Travelling vicariously with John Muir
Some insights on contentment, awe and sufficiency
Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal. This particular post comes to you from Scotland and doesn’t follow the normal pattern. For quicker, lighter reading, you might prefer my series of Sketches.
This summer I’ve been travelling vicariously rather than in the flesh, by reading My First Summer in the Sierra – a journal by the Scottish-born ecologist and wilderness preservation advocate, John Muir. Published in 1911, the book covers Muir’s explorations of the USA’s Sierra Nevada in 1869, and I’ve been drip-feeding myself the entries one day at a time so that my calendar aligns with his.
There’s an other-worldly kind of resonance about his prose. It’s the diary of a man continually burning with excitement for the natural world, entranced to the point of mania by his surroundings, experiencing frequent manifestations of heaven on earth and at blissful ease with the thoughts in his head. His words seem founded on an unwritten mantra that simply to live, and to live simply, is a sacred act.
Settled yet curious
A few years ago I spent a night at an AirBnB in Norwich (a small city with an ancient heart in the English county of Norfolk), near the centre on a tight and congested road. The couple who lived there weren’t at home, so I had the place to myself. It was a small house and very old, with a softness about its wood-and-mortar contours that stood in stubborn defiance against the regularities of brick and concrete which surrounded and towered above it. Despite the busy world outside their door, I’ve rarely known a space to feel more like a home – a shared sanctuary, and a celebration of curiosity for the world beyond its walls. Shelves and cabinets were busy with nick-nacks – carved ornaments from faraway places, a wooden drum, colourfully painted lamps, some kind of flute, each apparently quite different in origin. Somehow they spoke of curation rather than cheesy appropriation; these spaces were a living repository, rather than a dusty mausoleum of hoarded props propping up hoarded memories.
There’s a difference between compulsively hoarding (which corrodes what we find meaningful by attempting to value too much, devaluing what does deserve preservation by cheapening the finite currency that is our attention) and mindfully gathering an object from the world and finding a place for it within an ordered space where it can be happily appreciated anew, again and again, within the context of other artefacts we find curious, and to which it lends its own context.
In front of a small log burner, soft chairs (for more people than could sleep upstairs) were gathered around a low coffee table in an arrangement which suggested that the modestly-sized TV was watched only occasionally. The awkward floor plan made a crooked triangle out of the tiny adjoining kitchen, where a warm and jumbled smell of spices lingered around the green-painted cupboards, neatly crammed. Directly above, the same-shaped sliver of landing was an artist’s nook with an easel and a bookshelf and a wooden stool. Smallness had engendered ingenuity. This was a settled, contained, peaceful kind of spacefulness.
I never met the couple who lived there, but I sensed they had no grandiose ambitions for loftier ceilings, a dining room suite or a gravel driveway. They were, I imagined, finding contentment, not by retracting the scope of their dreams or denying an impulse to seek and acquire, but by attending more to people and ideas than to things, and by preserving their attention for one of the greatest luxuries available to us – creativity. Their lives were full of colour, appreciation and friendship, and their horizons were moderated to a tolerable, happy balance of freedom and boundedness. It was a modest house, but it contained the world.
A happy onslaught
Muir’s ecstasy for his surroundings must have been a little weird to witness. Even his canine companion thought so, “manifesting in his intelligent eyes a puzzled concern that was very ludicrous” in response to Muir who, on seeing another mountain valley, couldn't help himself from “shouting and gesticulating in a wild burst of ecstasy”. He sounds quite cuckoo.
To read his diary in larger chunks might feel tortuous, as Muir’s prose does get ‘frothy’ for modern minds, and the onslaught of rapture can come across a bit strong. In the West, we haven’t really done rapture since 1945 (or was it 1916?) and there are only so many descriptions of clouds (“the crispest, brightest, rockiest looking clouds, most varied in features”) that I can handle in one sitting. However, allowing myself to zone out wouldn’t be fair to the sincerity and frequent beauty of Muir’s words. These pages are easier to appreciate when taken slowly, as one-day(ish) snips. Doing so, we can imbibe his sentences at the same pace at which he drinks in his surroundings.
Making today's summer align with Muir’s also encourages us to draw direct comparisons between our own windows on reality and the author’s in 1869.
4th July 2024, Outer Hebrides (election day). 40mph winds, 11 degrees C and a continual downpour that refused to relent until the grey daylight slowly began to fade over the sea as midnight approached. I spent 9 tedious looking at my computer, trading an unrecoverable allocation of spirit for numbers.
4th July 1869, Sierra Nevada (Independence Day). A day that is “full of the essences of the woods...”.
Sneaking up
Riding a bike used to be one of my favourite things to do, but these days my mountain bike hardly comes out of the shed. Partly this is because I now have a dog to walk instead, but also it's because I've struggled to recover from the disappointment of a ride on Harris a few years ago when the anticipated thrill of wind and speed and terrain never became true. Instead, I remember a disintegrated, petty storm of dead frustration.
I knew that surrounding me were the objective ingredients of what I find to be beautiful. And this was a landscape that I knew and loved, a glen that I have fond memories of first walking as a small child with a beloved labrador. But on this occasion my mind was closed it.
I stopped to take the photos I was supposed to take: the sparkling sunburst through an expanse of gently spattering raindrops, my trusty old bike resting nonchalantly against a footbridge, a vaguely ‘arty’ composition of the winding path leading away to a bright horizon. I was ticking aesthetic boxes and finding no pleasure in it, and realising this only increased my vague, nebulous sense of growing frustration. Turning back would only have deepened what I was feeling, so I pressed on, hating and resenting each pointless stroke of the pedals for taking me further from the comfort of home while giving me nothing in return. The bargain was broken. Something wasn’t right.
Muir knew a shepherd who was like me that day, distracted and spiritually blind. “Such souls, I suppose, are asleep, or smothered and befogged beneath mean pleasures and cares.”
That day I learned first-hand that the experience of awe (and there are many sources and flavours of awe) has to be unlocked beforehand in other areas of life. You have to sneak up on it by preparing the way, setting other things straight. Beauty + brain does not inevitably equal awe, or happiness.
As the pop psych saying goes: "The thing is never the thing".
Infinite weave
Muir's landscapes are interconnected realms of organic rocks and cloudland geologies, where "a warm and sunny day [makes] sap and blood flow fast". There's a kind of continuity here between flesh and forest, and between the ‘real’ world and our less tangible inner selves.
“[…] White peaks deep in the sky, every feature glowing, radiating beauty that pours into our flesh and bones […]”.
In one particularly beautiful passage, Muir's campfire is a portal of fire through which the sunlight of past centuries, harvested by the forest, is given out again in flame.
"No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull [...] When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." – John Muir.
Nice dog you are with there. Thanks for sharing!
"A dusty mausoleum of hoarded props propping up hoarded memories."
What a gem of a lyric this is (within a lyrical gem)