A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf E-Book

John Muir

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'Many a beautiful plant cultivated to deformity, and arranged in strict geometrical beds, the whole pretty affair a laborious failure side by side with divine beauty.' A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf is the second book in John Muir's Wilderness-Discovery series. It is within this work that we are really given strong clues toward Muir's future trailblazing movement for environmental conservation, in such comments as 'The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.' Muir's walk from Indiana to Florida was conceived in order to explore and study further the flora and fauna across states. He undertakes this alone, a dangerous choice perhaps so soon after the civil war, as many characters along the way forewarn. Indeed, Muir is threatened by a robber, and we see a new side to the quiet, lowly gentleman we know as he springs into self-defence mode with lightning initiative and remarkable courage. This is not the only facet of Muir's personality that is uncovered throughout this journey. He makes reference to feeling 'dreadfully lonesome and poor', which is intriguing as his circumstances are self-sought: 'Stayed with lots of different people but preferred sleeping outside alone where possible'. He spends a substantial period of time struck down with malaria, which does not come as a surprise; he was covering many miles on an unsustainably meagre diet with thirst often quenched with swamp water or not at all. Join Muir in Kentucky forests, Cumberland mountains, Florida swamps and all the elegantly described trees, plants, creatures and rocks in-between. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf teaches us as much about Muir himself as it does the ecosystems in the wilderness across those 1,000 miles.

Leseprobe

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

A radical nature travelogue from the founder of national parks

John Muir

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www.v-publishing.co.uk

Please note that this is the original text from 1916, and contains language which today may be deemed offensive or inappropriate. However, in order to faithfully reproduce this classic work, the language has not been edited. The views stated by the author are not the views of Vertebrate Publishing.

– Contents –

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Series introduction by Terry Gifford

Foreword by Terry Gifford

Chapter 1 Kentucky Forests and Caves

Chapter 2 Crossing the Cumberland Mountains

Chapter 3 Through the River Country of Georgia

Chapter 4 Camping Among the Tombs

Chapter 5 Through Florida Swamps and Forests

Chapter 6 Cedar Keys

Chapter 7 A Sojourn in Cuba

Chapter 8 By a Crooked Route to California

Chapter 9 Twenty Hill Hollow

Photographs

– Series introduction –

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Terry Gifford

We have never needed nature more than now. At a time when our relationship with our home planet is under stress, the positive words of John Muir (1838–1914) can help us to reconnect, retune, and readjust what it is that we should value for the survival of our species. In 1901 John Muir opened his book Our National Parks with words that might resonate for readers today: ‘Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find that going to the mountains is going home’. This Scot, transplanted to the USA at the age of eleven by his family to help carve a farm out of the wilds of Wisconsin, came to invent the modern notion of a national park for the ‘recreation’ of future generations. His initial inspiration was Yosemite Valley, deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where he was sought out by the US President, Theodore Roosevelt, who was persuaded on a characteristic Muir camping trip that such an uplifting place and its rich ecology should be preserved in perpetuity for the nation.

Anticipating the modern concept of ‘biophilia’ – our need for regular contact between our inner nature with the outer nature around us – Muir’s opening sentence continued with the idea ‘that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life’. Muir’s suggestion that the fountains of our own lives need to be in contact with the self-renewing cycles of life in wild landscapes led him to be recognised as the founder of the American conservation movement. His establishment of the Sierra Club – still to this day a vigorous local and national conservation organisation in the US – arose because Muir understood the importance of local people holding government to account through membership of a national environmental movement. Muir knew that national policies would be needed if the balance between the economic ‘usefulness’ of timber and rivers was to be controlled. By the end of Our National Parks Muir’s tone had changed. ‘Any fool can destroy trees’, he declared in full preaching mode. ‘God has cared for these trees … but he cannot save them from fools – only Uncle Sam can do that’.

Actually, it was Muir’s ecological knowledge, gained by close observation, by scientific experiment and by always reflecting upon the larger forces at work in nature, that resulted in insights ahead of their time, like the idea that unregulated clear cutting of timber reduced the usefulness of those irrigating rivers as ‘fountains of life’. At a time just before the notion of ‘Oekology’ was being proposed, Muir wrote that, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. And it is in such unassuming, seductively approachable prose that Muir explored his vision of nature and our relationship with it. It was as a popular writer of newspaper and journal articles that Muir gained his following as a writer. Late in life he began crafting these little lyrical discoveries into the inspirational books that speak so clearly to our heightened environmental awareness today.

