Out of the Wilderness.

OUT OF THE WILDERNESS OUT OF THE WILDERNESS BY JOHN MUIR I learned arithmetic in Scotland without understanding any of it, although I had the rules by heart. But when I was about fifteen or sixteen years of age I began to grow hungry for real knowledge, and persuaded father, who was willing enough to have me study provided my farm work was kept up, to buy me a higher arithmetic. Beginning at the beginning, in one summer I easily finished it, without assistance, in the short intervals between the end of dinner and the afternoon start for the harvest and hay-fields, accomplishing more without a teacher in a few scraps af time, than in years in school before my mind was ready for such work. Then in succession I took up algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, and made some little progress in each, and reviewed grammar. I was fond of reading, but father brought only a few religious books from Scotland. Fortunately, several of our neighbors brought a dozen or two of all sorts of books, which I borrowed and read, keeping all of them except the religious ones carefully hidden from father\u27s eye. Among these were Scott\u27s novels, which, like all other novels, were strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus\u27s Wars of the Jews, and D\u27Aubigne\u27s History of the Reformation, and I tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch\u27s 1 Former chapters from John Muir\u27s life have appeared in the past three issues of the Atlantic. The Editobs. 26S Lives, which, as I told him, everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood, making a stir something like phrenology and spirit-rappings, which were mysterious in their attacks as influenza. He then thought it possible that Plutarch might be turned to account on the food question by revealing what those old Greeks and Romans ate to make them strong; so at last we gained our glorious Plutarch. Dick\u27s Christian Philosophy, which I borrowed from a neighbor, I thought I might venture to read in the open, trusting that the word \u27Christian\u27 would be proof against its cautious condemnation. But father balked at the word \u27Philosophy,\u27 and quoted from the Bible a verse which spoke of \u27philosophy falsely so-called.\u27 I then ventured to speak in defense of the book, arguing that we could not do without at least a little of the most useful kinds of philosophy. \u27 Yes, we can,\u27 he said, with enthusiasm, \u27the Bible is the only book human beings can possible require throughout all the journey from earth to heaven. \u27But how,\u27 I contended, \u27can we find the way to heaven without the Bible, and how after we grow old can we read the Bible without a Utile helpful science? Just think, father, you cannot read your Bible without spectacles, and millions of others are in the same fix; and spectacles cannot be made without some knowledge of the science of optics.\u27 \u27Oh,\u27 he replied, perceiving the drift of the argument, \u27there will always be plenty of worldly people to make spectacles.\u27 To this I stubbornly replied with a quotation from the Bible with reference to the time coming when \u27all shall know the Lord from the least even to . the greatest,\u27 and then who will make the spectacles? But he still objected to my reading that book, called me a contumacious quibbler too fond of disputation, and ordered me to return it to the accommodating owner. I managed, however, to read it later. On the food question father insisted that those who argued for a vegetable diet were in the right, because our teeth showed plainly that they were made with reference to fruit and grain, and not for flesh like those of dogs and wolves and tigers. He therefore promptly adopted a vegetable diet, and requested mother to make the bread from graham flour instead of bolted flour. Mother put both kinds on the table, and meat also, to let all the family take their choice; and while father was insisting on the foolishness of eating flesh, I came to her help by calling his attention to the passage in the Bible which told the story of Elijah the Prophet, who, when he was pursued by enemies who wanted to take his life, was hidden by the Lord by the brook Gherith, and fed by ravens; and surely the Lord knew what was good to eat, whether bread or meat. And on what, Tasked, did the Lord feed Elijah? On vegetables or graham bread? No, he directed the ravens to feed his prophet on flesh. The Bible being the sole rule, father at once acknowledged that he was mistaken. The Lord never would have, sent flesh to Elijah by the ravens lf graham bread were better. I remember as a great and sudden 267 discovery that the poetry of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton was a source of inspiring, exhilarating, uplifting pleasure and I became anxious to know all the poets, arid saved up small sums to . buy as many of their books as possible. Within three or four years I was the proud possessor of parts of Shakespeare\u27s, Milton\u27s, Cowper\u27s, Henry Kirk White\u27s, Campbell\u27s, and Aken- side\u27s works, and quite a number of others seldom read nowadays. I think it was in my fifteenth year that I began to relish good literature with enthusiasm, and smack my lips over favorite lines; but there was desperately little time for reading, even in the winter evenings only a few stolen