the john muir exhibit - life - a conversation
A Conversation with John Muir
from World's Work [London, England], Nov. 1906
-
"A Conversation with John Muir." World's
Work [London, England] Nov. 1906, pp. 8249-8250.
"Home is the most
dangerous place I ever go to," remarked Mr. John Muir, the famous
geologist and naturalist. He was on the train returning from Arizona to
his home in Martinez, Cal., after the earthquake. "As long as I camp
out in the mountains, without tent or blankets, I get along very well; but the
minute I get into a house and have a warm bed and begin to live on fine food, I
get into a draft and the first thing I know I am coughing and sneezing and
threatened with pneumonia, and altogether miserable. Outdoors is the
natural place for a man."
The train was passing through
the San Francisco Mountains in northwestern Arizona. The conversation was
left to Mr. Muir, in acknowledgment of his superior powers of entertainment and
instruction. It drifted naturally on to mountain tramping, and Mr. Muir
told of a walk he took around Mt. Shasta several years ago. "I was
stopping at Sisson's" he said, "and one morning I thought I'd take a
walk, so I put on my hat and started. As I went down the path to the gate,
Mrs. Sisson called after me to ask how long it would be before I would be
back. 'O, I don't know,' I said, 'not very long, I guess.' 'Will you
be back to luncheon?' she asked. 'I expect so,' I said, and went on.
After I had got along a bit I concluded to walk up to the timber-line and back
again. So I started off up the mountain side. I soon found that I
could not go up directly, as I had expected, as there were long gulches full of
snow ahead, around which I had to make detours before I could proceed. I
kept repeating this performance, intent on getting up, until it was growing dusk
before I realized what time it was. But I was used to being caught out so
I simply got on the lee side of a big log, made a fire, and went to sleep on a
pile of leaves. In the morning I soon reached the timber-line. Then
I noticed some new snow formations near the summit, and I concluded to go on
up. I made the ascent and got back to the timber-line again by about
nightfall of the second day. It was snowing, so I made a bigger fire and
lay up closer to my log shelter. When I awoke in the morning I was covered
with snow, but I wasn't uncomfortably cold. But I concluded I would work
down to a little lower level and continue on around the mountain. By this
time I began to feel a little 'gone' from lack of food. I've often spent
two days without anything to eat and even felt better for it; but the third day
is getting toward the point of being too much. As I tramped along I
thought I saw smoke. I stopped and watched it for a long time to make sure
that it wasn't a ribbon of cloud. When I was sure it was smoke, I worked
toward it, and in about an hour I came on a Mexican sheep-herders' camp.
After a lot of signaling and gesticulating, I made them understand that I was
very hungry, and at last they got me up a meal. I spent the night with
them, and the next day continued my march around the mountain, taking some bread
and coffee from the camp. For three days I went on without seeing
anybody. On the seventh day I completed the circuit of the mountain, and
about noon I sauntered up the walk to Sisson's, as if I had just come in from a
half-hour's stroll. Mrs. Sisson saw me and called out, 'Well, Mr. Muir, do
you call this a short walk? Where have you been? I've had a guide
out searching for you.' 'O, I just took a little walk: I went around the
base of the mountain. But I got back in time for lunch, didn't I?' I
had been gone seven days and had walked a hundred and twenty miles.
"But that is the way to
enjoy the mountains. Walk where you please, when you like, and take your
time. The mountains won't hurt you, nor the exposure. Why, I can
live out for $50 a year, for bread and tea and occasionally a little
tobacco. All I need is a sack for the bread and a pot to boil water in,
and an axe. The rest is easy."
Some one mentioned the "Boole,"
reputed to be the biggest "big tree."
"Yes," remarked Mr.
Muir, "I measured it. I'd been fooled so often with yarns about these
biggest trees that I wouldn't go until the engineer who had measured it told me
himself that he had used a steel tape. Then I made a three days' journey
to the tree. When I measured it, though, the most I could make its girth
was fifty feet less than the engineer's figures. But I learned afterward
that a lumberman who had helped him had held out that much slack of the tape as
a joke. Later, when looking over some of my old note-books, I found
memoranda on this very tree, which I had made years before.
"But," added Mr.
Muir, "I would go three times around the world to see a tree as big as they
said that was."
Then the subject branched
off. Later Mr. Muir told of a trip which he and Professor Sargent of
Brookline, Mass., took together to study trees in Siberia. "We went
out there and saw them all right, and then I wanted to see the Cedars of Lebanon
that old Solomon used to build the temple. So while Professor Sargent went
back to Petersburg I ran down that way, but was headed off by the smallpox
quarantine at Joppa. To fill in the time I went over in the Transcaucasus
to see some American copper concessions that are being worked there. When
I got back to Constantinople the quarantine was still on, and I took a run up
the Nile to see Assouan and the old temples at Karnak. Then I came back
and went into Palestine, and saw the Cedars of Lebanon at last. Then
Professor Sargent came along, and we went through the Red Sea together, and
around to India. I had always wanted to get into the high Himalayas, so I
took six weeks to go back into them about 600 miles. After I got back to
Calcutta I decided to see some of the trees in Ceylon, and that took several
weeks. Then we went on around to Hong Kong. I had a letter from
President Roosevelt to Conger at Peking, but when we got to Hong Kong I didn't
want to get into the hot, dusty city, so I told Sargent to take the letter and
go on up there. 'Why don't you want to go?' says he. 'O, there
aren't any trees there.' 'Well, where are you going, then?' he says.
'Never you mind,' says I. 'You go ahead. I'm going to buy a map of
the world and figure out a little trip.'"
That "little trip"
was to Australia, and included a 2,600-mile excursion into the interior by rail,
boat, stage, and afoot, solely to see the great eucalyptus forests.
"And," concluded Mr. Muir, "I'd have gone on from there to Chile,
to see the Araucaria imbricata, if I hadn't found out that the nearest
way was to go back home to San Francisco and start over again."
The reference to the Araucaria imbricata was to an earlier part of the conversation, about the petrified forests of Arizona. For twenty years the Santa Fé has advertised these forests as a side-trip to be made from either Holbrook or Adamana.
"And do you know," said Mr. Muir, "those fellows had waited all
that time for me to come down there to find three more forests that not even the
people in that country knew about--and one of them is the biggest one
there. But what strikes me most about these forests is that there is not a
solitary one of their species of trees in the North American continent.
These petrified trees were carbon millions of years ago--and yet in Chile to-day
there are magnificent forests of this identical species, the Araucaria
imbricata. And if I live long enough I'm going to make a trip to Chile
just to see them."
Source: A Conversation with John Muir." World's
Work [London, England] Nov. 1906, pp. 8249-8250.
Contributed by College of the Siskiyous Library, home of the John Muir Mount Shasta Collection.
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