My First Summer in the Sierra

John Muir

Description

Recovering from a factory accident that nearly claimed his eyesight, a young John Muir ventured into the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. The flowers, wildlife, and rock formations he saw during the summer of 1869 changed how he would look at nature forever. Recollected at the end of his life from early journals and sketches, this ecstatic personal narrative gives insight into the forward-looking nature lover who would become known as the father of the nation's parks system. To read this book is to become Muir's hiking partner, sharing in "a glorious botanical and geological excursion" that would blaze the trail for the modern-day environmental movement.

Sujets

• Environmental Protection
• Environmental Conservation
• Nature

Informations

• Publié par: Chemeketa Press
• Date de parution: 19 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781943536849
• Langue: English

Extrait

M Y F IRST S UMMER IN THE S IERRA
J OHN M UIR
with an introduction by Kevin Dye
My First Summer in the Sierra
ISBN: 978-1-943536-53-5
2019 by Chemeketa Community College. All rights reserved.
Introduction 2019 by Kevin Dye. Used by permission.
Chemeketa Press is a nonprofit publishing endeavor at Chemeketa Community College that works with faculty, staff, and students to create affordable and effective alternatives to commercial textbooks. All proceeds from the sales of this textbook go toward the development of new textbooks.
To learn more, visit www.chemeketapress.org .
Publisher : Tim Rogers
Director : Steve Richardson
Managing Editor : Brian Mosher
Instructional Editor : Stephanie Lenox
Design Editor : Ronald Cox IV
Cover Illustration : David Moraga
Interior Design : Ronald Cox IV
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
I NTRODUCTION
M Y F IRST S UMMER IN THE S IERRA
T HROUGH THE F OOTHILLS WITH A F LOCK OF S HEEP
I N C AMP ON THE N ORTH F ORK OF THE M ERCED
A B READ F AMINE
T O THE H IGH M OUNTAINS
T HE Y OSEMITE
M OUNT H OFFMAN AND L AKE T ENAYA
A S TRANGE E XPERIENCE
T HE M ONO T RAIL
B LOODY C A ON AND M ONO L AKE
T HE T UOLUMNE C AMP
B ACK TO THE L OWLANDS
Illustrations
H ORSESHOE B END , M ERCED R IVER
O N S ECOND B ENCH . E DGE OF THE M AIN F OREST B ELT, ABOVE C OULTERVILLE, NEAR G REELEY S M ILL
C AMP , N ORTH F ORK OF THE M ERCED
M OUNTAIN L IVE O AK ( Quercus chrysolepis ), EIGHT FEET IN D IAMETER
S UGAR P INE
D OUGLAS S QUIRREL OBSERVING B ROTHER M AN
D IVIDE BETWEEN THE T UOLUMNE AND THE M ERCED, BELOW H AZEL G REEN
T RACK OF S INGING D ANCING G RASSHOPPER IN THE A IR OVER N ORTH D OME
Abies Magnifica (M T . C LARK , T OP OF S OUTH D OME , M T . S TARR K ING )
I LLUSTRATING G ROWTH OF N EW P INE FROM B RANCH BELOW THE B REAK OF A XIS OF S NOW - CRUSHED T REE
A PPROACH OF D OME C REEK TO Y OSEMITE
J UNIPERS IN T ENAYA C ANYON
V IEW OF T ENAYA L AKE SHOWING C ATHEDRAL P EAK
O NE OF THE T RIBUTARY F OUNTAINS OF THE T UOLUMNE C ANYON W ATERS, ON THE N ORTH S IDE OF THE H OFFMAN R ANGE
G LACIER M EADOW, ON THE H EADWATERS OF THE T UOLUMNE , 9500 FEET ABOVE THE SEA
M ONO L AKE AND V OLCANIC C ONES, LOOKING S OUTH
H IGHEST M ONO V OLCANIC C ONES ( NEAR VIEW )
O NE OF THE H IGHEST M T . R ITTER F OUNTAINS
G LACIER M EADOW STREWN WITH M ORAINE B OULDERS , 10,000 FEET ABOVE THE SEA ( NEAR M T . D ANA )
F RONT OF C ATHEDRAL P EAK
V IEW OF U PPER T UOLUMNE V ALLEY
Introduction
John Muir struggled in his twenties, searching for his life s purpose and direction. He was a gifted inventor and amateur botanist. He harbored vague dreams of attending medical school in Michigan. During the Civil War, though, he quit college, joined his brother in Canada for two years, and finally found work designing and maintaining machinery at a barrel factory in Indianapolis.
Then, nearing thirty, on the cusp of a prosperous middle-class life, Muir suffered an accident that changed the course of his life. While tightening machine belts, he lost hold of a file that flew from a whirring belt and punctured his right cornea. As the fluid drained from his eye, he quickly lost his sight in that eye. A few hours later, his left eye also went dark, apparently in a sympathetic response.
After a depressing, month-long convalescence, unsure if he would ever see again, Muir finally regained full vision. He also gained a new clarity of purpose. Vowing to give up his life in urban factories and his own inventions, he decided to revel instead in the glory of God s inventions. He decided to set out exploring wild nature, far from Midwestern cities.
Over the summer, he said goodbye to family and friends, gathered his savings, a satchel full of botanical books, bread, tea, and other travel items. Perhaps most essential was his new writing and sketching notebook, in which he inscribed his name and address: John Muir, Earth Planet, Universe. After walking from Indiana to Florida writing, sketching, and collecting botanical specimens, he boarded a steamship for San Francisco in search of the legendary Yosemite Valley, which was still barely known to most Americans.
