by Marion Randall Parsons
Source: Sierra Club Bulletin, John Muir Memorial Number, Vol. 10, No. 1 (January, 1916)
I believe that John Muir's name is destined to be immortal through his writings on mountains, forests, rivers, meadows, and the sentiment of the animal and plant life they contain. I do not believe anyone else has ever lived with just the same sentiment toward trees and flowers and the works of nature in general as that which John Muir manifested in his life, his conversations and his writings.
In the splendid journey which I had the privilege of taking with him to Alaska in 1896 I first became aware of his passionate love of nature in all its forms and his reverence for it as the direct handiwork of the Creator. He retained from his early religious training under his father this belief, which is so strongly expressed in the Old Testament, that all the works of nature are directly the work of God. In this sense I have never known anyone whose nature philosophy was more thoroughly theistic; at the same time he was a thorough-going evolutionist, and always delighted in my own evolutionary studies which I described to him from time to time in the course of our journeyings and conversations.
It was in Alaska that he quoted the lines from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister which inspired all his travels:
Keep not standing fixed and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where 'er thou foot it,
And stout heart are still at home.
In each land the sun doth visit,
We are gay what 'er betide,
To give room for wandering is it
That the world was made so wide.
Another sentiment of his regarding trees and flowers always impressed me: that was his attributing to them a personality, an individuality such as we associate with certain human beings and animals, but rarely with plants. To him a tree was something not only to be loved, but to be respected and revered. I well remember his intense indignation over the proposal by his friend Charles S. Sargent to substitute the name Magnolia foetida for Magnolia grandifora on the grounds of priority. He quoted Sargent as saying, "After all, 'what's in a name?'" and himself as replying, "There is everything in the name; why inflict upon a beautiful and defenceless plant for all time the stigma of such a name as Magnolia foetida ? You yourself would not like to have your own name changed from Charles S. Sargent to 'the malodorous Sargent."'
John Muir's incomparable literary style did not come to him easily, but as the result of the most intense effort. I observed his methods of writing in connection with two of his books upon which he was engaged during the years 1911 and 1912. He came to our home on the Hudson in June, 1911, after the Yale Commencement, where he had received the degree of LL.D. on June 21. He brought with him his new silken hood, in which he said he had looked very grand in the Commencement parade. On Friday, June 2I, he was established in Woodsome Lodge,* [* the name is now changed to John Muir Lodge.] a log cabin on a secluded mountain height, to complete his volume on the Yosemite. Daily he rose at 4:30 o'clock, and after a simple cup of coffee labored incessantly on his two books, The Yosemite and Boyhood and Youth. It was very interesting to watch how difficult it was for him. In my diary of the time I find the following notes: "Knowing his beautiful and easy style it is very interesting to learn how difficult it is for him; he groans over his labors, he writes and rewrites and interpolates. He loves the simplest English language and admires most of all Carlyle, Emerson and Thoreau. He is a very firm believer in Thoreau and starts my reading deeply of this author. He also loves his Bible and is constantly quoting it, as well as Milton and Burns. In his attitude toward nature, as well as in his special gifts and abilities, Muir shares many qualities with Thoreau. First among these is his mechanical ability, his fondness for the handling of tools; second, his close identification with nature; third, his interpretation of the religious spirit of nature; fourth, his happiness in solitude with nature; fifth, his lack of sympathy with crowds of people; sixth, his intense love of animals." Thoreau's quiet residence at Walden is to be contrasted with Muir's world-wide journeyings from Scotland to Wisconsin; his penniless journey down the Mississippi to Louisiana, Florida, across Panama and northward into California in its early grandeur; his establishment of the sawmill, showing again his mechanical ability, as a means of livilihood in the Yosemite; his climbs in the High Sierra and discovery of still living glaciers; his eagerness to see the largest glaciers of Alaska and his several journeys and sojourns there; his wandering all over the great western and eastern forests of the United States; his visits to special forests in Europe; his world tour, without preconceived plan, including the wondrous forests of Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Finally, his very last great journey.
When starting out on this South American journey, from which I among other friends tried to dissuade him, he often quoted the phrase, "I never turn back." Although he greatly desired to have a comrade on this journey, and often urged me to accompany him, he finally was compelled to start out alone, quoting Milton: "I have chosen the lonely way."
