Muir, who seems to have had greater understanding and compassion might understand this is derived from the Western belief that nature must be tamed. Both would be amused by the notion that people feel that they need a military transport vehicle to drive to the mall and impress their neighbors. They would be staggered and angered at the amount of resources we discard in the form of litter and “garbage,” stuff that collects everywhere, even at the Horse Latitudes in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.