The Invention of Nature

Muir tenaciously clung to the idea of following the footsteps of his hero. If anything, as he became older his lifelong wish to see South America grew stronger. There was also less holding him at home. In 1905, his wife Louie died and then both his daughters married and had their own families. When Muir reached his seventies, an age when other men would have thought about their retirement, he still did not give up his dreams. He now turned his thoughts in earnest to his Humboldt exploration. Maybe it was the writing of his book My First Summer in the Sierra, in spring 1910, that renewed his wish to fulfil the dream of his youth – after all it had been his urge to be ‘a Humboldt’ that had made him leave Indianapolis and had brought him to California more than forty years previously. Muir bought a new edition of Humboldt’s Personal Narrative and reread it from cover to cover, marking and annotating the pages. Nothing would stop him. No matter how much his daughters and friends protested, he had to go ‘before it is too late’. They knew that he could be stubborn. He had so often talked about the expedition, one old friend said, that she was certain Muir would not be happy until he had seen South America.

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books. Then, on 12 August, Muir boarded a steamer in New York. He was finally travelling towards ‘the great hot river I’ve been wanting to see’. An hour before the ship left the harbour he dashed off one last note to his increasingly distraught daughter Helen. ‘Don’t fret about me,’ he assured her, ‘I’m perfectly well.’ Two weeks later Muir reached Belém in Brazil, the gateway to the Amazon. Forty-four years after he had left Indianapolis for his walk south, and more than a century after Humboldt had set sail, Muir finally set foot on South American soil. He was seventy-three years old.

It had all begun with Humboldt and with a walk. ‘I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,’ Muir wrote after his return, ‘for going out, I found, was really going in.’

In April 1911, Muir left California and crossed the country on the Southern Pacific Railroad to the East Coast where he spent a few weeks working manically on the manuscripts of several books, and campaigning.

¹ Humboldt’s dream of a canal across the Panama isthmus had still not come to fruition. Instead, a railway now crossed the narrow stretch of land from Colón to Panama City. Completed only thirteen years previously, in 1855, it had been used by the tens of thousands of people who had gone to California during the gold rush.

² Muir marked in his copy of Views of Nature

and Cosmos the sections where Humboldt had written about the ‘harmonious co-operation of forces’ and the ‘unity of all the vital forces of nature’, as well as Humboldt’s famous remark that ‘nature is indeed a reflex of the whole’.

³ Humboldt had often explained how everything was infused with life – rocks, flowers, insects and so on. In his copy of Views of Nature, Muir underlined Humboldt’s remarks on this ‘universal profusion of life’ and the organic forces that were ‘incessantly at work’.

⁴ Only Muir’s stern father was displeased with his son’s nature writing. Daniel Muir, who had left his wife in 1873 to join a religious sect, wrote to John: ‘You cannot warm the heart of the Saint of God with your cold icey topped mountains.’

⁵ Muir had underlined a similar idea in his copy of Thoreau’s book The Maine Woods which read: ‘But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure … a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.’

⁶ Roosevelt kept his promise when Yosemite Valley as well as Mariposa Grove were added to Yosemite National Park in 1906.

Epilogue

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT has been largely forgotten in the English-speaking world. He was one of the last polymaths, and died at a time when scientific disciplines were hardening into tightly fenced and more specialized fields. Consequently his more holistic approach – a scientific method that included art, history, poetry and politics alongside hard data – has fallen out of favour. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there was little room for a man whose knowledge had bridged a vast range of subjects. As scientists crawled into their narrow areas of expertise, dividing and further subdividing, they lost Humboldt’s interdisciplinary methods and his concept of nature as a global force.