minutes now and then. Father\u27s strict rule was, straight to bed immediately after family worship, which in winter was usually over by eight o\u27clock. I was in the habit of lingering in the kitchen with a book and candle after the rest of the family had retired, and considered myself fortunate if I got five minutes reading before father noticed the light and ordered me to bed; an order that, of course, I immediately obeyed. But night after night I tried to steal minutes in the same lingering way; and how keenly precious those minutes were, few nowadays can know. Father failed, perhaps, two or three times in a whole winter to notice my light for nearly ten minutes, magnificent golden blocks of time, long to be remembered like holidays or geological periods. One evening when I was reading Church History father was particularly irritable and called out with hope-killing emphasis, \u27John, go to bed! Must I give you a separate order every night to get you to go to bed? Now, I will have no irregularity in the family; you must go when the rest go, and without my having to tell you.\u27 Then, as an afterthought, as if judging that his words OUT OF THE WILDERNESS and tone of voice were too severe for so pardonable an offense, he unwarily added, \u27If you will read, get up in the morning and read. You may get up in the morning as early as you like.\u27 That night I went to bed wishing with all my heart and soul that somebody or something might call me out of sleep to avail myself of this wonderful indulgence; and next morning, to my joyful surprise, I awoke before father called me. A boy sleeps soundly after working all day in the snowy woods, but that frosty morning I sprang out of bed as if called by a trumpet blast, rushed downstairs scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won; and, when I held up my candle to a little clock that stood on a bracket in the kitchen, I found that it was only one o\u27clock. I had gained five hours, almost half a day! \u27Five hours to myself!\u27 I said, \u27five huge, solid hours!\u27 I can hardly think of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of these five frosty hours. In the glad tumultuous excitement of so much suddenly acquired time- wealth I hardly knew what to do with it. I first thought of going on with my reading, but the zero weather would make a fire necessary, and it occurred to me that father might object to the cost of firewood that took time to chop. Therefore I prudently decided to go down cellar, where I at least would find a tolerable temperature very little below the freezing .point, for the walls were banked up in the fall to keep the potatoes from freezing. There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar, a vise, a few files, a hammer, and so forth, that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse, crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also made my own brad-awls and punches, a pair of compasses, and so forth, out of wire and old files, and went to work on a model of a self-setting sawmill I had invented. Next morning I managed joyfully to get up at the same gloriously early hour. My cellar workshop was immediately under father\u27s bed and the filing and tapping in making cog-wheels, journals, cams, and so forth, must no doubt have annoyed him; but with the permission he had granted, in his mind, and doubtless hoping that I would soon tire of getting up at one o\u27clock, he impatiently waited about two weeks before saying a word. I did not vary more than five minutes from one o\u27clock all winter, nor did I feel any bad effects whatever, nor did I think at all about the subject as to whether so little sleep might be in any way injurious; it was a grand triumph of will power over cold and common comfort and work-weariness in abruptly cutting down my ten hours\u27 allowance of sleep to five. I simply felt that I was rich beyond anything I could have dreamed of or hoped for. I was far more than happy. Like Tam-o\u27-Shan- ter, I was \u27glorious, O\u27er a\u27 the ills of life victorious.\u27 Father, as was customary in Scotland, gave thanks and asked a blessing before meals, not merely as a matter of form and decent Christian manners, for he regarded food as a gift derived directly from the hands of the Father in, heaven. Therefore every meal was to him a sacrament requiring conduct and attitude of mind not unlike that befitting the Lord\u27s supper. No idle word was allowed to be spoken at our table, much less any laughing or fun or storytelling. When we were at the breakfast- table, about two weeks after the great oom OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 269 golden time-discovery, father cleared his throat, preliminary, as we all knew, to saying something considered important. I feared that it was to be on the subject of my early rising, and dreaded the withdrawal of the permission he had granted on account of the noise I made, but still hoping that, as he had given his word that I might get up as early as I wished, he would as a Scotchman stand to it, even though it was given in an unguarded moment and taken in a sense unreasonably far- reaching. The solemn sacramental silence was broken by the dreaded question, \u27John, what time is it when you get up in the morning?