John Muir: An Exclamation Point in Hiking Boots

(Part two of the three part series "The Two Johnnies")

(In 1899, both John Muir and John Burroughs were part of the E.H. Harriman Alaska Expedition. Despite the differences in their personalities and approaches to nature, Muir and Burroughs both sought the kind of connection with the natural world that many of us are seeking even today. In this three part series, we are exploring the legacy of the “Two Johnnies” - John Muir and John Burroughs and what we can learn from each of them in our own quest for sense of place. To read part One of the series, click below. Otherwise keep reading for a look at John Muir, the exclamation point in hiking boots.)

(Photograph courtesy of the John Muir Trust)

The wind is up. Big, long, slow rolling swells like crystal mountains, are rising behind the Little Dipper on the wide open horizons just west of Outer Island. This is big water, in a small boat. I am miles from land, longer from help, alone with this clear blue power and each time the following sea lifts the stern of the Little Dipper, I am caught between the thrill and beauty of it all, and the taste of fear in the back of my throat.

That edge of fear and beauty is where the sublime lives. It is a landscape that John Muir knew well.

Born in Scotland in 1838, John Muir moved with his family to central Wisconsin when he was just 11, establishing a 160-acre homestead they called “Fountain Lake Farm.” To young Muir, it was a "sunny woods, overlooking a flowery glacial meadow and a lake rimmed with water lilies." As much as he loved Fountain Lake (he would later twice try unsuccessfully to buy the property), its horizons could not contain his restless soul

Muir was cut from wilder cloth. His spirit sprang from the full-throated roar of a windstorm screaming through a mountain pass. He was literally the first tree-hugger swinging from the pines in a Sierra windstorm. Here was language swirled into action, the daydreams of the desk-bound poet transformed into ridge-running, mountain-climbing, waterfall-clinging, muscle, bone, and voice. Here was Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp come to life,” an exclamation point in hiking boots.

After an 1867 accident in an Indianapolis carriage factory left him temporarily blinded, Muir vowed to live in the closest possible association with nature. At the Great Salt Lake, he ripped off his clothes and leapt into the salty water in a “right lusty relationship with the brave old lake.” At the Grand Canyon, he flipped himself upside to stand on his head because “we become new creatures with bodies inverted.”  When an avalanche dragged him down a mountain he called the ride “a flight in a Milky Way of snow flowers” and “the most spiritual of all my travels.”

And travel he did -- Cuba, Japan, the Philippines, Panama, California, New York City, Finland, Russia, Egypt, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and the Himalayas, as well as Alaska. In San Francisco he asked a passerby for the quickest route out of the city. “But where do you want to go?” asked the man. Muir’s reply: “Anywhere that is wild.”

Muir wrote the same way he climbed mountains, his prose rushing off the page, penning rhapsodies on cascading streams, on mountain snows and rain squalls. His favorite punctuation mark was the exclamation point causing many of his most impassioned writings to read like a man howling to be heard over the roar of a waterfall.

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings Nature’s peace will flow into you as sun flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares drop off like autumn leaves.”

The son of a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian minister, Muir’s style was spontaneous and flowery, often excessive. His editors urged him, less than successfully, to limit his use of adjectives. Yet it is precisely this enthusiastic style, this unbridled passion that makes Muir’s writing memorable. To read John Muir is to chase him up the mountains and into the deepest glens listening as he shouts over his shoulder, buoyant with the wild, exuberant joy of it all. “Muir’s writing has survived for a century,” Ted Hoagland has said, “because he was not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve.”

Nor was he afraid to fight to protect the places he exalted in.

(Roosevelt and Muir in Yosemite, 1903. National Park Service photograp)

Unlike John Burroughs, the “other” Johnny on the 1898 Harriman Expedition, who shied away from controversy saying “I do not join the noisy processions, I do not howl with the reformers, or cry ‘Fire!’” Muir cried “Fire” at the top of his lungs. He became the voice of the fight to preserve wild places, founded the Sierra Club to rail against the “temple destroyers” and helped to establish Yosemite National Park. He battled unsuccessfully to stop the Hetch Hetchy dam, and urged all who love nature to “fight, fight, and fight.” “Mountain parks are useful not only as fountains of timber,” he reminded us, “but as fountains of life.”

In the early 1900’s, Teddy Roosevelt himself wrote to John Muir asking him to act as his personal guide through the Yosemite. “I do not want anyone with me but you,” Roosevelt wrote, “and I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.” Muir accepted, although later admitted he ignored TR’s plea to “drop politics” and “stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves, and the destructive work of lumbermen and other spoilers of the forest."

It must have worked. Roosevelt would go on to expand Yosemite National Park, create five new national parks, as well as 18 national monuments, 55 bird sanctuaries, and become the father of our national forest system. Muir himself would go on to become one of the primary environmental voices in history, a voice that is still ringing in the hearts of many today. “The battle we have fought, and are still fighting … is a part of the eternal conflict between right and wrong,” he wrote near the end of his life, “and we cannot expect to see the end of it.”

Muir died on Christmas Eve 1914, some say of a broken heart after losing the battle to prevent the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley near his beloved Yosemite.

John Muir never visited the Apostle Islands as far as I know. Yet, if he were in the Little Dipper with me as those big blue crystal mountain waves tossed the boat or watching the shark fin of a rain squall rip across a distant island, he would instantly recognize the power of this place, and match it with his passion. His love of the sublime and swirling energy of nature is a reminder of the power and adventure in every wave-rocked boat ride, every late night northern lights show, every encounter with a bear, or distant horizon.

I also feel the echo of his ceaseless energy to speak up and fight for what he believed and the wild places he loved. There can be no true connection with a landscape if it is lost. And so a love for any place comes with a price: the responsibility to speak up for its protection.

But mostly John Muir understood that wild places could be a kind of gateway to something bigger. “Between every two pine trees,” he once wrote, “is a doorway to a new world.” For me, those two pines are on an island. And, thanks to John Muir, sometimes what I find there is best described in exclamation points!

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)