Muir and More E-Book

Ronald Turnbull

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

John Muir – a life, but also a hike. Muir is 200 miles of high-level granite and pine, but also the inventor of a clockwork self-awakening bed and the American national park system. Muir is East Lothian's Man of the Millennium – this despite the fact that he left Scotland for ever at the age of eleven – and one of the best long paths in the world. Award-winning outdoor writer Ronald Turnbull follows John Muir from his birthplace in Dunbar to the Californian trail that bears his name. A perceptive, humorous companion over 210 miles of the Sierra Nevada (and 45 miles of East Lothian coast), Turnbull shares remote camps with some eccentric trail types, pokes fun at Thoreau and explores the paradoxes inherent in the preservation of wilderness. Most of all, he reflects on the life and ideas of John Muir himself: pioneering conservationist, writer and walker, inspired visionary and tiresome tree-hugger - the exiled Scot who invented the American outdoors.

Leseprobe

Muir and More

Muir and More

John Muir, his life and walks

Ronald Turnbull

Drawings by Colin Brash

www.v-publishing.co.uk

John Muir

1838–1914

The John Muir Trail

Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney

210 miles

The John Muir Way

Dunbar to Fisherrow

45 miles

Like John Muir, we found a warm welcome in the United States. Muir and More is dedicated to ‘Primrose’ and ‘Chanson’, Jim from Georgia, and all the companions of the John Muir Trail; and to the Ford family of North Carolina.

– Contents –

Introduction

Chapter 1 The John Muir Way: Towards Dunbar

Chapter 2 The John Muir Way: Departing Dunbar

Chapter 3 Yosemite to Half Dome

Chapter 4 Cathedral Pass

Chapter 5 Lyell Canyon and Garnet Lake

Chapter 6 Devil’s Postpile

Chapter 7 Mammoth Crest

Chapter 8 Pocket Meadow

Chapter 9 Vermilion Resort

Chapter 10 Evolution Basin

Chapter 11 Le Conte Canyon

Chapter 12 Palisades

Chapter 13 Forester Pass

Chapter 14 Mount Whitney

Chapter 15 Lone Pine

Chapter 16 New York

Chapter 17 The Eagle in his Ink

Further Reading

Maps, Illustrations and Photographs

The first wild creature we saw, out of the bus window as we approached the Sierra Nevada, was the American red-tailed hawk. It was soaring to lift the heart above some scrubby yellow grassland.

The red-tail hunts from the sky or from a high perch. It dives at 120mph, but walks awkwardly. The wingspan is about four feet. In the mating season, or when annoyed, it screams rather like an old-fashioned steam train. One recording of a red-tail has been used and reused to add atmosphere to many different Western movies, and as a ‘soundtrack double’ for the rather wimpy noise of a bald-headed eagle.

The red-tail has eyesight eight times as sharp as us humans, and has been around for five times as long. It is territorial, and monogamous—at least when living in the countryside. ‘Pale Male’, who lives on an apartment building in New York just across the road from Woody Allen, has had four mates; but has been described as a ‘cool dad’ because of his parental involvement in fledgling flying lessons. Red-tails eat voles and mice mostly, but anything from beetles to jackrabbits, and as vermin control are helpful to humans. Meanwhile, humans’ habit of building electricity poles above open road verges, and woodlots in alternation with open pasture, is helpful to the red-tailed hawk.

There’s nothing rare or special about the red-tail: it occurs a million strong all over the USA. Sitting on the stoop with your honey lamb and watching it ‘makin’ lazy circles in the sky’: this is a fundamental act linking an American and his landscape—at least according to Oscar Hammerstein II (Oklahoma! 1943).

John Muir hunted down eagle feathers to make his quill pens. But in this book, chapters are headed by the red-tailed hawk.

