My First Summer in the Sierra E-Book

John Muir

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

'Divine beauty all. Here I could stay tethered forever with just bread and water, nor would I be lonely.' In the summer of 1869, John Muir joined a group of shepherds in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, that he might study and expand his knowledge of the plants, animals and rocks he found there. My First Summer in the Sierra – first published in 1911 – is the detailed and colourful diary he kept while tending sheep and exploring the wilderness. Muir's account tracks his experiences in the Yosemite Valley and the High Sierra alongside faithful companion Carlo the St Bernard, describing the majestic landscapes and the flora and fauna of the area with the excitement and wonder of a child. From sleeping on silver-fir-bough mattresses to goading wild bears, and valuing everything from tiny pebbles to giant sequoia, he truly immerses himself and falls in love with the wilderness. Muir's enthusiasm is infectious, and over 100 years on his environmental message is more pertinent than ever. With a new introduction from Muir authority Terry Gifford, My First Summer in the Sierra is an enchanting and informative read for anyone passionate about the natural world and its splendours.

Leseprobe

My First Summer in the Sierra

My First Summer in the Sierra

The nature diary of a pioneering environmentalist

John Muir

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www.v-publishing.co.uk

– Contents –

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Series Introduction

Foreword

Chapter 1 Through the Foothills with a Flock of Sheep

Chapter 2 In Camp on the North Fork of the Merced

Chapter 3 A Bread Famine

Chapter 4 To the High Mountains

Chapter 5 The Yosemite

Chapter 6 Mount Hoffman and Lake Tenaya

Chapter 7 A Strange Experience

Chapter 8 The Mono Trail

Chapter 9 Bloody Canyon and Mono Lake

Chapter 10 The Tuolumne Camp

Chapter 11 Back to the Lowlands

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

Never has a world-famous landscape found its writer with such a felicitous serendipity as when Yosemite Valley found John Muir. It was as though the valley had been waiting for the right combinations of attention and enthusiasm, of scientific training and spiritual neediness, of awestruck exploration and the language to communicate it. In the summer of 1869 John Muir thought he had found his spiritual home, but as the Sierra Nevada mountains of California still come vividly alive in Muir’s writings 150 year later, it is clear that really ‘the Range of Light’ had discovered a writer who was up to the job of celebrating what continues to be, for successive generations of visitors, both an uplifting and formidable experience of awesome beauty and danger. This book, compiled from the breathless journal writing of that first summer of love, is the story of the discovery of a relationship that was to have far-reaching repercussions for conservation across the world, from modest nature reserves to proud national parks. If the impulse towards conservation is embedded in an awe derived from close observation that stirs a passionate advocacy, these journals of John Muir’s first summer in the Sierra brilliantly express those first impulses from the founding father of the American conservation movement.

Actually, this visit to Yosemite was intended as a side trip. Muir was on his way to South America, in the footsteps of the scientist explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Whilst in bed with a fever in Florida, Muir saw a flyer for Hutchings’ hotel in Yosemite Valley and it was probably the first image of the spectacular Yosemite Falls by Thomas Ayres (1855) that spoke to Muir’s adventurous spirit and insatiable curiosity. So a boat journey and a walk across the Central Valley led to getting a job with a man and a dog to herd sheep up to the summer flower meadows in the high mountains. Muir set off, ‘with notebook tied to my belt’, on a journey into what was to become his life’s work. Thanks to that notebook we can experience the ‘glow of enthusiasm’ in Muir’s writing that he thought must have been in the creator making the landscapes through which he passed. The modern reader might be slightly embarrassed by Muir’s enthusiasm, and especially the biblical metaphors through which he expressed his sense of respect for the divinity of nature from flowers to snowflakes to clouds to rock forms. But if one thinks of Muir as escaping his father’s severe puritanism (for whom a mountain as a ‘temple’ would be heresy) and gradually lapsing into an earlier pagan form of animism, Muir’s vision, whilst retaining the language of his upbringing, can be seen as a mode of deep ecology.

