The Invention of Nature

Muir avoided cities, towns and villages. He wanted to be in nature. Some nights he slept in the forest and awoke to the dawn chorus of birds; other nights he found shelter in a barn on someone’s farm. In Tennessee he climbed his first mountain. As the valleys and forested slopes stretched out below him, he admired the billowing landscape. While he continued his journey, Muir began to read the mountains and their vegetation zones through Humboldt’s eyes, noticing how the plants that he knew from the north grew here on the higher colder slopes while those in the valleys were becoming distinctively southern and unfamiliar. Mountains, Muir realized, were like ‘highways upon which northern plants may extend their colonies to the South’.

During his forty-five-day walk across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and then Florida, Muir’s thoughts began to change. It was as if with every mile that he moved away from his old life, he came closer to Humboldt. As he collected plants, observed insects and made his bed on moss-cushioned forest floors, Muir experienced the natural world in a new way. Where previously he had been a collector of individual specimens for his herbarium, he now began to see connections. Everything was important in this grand big tangle of life. There existed no unconnected ‘fragment’, Muir thought. Tiny organisms were as much part of this web as humankind. ‘Why ought man to value himself as more than an infinitely small unit of the one great unit of creation?’ Muir asked. ‘The cosmos,’ he said, using Humboldt’s term, would be incomplete without man but also without ‘the smallest transmicroscopic creature’.

In Florida Muir was struck down by malaria but after recuperating for a few weeks, he boarded a ship to Cuba. The thoughts of the ‘glorious mountains & flower fields’ of the tropics had sustained him during his fever attacks, but he was still weak. In Cuba he felt too ill to explore the island that Humboldt had called his home for many months. Exhausted by the recurring fevers, Muir finally and reluctantly abandoned his South American plans and decided to travel to California where he hoped the milder climate would restore his health.

In February 1868, only a month after his arrival, Muir left Cuba for New York from where he found a cheap passage to California. The quickest and safest way from the North American East Coast to the West was not overland across the continent but by boat. For forty dollars Muir bought a steerage ticket that took him from New York back south, to Colón on the Caribbean coast of Panama. From here he made the short fifty-mile rail journey across the Panama isthmus to Panama City on the Pacific coast, and saw the tropical rainforest for the first time, but only from his train carriage.¹ Trees, garlanded with purple, red and yellow blossoms, rushed by at ‘cruel speed’, Muir moaned, and he could ‘only gaze from the car platform & weep’. There was no time for a botanical exploration because he had to catch his schooner in Panama City.

On 27 March 1868, a month after he had departed from New York, Muir arrived in San Francisco, on the West Coast of the United States. He hated the city. Over the past two decades the gold rush had turned the small town of 1,000 inhabitants into a bustling city of some 150,000 people. Bankers, merchants and entrepreneurs had come with those who had tried to find their luck. There were noisy taverns and well-stocked shops, as well as full warehouses and plenty of hotels. On his first day, Muir asked a passer-by the way out of town. When questioned where he wanted to go, he replied, ‘To any place that is wild.’

And wild it was. After one night in San Francisco Muir left and walked towards the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range that runs 400 miles from north to south through California (and some of its eastern parts through Nevada), roughly parallel to and 100 miles inland from the Pacific coast. Its highest peak is almost 15,000 feet and in its midst lies Yosemite Valley, about 180 miles east of San Francisco. Yosemite Valley was surrounded by huge granite rocks with sheer cliffs and famed for its waterfalls and trees.

To reach the Sierra Nevada, Muir first had to cross the vast Central Valley that stretches as a great plain towards the mountain range. As he walked through high grass and flowers, he thought it was like an ‘Eden from end to end’. The Central Valley resembled one enormous flowerbed, a carpet of colour that was rolled out under his feet. All this would change within the next few decades as agriculture and irrigation transformed it into the world’s largest orchard and vegetable patch. Muir would later lament that this great wild meadow had been ‘ploughed and pastured out of existence’.