John Muir - My Summer in the Sierras

Reading John Muir’s “My Summer in the Sierras” made me want to go out and hike all weekend. Unfortunately, finals are looming so my butt is glued to my desk but my love of the outdoors has been reawakened. It made me remember spending so much time outside when I was younger. I used to run around my backyard inspecting bugs and chasing garter snakes and lizards. I loved working with my mom in the garden and with our neighbor who was even more into plants than my mom is. I learned plant names and characteristics, how to care for them, what they like and don’t like, what works well together from them. Muir’s journal entries also reminded me of taking Marine Bio in high school. Our teacher had several of these big tanks that were actually saltwater tanks filled with animals and different kinds of kelp. Several times over the year we took field trips and spent the whole day studying tide pools close up. Part of our assignments for that class was that we had to do these observation cards. We needed to pick an organism and then give its classification, common name, some other info and then do a sketch of it. Reading Muir’s entries made me think of those observation cards.

There were a few moments in the text that caught my attention for different reasons. The first was the way that Muir confronts the idea of utility in the text. A few different times he looks at different things and speculates on why they were created. He is observing how poison ivy runs rampant and how it coexists peacefully with other parts of nature. He notices that even though poison ivy is seen as a bane to humans and a nuisance it has a part in nature, it is even “intertwined” with it. He gently raises the question of the validity of utility as a measure of the value of nature or even if we have the right to place a value on nature. He defers that question to God. The idea of nature as having value only if it’s useful to humans goes back to the secondary readings we’ve done this quarter, most obviously for me, Evernden.

Another thing that caught my attention was the way that Muir positions himself in comparison to the shepherd. He talks about the difference between how being a shepherd in Scotland is this almost ideal way of life. It allows man to be outdoors, provides him a living, and affords him the opportunity to still nourish his soul through reading and interacting with his neighbors and family. However, the shepherd that Muir observes has a relatively unhappy life. His living is exhausting, from before morning to well after night he is forced to work, alone and unsupported. The difference I see in the two is a question of scale. The Scottish shepherd works for himself and his family. His business (his herd) will only grow to the size that he can comfortably handle. It’s more of a “natural” approach to business, the undertone is that it isn’t a lifestyle motivated by greed. In contrast, this shepherd is working for someone else. He is working to make that someone else rich. Since the point of this sort of business venture is wealth and not survival the shepherd is pushed to work to the end of human limits. His lifestyle is in opposition to nature, motivated by the greed of capitalism. This goes back to the idea of sucking the marrow from the bones of nature in the service of making money. What Muir’s journal does is raise the question: “is this the best way to live?”  This approach to nature is exhausting an essentially blinds those taken in by it. The shepherd Muir observes is blind to all of the beauty that Muir sees in the land around them and by extension he is also excluded from the knowledge and deeper reflection that Muir acquires and experiences by observing nature.

Another thing that caught my attention was the brief anecdote about the Frenchman and the cave. The story is that a Frenchman passing along sees this cave and seeing no one else there decides to fence and gate the entrance to the cave and then charge admission. At first I laughed at the story but almost at the same time I got angry. That story is so typical of the Western/American relationship to land. The idea that a cave can belong to a person is ludicrous. It also reminds me of some texts that I’m reading for Dr. Karafilis’ class. So much of the justification for the Indian Removal Act is rhetoric that centers around ideas of discovery and possession. Essentially, America justified evicting the Native Americans because of the hallowed principles of “finders keepers” and “possession goes to whoever has the bigger gun”.