My First Summer in the Sierra tells the story of Muir s introduction to the California wilds, and his conversion to mountaineer and champion of the Sierra Nevada mountains that he calls his Range of Light. However, this is not, as many have assumed, a raw, firsthand account of his 1869 summer in the mountains. He revised this narrative for decades. In fact, it wasn t until forty years after his first full summer in California that Muir gathered old notebooks, rewritten drafts, and published articles, and began to reconstruct them into this book.
At 76, having survived his wife, and living alone in his large Martinez, California home, he wrote to a friend:
I ve been reading old musty dusty Yosemite Notes until I m tired and blinky blind, trying to arrange them in something like lateral, medial, and terminal moraines on my den floor. I never imagined I had accumulated so vast a number . I thought that in a quiet day or two I might select all that would be required for a [Yosemite] guidebook; but the stuff seems enough for a score of big jungle books, and it s very hard, I find, to steer through on anything like a steady course in reasonable time.
He managed to steer through them, however, and My First Summer was the first of several autobiographical books he published in the final years of his life.
My First Summer is organized like a daily journal with chapters based on the geographic region where Muir camped for several weeks at a time with Mr. Delaney s large flock of sheep, pasturing them up and down the mountain range through the summer months. Muir was in the mood to accept work of any kind that would take me into the mountains, whose treasures I had tasted last summer in the Yosemite region. This arrangement also gave Muir ample time to ramble away on hikes with Carlo the dog, and to describe and sketch everything that he encountered.
While he occasionally evokes other senses, Muir s narrative is about seeing the beauty all around us. Muir implores readers, as Henry David Thoreau did a generation earlier, to wake up to the miracle of the present moment. He also gives voice to secular spiritual awe, a pantheistic philosophy that was articulated many years earlier by Ralph Waldo Emerson. To do this, he often relies on religious language. Perhaps Muir thought his Christian audience in 1910 would feel comfortable with his religious tone. Or perhaps, encountering this grandest of God s terrestrial cities, cathedral groves of great firs and sequoias, temple valleys surrounded by blessed mountains, Muir could find no other words.
Along with his passion, Muir also brings the curiosity and interest of a citizen scientist to this book. When he drafted his original journals, he tried to report everything that he observed in the Sierra Nevada Range to the scientific world. Like his heroes, Charles Darwin and Alexander von Humboldt, he saw the ecosystem of mountains, glaciers, rivers, plants, and animals as a great puzzle that was constantly revealing secrets to keen observers. His instincts always pointed him toward interconnections in the natural world. Geology and ecology were just emerging as fields of study, and many of his observations and pronouncements in My First Summer have become classic statements of ecological thinking: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
Despite his scientific interests, Muir s anthropomorphic musings on the plant and animal people repeatedly bring us back to the feeling Muir wants us to embrace with him. After his famous line above, he continues, One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers. These reflections evoke a mystical sense of the interconnectedness of life.
Such ecological insight and poetic prose still move contemporary readers, but many find other aspects of this book, and of Muir s preservationist legacy, to be outdated and problematic. Most troubling are Muir s dehumanizing references to Chinese and Native American people he encountered in the Sierra Nevada. He introduces his companions as a nameless Chinaman and Billy the Indian, but has more to say about the emotions and actions of Carlo the St. Bernard than his human companions. He refers repeatedly to the far from clean, Digger Indians, a term now viewed as a derogatory slur often attached to Great Basin and mountain bands of Miwok, Shoshone, Paiute, and other groups by fearful, ignorant prospectors and settlers. Muir was a product of the nineteenth-century and seems to have viewed both Chinese immigrants and Native people he encountered as less civilized members of the human family.
While Muir s descriptions contain racist stereotyping and a desire to see the Native Americans vanish from sight and mind, he also admonishes himself for his own narrowness and lack of empathy. When he encounters a band of Indians from Mono on their way back to Yosemite for a load of acorns, he tries to hurry by without any contact, and after convincing the Indians he has no whiskey or tobacco to trade, he writes, How glad I was to get away from the gray, grim crowd and see them vanish down the trail. To his credit, however, he scrutinizes his own prejudice:
Yet it seems sad [that I] feel such desperate repulsion from one s fellow beings, however degraded. To prefer the society of squirrels and woodchucks to that of our own species must surely be unnatural. So with a fresh breeze and a hill or mountain between us, I must wish them Godspeed and try to pray and sing with Burns, It s coming yet, for a that. That man to man, the warld o er shall brothers be for a that.
Many who are concerned with the rights of indigen