John Muir Newsletter, Summer 1995

John Muir Newsletter summer 1995 university of the pacific volume 5, number 3 JOHN MUIR AND THE VAN DYKE RANCH: INTIMACY AND DESIRE IN HIS FINAL YEARS By Peter Wild (Editor\u27s note: Well-known author, poet, biographer and nature writer, Peter Wild is Professor of Modern Language at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The following paper is an outgrowth of his recent research on the Muir family in the Southwest. Part Two will be published in the next issue.) PARTONE When occasional gunfire erupted in the town, it could be heard at the nearby desert ranch, but that didn\u27t seem to bother Helen Muir. This is a beautiful day full of sunshine, and I am feeling sunshiny, too, Helen reassured herfather, John Muir (January 8,1908).\u27 I was very glad to get your all-well letter today, Muir responded from Martinez, at his orchard home in the San Francisco Bay area (January 9, 1908). Not many days before, Helen\u27s bout with pneumonia took a sharp turn for the worse, and Muir had made a desperate rush south with Helen in hopes that the warm, dry air of the Mojave desert would put his pallid daughter back on the path of recovery. Now the crisis, in an age when people regularly died of respiratory problems, seemed to be passing. Helen\u27s health would always be of concern, but in the main she grew ever more robust as the days passed into months. She came to love her new desert surroundings and eventually married a local rancher\u27s son. Such an upbeat exchange between father and daughter as marked the early correspondence of their separation beginning early in 1908 would be repeated overthe sixyears until Muir\u27s death in 1914. Duringthat time, Muir would take the train south to visit Helen, bounce his grandsons on his knee, regale the cowboys at the desert ranch with tales spun in his charming Scottish brogue and hand out boxes of pineapples, peaches, and cigars.2 Yet such happy letters often let slip hints of other, less pleasant matters churning under the surface of the hopeful Victorian prose flying between father and daughter. The truth is that Muir\u27s closing years were the most tumultuous of his mature life, and to probe such issues through letters and other documents gives a good measure of Muir both as a public figure and a private man. They show him to be a person, indeed, as his popular image suggested, rising with heroic strenuousness to wrestle with the national environmental problems of the day, writing doggedly in his final years to produce books that still stir nature lovers after almost a century, yet, less known, getting mired in the mundane afflictions that assail us all. Essentially, the problem was that Muir was getting old, and the cantankerous world was changing. Rude reality refused to conform to his bright vision of what it should be. Yet despite the pain and frustration this caused him, the dramatic loss of the biggest conservation battle of his life, the depths of his private loneliness for all his public acclaim, he would die a happy man, the comfort of any expiring writer, the manuscript of his next book nearly completed and laying beside him. Before that happened, unhappiness crept into Muir\u27s life. In 1905, he was living happily enough, surrounded by his wife, Louie, and his two daughters, Helen (continued on page 4) 1996 MUIR CONFERENCE PLANNING CONTINUES Be sure to mark your calendars for the special conference, John Muir in Historical Perspective, to be held April 18-21,1996. The planning committee is working on a three- day event, each day in a separate location to take advantage of the variety of Muir-related sites in Central California. Below is the tentative schedule: Thursday evening, April 18: Reception at John Muir National Historic Site, Martinez Friday morning, April 19: Academic sessions, John Muir National Historic Site Friday afternoon: Tours of Strentzel-Muir home, Muir Cemetary Saturday morning, April 20: Academic sessions, University of the Pacific, Stockton Saturday afternoon: travel to Yosemite National Park Sunday morning, April 21: Academic sessions, Yosemite Institute, Crane Flat Sunday afternoon: tour of Muir sites in Yosemite Valley Participants and guests will be invited to stay overnight at Martinez on Thursday. After Friday morning sessions and tours, they will travel to Stockton and stay overnight there. On Saturday afternoon, after morning sessions and a visit to the Holt-Atherton Library, home of the Muir Family Collection, the conference will recess so that participants may travel to Yosemite and spend the night at the Yosemite Institute in Crane Flat. On Sunday, following a morning academic session, they will have opportunity to visit several Muir sites in the Valley, and still have free time to enjoy the Park. The deadline for proposals is November 15. Tentative plans and locations may change, depending on the program committee\u27s recommendations and the success in developing the local arrangements. Outside funding will be essential. Any contributions, suggestions or comments will be most welcome and may be forwarded to: CHI96, John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211. The conference invites proposals on any aspect of the theme. Proposals for papers and sessions should be forwarded, along with a brief resume, to the CHI 96 Program Committee, in care of its Co-Chairs, Professors Sally Miller and Ron Limbaugh, Department of History, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 by November 15,1995. Phone (209)946-2145;fax(209)946-2318. ELECTRONIC LETTERS Date: Wed, 31 May 199510:21:00 +0900 Subject: Muir and Buddhism To: johnmuir@vmsl.cc.uop.edu In the Spring 1995 issue of the John Muir Newsletter. Michelle L. Dwyer argues persuasively that Muir\u27s experience of and writings about Nature show strong affinities to Zen Buddhism. As I argued in my contribution to John Muir, Life and Work, I don\u27t think there can be any doubt about this point. Muir\u27s essential perception of reality is in conformance with the basic perceptions of Zen. This perception of Oneness, of undifferentiated existence, is basic not just to the three sects of Zen, but to Buddhism as a whole. Indeed, such identification with nature is at the heart of many spiritual traditions. Thoreau, even as early as his stay at Walden Pond, was experiencing such perceptions and identifying them, correctly, as common both to the Vishnu Purana and the sufi philosophy of Kabir. William James detailed many such ideas in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Certainly, as Ms. Dwyer says, Muir had no systematic knowledge of Zen, since the first glilmpse of Zen teachings didn\u27t reach America until the World Parliament of Religions atthe Chicago World\u27s Columbian Exposition in 1892. Most of Muir\u27s published work seems to be based closely on diaries written long before Zen could possibly have influenced him. But he was exposed much earlier to Vedic and Sufi influences through his Transcendentalist contacts. But there is no need to posit a direct teaching influence. These ideas are freely available within the mind and appear periodically in most or all religious traditions. Don Weiss, Ryozenji, Temple l.Bando 126, Oasa-cho, Naruto City, Tokushima-ken, JAPAN 779-02, e-mail PXQO 1000@niftyserve.or.jp JOHN MUIR NEWSLETTER. VOL. V, NUMBER 3 SUMMER 1995 Published quarterly by the John Muir Center for Regional Studies, University of the Pacific, Stockton, CA 95211 Editor Center Director Staff © Sally M. Miller R.H. Limbaugh This Newsletter is printed on recycled paper. BOOK Mori no seija: Shizenhogo no chichi John Muir [A Saint in the Forest: The Father of NatureProtection John Muir]. ByKatoNoriyoshi. Yama-to-keikokusha. (Tokyo: 1995) 279 pp. ¥1600. Reviewed by KozyAmemiya, Sociologist Kato Noriyoshi, the author of this book, abandoned a publishing career in order to live in the mountains, and he now writes on the subject of nature while running a lodge. He visited the Giant Forest in the Sequoia National Park in the winter of 1992 when he was inspired to learn more about John Muir, who has been little known in Japan. The result is this book, written as an introduction for the Japanese audience to Muir, the father of wilderness protection. It is not easy to write a book on Muir in such a way that would make sense to a Japanese audience unfamiliar with American history and geography. Mr. Kato takes up this task by narrating Muir\u27s life in chronological order against the historical backdrop supported by geographical descriptions, and succeeds at least in painting an overall picture of Muir\u27s accomplishments. Kato reconstructs Muir\u27s life around several external factors. First is Muir\u27s childhood in Scotland, especially his strolls in the field with his grandfather, to which Kato attributes Muir\u27s love of nature. Secondly, attendance at the University of Wisconsin provided Muir with basic scientific training and life-long mentors. The third and most significant factor is his accidental arrival in Yosemite whose magnificent beauty enraptured Muir. His glacier theory as to the creation of the Yosemite Valley is the fourth factor and the highlight of Muir\u27s career as a Yosemite specialist. Muir\u27s married life and his political campaigns for congressional protection of Yosemite and other wilderness areas are the last factors considered. Muir is depicted as a fiercely independent individual who wholeheartedly devoted himself to the wilderness and to his family. Muir is also contrasted with nature philosophers of the East Coast elite and with scientists in academic institutions. Notwithstanding all this, the picture of Muir, the man, remains superficial and does not fully come to life. The problem is that Kato\u27s description of Muir often falls into a trite portrait of an eccentric. As a result, Muir\u27s personal and professional lives are not integrated into the larger cultural context. Nor does Kato discuss Muir\u27s ideas about nature in depth and in what way they are related to the various ideologies of the environmental protection movement. For a Japanese reader to understand Muir, it is important that an author provide a basic grasp of American ideas about nature and wilderness as well as an exploration of how they might differ from Japanese ideas. For example, did Muir regard nature as basically at odds with human beings and in need of human protection? Were Muir\u27s ideas about nature and wilderness in line with or REVIEWS different from that of American mainstream thinkers? Does nature mean the same as shizen, a favorite concept of the Japanese? How does wilderness, to which the Japanese language has no exact equivalent, differ from nature? Without thinking about these questions, it will be difficult for a Japanese to understand the social and cultural meaning of national parks in the American context and to appreciate Muir\u27s work. This book explores John Muir\u27s achievements. Without discussions of Muir\u27s ideas on the relationship between nature and human beings, however, it does not sufficiently explain what propelled Muir in his pursuits. As the Japanese take more interest in the environmental protection movement in the United States, they will demand a book to help them understand Muir in greater depth. Until then, this book will serve as a fair introduction to Muir. Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II. Edited by Rob Kling, Spencer Olin and Mark Poster. (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1995) (paperback). Reviewed by Roy Childs, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of the Pacific (Editor\u27s Note: The John Muir Newsletter, with its focus on Muir and the environment sometimes finds that important work on urban and suburban developments merit attention. An example is the book considered below.) As this title suggests, the authors in this collection see the emergence of an urbanized Orange County late in the twentieth century as a phenomenon distinctly different in its spatial, economic and social patterns from urban centers which developed earlier. The resulting multinucleated metropolitan region may superficially resemble the stereotypical twentieth century suburb, but the reality is quite different. Hence, they apply the term \u27postsuburban\u27 to urbanized Orange County. The chapters in the book discuss the rise of Orange County\u27s postsuburban form as an element of post-industrial society, explain the economic forces responsible for this form, examine the resulting socioeconomic, occupational, and lifestyle consequences, and discuss the political dynamics, more or less in that order. The volume has value as a case study of Orange County and the kind of urban area it seems to epitomize, but has at least equal value as a discussion of contemporary urban theory. For, to make the argument that Orange County represents a new phenomenon, Kling, Olin, Poster and other contributing authors must critique existing theory as it applies to the Orange County case, and attempt new paradigms to frame the data they present. These discussions may prove as useful to the serious reader as the case study itself. (continued on page 6) (continued from page 1) and Wanda, while managing the extensive orchards in Martinez. In June, however, Helen became seriously ill, and Muir\u27s life took a turn for the worse. Together with her elder sister, Wanda, Muir took Helen to Arizona to benefit from the bright sunshine and high desert air. Barely settled there, the three received word that Louie also was seriously ill. John Muir and Wanda rushed back to Martinez, only to stand by helplessly as Louie died in August. Now the family not only was weakened but split, with Helen remaining in Arizona because of her illness, while John and Wanda took turns traveling back and forth to stay with her. To complicate matters, Wanda married in 1906. Thereality of Muir\u27s vision of a stable Victorian home was disintegrating.3 For the rest of his life he would battle to shore up what had, to a large degree, already fallen apart. In his last extant letter to Helen, Muir was still lamenting: If I could only have you and Wanda as in the lang syne ... (Decembers, 1914). Adding to his woes, the growing city of San Francisco stepped up plans to enlarge its water supply. This would mean invading Yosemite National Park to create a reservoir inHetch-Hetchy Valley, one of the loveliest of the Sierra\u27s jewels. Bad enough in itself, this could be an alarming precedent, a license to violate other national parks for the real or imagined needs of an expanding economy. In response, Muir rallied the incipient conservation movement, rousing the nation to protest the invasion. Yet, despite years of exhausting activism and several near successes, Muir discovered that it was not enough to be on the side of the angels. Bankrolled by the proponents of growth, the politicians won out. Another battle lost.4 In short, during the closing years of his life, Muir was a torn man. As a youth exploring the Sierra in the 1870s, he may have been possessed by a genuine inner calm, but now in his seventies, he sat on his estate in sometimes foggy and chill Martinez, grieving for his lost wife and deceased friends, and depressed with loneliness.5 Usually not a man to complain, on February 13,1913, Muir wrote openly to James Whitehead. Briefly catching up his boyhood friend on the events of the decades, Muir concluded that his wife had died ... long years ago ... and that his two daughters were married. That left him ... alone in a large house with only books and hard literary work for companions. Feeling at loose ends as he shuffled around the big, empty house, he fretted over Helen\u27s health, while the hounds of the Hetch-Hetchy conflict constantly bayed, reminding him that what he had accomplished for wilderness preservation might be undone in one swoop. In the midst of this, plagued now by his own coughing assaults, he struggled to rouse himself, to find the energy and mental clarity to write what he knew would be his final books. At one point his friends saw illness and depression looming so large about him that a worried J. E. Calkins discussed Muir\u27s condition at length with fellow Sierra Club member A. H. Sellers. Calkins feared that ... we shall