Although he might seem to be writing like a teenager in these journals, Muir was thirty years old with the training of a natural scientist and an interest in new post-evolutionary ways of thinking about natural processes that were the talk of his age. At the very moment when the term ‘Oekology’ was being coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel (who himself wrote about ‘the temple of nature’), John Muir was independently developing a practical example of what that might mean as a way of living. Not only did Muir casually formulate what has become the popular definition of ecology – ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’ – but he tried to become an embedded part of nature in order to understand connectedness: ‘I should like to live here always. It is so calm and withdrawn while open to the universe in full communion with everything good’.

The key to Muir’s implicit vision in these journals is his alertness to the dynamics of natural processes: ‘Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing – going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water’. Of course, that ‘so-called’ is a radical nudge to his nineteenth-century readers that rocks can no longer be regarded as ‘lifeless’, although the implications of this idea might challenge some contemporary readers: ‘The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. No wonder when we consider that we all have the same Father and Mother’. For Muir the human species, if it could shoulder aside its deafening ego, could tune into what he calls the ‘sermons in stones’ as another animal in the living ecology of the Sierra mountains. Then humans could be open to learning what Muir summarises at the end of this book as ‘the lessons of unity and interrelation of all the features of the landscape’. Such lessons would include an understanding of the role of destruction as well as creation, of the benefits of decay for recreation, and of a continuity derived from dissolution that could be perceived as a deep and dynamic beauty: ‘How lavish is Nature building, pulling down, creating, destroying, chasing every material particle from form to form, ever changing, ever beautiful’.

As usual, Muir’s ecological vision is not expressed as heavy philosophy or explicit commentary, but in the folksy ‘hitched’, the familiar ‘brotherly’, or the slightly biblical ‘ever beautiful’. His original and often radical insights arise from his lived engagement with the place and its fellow inhabitants. The need to conserve the wild flowers of Tuolumne Meadows will follow from the first outrage expressed here against his sheep as ‘hoofed locusts’, as will his political lobbying for Yosemite Valley as a national park. Later still will come the strategic passing on of enthusiasm and informed concern when Muir forms the Sierra Club and leads their outings into the inspirational landscapes described here. But in My First Summer in the Sierra John Muir lights the flame in himself that through his eloquence will catch the flickers of recognition in lovers of nature in less majestic corners that will be no less alive with flowing and speaking presences.

– Chapter 1 –

Through the Foothills with a Flock of Sheep

In the great Central Valley of California there are only two seasons: spring and summer. The spring begins with the first rainstorm, which usually falls in November. In a few months the wonderful flowery vegetation is in full bloom and by the end of May it is dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven.

Then the lolling, panting flocks and herds are driven to the high, cool, green pastures of the Sierra. I was longing for the mountains about this time, but money was scarce and I couldn’t see how a bread supply was to be kept up. While I was anxiously brooding on the bread problem, so troublesome to wanderers, and trying to believe I might learn to live like the wild animals, gleaning nourishment here and there from seeds and berries, sauntering and climbing in joyful independence of money or baggage, Mr Delaney, a sheep owner, for whom I had worked a few weeks, called on me and offered to engage me to go with his shepherd and flock to the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers – the very region I had most in mind. I was in the mood to accept work of any kind that would take me into the mountains whose treasures I had tasted last summer in the Yosemite region. The flock, he explained, would be moved gradually higher through the successive forest belts as the snow melted, stopping for a few weeks at the best places we came to. These I thought would be good centres of observation from which I might be able to make many telling excursions within a radius of eight or ten miles of the camps to learn something of the plants, animals and rocks; for he assured me that I should be left perfectly free to follow my studies. I judged, however, that I was in no way the right man for the place, and freely explained my shortcomings, confessing that I was wholly unacquainted with the topography of the upper mountains, the streams that would have to be crossed, and the wild sheep-eating animals; in short that, what with bears, coyotes, rivers, canyons and thorny, bewildering chaparral, I feared that half or more of his flock would be lost. Fortunately these shortcomings seemed insignificant to Mr Delaney. The main thing, he said, was to have a man about the camp whom he could trust to see that the shepherd did his duty, and he assured me that the difficulties that seemed so formidable at a distance would vanish as we went on; encouraging me further by saying that the shepherd would do all the herding, that I could study plants and rocks and scenery as much as I liked, and that he would himself accompany us to the first main camp and make occasional visits to our higher ones to replenish our store of provisions and see how we prospered. Therefore I concluded to go, though still fearing, when I saw the silly sheep bouncing one by one through the narrow gate of the home corral to be counted, that of the 2,050 many would never return.