\u27 \u27About one o\u27clock,\u27 I replied in a low, meek, guilty tone of voice. \u27And what kind of a time is that, getting up in the middle of the night and disturbing the whole family?\u27 I simply reminded him of the permission he had freely granted me to get up as early as I wished. \u27I know it,\u27 he said, in an almost agonizing tone of voice; \u27I know I gave you that miserable permission, but I never imagined that you would get up b the middle of the night.\u27 To this I cautiously made no reply, but continued to listen for the heavenly one-o\u27clock call, and it never failed. After completing my self-setting sawmill I dammed one of the streams in the meadow and put the mill in operation. This invention was speedily followed by a lot of others, water-wheels, curious door-locks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, pyrometers, clocks, a barometer, an automatic contrivance for feeding the horses at any required hour, a lamp-lighter aAd fire- lighter, an early-or-late.-rising machine, and so forth. Alter the sawmill was proved and discharged from my mind, I happened to think it would be a fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell the day of the week and the day of the month, as well as strike like a common clock and point out the hours; also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected with a bedstead to set me on my feet at any hour in the morning; also to start fires, light lamps, and so forth. I had learned the time laws of the pendulum from a book, but with this exception I knew nothing of timekeepers, for I had never seen the inside of any sort of clock or watch. After long brooding, the novel clock was at length completed in my mind, and was tried and found to be durable, and to work well and look well, before I had begun to build it in wood. I carried small parts of it in my pocket to whittle at when I was out at work on the farm, using every spare or stolen moment within reach without father\u27s knowing anything about it. In the middle of summer, when harvesting was in progress, the novel time-machine was nearly completed. It was hidden upstairs in a spare bedroom where some tools were kept. I did the making and mending on the farm; but one day at noon, when I happened to be away, father went upstairs for a hammer or something and discovered the mysterious machine back of the bedstead. My sister Margaret saw him on his knees examining it, and at the first opportunity whispered in my ear, \u27John, fayther saw that thing you\u27re making upstairs.\u27 None of the family knew what I was doing, but they knew very well that all such work was frowned on by\u27father, and kindly warned me of any danger that threatened my plans. The fine invention seemed doomed to destruction before its time-ticking commenced, although I had carried it so long in my mind that I thought it handsome, and like the nest of Burns\u27s wee mousie it had cost me mony a weary whittling OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 270 nibble. When we were at dinner several days after the sad discovery, father began to clear his throat, and I feared the doom of martyrdom was about to be pronounced on my grand clock. \u27John,\u27 ho inquired, \u27what is that thing you are making upstairs?\u27 I replied in desperation that I did n\u27t know what to call it. \u27What! Y\u27ou mean to say you don\u27t know what you are trying to do?\u27 \u27Oh, yes,\u27 I said, \u27I know very well what I am doing.\u27 \u27What then is the thing for?\u27 \u27It\u27s for a lot of things,\u27 I replied, \u27but getting people up early in the morning is one of the main things it is intended for; therefore, it might perhaps be called an early-rising machine.\u27 After getting up so extravagantly early, to make a machine for getting up perhaps still earlier seemed so ridiculous that he very nearly laughed. But after controlling himself, and getting command of a sufficiently solemn face and voice, he said severely, \u27Do you not think it is very wrong to waste your time on such nonsense?\u27 \u27No,\u27 I said meekly, \u27I don\u27t think I\u27m doing any wrong.\u27 \u27 Well,\u27 he replied,\u27 I assure you I do; and if you were only half as zealous in the study of religion as you are in contriving and Whittling these useless, nonsensical things, it would be infinitely better for you. I want you to be like Paul, who said that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and Him crucified. To this I made no reply, gloomily believing my fine machine was to be burned, but still taking what comfort I could in realizing that anyhow I had enjoyed inventing and making it. After a few days, finding that nothing more was to be said, and that father, after all, had not had the heart to destroy it, all necessity for secrecy being ended, I finished it in the half- hours that we had at noon, and set it in the parlor between two chairs, hung moraine boulders, that had come from the direction of Lake Superior, on it for weights, and set it running. We were then hauling grain into the barn. Father at this period devoted himself entirely to the Bible and did no farm work whatever. The clock had a good loud tick and when he heard it strike, one of my sisters told me that he left his study, went to the parlor, got down on his knees, and carefully examined the machinery, which was all in plain sight, not being inclosed in a case. This he did repeatedly, and evidently seemed a little proud of my ability to invent and whittle such a thing, though careful to give no encouragement for anything more of the kind in future. But somehow it seemed impossible to stop. Inventing and whittling faster than ever, I made another hickory clock, shaped like a scythe to symbolize the scythe of Father Time. The pendulum is a bunch of arrows symbolizing the flight of time. It hangs on a leafless mossy oak snag showing the effect of time, and on the snath is written, \u27All flesh is grass.