My First Summer In The Sierra, John Muir
“Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat...”
is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees, but as far as I have seen, man alone, and the animals he tames, destroy these gardens. Awkward, lumbering bears, the Don tells me, love to wallow in them in hot weather, and deer with their sharp feet cross them again and again, sauntering and feeding, yet never a lily have I seen spoiled by them. Rather, like gardeners, they seem to cultivate them, pressing and dibbling as required. Anyhow not a leaf or petal seems misplaced.
The trees round about them seem as perfect in beauty and form as the lilies, their boughs whorled like lily leaves in exact order. This evening, as usual, the glow of our camp-fire is working enchantment on everything within reach of its rays. Lying beneath the firs, it is glorious to see them dipping their spires in the starry sky, the sky like one vast lily meadow in bloom! How can I close my eyes on so precious a night?
July 10. – A Douglas squirrel, peppery, pungent autocrat of the woods, is barking overhead this morning, and the small forest birds, so seldom seen when one travels noisily, are out on sunny branches along the edge of the meadow getting warm, taking a sun bath and dew bath–a fine sight. How charming the sprightly confident looks and ways of these little feathered people of the trees! They seem sure of dainty, wholesome breakfasts, and where are so many breakfasts to come from? How helpless should we find ourselves should we try to set a table for them of such buds, seeds, insects, etc., as would keep them in the pure wild health they enjoy! Not a headache or any other ache amongst them, I guess. As for the irrepressible Douglas squirrels, one never thinks of their breakfasts or the possibility of hunger, sickness, or death; rather they seem like stars above chance or change, even though we may see them at times busy gathering burrs, working hard for a living.
On through the forest ever higher we go, a cloud of dust dimming the way, thousands of feet, trampling leaves and flowers, but in this mighty wilderness they seem but a feeble band, and a thousand gardens will escape their blighting touch. They cannot hurt the trees, though some of the seedlings suffer, and should the woolly locusts be greatly multiplied, as
“This evening, as usual, the glow of our camp-fire is working enchantment on everything within reach of its rays. Lying beneath the firs, it is glorious to see them dipping their spires in the starry sky, the sky like one vast lily meadow in bloom! How can I close my eyes on so precious a night?”
To celebrate John Muir Day today we’re sharing two pages from My First Summer In The Sierra (found within Journeys In The Wilderness: A John Muir Reader in the library’s collection) because we bookmarked four and couldn’t pick just one. The first stood out, as many pages in many books are right now, as illustrating how it might feel when all this is over, when “every movement of limbs is pleasure” and beauty is felt “through all one’s flesh like radiant heat”. The second is just bursting with the kind of exuberant, unbridled joy for nature that sprouts up throughout all of Muir’s writing. This duo, we hope, will shine some of Muir’s brightness onto darker days.
The John Muir Trust have listed 6 ways to celebrate John Muir Day on their website, one being to get lost in his own writing — many of John Muir’s personal journals have been available to read online and include, among others, his 1867-1868 "thousand mile walk," his early years in Yosemite and his extensive travels in Alaska.
John Muir was born on April 21, 1838 in Dunbar, Scotland. At age 11 he moved with his family to Wisconsin in the United States of America, where he continued on his spectacular trajectory through life as a farmer, inventor, sheepherder, naturalist, explorer, writer, and conservationist — the Father of the National Parks. In 1868 at age 30, Muir arrived in California and found work as a shepherd in Yosemite Valley, a season which he recounts with vivid imagery (and humorous, less favourable views on sheep) in My First Summer In The Sierra, published in 1911. Without this first summer he might not have felt so passionately about the environmental degradation that subsequently befell the mountains and valleys of California by loggers, miners and herders. My First Summer In The Sierra has been described as ‘the journal of a soul on fire’, and it is exactly that.