– Introduction –

One day’s exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books.[1]

John Muir

Every game has its homeland. Walking up pretty hills and going to the pub: you can do it in various parts of the world, but England’s Lakeland is where it’s all about. My personal game of austere hikes with bivvy-bag is basically Highland Scotland. Mountaineering—rocky ridges, snowy crests, glaciers —happens in the Alps and is referred to in several languages as ‘Alpinism’. Nepal is the spiritual centre of yakpacking—hand your luggage to a helpful inhabitant who also boils the evening lentils, get altitude sickness, use up a lot of photo film and not that much boot sole.

What St Andrews is to golf, North America is to backpacking. Country where you walk for 250 miles without crossing a road; where you get attacked by biting insects but also by bears; where you camp for five days while a river runs down after a storm. And so we get the frightful ergonomics of how to don a 50lb rucksack: that being an act I set off from Yosemite sincerely hoping not to have to perform. In navigation, the technique of ‘aiming-off’ is applied over a fortnight of empty country, eventually arriving at the handrail road just 40 miles from the intended target.

And yet, like golf itself, like deerstalking, backpacking seems to have been invented by a Scotsman. ‘I only took a walk in the Yosemite,’ says Johnnie Muir from Dunbar, ‘but stayed for six years.’[2] America invites excess, and Americans do tend to overdo things. Even so, Muir’s followers along the Pacific Crest and Appalachian Trails spend a mere six months afoot before retiring to some cosy city to replace their equipment, relearn their social skills, and earn a little money for the next hiking season.

So to call the John Muir Trail, in California’s Sierra Nevada, the best long walk in the world is wrong straight away. By the standards of the country, and of the man who gave it his name, it’s a short saunter that, even if you embrace that unnecessarily heavy backpack, still takes a mere three weeks. Cricket is the best game in the world—if you happen to like cricket. Long or not, the John Muir Trail is the best walk in the world—if what you like is a self-reliant journey through remote country inhabited by bears. If what you like is a mule path through the wilderness and being a beast of burden yourself as you hoof along it. If what you like is big trees and bare granite. If what you like is …

… a wide, well-built path that after five days heads gradually down to the outflow of a narrow lake. The slopes around the lake are tumbled boulders and ice-smoothed granite slabs, but the path is terraced across the stone-fields and carved into the occasional outcrop. The tree roots tangle in a maze of boulders, and their trunks and branches above are twisted in sympathy.

Beyond the lake rises a tall, shapely mountain. On our map it has no name, and some of its buttresses might even be unclimbed, for we are several days away from the nearest car-parks. Half-way through a September afternoon, me and Tom may be the only people looking at this particular mountain and this particular lake.

The lake we look at is blue-grey; the sky above is grey with patches of gangrene yellow. Small thunderstorms are rumbling among the summits. We cross the outflow, and emerge from the lake’s hanging valley to a hollow of dark forests. Ten miles away, the opposite slopes are mottled with scrub, then rise to slabs and domes of bare granite.

We descend in zigzags to a trail that contours along the valley. Between thick trunks we glimpse again the forest hollow below us. By late afternoon, the trail is descending again, to the outflow of Purple Lake. A single angler stands on the opposite shore. We drop the packs onto the strip of meadow between the lakeside and the rising trees. We stand for a minute. We wiggle our shoulder blades, let the power of thinking seep back into tired minds.

Just as we’ve got the tent up, it rains. It rains for twenty minutes; while I lie and listen to it on the green nylon, Thomas stands outside to see if he’s going to get wet. The sun comes out, and we pour boiling water onto our dehydrated supper. Above the Purple Lake, buttresses of black basalt interrupt the granite hillside. As the sun sinks, the paler rocks turn golden. By the time we’ve finished eating, the forest is slaty grey, the granite rocks are delicate greyish pink.

The fishermen are apologetic. ‘It doesn’t normally do this, not at this time of year.’

They didn’t really need to be embarrassed. Never, in my life so far, have I walked six days with only twenty minutes’ rain.

‘You see, we’re from Scotland.’

‘Oh, but John Muir was from Scotland!’