I was fortunate in getting a fine St Bernard dog for a companion. His master, a hunter with whom I was slightly acquainted, came to me as soon as he heard that I was going to spend the summer in the Sierra and begged me to take his favourite dog, Carlo, with me, for he feared that if he were compelled to stay all summer on the plains the fierce heat might be the death of him. ‘I think I can trust you to be kind to him,’ he said, ‘and I am sure he will be good to you. He knows all about the mountain animals, will guard the camp, assist in managing the sheep and in every way be found able and faithful.’ Carlo knew we were talking about him, watched our faces and listened so attentively that I fancied he understood us. Calling him by name, I asked him if he was willing to go with me. He looked me in the face with eyes expressing wonderful intelligence, then turned to his master, and after permission was given by a wave of the hand toward me and a farewell patting caress, he quietly followed me as if he perfectly understood all that had been said and had known me always.

3 June 1869. This morning provisions, camp-kettles, blankets, plant press etc., were packed on two horses, the flock headed for the tawny foothills, and away we sauntered in a cloud of dust: Mr Delaney, bony and tall, with sharply hacked profile like Don Quixote, leading the packhorses; Billy, the proud shepherd; a Chinaman and a Digger Indian to assist in driving for the first few days in the brushy foothills; and myself with notebook tied to my belt.

The home ranch from which we set out is on the south side of the Tuolumne River near French Bar, where the foothills of metamorphic gold-bearing slates dip below the stratified deposits of the Central Valley. We had not gone more than a mile before some of the old leaders of the flock showed by the eager, inquiring way they ran and looked ahead that they were thinking of the high pastures they had enjoyed last summer. Soon the whole flock seemed to be hopefully excited, the mothers calling their lambs, the lambs replying in tones wonderfully human, their fondly quavering calls interrupted now and then by hastily snatched mouthfuls of withered grass. Amid all this seeming babel of baas as they streamed over the hills every mother and child recognised each other’s voice. In case a tired lamb, half asleep in the smothering dust, should fail to answer, its mother would come running back through the flock toward the spot whence its last response was heard, and refused to be comforted until she found it, the one of a thousand, though to our eyes and ears all seemed alike.

The flock travelled at the rate of about a mile an hour, outspread in the form of an irregular triangle, about 100 yards wide at the base and 150 yards long, with a crooked, ever-changing point made up of the strongest foragers, called the ‘leaders,’ which, with the most active of those scattered along the ragged sides of the ‘main body’, hastily explored nooks in the rocks and bushes for grass and leaves; the lambs and feeble old mothers dawdling in the rear were called the ‘tail end’.

About noon the heat was hard to bear; the poor sheep panted pitifully and tried to stop in the shade of every tree they came to, while we gazed with eager longing through the dim burning glare toward the snowy mountains and streams, though not one was in sight. The landscape is only wavering foothills roughened here and there with bushes and trees and outcropping masses of slate. The trees, mostly the blue oak (Quercus Douglasii), are about thirty to forty feet high with pale blue-green leaves and white bark, sparsely planted on the thinnest soil or in crevices of rocks beyond the reach of grass fires. The slates in many places rise abruptly through the tawny grass in sharp lichen-covered slabs like tombstones in deserted burying grounds. With the exception of the oak and four or five species of manzanita and ceanothus, the vegetation of the foothills is mostly the same as that of the plains. I saw this region in the early spring, when it was a charming landscape garden full of birds and bees and flowers. Now the scorching weather makes everything dreary. The ground is full of cracks, lizards glide about on the rocks and ants in amazing numbers, whose tiny sparks of life only burn the brighter with the heat, fairly quiver with unquenchable energy as they run in long lines to fight and gather food. How it comes that they do not dry to a crisp in a few seconds’ exposure to such sun-fire is marvellous. A few rattlesnakes lie coiled in out-of-the-way places, but are seldom seen. Magpies and crows, usually so noisy, are silent now, standing in mixed flocks on the ground beneath the best shade trees, with bills wide open and wings drooped, too breathless to speak; the quails also are trying to keep in the shade about the few tepid alkaline waterholes; cottontail rabbits are running from shade to shade among the ceanothus brush and occasionally the long-eared hare is seen cantering gracefully across the wider openings.

