Dan Chapman - A Road Running Southward: Following John Muirs Journey Through an Endangered Land

I could not possibly have been placed in circumstances more highly favorable for study and exploration than those which I now enjoy. I am free from the distractions constantly arising in civilized life from social claims. Nature offers unceasingly the most novel and fascinating objects for learning.

Alexander von Humboldt

Savannah, Georgia By the time he reached this colonial city in the throes of Reconstruction, John Muir had walked more than seven hundred miles in thirty-eight days, guided by little more than divine inspiration, boundless curiosity, and a love of plants. Tired, hungry, and broke, he wandered the cobblestoned streets and the swampy outskirts of town in search of a place to sleep.

He ended up at Bonaventure Cemetery. It changed his life, and Americas relationship with nature.

Bonaventure was a private cemetery on the grounds of an old cotton plantation, a bucolic refuge along the Wilmington River with live oaks festooned in Spanish moss. The bluff afforded stunning views of the saltmarsh with cordgrass that magically changed colors as the day unfolded. Bald eagles, snowy white egrets, and monarch butterflies dotted the sky. It was mid-October and fall had yet to reach Savannah.

The rippling of living waters, the song of birds, the joyous confidence of flowers, the calm, undisturbable grandeur of the oaks, mark this place as one of the Lords most favored abodes of life and light, Muir wrote in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.

He fashioned a small shelter of moss and sparkleberry bush and spent a half-dozen nights in Bonaventure. Each day he hiked three miles into town along a crushed shell road to the express office, where he hoped a package from his brother containing $150 awaited. He survived on breakfast crackers and water from a coffee-colored stream outside the cemeterys gate. Each day he grew fainter. Bonaventure, though, invigorated Muirs mind and made the twenty-nine-year-old wanderer reconsider long-held notions of life, death, nature, and mans twisted relationship with all three.

Why, he wondered, are humans considered more important than birds, bees, or bluets? Werent animals a sacred fabric of life and well-being, worthy of preservation and not to be killed for fashion, sport, or whim? The death of plants, animals, and men are all part of lifes natural cycle and Gods plan. Yet Muir intuited that nature would ultimately get crushed by man if not preserved. Flora and fauna of all sizes need spaceuntrammeled forests, mountain ranges, ocean preserves, wildlife refugesso their lives can proceed apace without undue human interference. Nature requires the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge, Muir wrote. Humans, too, need room to roam.

The budding environmentalist also began to realize at Bonaventure that there was more to life than collecting plants.

Never was Muir happier than outside the industrial grime and incessant clamor of the city. The Civil Wars destruction and ensuing decaythat he had witnessed while crossing Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia en route to Savannah and, ultimately, Florida solidified, for him, the preeminence of the natural world. Indeed, many of Bonaventures newer residentsgenerals, colonels, and privatesoffered silent testimony to mans capacity for awfulness. So-called civilization left a lot wanting; not so with nature, Muir believed.

Muirs environmental, ethical, and philosophical beliefs that under-gird the American conservation movement took hold at Bonaventure. Ironically, the father of the national parks, conscience of the environmental movement, cofounder of the Sierra Club, and passionate defender of all things wild owes much of his lifes work and reputation to the dead.

His transformational moment began with his experience at St. Bonaventure, a biographer wrote.

That was enough for me. It was time for a visit.

I leave Atlanta, my wife, Bita, and sons Sammy and Naveed on a warm October morning. It rains sporadically as my Subaru chugs south to Macon, then east to Savannah. My goal is to spend the night in Bonaventure as close to Muirs hidden spot in a dense thicket as possible. Id reported from Savannah a hundred times before and on occasion played tourist in the cemetery. The parklike layout is magnificent, with boulevards and paths bordered by towering oaks leading to the marsh, as is the craftsmanship of the tombs. Poet laureate Conrad Aikens gravesite includes a marble bench inscribed with the epitaph Cosmos Mariner Destination Unknown. The plot for songsmith Johnny Mercer (Moon River, Days of Wine and Roses) also includes a bench etched with his likeness. Little Gracie Watson, the cemeterys most beloved denizen, died at age six from pneumonia. Visitors leave toys and stuffed animals alongside the iron gate that surrounds her tomb and life-sized statue. Legend has it that tears of blood flow from Gracies eyes if her presents are removed.