– Foreword –

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Terry Gifford

In this book John Muir discovered a voice that changed the world. It is a living, improvised, articulation of a voice that ultimately led to the notion of national parks and the attempt to live the ideal that eluded King Lear – the opposite of Lear’s resignation to ‘unaccommodated man’. It is the voice of a young man in his twenties, free to walk and to think his own thoughts: free from his father’s extreme puritanism; free from a Civil War he felt was not his own; free from his university studies in the new fields of botany, geology and evolutionary theory; free from his draft-dodging apprenticeship of botanising in Canada; and newly free from the blindness that he thought was his life’s fate after an industrial accident. On this walk Muir would see for himself anew and think for himself anew. That many statements in this journal are still regarded as radical, and far from the accepted norm, indicates how this journal, in deceptively effortless lyricism, actually works hard at new insights from this newly freed sensibility.

When Muir identified himself at the start of this journal as ‘John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe’ he was not just connecting himself to the natural world – Humboldt’s Cosmos – but rather liberating himself from all that he had been bound by, learned from, been located in, that he wanted to shake off, but inevitably carried with him to both argue against and at the same time sharpen his new insights. So this is a walk measured in miles to the Gulf, but an inner journey to an unmeasurable new ecological self. It is less a travelogue and more an emergent environmental philosophy forged by walking ‘the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find’. It is a mark of the new orientation that Muir was seeking on this walk that just before he reached the sea he would write, ‘I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilised man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathise with the bears.’

Two examples will demonstrate Muir’s amazing thinking in response to the material environment in front of him on this trip. Outside Savannah, Georgia, Muir botanised in Bonaventure Cemetery, savouring its ‘depth of life’ in ‘the rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbed grandeur of the oaks’. The paradox of such life amongst the graves prompted one of Muir’s most striking reflections: ‘On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. Instead of the sympathy, the friendly union, of life and death so apparent in nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the archenemy of life, etc. Town children, especially, are steeped in this death orthodoxy, for the natural beauties of death are seldom seen or taught in towns.’ For any era, this would be a challenging idea, but for Muir’s journey it reveals how far he was prepared to push his thinking beyond the extreme puritanism of his father’s beliefs.

Before he had even entered Yosemite Valley and well before he proposed the Sierra Club outings to bring people into a landscape that he hoped they would then want to defend for future generations, Muir expressed his belief that contact with nature would in itself be deeply educative, especially for children struggling to understand the meaning of something as formidable as death: ‘But let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.’ That final sentence is deceptive in terms of the huge cultural shifts that Muir is proposing here. Muir’s sense of harmony is complex and the opposite of a pastoral simple complacency. Conceiving of Muir’s ‘beautiful blendings’ would sometimes be uncomfortable for the future readers of this personal journal, as is vividly demonstrated by his later reconception of the common cultural construction of alligators and snakes, with a little help, in typical Muir fashion, from the behaviour of rocks.

Further south, in the Florida swamps, he reflects upon the dynamics of predation through an image drawn from geology: ‘The antipathies existing in the Lord’s animal family must be wisely planned, like balanced repulsion and attraction in the mineral kingdom.’ Rather than Tennyson’s horror at ‘nature red in tooth and claw’, Muir’s ecological vision is in awe of a ‘wisdom’ that enables him to think of predator and prey in terms of a balanced ‘animal family’. It is the human species – ‘Lord Man’ – he went on to argue, that has developed a narrow hubris that precludes ecocentric sympathies: ‘How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies! How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! With what dismal irreverence we speak of our fellow mortals!’ Roderick Nash, in his book The Rights of Nature, says that this is ‘the first association of rights with what a later generation would call environment’. Muir was remembering from his childhood the Scottish biblical image of the serpent as he continued, ‘Though alligators, snakes, etc., naturally repel us, they are not mysterious evils. They dwell happily in these flowery wilds, are part of God’s family, unfallen, undepraved, and cared for with the same species of tenderness and love as is bestowed on angels in heaven or saints on earth.’ The notion that reptiles had rights and might be compared with saints would have been as radical an idea in 1867 as it still is for some in the twenty-first century.

This journal takes Muir into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in which his future fame would be based. A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf reveals the forging of the ecological way of seeing and thinking that would eventually make him the founder of the American conservation movement.

– Chapter 1 –

Kentucky Forests and Caves

I had long been looking from the wild woods and gardens of the Northern States to those of the warm south, and at last, all drawbacks overcome, I set forth (from Indianapolis) on the first day of September, 1867, joyful and free, on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. (The trip to Jeffersonville, on the banks of the Ohio, was made by rail.) Crossing the Ohio at Louisville (2 September), I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to anyone. Beyond the city I found a road running southward, and after passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey.

My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest. Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks, rejoicing in splendid visions of pines and palms and tropic flowers in glorious array, not, however, without a few cold shadows of loneliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.

I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life. Walked twenty miles, mostly on river bottom, and found shelter in a rickety tavern.

