For the LOVE of nature

AMONG all those environmentalists whose names crowd the annals of America, and all those that loved nature deeply, John Muir stands out tall. I was familiar with his name – as one active a little later than the east coast cult figure, Thoreau, author of Walden, that great work on ‘Living in the Woods’ – but I confess that I had not read much on or by him. Till recently, when a kindly inclined docent at the San Diego Museum of Art, gifted me a copy of a slim little book containing some of his writings. Titled Northwest Passages, with obvious reference to the sprawling, unspoilt region of the United States that he had made his own, the book brought John Muir suddenly alive for me. I felt moved by his passion, and his celebration of the purity and the beauty of nature, some of his utterances reminding me of that great open letter which one Red Indian chief addressed early in the 19th century to ‘the White Man’, urging him at least to take care of those beloved hills and streams and woods that he had snatched away from him and his people.

Sometimes referred to as "John of the Mountains", John Muir was born in Scotland. But he moved to the United States when still young, and soon surrendered himself to the majesty and expanse of the nature he saw in this vast land. From Wisconsin, where he first settled, he took a 1000-mile journey on foot to Florida ‘just for the adventure of it’, and then, moving to California, he became a pioneering mountaineer, climbing many peaks, like Mount Ritter, for the first time, and tramping through deep valleys for months with little more than bread and a blanket to sustain him. The cares of the world did press down upon him, as upon any man, and he had a family to look after. But every now and then, resentful of the ‘penal servitude’ of having to take care of his ranch, he would pry himself free, and take off towards the wilderness, now in California, now in Oregon, in Washington State today, and in Alaska the next. And throughout these wilderness trips, he would keep writing and publishing, contributing article after eloquent article to newspapers, drawing attention not only to the beauties of the land that he traversed with such joy, but, forcefully, also to the need of preserving them. For his generation, John Muir became the most famous nature writer in America. And once, when there was a dip in his activity, and his health dwindled temporarily, his anxiety-ridden editors started writing to him, asking if "he had abandoned literature altogether", or addressing questions like: "Has the ink in your fountain entirely dried up?"

With time, John bounced back, urged in part by a celebrated letter that his wife wrote to him, asking him to forget his ranch, for it was only taking the "sacrifice of a noble life", and "ought to be flung away beyond all reach and power for harm …." "The Alaska book and the Yosemite book must be written, and you must be your own self", she said.

In 1888, began his most famous journey, his Northwest Passage, in which he wrote about the destruction of nature that he saw around himself: the forests ‘logged from valley floor to timberline’, the streams and lakes muddy with eroded topsoil, and the once-flourishing mountain meadows ‘gnawed and trampled into dust by multitudes of domestic sheep’. John’s writings turned political at this point, and from a curious naturalist, he turned into the leader of a national conservation movement. His efforts bore fruit, and the natural parks of the Northwest in America became everyone’s concern.

Much of this I picked up in the little book that I have referred to above. But for me the book contained more than some of the famous utterances of John Muir – "Going out I found that I was really going in", for instance; or "The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness" – it was filled with sensitive illustrations by Andrea Hendrick, who also designed the book. Her sketches are simple, and all in black and white, with only an occasional stroke picked in colour, but she is able to evoke through them the sights that Muir must have seen and the untrammeled sounds that he must have heard. Where Muir speaks of "most people being on the world and not in it, ‘undiffused’ and ‘separate’ and ‘rigidly alone’, she brings in three rough marbles and strews them on the page; when there is talk of "touching the living rock" of uninhabited peaks, she paints a soaring eagle that spreads, noiselessly, its giant wings and nudges the words on the page with their tips. It is effective; and moving.