He was indeed; and, a century after his death, Scotland is starting to wake up to the fact. The Loch Lomond National Park has wandered through the Sierra Club website, clipping sweetly-scented Muir quotes for its brochures and signage. Nineteen of his words have been carved into the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. But never mind the words: his walks have been commemorated with a 45-mile ‘John Muir Way’ along the bleak East Lothian coastline where he fell into the rock pools as a boy. In his name also, Schiehallion, Blaven and Ben Nevis have been purchased for wildlife and the people.

After we’d finished talking about bears, one of the American walkers kindly told us all about John Muir.

Notes and references

Unattributed Muir quotations throughout this book are mostly from his letters, and can sometimes be tracked down by an electronic search of the John Muir Exhibit on the Sierra Club’s website.

1. John Muir: ‘Mountain Thoughts’, written during the 1870s, collected by Linnie Marsh Wolfe and published in John of the Mountains (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).[back]

2. John Muir. Like many Muir quotes, this has been quoted and requoted by outdoor writers for a 100 years. It is surely authentic, but my attempt to trace the original has failed.[back]

– Chapter 1 –

The John Muir Way: Towards Dunbar

Beautiful hills and dales, green fields in the very height of cultivation, and many belts and blocks of woods so arranged as to appear natural. … The weather here reminds me of Alaska, cold and damp.[1]

John Muir

A windy night, in December 2007, on the east coast of Scotland. Away to my right a road rose over a rise, and car headlights fanned across the night sky. Away on the left, the nuclear power station three miles away sent a wash of yellow sodium light over the top of the grass bank. Although I was below the cliff rim, the rumble and screech of the A1 road drifted over my head as I slept. And my nose was hinting that somewhere, some dog had disobeyed the Scottish Parliament’s new poop-scoop injunctions.

The price we pay for our comfortable, pleasant life in the 21st century is this: a layer of ugliness smeared over our entire countryside. An aeroplane flashed its way like some night insect across the field of stars. Blackness ahead was the Firth of Forth. At midnight its muddy waters came across the flats and almost drowned the noise of the dual carriageway.

I rose in cold darkness, and spooned in some cold muesli with, as a treat, a pint of fresh milk I’d carried from Cockburnspath. The path took me across a grey beach to Torness power station.

The orange glare of the high windows, and the softer pinkish glow of the concrete walls—all rising from a sparkly sea of little streetlights. Just two men sitting somewhere behind one of the high walls, watching a screen as every 100 seconds a fuel pellet drops like a pea into the machine, and keeping an eye on one another to make sure they don’t fall asleep. Or perhaps there are 300 men in there in black uniforms with machine guns and anti-tank rockets, waiting through another night for the first ever terrorist attack on a working nuclear installation. Do they leave the sodium lights on all night as a display of its rigid, unceasing power output, or is it a sort of artwork, an attempt to express the alien and alarming beauty of nuclear fission reactions?

Last time I’d been here, I was in the mud in front of the bulldozers trying to prevent the place from ever existing at all. It was fun climbing into the buckets of the big digger machines. Nowadays, it’s more complicated. Would you rather see a big dangerous place like Torness Power Station, or a line of wind turbines, just slightly less tall than the Yosemite sequoias, all along the Lammermuirs where John Muir used to run wild? Fortunately we don’t have to make that difficult decision. Against global warming, both turbines and atom-plant are going to be necessary. These will be the 21st century’s stratum of ugliness laid down across the damaged land. And the one dark part of my night landscape, the noisy sea, will become an offshore wind farm, and transform this winter wind into computer screens and low-energy light bulbs.

A concrete walkway leads around the power station. It’s protected from the sea by a slope of several thousand abandoned trig points. The interpretation boards identify them as ‘dolos blocks’, a South African invention. The concrete pillar we see is just the corner of a twisted H-shape, designed so that the waves will only entangle them further. The assembly does not block the incoming wave, but breaks it up: the result is many times more resistant than a line of square stone blocks. The Afrikaans dolosse refers to knuckle-bones of goats or oxen, used in children’s games and traditional fortune-telling: Wat speel julle met die dolos? (English: What are you playing at with the dolos?) This could be, after trek, the second Afrikaans word to enter English (trek is related to German tragen, to pull or carry, and English ‘drag’). We need more, from the vigorous language that refers to a jeep’s gearbox as rattelkaas.