3 September. Escaped from the dust and squalor of my garret bedroom to the glorious forest. All the streams that I tasted hereabouts are salty and so are the wells. Salt River was nearly dry. Much of my way this forenoon was over naked limestone. After passing the level ground that extended twenty-five or thirty miles from the river I came to a region of rolling hills called Kentucky Knobs – hills of denudation, covered with trees to the top. Some of them have a few pines. For a few hours I followed the farmers’ paths, but soon wandered away from roads and encountered many a tribe of twisted vines difficult to pass.

Emerging about noon from a grove of giant sunflowers, I found myself on the brink of a tumbling rocky stream (Rolling Fork). I did not expect to find bridges on my wild ways, and at once started to ford, when a negro woman on the opposite bank earnestly called on me to wait until she could tell the ‘men folks’ to bring me a horse – that the river was too deep and rapid to wade and that I would ‘sartain be drowned’ if I attempted to cross. I replied that my bag and plants would ballast me; that the water did not appear to be deep, and that if I were carried away, I was a good swimmer and would soon dry in the sunshine. But the cautious old soul replied that no one ever waded that river and set off for a horse, saying that it was no trouble at all.

In a few minutes the ferry horse came gingerly down the bank through vines and weeds. His long stilt legs proved him a natural wader. He was white and the little sable negro boy that rode him looked like a bug on his back. After many a tottering halt the outward voyage was safely made, and I mounted behind little Nig. He was a queer specimen, puffy and jet as an India rubber doll and his hair was matted in sections like the wool of a merino sheep. The old horse, overladen with his black and white burden, rocked and stumbled on his stilt legs with fair promises of a fall. But all ducking signs failed and we arrived in safety among the weeds and vines of the rugged bank. A salt bath would have done us no harm. I could swim and little Afric looked as if he might float like a bladder.

I called at the homestead where my ferryman informed me I would find ‘tollable’ water. But, like all the water of this section that I have tasted, it was intolerable with salt. Everything about this old Kentucky home bespoke plenty, unpolished and unmeasured. The house was built in true Southern style: airy, large, and with a transverse central hall that looks like a railway tunnel, and heavy, rough outside chimneys. The negro quarters and other buildings are enough in number for a village, altogether an interesting representative of a genuine old Kentucky home, embosomed in orchards, corn fields and green wooded hills.

Passed gangs of woodmen engaged in felling and hewing the grand oaks for market. Fruit very abundant. Magnificent flowing hill scenery all afternoon. Walked southeast from Elizabethtown till wearied and lay down in the bushes by guess.

4 September. The sun was gilding the hilltops when I was awakened by the alarm notes of birds whose dwelling in a hazel thicket I had disturbed. They flitted excitedly close to my head, as if scolding or asking angry questions, while several beautiful plants, strangers to me, were looking me full in the face. The first botanical discovery in bed! This was one of the most delightful camp grounds, though groped for in the dark, and I lingered about it, enjoying its trees and soft lights and music.

Walked ten miles of forest. Met a strange oak with willow-looking leaves. Entered a sandy stretch of black oak called ‘Barrens’, many of which were sixty or seventy feet in height, and are said to have grown since the fires were kept off, forty years ago. The farmers hereabouts are tall, stout, happy fellows, fond of guns and horses. Enjoyed friendly chats with them. Arrived at dark in a village that seemed to be drawing its last breath. Was guided to the ‘tavern’ by a negro who was extremely accommodating. ‘No trouble at all,’ he said.

5 September. No bird or flower or friendly tree above me this morning; only squalid garret rubbish and dust. Escaped to the woods. Came to the region of caves. At the mouth of the first I discovered, I was surprised to find ferns which belonged to the coolest nooks of Wisconsin and northward, but soon observed that each cave rim has a zone of climate peculiar to itself, and it is always cool. This cave had an opening about ten feet in diameter, and twenty-five feet perpendicular depth. A strong, cold wind issued from it and I could hear the sounds of running water. A long pole was set against its walls as if intended for a ladder, but in some places it was slippery and smooth as a mast and would test the climbing powers of a monkey. The walls and rim of this natural reservoir were finely carved and flowered. Bushes leaned over it with shading leaves, and beautiful ferns and mosses were in rows and sheets on its slopes and shelves. Lingered here a long happy while, pressing specimens and printing this beauty into memory.

Arrived about noon at Munfordville; was soon discovered and examined by Mr Munford himself, a pioneer and father of the village. He is a surveyor – has held all country offices, and every seeker of roads and lands applies to him for information. He regards all the villagers as his children, and all strangers who enter Munfordville as his own visitors. Of course he inquired my business, destination, et cetera, and invited me to his house.