My love for John Muir began with the help of Ken Burns. After a trip to Yellowstone National Park last summer, my interest was sparked by an ad for The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (probably on Facebook). For a week I watched each two hour episode on PBS in the floor lounge of my dorm so I could learn more about the magnificent park I recently visited. That’s when it started. Obsession commence! Before that week I had never heard of John Muir. How I do not know, but I managed it. He has been called “the national parks’ patron saint” and that title is kind of a big deal (Choke, 60). Here is what I learned from The National Parks that made me love John Muir.
1) He is Scottish:
Enough said!
2) He memorized the bible:
By the time he was eleven, John Muir had three quarters of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament memorized. MEMORIZED! Granted this is because his father was a bit of a nut about religion, and kind of abusive. You can read about it in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, which “is notable less for describing life on a frontier family farm than for documenting the cruel life he and the rest of the family suffered under his father” as O'Grady notes in his Muir biography. I’ve started reading it and it is really not my favorite. (NOT THAT JOHN MUIR CAN EVER DO ANYTHING WRONG EVER, but he would have been fine if he had just stuck to Nature writing…)
3) He walked from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico:
And then wrote a book about it! A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf follows Johnny on his expedition south, to study and learn about plants. He had planned on walking all the way to South America to find the headwaters of the Amazon, build a raft, and float the river. However, he decided not to because he got a little bit of Malaria. Oh you know, no big deal right?
4) He liked to climb trees:
In The National Parks, Gretel Ehrlich discusses Muir’s attachment to nature and his desire to understand it. She references the event that Muir describes in the chapter “A Wind- Storm in the Forests” from his book The Mountains of California. In this passage John Muir climbs to the top of a tree in order to, as Ehrlich says “understand what a storm felt like to a tree” (Ehrlich, “The Scripture of Nature”).
5) HE IS THE COOLEST MAN THAT HAS EVER WALKED THE FACE OF THIS EARTH!!
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.1/images/worster_fig01b.jpg
1) He is Scottish:
Enough said!
2) He memorized the bible:
By the time he was eleven, John Muir had three quarters of the Old Testament and the entire New Testament memorized. MEMORIZED! Granted this is because his father was a bit of a nut about religion, and kind of abusive. You can read about it in The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, which “is notable less for describing life on a frontier family farm than for documenting the cruel life he and the rest of the family suffered under his father” as O'Grady notes in his Muir biography. I’ve started reading it and it is really not my favorite. (NOT THAT JOHN MUIR CAN EVER DO ANYTHING WRONG EVER, but he would have been fine if he had just stuck to Nature writing…)
3) He walked from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico:
And then wrote a book about it! A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf follows Johnny on his expedition south, to study and learn about plants. He had planned on walking all the way to South America to find the headwaters of the Amazon, build a raft, and float the river. However, he decided not to because he got a little bit of Malaria. Oh you know, no big deal right?
4) He liked to climb trees:
In The National Parks, Gretel Ehrlich discusses Muir’s attachment to nature and his desire to understand it. She references the event that Muir describes in the chapter “A Wind- Storm in the Forests” from his book The Mountains of California. In this passage John Muir climbs to the top of a tree in order to, as Ehrlich says “understand what a storm felt like to a tree” (Ehrlich, “The Scripture of Nature”).
5) HE IS THE COOLEST MAN THAT HAS EVER WALKED THE FACE OF THIS EARTH!!
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.1/images/worster_fig01b.jpg
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