Tony Perrottet - John Muirs Yosemite

Legendary naturalist John Muir s name crops up so often in California on schools, parks, nature preserves, hiking trails, libraries, roads, even medical centers you would think his first home, a log cabin in Yosemite National Park , would be lit by neon signs or at least a visitors center. Surprisingly, there is no marker at all; only a few Muir aficionados are even aware of its location, just off the worn main trail below Lower Yosemite Falls. But its conspicuous absence has a poetic, Muir-like logic, I found, when I was led to the precise spot on a crisp summers morning. The strictly-defined Yosemite trails seem designed to keep visitors from experiencing its forests. But nosing through the woods here offered glimpses of nature that would have thrilled Muir. The mountain air was heavy with ponderosa and cedar. Blue jays, larks, and chipmunks frolicked like Disney animations. And with every turn, the vista of the Yosemite Valley offered staggering cliffs so wondrous in their scale that early visitors compared them to soaring Gothic cathedrals. Who wouldnt be a mountaineer! Muir wrote. Up here, all the worlds prizes seem nothing. To me, the combined effect was otherworldly; no doubt early Californians regarded Yosemite as the new Eden.

Bonnie Gisel, curator of the Sierra Club s LeConte Memorial Lodge, led me through the wilderness known as Yosemite National Park. The Yosemite Valley was the ultimate pilgrimage site for Victorian Americans, Gisel explained. Here was the absolute manifestation of the divine, where they could celebrate God in nature. Locating the Grail on my own modest pilgrimage, however, took some tenacity. At one point, a sign noted Muirs cabin, but did not give its exact location. A bronze plaque placed at the foot of the falls in the 1920s erroneously claimed to mark the cabins site. Its a nice spot, Gisel said, but it wasnt here. Soon we were wading through knee-high grass and clambering over fallen trunks alongside Yosemite Creek. Was Gisel looking for a secret Sierra Club marker, I asked? She paused and readjusted her John Lennon sunglasses: Actually, Im looking for the place where kids from the parks school bring their gerbils. Finally, she paused in triumph: This is where it was.

The site was a shady grotto, overflowing with bracken ferns and milkweed, as picturesque a scene as fans might have hoped for the thirty-one-year-old drifter who would become Americas most influential conservationist. Although there are no structural remains, we know from Muirs diaries and letters that he built his one-room cabin from pine and cedar with a friend, Harry Randall, and that its playful design reflected his boyish personality. He even diverted the creek to run beneath the floor. (Muir loved the sound of water, Gisel told me). Plants grew exuberantly through the floorboards. Muir wove the fronds of two ferns into an ornamental arch in the window over his writing desk and slept in a hammock softened by green cedar boughs under sheepskin blankets. He couldnt have lived closer to nature without sleeping inside a tree trunk.

It was a beguiling glimpse of Muir in his own version of Walden Pond . He is such an icon that its sometimes difficult to believe he was a living human being, let alone a highly whimsical young man. He can seem a remote figure even in Yosemite National Park, the slice of America he loved best, 200 miles east of San Francisco in the central Sierra Nevada . A life-sized bronze statue of Muir in the visitors center presents him as a wizened prophet, complete with flowing Methuselah beard, leaning on a staff and gazing into the distance as if listening to the music of the spheres. In the nearby museum, Muirs battered tin cup and the traced outline of his foot are displayed like religious relics. Park bookstores overflow with Muirs writings, and his pithy quotations adorn the walls even those in compost toilets of campgrounds in the parks rugged backcountry. Meanwhile, his prophet-like visage adorns the California state quarter, minted in 2005. But all this hero-worship obscures the real story of the man and his achievements.

There are an amazing number of misconceptions about John Muir, Yosemites public information officer, Scott Gediman, told me. People think he discovered Yosemite or started the national park system. Others assume he lived here all his life. In fact, Muir lived in Yosemite on and off over a short but intense period from 1868 to 1873, a time that transformed him personally and put him on the path to becoming his eras successor to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson . Later in his busy life, Muir would return to Yosemite at key political moments, but always on shorter trips burdened with responsibility and his own celebrity. It was during the happy period of his relative youth, when Muir was free to anonymously scooch around Yosemite, that he shaped his ideas. Many of his famous adventures that appeared in classic books like The Yosemite and Our National Parks were written in his mature years, but drawn from this pivotal time.

As a young man, Muir felt he was a student in what he called the University of the Wilderness, Gisel said. And... Yosemite was his graduate course. This is where he decided who he was, what he wanted to say, and how he was going to say it.

Few who saw him then would have anticipated his illustrious future. When he first strode into Yosemite in the spring of 1868, Muir was a scruffy Midwestern hobo and former draft dodger he went to Canada to escape conscription during the Civil War - wandering the wilderness fringes of America, taking odd jobs wherever he could. In retrospect, visiting Yosemite seemed an inevitable step in his lifes journey, but Muirs journals and letters at the time reveal him battling self-doubt and uncertainty. Though my lot in these years is to wander in foreign lands, he wrote his family in Wisconsin, my heart is at home.

Muirs presence in the West was actually the result of a series of improbable accidents. Emigrating from Scotland at age eleven, he was raised by a dour father in Madison, Wisconsin. By his mid-twenties, Muir seemed to have a respectable career ahead of him as an inventor, albeit an eccentric one. (His gadgets included an early-rising bed, which would raise the sleeper to an upright position and a clock made in the shape of a scythe to signify the advance of Father Time ). But in 1867, he was nearly blinded in a factory mishap, and after slowly recovering his eyesight, the religious Muir decided to devote his life to studying the beauties of Gods creation. With almost no money and already sporting the full beard that would eventually become his trademark, he set off on a 1,000-mile walk from Kentucky to Florida with the intention of continuing to South America to see the Amazon . But fate intervened again: Muir contracted a violent case of malaria. The Gilded Age Jack Kerouac then sailed to San Francisco via Panama, hoping the California air would restore his health. He didnt plan to stay long.

On March 27, 1868, Muir hopped off the boat in San Francisco and asked a carpenter the fastest way out of the chaotic city. Where do you want to go? the man asked. Muir replied, Anywhere that is wild. The carpenter pointed in the direction of Yosemite. In truth, Muir had been aware of the valley for several years through newspaper reports, photographs, and lithographs. His lifelong friend and mentor, the erudite nature-lover Jeanne Carr, had recommended a visit two years earlier. Yosemite was a sacred place, she thought, where Gods hand was manifest in the West. Oh this house of our Father! she piously wrote. I would like to know all its mansions.

Few Americans then recalled that the landscape inspiring such Christian fervor had an ignoble history. The first white visitors were vigilantes from the so-called Mariposa Brigade, who in 1851 charged into Yosemite with guns blazing on a punitive expedition against the Ahwahnechee ; the Indians the vigilantes didnt kill were driven from the valley. But the brigade brought back reports of a tremendous seven-mile-long gorge framed by monumental cliff formations, now known as El Capitan and Half Dome , filled with serene meadows and waterfalls that thundered into lakes like titanic fountains.