\u27 This, especially the inscription, rather pleased father, and of course mother and all my sisters and brothers admired it. Like the first, it indicates the days of the week and month, starts fires and beds at any given hour and minute, and though made more than fifty years ago, is still a good timekeeper. My mind still running on clocks, I invented a big one like a town clock, with four dials, with the time figures so large they could be read by all our immediate neighbors as well as ourselves when at work in the fields, and on the side next the house the days of the ^veek and month were indicated. It was to be placed on the peak of the barn roof. But just as it was all but finished father stopped.me, saying that it would bring too many people around the barn. I. then asked permission to put it on the top of a black oak tree near the house. Studying the larger main branches I thought I could secure a sufficiently rigid foundation for it, while the trimmed sprays and leaves would conceal the angles of the cabin required to shelter the works from the weather, and the two-second pendulum, fourteen feet long, could be snugly incased on the side of the trunk. Nothing about the grand, useful timekeeper, I argued, would disfigure the tree, for it would look something like a big hawk\u27s nest. \u27But that,\u27 he objected, \u27would drttw still bigger, bothersome trampling crowds about the place, for who ever heard of any thmg so queer as a big clock on the top of a tree.\u27 So I had to layaside its big wheels and cams and rest content with the pleasure of inventing it, and looking at it in my mind and listening to the deep, solemn throbbing of its long two-second pendulum, with its two old axes back to back for the bob. One of my inventions was a large thermometer made of an iron rod, about three feet long and five-eighths of an inch in diameter, that had formed part of a wagon-box. The expansion and contraction of this rod was multiplied by a series of levers made of strips of hoop-iron. The pressure of the rod against the levers was kept constant by a small counterweight, so that the slightest change in the length of the rod was instantly shown on a dial about three feet wide, multiplied about thirty-two thousand times. The zero point was gained by packing the rod m wet snow. The scale was so large that the big black hand on the white painted dial could be seen distinctly, and the temperature read, while we were ploughing in the field below the bouse. The extremes of heat and cold. caused the hand to make several revolutions. The number of these revolutions was indicated on a small dial marked on the larger one. This thermometer was fastened on the side of the house, and was so sensitive that when any one approached it within four or five feet the heat radiated from the observer\u27s body caused the hand of the dial to move so fast that the motion was plainly visible, and when he stepped back, the hand moved slowly back to its normal position. It was regarded as a great wonder by the neighbors, and even by my own all-Bible father. Talking over plans with me one day, a friendly neighbor said, \u27Now, John, if you wish to get into a machine-shop, just take some of your inventions to the state fair, and you may be sure that as soon as they are seen they will open the door of any shop in the country for you. You will be welcomed everywhere.\u27 And when I doubtingly asked if people would care to look at things made of wood, he said, \u27Made of wood! Made of wood! What does it matter what they\u27re made of when they are so out-and-out original. There\u27s nothing else like them in the world. That is what will attract attention, and besides they\u27re mighty handsome things anyway to come from the ûábackwoods.\u27 So I was encouraged to leave home and go at his direction to the state fair when it was being held in Madison. When I told father that I was about to leave home, and inquired whether, if I should happen to be in need of money, he would send me a little, he said, \u27No. Depend entirely on yourself.\u27 Good advice, I suppose, but surely needlessly severe for a bashful home- loving boy who had worked so hard. I had the gold sovereign that my grandfather had given me when I left Scotland, and a few dollars, perhaps ten, 272 OUT OF THE WILDERNESS OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 273 that I had made by raising a few bushels of grain on a little patch of sandy, abandoned ground. So when I left home to try the world I had only fifteen dollars in my pocket. Strange to say; father carefully taught us to consider ourselves very poor worms of the dust, conceived in sin, and so forth, and devoutly believed that quenching every spark of pride and self-confidence was a sacred duty, without realizing that in so doing he might, at the same time, be quenching everything else. Praise he considered most