The final stage of our memorable
trip of a few months ago began with catching a train bound for King’s Cross,
London, at the coastal town of Dunbar in southeast Scotland. We found ourselves with a spare hour or so to
take in some of the sites. I had not been
there in more than fifty years and the chief mental association I had with the
town, if I had one at all, was with the poet William Dunbar (1459?-1530?), a
brilliant writer scarcely known today except among academic experts, who may have had connections with the
place. I now discovered that the town
was the birthplace of John Muir (1838-1914), the great American naturalist, and
as we say today, environmentalist, and that his old family house on the High
Street, from which his father operated a feed store, was now the “John Muir Birthplace” Museum run by the East Lothian Council.
The house is an old up-and-down
framed thing with steep and awkward stairways.
As is typical of so many houses in the old centers of British market
towns the Muir house is built cheek by jowl to a roadway never intended for
motor vehicles but long since overwhelmed by them. Visiting it requires the exercise of the
mind’s eye no less than that of the body’s.
We make something of a specialty of the museumized residences of long
dead writers, some of which—those of Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Kipling being
fairly recent and fresh in the memory—really can add an increment to the
understanding of the written work. The
holdings of the Muir House are modest but imaginatively deployed. It is not the Victoria and Albert, but as a
place to wait for a train it was vastly superior to a station waiting room with
uncomfortable benches and cracked cement floors.
In my experience a good museum
visit is one that teaches you a little but whets your appetite to learn a lot more. That hour in Dunbar was an excellent
visit. I knew a little bit about Muir,
as most Americans must; and we are rather Low Church members of the Sierra Club
(founded by Muir) among a few other “nature” organizations. Years ago I had read some pages of My First Summer in the Sierra, but I had
no idea how Muir had gotten from East Lothian to the West Coast of America or
when he had done it. Now I wanted to
find out. Fortunately there is a Library
of America volume (John Muir, Nature
Writings) designed especially with me in mind, that begins with his
charming short autobiography: The Story
of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). Its
opening sentence typifies the frankness of the man’s prose style even as it
summarizes the plot of his most consequential life. “When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of
everything that is wild, and all my life I’ve been growing fonder and fonder of
wild places and wild creatures.”
Muir’s father Daniel, the grain
dealer, was a grim and inflexible Puritan of the sort whose version of Christ’s
love was mediated by rawhide whips and hardwood paddles, freely administered in
recompense for his wicked son’s proclivities toward long country rambles. In 1849, before John Muir had achieved his
eleventh birthday, Daniel abruptly decided to emigrate to America and set off
with his son in the family vanguard, with the mother and other children to
follow when a property had been secured and readied. Daniel’s first thought had been Canada, but
influenced by the fake news of a proposed grand canal linking the Lakes and the
Gulf Coast, he went instead to Marquette County in the middle of Wisconsin,
where he acquired a beautiful eighty-acre lakeside plot. There, John Muir later reflected, “I was set
down in the midst of pure wildness where every object excited endless
admiration and wonder.” From the
agricultural point of view what every object chiefly excited was brutal labor,
sometimes for sixteen hours a day. Does
anyone still read Rolvaag’s Giants in the
Earth or Cather’s O, Pioneers? Perhaps the titles alone are enough to
provide some hint of “immigrant life” on the plains.
I chose today’s antiquarian subject
in part to avoid more obvious political topics that must dominate every
American’s mind this week. But they have
a way of intruding nonetheless. The
radio has been on in the background, with occasional snatches of the Senate
hearings for Ms. DeVos, the nominee for Secretary of Education, and of prolusions
upon them by various political commentators, educational experts, and union
officials. The horror! The absolutely bipartisan horror! What is
it reasonable to ask of our public schools?
In America John Muir’s formal education, achieved in provincial Scottish
schools of the 1840s, went into a ten-year hiatus when he was twelve. But by that time he was a competent reader
and writer of Standard English, and a fluent speaker of his native
Northumberland dialect, sometimes called “Scots”. He knew quite a lot of Latin and French. His life’s work would incline toward
practical technology and the natural sciences, but he had already inculcated a
lifelong love for the beauty of language and literature—the plays of Shakespeare,
the romantic narrative poems of Southey.
Long pages he had committed to memory.
He reports that he had the entire New Testament off by heart!
His was not the profile of a Goody
Two-Shoes, however. Young Muir was as
antinomian as any of his fellow reprobates, a schoolyard scrapper, a daredevil,
risk-taker, and rule-breaker. And if
ever there was one who “followed his bliss,” it was he. “With red-blooded playmates, wild as myself,
I loved to wander in the fields to hear the birds sing, and along the seashore
to gaze and wonder at the shells and seaweeds, eels and crabs in the pools
among the rocks when the tide was low; and best of all to watch the waves in
awful storms thundering on the black headlands and craggy ruins of the old
Dunbar Castle when the sea and the sky, the waves and the clouds, were mingled
together as one.”