On July 26 I said good-bye to this very dear friend, leaving him to work on his books and prepare for the long journey to South America, especially to see the forests of Araucaria. I know that at this time he had little intention of going on to Africa. It was impulse which led him from the east coast of South America to take a long northward journey in order to catch a steamer for the Cape of Good Hope.
He remained at Garrison for more than two months, writing his Boyhood and Youth and his Yosemite, and I have just decided to erect a tablet at the log cabin where this work was done and to name the cabin John Muir Lodge.
Among the personal characteristics which stand out like crystal in the minds and hearts of his friends were his hatred of shams and his scorn of the conventions of life, his boldness and fearlessness of attack, well illustrated in his assault on the despoilers of the Hetch Hetchy Valley of the Yosemite, whom he loved to characterize as "thieves and robbers." It was a great privilege to be associated with him in this campaign. But certainly his chief characteristic was his intimate converse with nature and passionate love of its beauties; also I believe his marvelous insight into the creative powers of nature, closely interwoven with his deep religious sentiments and beliefs.
There were published in the New York Evening Mail some verses by Charles L. Edson with which I would close this all too brief tribute:
John o' the mountains, wonderful John,
Is past the summit and traveling on;
The turn of the trail on the mountain side,
A smile and "Hail!" where the glaciers slide,
A streak of red where the condors ride,
And John is over the Great Divide.
John o' the mountains camps today
On a level spot by the Milky Way;
And God is telling him how He rolled
The smoking earth from the iron mold,
And hammered the mountains till they were cold,
And planted the Redwood trees of old.
And John o' the mountains says: "I knew,
And I wanted to grapple the hand o' you;
And now we're sure to be friends and chums
And camp together till chaos comes."
In November, 1912, not long after his return from his last long journey across South America and Africa, Mr. Muir came to Berkeley to begin work on his Alaska notes. For a month he worked at my home with a stenographer, getting an exact transcription of the journals. The travel-worn, weather-stained little books carried on those memorable exploring trips of nearly forty years before were crammed with sketches and voluminous notes, jotted down perhaps in the canoe, or around the camp-fire, but oftenest in the solitudes of the great glaciers in whose study he cheerfully underwent so much cold and hunger and hardship.
It was most amusing to watch Mr. Muir at work. His intense interest in his subject led him to make many a long digression as his notes brought this or that incident to mind. Time meant nothing to him. Household machinery might stop, food grow cold on the table, and the business members of the family miss their morning trains while Mr. Muir pursued the tranquil course of his subject to the end. And so for an hour or more he might discourse while the stenographer sat with her hands folded. Her stolidity and indifference exasperated him beyond measure. To have no curiosity about the "terrestrial manifestations of God," above all to have no interest in glaciers, was to him both incomprehensible and sinful.
Once started on a task Mr. Muir was a tireless worker. The book in hand might have lain fallow for thirty years, but when it began to take form and substance he was all afire with eagerness to see it finishes. Long evenings he spent poring over the notebooks or drawing from them the texts of the monologues he delighted in. His mind, indeed, dwelt with such complete absorption on his work that his conversation nearly always indicated its trend. His speech had all the beauty of phrase, the force and vigor of style of his written word, but with an added spell of fire and enthusiasm and glowing vitality that made it an inspiration and never-ending delight. Many a page of this Alaska book is for me a living record of our fireside hours of companionship.
Not until many months later, however, did I have any close acquaintance with Travels in Alaska. After working on it only a short time, Mr. Muir laid the book aside to take an active part in the fight for Hetch Hetchy. A few weeks after the final defeat a severe illness, from whose effects he never fully recovered, again interrupted the book. In his weakened condition the mere sifting out of the enormous mass of material was a task almost beyond his strength. Find him day utterly discouraged over it, I offered to go to him a day or two each week to help him until he could find the secretary to his mind. The arrangement proved unexpectedly happy and congenial to us both, and lasted until within a week of his death.