After a short noon rest in a grove, the poor dust-choked flock was again driven ahead over the brushy hills, but the dim roadway we had been following faded away just where it was most needed, compelling us to stop to look about us and get our bearings. The Chinaman seemed to think we were lost, and chattered in pidgin English concerning the abundance of ‘litty stick’ (chaparral), while the Indian silently scanned the billowy ridges and gulches for openings. Pushing through the thorny jungle, we at length discovered a road trending toward Coulterville, which we followed until an hour before sunset, when we reached a dry ranch and camped for the night.

Camping in the foothills with a flock of sheep is simple and easy but far from pleasant. The sheep were allowed to pick what they could find in the neighbourhood until after sunset, watched by the shepherd, while the others gathered wood, made a fire, cooked, unpacked and fed the horses, etc. About dusk the weary sheep were gathered on the highest open spot near camp where they willingly bunched close together and after each mother had found her lamb and suckled it, all lay down and required no attention until morning.

Supper was announced by the call, ‘Grub!’ Each with a tin plate helped himself direct from the pots and pans while chatting about such camp studies as sheep-feed, mines, coyotes, bears, or adventures during the memorable gold days of pay dirt. The Indian kept in the background, saying never a word, as if he belonged to another species. The meal finished, the dogs were fed, the smokers smoked by the fire, and under the influences of fullness and tobacco the calm that settled on their faces seemed almost divine, something like the mellow meditative glow portrayed on the countenances of saints. Then suddenly, as if awakening from a dream, each with a sigh or a grunt knocked the ashes out of his pipe, yawned, gazed at the fire a few moments, said, ‘Well, I believe I’ll turn in’, and straightaway vanished beneath his blankets. The fire smouldered and flickered an hour or two longer; the stars shone brighter; coons, coyotes and owls stirred the silence here and there, while crickets and hylas made a cheerful, continuous music, so fitting and full that it seemed a part of the very body of the night. The only discordance came from a snoring sleeper and the coughing sheep with dust in their throats. In the starlight the flock looked like a big grey blanket.

4 June. The camp was astir at daybreak; coffee, bacon and beans formed the breakfast, followed by quick dishwashing and packing. A general bleating began about sunrise. As soon as a mother ewe arose, her lamb came bounding and bunting for its breakfast and after the thousand youngsters had been suckled the flock began to nibble and spread. The restless wethers with ravenous appetites were the first to move but dared not go far from the main body. Billy and the Indian and the Chinaman kept them headed along the weary road, and allowed them to pick up what little they could find on a breadth of about a quarter of a mile. But as several flocks had already gone ahead of us, scarce a leaf, green or dry, was left; therefore the starving flock had to be hurried on over the bare, hot hills to the nearest of the green pastures, about twenty or thirty miles from here.

The pack animals were led by Don Quixote, a heavy rifle over his shoulder intended for bears and wolves. This day has been as hot and dusty as the first, leading over gently sloping brown hills with mostly the same vegetation, excepting the strange looking Sabine pine (Pinus Sabiniana), which here forms small groves or is scattered among the blue oaks. The trunk divides at a height of fifteen or twenty feet into two or more stems, outleaning or nearly upright with many straggling branches and long grey needles, casting but little shade. In general appearance this tree looks more like a palm than a pine. The cones are about six or seven inches long, about five in diameter, very heavy, and last long after they fall so that the ground beneath the trees is covered with them. They make fine resiny, light-giving campfires, next to ears of Indian corn the most beautiful fuel I’ve ever seen. The nuts, the Don tells me, are gathered in large quantities by the Digger Indians for food. They are about as large and hard-shelled as hazelnuts – food and fire fit for the gods from the same fruit.