An early use of the dolos blocks was at Durban. From there it’s a simple transposition of letters to their use here at Dunbar. The sea wall is said by the interpretation board to be proof against a 10,000-year storm. As its concrete gives way to sea shingle, there appears around the next headland the floodlit chimneys of the Dunbar cement works that will be the next of the walk’s ugly-building way markers.

One and a half centuries ago, industrial intrusion was a pair of flickering oil lamps on the front of a coach, its unoiled wooden wheels audible at a quarter of a mile. Even then, an unusually far-sighted man might realise that ever-cosier modern lifestyles, and our wild natural landscape, were not finally compatible. That unusually far-sighted man was born in 1838, just beyond the big cement works, in the red sandstone town of Dunbar. His name, which is also the name of the path I was walking along: John Muir.

If you want your offspring to grow into a really interesting person, one way is to give them a really interesting name—Tallulah Bankhead, or Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Theodore Roosevelt. But by the time Daniel Muir had that one worked out, the kid was called John and that was that. The other way, though, is a really interesting and unusual childhood. John Muir’s childhood was interesting and unusual. Some of it was also enjoyable. The playground fights between streeties and shories—town kids and kids from the fishing community. The running wild in the Lammermuir Hills. The Dunbar shoreline with the dulse seaweed and the rock pools and the Bass Rock against the silver skyline. Muir loved

to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old Dunbar Castle.[2]

Some of it, on the other hand, was not enjoyable. The silent mealtimes. The nightly beatings. The backup beatings from the village schoolmaster. The reading and learning by heart of the whole of the New Testament and 75 per cent of the Old. (The 25 per cent left out would include the ‘Song of Solomon’, which is lyrical and slightly sexy.) The not reading of anything else at all.

Thirty years later, John Muir had a wild time on Mount Shasta, an ice-covered volcano only slightly lower than Mount Whitney and, being 300 miles further north, a much more serious mountain. Trapped on the summit in a blizzard, in his shirtsleeves, Muir spent the night warming himself at a volcanic fumarole. He wrote what was presumably a self-deprecating letter about his discomforts and the tough job of being a pretty successful outdoor writer. His Dad’s reply has survived.

‘If it had not been for God’s boundless mercy you would have been cut off in the midst of your folly.’[3] Daniel Muir doesn’t say so, but one gets the impression that God’s judgement and mercy wouldn’t have been Daniel’s, if it had been Daniel deciding life or death on Mount Shasta, God sitting at home in Wisconsin and getting the letter about it afterwards. As for the outdoor writing: ‘And the best and soonest way of getting quit of the writing and publishing your book is to burn it, and then it will do no more harm either to you or others.’

Dunbar is a handsome town built of Old Red Sandstone with pantiled roofs. In its high street, a bronze boy Muir gazes rapturously upwards at the Christmas lights. Muir is East Lothian’s man of the millennium; East Lothian’s John Muir Way is in direct competition with the same-named Trail in California’s Sierra Nevada.

On a Tuesday morning in December, I’d expected the Muir Birthplace cottage to be bleak. Actually, until I checked, I’d expected it to be shut. But open it was, and full of schoolchildren with clipboards and a photocopied project. Boisterous in their blue jerseys, not one of them (we believe and hope) bore the scars of a nightly parental flogging. But neither did they have young Johnnie’s total enthusiasm for the natural world.

‘This to me was a wonderful discovery,’ Muir writes of a field mouse and her hairless pink young found in the foot of a corn stook. ‘No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den.’[4]

‘Ooh, that’s mingin!’ exclaimed one small school-girl of today at their resin reproduction.