No on unacquainted with Mr. Muir's habits of work and living could appreciate the difficulty, nor, indeed, the humorous nature of the task. He was living alone in the dismantled old home, unused save for his study and sleeping porch. He went to his daughter's home for his meals, but neither she nor anyone else was allowed to touch the study, overflowing as it was with books and papers. Confusion was no word for the state of the manuscripts. He had been collecting material for over thirty years. In the interval that had elapsed since he began real work on it the two typewritten copies of the journals had become mixed, and in some cases both had been revised. Material from certain parts of the journals, moreover, had been used in newspaper letters and again in magazine articles, so as many as five different versions of some passages were in existence. Even had they been collected together and in order, to read and compare and reject would have been sufficiently hard, but fresh versions were constantly coming to light, or in my absence Mr. Muir would unearth a copy of some version already disposed of. He was in the habit of making notes on anything that came to hand - an opened envelope, a paper bag, the margin of a newspaper. No scrap of manuscript could ever be destroyed, and I could devise no system of putting the rejected material aside that served to keep him from "discovering" it at some later date. Finally I took to hiding copied and rejected sheets alike inside a great roll of papers conspicuously tied with red ribbons and labeled in huge capitals "Copied!" and little by little the orange-box full of manuscript and the piles of scattered notes littering desk and table were reduced to a single working copy.
By seven o'clock each morning Mr. Muir had breakfasted and was ready for the day's work, usually lasting, with but the interruption of an hour at lunch and dinner and another at mail time, until ten at night. Composition was always slow and laborious for him. "This business of writing books," he would often say, "is a long, tiresome, endless job." To read his easy, flowing, forceful sentences, as rich in imagery and simple in diction as Bible English, no one would dream what infinite pains had been taken in their creation. Each sentence, each phrase, each word, underwent his critical scrutiny, not once but twenty times before he was satisfied to let it stand. His rare critical faculty was unimpaired to the end. So too was the freshness and vigor of his whole outlook on life. No trace of pessimism or despondency, even in the defeat of his most deeply cherished hopes, ever darkened his beautiful philosophy, and only in the intense physical fatigue brought on by his long working hours was there any hint of failing powers.
Mr. Muir himself, however, seemed to know that the end was near. Very touching were his attempts to rehabilitate the old house, whose forlorn emptiness and desolation were never allowed to weigh upon his own serene spirit, to put it in readiness for whomsoever should next live there. During the latter months of his life he often expressed the conviction that he would never live to write another book. His plan had long been to have his books tell the story of his life and travels, and in the early days of our work together he would often speak of the volumes of this wanderer's autobiography that he hoped yet to complete. But he was curiously untroubled about leaving his work unfinished. To a most unusual degree he seemed to feel that his had been a glorious life, wholly worth while, "Oh, I have had a bully life!" he said once. "I have done what I set out to do." And again: "To get these glorious works of God into yourself - that's the great thing; not to write about them." That nature's beauty had a deep and lasting influence on character was one of his most earnest believes. No impassable gulf between things material and spiritual ever existed for him, and scientific study only served to deepen his natural reverence and faith. Throughout this book, as through all the others, rings his triumphant belief in the harmony and unity of our universe, its imperishable beauty, its divine conception, "reflecting the plans of God."
It was a rare privilege to work with him day by day, a man of the most original thought, of the very highest ideals, of simplicity and truth and kindliness unsurpassed. He gave of his best in conversation. His genial, whimsical humor, his acute appraisal of character and motives, his wide knowledge of literature and intimate friendship with many of the leading men of his time, made him a wonderful companion. The memory of our long hours together will always remain a delight and an inspiration, for they brought me not only increased love and reverence for a beautiful spirit, but a new conception of the spiritual significance of the great world of nature he loved so well.
The work on this book was the chief pleasure and recreation of Mr. Muir's last days, for through it he lived again many of the most glorious experiences of his life. Always I shall remembers the glow that would light his face whenever he paused in his work to tell in stirring words the story of some particularly inspiring day. Many years ago, after watching a sunrise in Glacier Bay, he wrote: "We turned and sailed away, joining the outgoing bergs . . . feeling that, whatever the future might have in store, the treasures we had gained this glorious morning would enrich our lives forever." How true this was, how vital a part of his life these treasures of memory were, no one who met him could fail to know. For him neither time nor age had power to dim the glory of that icy land, after the Sierra Nevada, the best loved of all his wilderness homes.
Source: Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1916 January)