never have much more writing... from Muir before he ... crosses the Great Range (March 23,1908). One thing brought Muir through, and if to our far more skeptical age it smacks of cliche, it brought him through nonetheless. Time and again, when the Hetch-Hetchy affair looked bleak or when Helen again had a brush with death, Muir\u27s nineteenth-century optimism rescued him. It blended two impulses. Along with other Christians of the day weary of a constantly chiding and scowling God, Muir defanged his earlier Christianity of its hellfire and spun his beliefs into a rosy gauze, the generalized hope for abetter life now assured by a vague but avuncular Providence. Reinforcing this optimism was the transcendentalism popularized by the writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Again conveniently vague, making up with good feelings what it lacked in bothersome specifics, the attitude placed faith in intuition as the means to truth. It was an effervescent approach to nature-decades before Muir had called nature the great book full of priceless knowledge (September 13,1865). In this yeasty view, to study a leaf or to revel in the grand prospect of snowy peaks was to catch glimpses of nothing less than the face of God. Thus, taking all this together, Muir gives solace to a recent widow that her beloved husband now is in ... abetter world ... (ca. May 26,1914). MuirwritestheHookerfamily,rejoicingthatthey have found refuge in the ... healing, soothing mountains (June 13,1911). In fact, nature could be so efficacious that he urges Helen to leave home for a while and ... camp out under the pines ... as a cure for her baby\u27s teething (June 15,1911). And even when the Hetch-Hetchy battle is all but lost-and at the same time, the Kaiser\u27s army is marching roughshod across Europe-Muir consoles former Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson that though things may look bleak now, ... we are making some slight progress heavenward ... and someday ... man to man the worldo\u27er shall brothers be... (September 17,1914). Not that John Muir was a fool. A realistic businessman when need be, he could cut a sharp deal with a publisher or honestly best his fellow orchardists in Martinez. During harvest time, a train stopped at the local station and in the twilight hours dropped off packing crates for the growers. On such days, Muir rose early, to be sure he\u27d be first at the platform and get his pick of the best boxes. However, despite the practicality, Muir also had the good fortune of a salving, overarching philosophy to get him through his nights. Not that those nights were all dark. Muir was swamped with letters begging for photographs and autographs and assaulting him with their authors\u27 poetic efforts, conferring honorary degrees on him, inviting him to speak at this confab and that. Mail from admirers to their wilderness hero often began with high praise, then quickly shifted into requests for advice about intimate personal problems explained in pages of painful detail. Or they reminisced about meeting Muir briefly on the trail decades before. None of that shillyshallying, whining, or lightly veiled ingratiation for John M. Pfautz, a robust fan writing from Lisbon, Iowa. Leaving his rival eulogists far behind, he opened directly with In my eyes you are Gods [sic] beloved Apostle ... (undated; ca. 1914). The naive and unrestrained adoration might have chafed a more sophisticated and less patient man but, taking it all with cheerful appreciation, Muir penned gracious responses. Then, too, on the positive side, if his writing was coming hard, nonetheless it was coming along. The sales of My First Summer in the Sierra, for example, proved so lucrative that publishers were vying for his next book, which of course delighted Muir (June 25,1911). Even Helen\u27s illness, dire affliction that it was, had unforeseen benefits. Muir tended to be a cave bear when he wrote. While the Bay fog swirled around the big house in Martinez, he holed up in his study, for weeks on end fussing to turn his mass of irascible notes into polished prose. Helen\u27s illness got Muir out, forcing him to travel south. There, he renewed old friendships and made new ones among the heady literati typified by Southwestern booster Charles F. Lummis. Particularly important in this regard was the city of Pasadena, then a cultural center in Southern California, with Vroman\u27s bookstore on 60 East Colorado Street serving as a lively gathering place.6 Representing the cream of the intellectual set there was Muir friend Adam Clark Vroman himself, a bibliophile and pioneer photographer of Southwestern Indians.7 Rather different and mildly eccentric was Muir\u27s fellow conservationist-at-arms Theodore P. Lukens. A pioneer in successful reforestation but also an enthusiast for some ill- fated adventures--be they mastering the intricate evils of learning to drive a car8 or trying to make twisting eucalyptus trees defy their nature and grow into a crop of future telephone poles\u27—Lukens nevertheless prospered, becoming the mayor of Pasadena and leading the charge against Hetch- Hetchy from the southern part of the state. Not that Muir\u27s joy was unadulterated. Helen developed typhoid and, though eventually she regained her strength, for a while she was dangerously ill in a Los Angeles hospital (April 2,1909). Addingto the mountaineer\u27s worries at the time was a sleazy game played by Geo