JOHN MUIR: AN ODYSSEY, A PILGRIMAGE 
                                              By J. Charles
        artssf.com, the independent observer of Northern California books
                                                                 Week of March 17-24, 2008
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 78  
             When John Muir set off on his first long walk into the wilderness, he carried with him four texts: the poems of Robert Burns, the New Testament,  Paradise Lost, and a thick book on botany.  These, along with some personal items (one change of underwear), a homemade plant press, a notebook, and some money, made up his entire equipment list for a foot journey of a thousand miles.  Such an  image,  vividly presented to us in Donald Worster's A Passion for Nature, The Life of John Muir, is the one that    pops up whenever one thinks of the patron saint of Yosemite.  Here is the wiry, impossibly energetic enthusiast for the Sierra Nevada and the simple life, ready to run up mountains and sleep under giant sequoias.  But Worster reminds us that the real Muir was  a more complex product of familial and cultural influences common to many nineteenth-century Americans.  How they came together to form this extraordinary man is the most interesting theme of Worster's engrossing biography.
             Muir is twenty-nine when he begins this journey.  He is not a mountaineer and he has not yet thought seriously of  California, although he has read a bit about Yosemite.  Instead, he is off to South America, walking from his midwestern home to Florida,  then hopping a timber schooner to Cuba, always dreaming of botanising in rain forests.  But Nature, in the form of malaria, soon convinced him that the tropics were not for him, and, while sweltering in Cuba, he happened upon a New York newspaper advertising cheap transportation to California.  Back he hopped to New York, where he found a ship to Panama, a second-class seat on the Panama Railroad, and the steamer "Nebraska," bound for San Francisco.  Here, healthy again, full of energy and ever optimistic, he found his calling.
             Optmism, writes Worster, was an important element in Muir's character.  Worster is particularly good at tracing the intellectual and cultural forces which formed Muir's view of the world.  The books he carried on that first journey were emblematic.  Having immigrated from Scotland with his family,  Muir had a strong religious background.  His father (who ended his days as a poor lay-preacher) made sure that the Bible and the church loomed large in the lives of all his eight children.  Muir  eventually turned away from organized religion, but the teachings of Scots fundamentalism stayed with him, forming his independent, highly ethical way of thinking.  Superimposed on this were the influences of the romantic movement.  Muir read Wordsworth and Burns and drank in their love of nature and the simple life.
             Combined with this romantic world view was enthusiasm for the natural sciences. Darwin's writings were still new, and biology, geology and botany were flourishing fields.  Muir, because of his own reading and his education at the University of Wisconsin, was well versed in the latest theories.  And finally, writes Worster, Muir was influenced by American transcendentalist thought.  He once visited Yosemite with Emerson  (who disappointed him by refusing to sleep on the ground under the trees), and, later in his life, he visited Walden pond. All of these influences merged  with  the essential American desire to cut ties and move west.  Muir got to California and found his life's work.
              Success in this work did not come quickly.  Muir spent some time in Yosemite working in a sawmill and herding sheep.  He wrote occasional articles and gained some fame, but he still was unsure about   making a living.  Then he got lucky.  Worster portrays Muir as a charismatic, charming man whom everyone liked.  He was particularly popular with women, although he avoided romance.  When he was thirty-six, one of his women friends decided that he should marry, and she arranged a meeting with the family of Louie Strenzel.  Louie was, indeed, the ideal wife for him.  The only child of a wealthy landowner, with extensive vinyards and orchards in the vicinity of Martinez, she married him, bore him two daughters, and tended the home farm while he travelled the world.
             Muir's career flourished.  He became the father of the conservation movement, spoke eloquently for the establishment of national parks, and was an early supporter of the Sierra Club.  He got to know influential people, from Theodore Roosevelt to railway magnet Edward Harriman, and he had strong supporters in academia, from the University of California to MIT.  Part of Muir's genius was that he could fit into almost any milieu.   It is hard to imagine him in an evening suit, gracing the tables of the mega-rich, drinking wine and smoking cigars, but he spent many evenings in his later life like this, as he travelled the world.  It helped that conservationism was popular; Muir must have been a sort of radical-chic icon.  But he also was  enthusiastic, tolerant, and  not particularly political.  He was happy singing the praises of nature to whoever would listen.
             Perhaps it was his lack of political shrewdness that led to the one great defeat in his life: the struggle over Hetch Hetchy.  Worster tells this story particularly well.  When it came to battling the monied interests in San Francisco--people committed to growth and progress and not impressed  by sentimental tree-huggers--Muir lost.  He was an old man by then, and he never again had the power of his middle age, although he remained a popular figure.  An essentially nineteenth-century man, he was out of step with the twentieth, and his death was sad.
              Worster is lauded on the back cover of his book as a fine environmental historian.  He lives up to that praise in this book, but shows that his talents go beyond chronicling the advance of conservationism.  His book has an important place in the history of ideas and the history of Northern California.  It is a fine account of an inspirational life.  Even if you don't carry it on your next thousand-mile walk, it will valuably fill many quiet hours at home. 
            "A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir," by Donald Worster,  < style="color: rgb(51, 51, 153);">2008: Oxford University Press, 533 pages, $34.95
         ©J. Charles 2009

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        J. Charles is a book-review contributor to www.artssf.com.
   These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly)focus on book reviews (by authors of the region), plus theater, dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into recordings by local artists as well.
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