John Muir: Family, Friends, and Adventures

Introduction: Meeting John Muir’s Family, Friends, and Adventures: Between the Calypso borealis and the Araucaria imbricata

1 1 2 introduction 1 Meeting John Muir’s Family, Friends, and Adventures Between the Calypso borealis and the Araucaria imbricata Bonnie Johanna Gisel 2 1 John Muir left Wisconsin in March 1864 and headed north into Canada, where he matriculated as a student at the “University of the Wilderness.” He was twenty-six. In April, he waded into swamps. In May, he traveled as far as Simcoe and Grey counties in Ontario. In June, he stayed with the Campbells of Bradford, Ontario. In July, he botanized north of Toronto in the Holland River swamps in search of the Calypso borealis, an uncommon lady-slipper orchid. He found the Calypso, about which he wrote to Jeanne Carr in 1866—a letter that resulted in his first publication later that year.1 The experience of seeing the Calypso borealis proved to be epiphanic for Muir.It was a solemn moment when he and nature commingled.Muir and the orchid merged in a divine complex of mind and flower, hand and leaf, leg and stem, heart and blossom, soul to soul. Never before had he seen a plant so full of life, so perfectly spiritual. On a plat of yellow moss near a fallen hemlock log, he found himself in the presence of the Calypso, whom he recognized as a superior being who loved him.He sat down beside the wild plant and wept for joy—such beauty in a plant creature, such pleasure, deep, pure, eternal. The singular beauty of the Calypso—visible proof of Muir’s invisible faith in God, who created such a friend as this—certainly served as fuel for the fire of restlessness that urged him on. A seed of divine truth that germinated throughout his life, Muir would read the power and goodness of God from the things that He created. And his mentor and friend, Jeanne Carr, often reminded Muir of the beauty of nature, of its pure and deep communion , of the glorious chart of God in nature spread out for them to see. Doomed by a restless spirit of inquiry to be carried into wilderness, Muir, now twenty-nine, began his thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico in 1867. Perhaps he thought about the lady-slipper orchid as he encountered the changing botanical climate the farther south he walked. In Georgia, he saw Spanish moss (Tillandsia), a cypress swamp, and a banana tree. In Florida, he found the Magnolia grandiflora, and he wrote that he was meeting many strange plants as well as a palmetto in a grassy place. The palm may have triggered deeper thoughts.“They tell us that plants are perishable, soulless creatures , that only man is immortal . . . but this . . . is something that we know very nearly nothing about.”2 Earlier, through Kentucky, Muir walked past miles and miles of beauty, over swelling hills, and lordly trees that cut into his memory and forever remained with him. He walked through Madisonville, Tennessee, to Gainesville, Georgia, then into Florida and traveled on to Cuba, intent on visiting“some part”of South America.Weak with malarial fever, Muir wrote to Jeanne Carr from Cedar Key. He was creeping about getting plants and strength. While he convalesced and planned his trip to South America, he contemplated the common belief that the world was made especially for humanity and his own belief that each animal and plant was created first to experience its own happiness. The dust of the earth was the source from which Homo sapiens and all other creatures were made—all earth-born companions and fellow mortals. The dignity of all life—independent yet interrelated and community-bound—was a thread in the fiber of Muir’s growing preservationist objectives that he tweaked in different ways, against different cords, throughout his life. Muir’s sensibility toward nature and wilderness, gathered up and garnered from the writings of Thomas Dick, Alexander von Humboldt, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walter Brooks, and Alphonse de Lamartine, would later be reflected in the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954), botanist and horticulturalist, in The Holy Earth, published in 1943, and in the land ethic introduction 2 1 introduction of Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), published in A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There in 1949. In January 1868, Muir booked passage to Cuba on the Island Belle. For a month he walked beaches and collected...