The Invention of Nature

Unlike the scientists who at that time conducted the Geological Survey of California and who believed that cataclysmic eruptions had given birth to the valley, Muir was the first to realize that glaciers – slowly moving giants of ice – had carved it out over thousands of years. Muir began to read the glacial footprints and scars on the rocks. When he found a living glacier, he proved his theory of glacial motion in Yosemite Valley by placing stakes into the ice which moved several inches over a period of forty-six days. He had become completely ‘iced’, he explained. ‘I have nothing to send but what is frozen or freezable,’ he wrote to Jeanne Carr. And though Muir still wanted to see the Andes, he decided not to leave California as long as the Sierra ‘trust me and talk to me’.

In Yosemite Valley, Muir also thought about Humboldt’s concept of plant distribution. In spring 1872, exactly three years after his first visit, Muir sketched the migration of Arctic plants over thousands of years from the plains in the Central Valley up to the glaciers in the Sierra. His little drawing showed the position of the plants, he explained, ‘at the opening of the glacial springtime’ but also the location where they grew now, near the summit. It was a sketch that reveals its parentage in Humboldt’s Naturgemälde and Muir’s new understanding that botany, geography, climate and geology were tightly intermeshed.

Muir’s sketch showed the movement of Arctic plants over thousands of years. He gave three positions: in the plains ‘setting out on their journey up the mountains’; further up some were still ‘lingering’ and then near the summit, the ‘recent position of arctic plants – still journeying upward’ (Illustration Credit 23.1)

Muir enjoyed nature intellectually, emotionally and viscerally. His surrender to nature was, as he said, ‘unconditional’, and he happily ignored dangers. One evening, for example, he climbed on to a perilously high ledge behind the Upper Yosemite Fall to investigate what he thought might be a mark made by a glacier. He slipped and fell but somehow managed to hold tight to a small bit of protruding rock. As he crouched on the ledge behind the waterfall some 500 feet high, the relentless spray drove him against the wall behind him. He was soaking wet and almost in a trance. It was pitch dark by the time he scrambled down, but he was ecstatic – baptized, as he said, by the waterfall.

Muir was at ease in the mountains. He leapt across steep icy slopes ‘as surely as a mountain goat’, one friend said, and climbed up the highest trees. Winter storms were greeted with enthusiasm. When strong tremors shook Yosemite Valley and his little cabin in spring 1872, Muir ran outside, shouting, ‘A noble Earthquake!!!’ As huge granite boulders tumbled, Muir saw his mountain theories brought alive. ‘Destruction,’ he said, ‘is always creation.’ This was proper discovery. How could one find the truth of nature in a laboratory?

During these first few years in California, Muir wrote enthusiastic letters to his friends and family but also guided visitors through the valley. When Jeanne Carr, his old friend and mentor from his university days, moved to California from Madison with her husband, she introduced Muir to many scientists, artists and writers. He was easy to recognize, Muir wrote, visitors just had to look out for the ‘most suntanned and round shouldered and bashful man’. He welcomed scientists from across the States.

Respected American botanists Asa Gray and John Torrey came, as did geologist Joseph LeConte. Yosemite Valley was also becoming a tourist attraction and the numbers of visitors soon grew into the hundreds. In June 1864, three years before Muir first arrived, the US government had granted Yosemite Valley to the state of California as a park ‘for public use, resort and recreation’. As industrialization had picked up pace, more and more people were moving into cities and some began to feel the loss of nature in their lives. They now arrived in Yosemite on horses loaded with the comforts of civilization. With their gaudy clothes, Muir wrote, they were like colourful ‘bugs’ among the rocks and trees.

One visitor was Henry David Thoreau’s old mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been encouraged by Jeanne Carr to seek out Muir. The two men spent a few days together during which Muir, who had just turned thirty-three, showed the almost seventy-year-old Emerson his sketches and herbarium, as well as the valley and his beloved sequoias in the Mariposa Grove. But Muir was deeply disappointed that instead of camping under the open sky, Emerson preferred to spend his nights in one of the log cabins in the valley where tourists could rent a room. Emerson’s insistence on sleeping indoors was a ‘sad commentary’, Muir said, on ‘the glorious transcendentalism’.