Exuberance: The Passion for Life (3 page)

Muir left Madison without a degree and wandered off, as he put it, into the “
University of the Wilderness.” This “
glorious botanical and geological excursion” would last for the next fifty years. On the flyleaf of his journal, with the expansiveness that would characterize his life and writings, he inscribed: “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe.”

When Muir was thirty years old he saw Yosemite for the first time. He fell in love. Everything, he wrote, was “
glowing with Heaven’s unquenchable enthusiasm.… I tremble with excitement in the dawn of these glorious mountain sublimities, but I can only gaze and wonder.” Watching the sun come up between the mountain peaks and over the rock domes of Yosemite, he proclaimed what he experienced: “
Our camp grove fills and thrills with the glorious light. Everything awakening alert and joyful … every pulse beats high, every cell life rejoices, the very rocks seem to thrill with life. The whole landscape glows like a human face in a glory of enthusiasm.” With good cause, Muir’s
My First Summer in the Sierra
has been described as the journal of a “soul on fire.”

The mountains, the trees, and the air were, he effused, “
joyful, wonderful, enchanting, banishing weariness and a sense of time.” The streams “sing bank-full”; they leap, shout in “wild, exulting energy … joyful, beautiful.” Muir joined in the exuberance of nature: “
I shouted and gesticulated in a wild burst of energy,” he wrote. “
Exhilarated with the mountain air, I feel like shouting this
morning with excess of wild animal joy.” He climbed to the top of a hundred-foot Douglas spruce in the midst of a winter gale and, clinging to the tree, joined in its “
rocking and swirling… [its] wild ecstasy.” Never, he said, had he enjoyed “
so noble an exhilaration of motion. The slender [tree]tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.”

Whether he was climbing in the Sierra or exploring the crevices of an Alaska glacier, Muir’s fiery, joyous relationship with nature burned on. A friend described Muir’s reaction to seeing a thick spread of mountain flowers in Alaska: “
Muir at once went wild.… From cluster to cluster of flowers he ran, falling on his knees, babbling in unknown tongues, prattling a curious mixture of scientific lingo and baby talk.” He felt himself to be “doomed to be ‘carried of the spirit into the wilderness,’ ” and at times expressed concern that he was out of control: “
I feel as if driven with whips, and ridden upon,” he wrote his sister. “I am swept onward in a general current that bears on irresistibly.”

Muir’s exuberance found a match only in Nature’s: “
Every summer my gains from God’s wilds grow greater,” he wrote his fiancée from Alaska. “This last seems the greatest of all. For the first few weeks I was so feverishly excited with the boundless exuberance of the woods and the wilderness, of great ice floods, and the manifest scriptures of the ice-sheet that modelled the lovely archipelagoes along the coast, that I could hardly settle down to the steady labour required in making any sort of Truth one’s own.”

“Manifest scriptures” is a telling phrase. Muir’s capacity to exult in nature, and his feeling of unity with the mountains and trees, led inexorably to a deep mystical appreciation of the world as he experienced it. The great sequoias were not just magnificent, they were
sacred. The light that streaked through the sequoia woods was oracular, the tree sap sacramental. In a rhapsodic letter to a friend, written with the sap of a sequoia tree, Muir let his devotions tumble out: “
Do behold the King in his glory, King Sequoia! Behold! Behold! seems all I can say. Some time ago I left all for Sequoia and have been and am at his feet; fasting and praying for light, for is he not the greatest light in the woods, in the world? … I’m in the woods, woods, woods, and they are in
me-ee-ee
. The King tree and I have sworn eternal love.… I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglas squirrel, drunk Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood.… I wish I were so drunk and Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like John the Baptist … crying, Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand!”

Having taken communion with the woods, Muir offered up their liniment: “
There is a balm in these leafy Gileads—pungent burrs and living King-juice for all defrauded civilization; for sick grangers and politicians; no need of Salt rivers. Sick or successful, come suck Sequoia and be saved.” The salvation of the wilderness was not an abstraction to John Muir. He understood nature, felt nature, and then illuminated her to those who did not. The slaying of the wilderness was to him personal and intolerable.

With an almighty energy, Muir threw himself into saving the great groves of the sequoias and the mountain ranges of Yosemite. He brought into words the beauty he had seen and viscerally knew. He became an interpreter of nature, a prophet. “
He sung the glory of nature like another Psalmist,” said Muir’s editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, and “as a true artist, was unashamed of his emotions.” Muir took Johnson camping in Yosemite in 1889 and together they drew up plans for a campaign to establish what is now Yosemite National Park. Muir’s writings and compelling enthusiasm were essential forces leading to the preservation of that part
of the Sierra. When the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to preserve the American wilderness, Muir became its first president; he held that office until his death twenty-two years later.