5 June. This morning a few hours after setting out with the crawling sheep cloud, we gained the summit of the first well-defined bench on the mountain flank at Pino Blanco. The Sabine pines interest me greatly. They are so airy and strangely palm-like I was eager to sketch them and was in a fever of excitement without accomplishing much. I managed to halt long enough however to make a tolerably fair sketch of Pino Blanco peak from the southwest side, where there is a small field and vineyard irrigated by a stream that makes a pretty fall on its way down a gorge by the roadside.

After gaining the open summit of this first bench, feeling the natural exhilaration due to the slight elevation of 1,000 feet or so and the hopes excited concerning the outlook to be obtained, a magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came full in sight – a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down-sweeping slopes, feathered with pines and clumps of manzanita with sunny, open spaces between them, make up most of the foreground; the middle and background present fold beyond fold of finely modelled hills and ridges rising into mountain-like masses in the distance, all covered with a shaggy growth of chaparral, mostly adenostoma, planted so marvellously close and even that it looks like soft, rich plush without a single tree or bare spot. As far as the eye can reach it extends, a heaving, swelling sea of green as regular and continuous as that produced by the heaths of Scotland. The sculpture of the landscape is as striking in its main lines as in its lavish richness of detail; a grand congregation of massive heights with the river shining between, each carved into smooth, graceful folds without leaving a single rocky angle exposed, as if the delicate fluting and ridging fashioned out of metamorphic slates had been carefully sandpapered. The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever. I gazed and gazed and longed and admired until the dusty sheep and packs were far out of sight, made hurried notes and a sketch, though there was no need of either, for the colours and lines and expression of this divine landscape countenance are so burned into mind and heart they surely can never grow dim.

The evening of this charmed day is cool, calm, cloudless and full of a kind of lightning I have never seen before – white glowing cloud-shaped masses down among the trees and bushes, like quick throbbing fireflies in the Wisconsin meadows rather than the so-called ‘wild fire’. The spreading hairs of the horses’ tails and sparks from our blankets show how highly charged the air is.

6 June. We are now on what may be called the second bench or plateau of the range, after making many small ups and downs over belts of hill waves with, of course, corresponding changes in the vegetation. In open spots many of the lowland compositae are still to be found and some of the Mariposa tulips and other conspicuous members of the lily family; but the characteristic blue oak of the foothills is left below and its place is taken by a fine large species (Quercus Californica) with deeply lobed deciduous leaves, picturesquely divided trunk, and broad, massy, finely lobed and modelled head. Here also at a height of about 2,500 feet we come to the edge of the great coniferous forest, made up mostly of yellow pine with just a few sugar pines. We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh and bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun – a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can hardly conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from! In this newness of life we seem to have been so always.

Through a meadow opening in the pine woods I see snowy peaks about the headwaters of the Merced above Yosemite. How near they seem and how clear their outlines on the blue air, or rather in the blue air; for they seem to be saturated with it. How consuming strong the invitation they extend! Shall I be allowed to go to them? Night and day I’ll pray that I may, but it seems too good to be true. Someone worthy will go, able for the Godful work, yet as far as I can I must drift about these lovemonument mountains, glad to be a servant of servants in so holy a wilderness.

Found a lovely lily (Calochortus albus) in a shady adenostoma thicket near Coulterville, in company with Adiantum Chilense. It is white with a faint purplish tinge inside at the base of the petals, a most impressive plant, pure as a snow crystal, one of the plant saints that all must love and be made so much the purer by it every time it is seen. It puts the roughest mountaineer on his good behaviour. With this plant the whole world would seem rich though none other existed. It is not easy to keep on with the camp cloud while such plant people are standing preaching by the wayside.