Muir branded others with his own almost painful awareness of the wilderness, attempting to make them feel some measure of what he himself felt so acutely. One friend, in discussing their exploration of Alaska, said, “
Muir was always discovering to me things which I would never have seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight, and adoration.…
How often have I longed for the presence of Muir to heighten my enjoyment by his higher ecstasy, or reveal to me what I was too dull to see or understand … for I was blind and he made me see!” Person after person acknowledged a debt of profound comprehension: “
To have explored with Muir the great glacier which bears his name,” proclaimed one, “to have wandered with him in Yosemite and the Kings River Canyon, is to have come, through his enthusiasm and vision, a little nearer the hidden mysteries of nature.”

Emerson, who visited Muir in Yosemite, said that
Muir’s was the most original mind in America. Muir used this originality to advantage, pouring it into persuasive, exultant language. His speech was described by those who heard him as nonstop and magnetizing—it had a “
spell of fire and enthusiasm and glowing vitality,” said one acquaintance—and Muir talked to all who would listen about the need to conserve the wild. He barraged lawmakers with letters and petitions and poured his heart into writing the books that would eventually bring the world’s attention to the spectacular Sierra Nevada and its great stands of sequoias.

One of those who paid attention was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. “
I write to you personally to express the hope that you will be able to take me through the Yosemite,” he requested of Muir. “I do not want anyone with me but you.” Muir agreed, and in May 1903 he met the president and together they set off with packers and mules. For several days they
hiked and camped in the Sierra, an experience they both recollected with great pleasure. Muir wrote to his wife, “
I had a perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains”; to a friend he said, “
I fairly fell in love with him.” Roosevelt, who declared he had never felt better in his life, was no less enthusiastic in his letter to Muir: “
I trust I need not tell you, my dear sir, how happy were the days in the Yosemite I owed to you, and how greatly I appreciated them. I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the great sequoias; the next in the snow storm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand.”

It is not possible to know the extent to which Muir’s contagious enthusiasm for Yosemite and the sequoia groves influenced Roosevelt’s subsequent actions. Roosevelt was already committed to the idea of conservation and had been for many years, but there is no doubt that he felt
an additional sense of urgency after hiking with Muir. Immediately following his trip to Yosemite, Roosevelt delivered what was to become one of his most famous speeches. “
I have just come from a four days’ rest in Yosemite,” he said to a gathering of people in Sacramento. “I want [the trees] preserved because they are the only things of their kind in the world. Lying out at night under those giant sequoias was lying in a temple built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civilization to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves.” He talked about the need to conserve American forest lands and then closed with a plea for the rights of future generations: “I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unimpaired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours for a day. It is to last through the ages.”

Muir expressed the same desire differently. “
Any fool can
destroy trees,” he wrote. “They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed.… It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods—trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ’s time—and long before that—God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, levelling tempests and floods; but He cannot save them from fools—only [the government] can do that.”

Muir knew in his marrow that
wilderness was a necessity, that “going to the mountains is going home.” It was scripture: in wilderness “
lies the hope of the world.” To save nature was to save oneself. “
The galling harness of civilization drops off,” he said, “and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”

John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt were exuberant men. Infectiously enthusiastic, stupendously energetic, they left the country a wilder and more beautiful place because of their vision and action. Both registered the mountains and lands so keenly that they could not but act with urgency when the wilderness was threatened. Their receptive natures allowed them to feel and see that which was essential in the lands, that which could not be gotten elsewhere. Neither was capable of doing nothing when there was much to be done. Their joy in the wild was contagious to those around them. Both were persuasive by temperament and able to convince others of what they felt to be a moral imperative. Conservation was in their blood, not just in their intellect. It was elemental.

For Muir, it was a single, sustained, and consistent life’s passion to preserve the wilderness. For Roosevelt, there would be many other crusades to engage his energies over a long and diverse political
life. But because Roosevelt was a politician, because he had so many other passions and commitments, he was in a wider arena, with a more powerful scope, and therefore better able to act on behalf of the lands they cherished in common. “
All of us who give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers,” wrote Roosevelt. “We run with the torches until we fall, content if we can pass them to the hands of the other runners.… These are the torch-bearers; these are they who have dared the Great Adventure.”

John Muir spoke of a more inward journey: “
I only went out for a walk,” he wrote, “and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”

(photo credit 2.1)

I
n the exuberance of nature begins our own. And nature is self-evidently exuberant.
One pair of poppies, given seven years and the right conditions, will produce 820 thousand million million million descendants. A single pair of spiders over the same time period and under ideal circumstances will give rise to 427 thousand million million more spiders.
The fertility and diversity of nature are staggering. In a sliver of Brazilian forest only a few kilometers square, scientists have counted more than
1,500 species of butterfly.
Lichens, among nature’s oldest and slowest of living things, grow nearly everywhere—together with blueberries under the snow, on
stained-glass windows of churches and cathedrals, in deserts and in birch woodlands, on the backs of tortoises—and an individual community of lichen may survive longer than most human civilizations. (One in Swedish Lapland is thought by scientists to have begun its collective life nearly nine thousand years ago.) The 13,500 known species of lichen are as exuberant in color as they are diverse in form and habitat, showing themselves in scarlets, snow whites, emerald greens, blacks, and sulfur yellows.