Muir on Sundays Part 2
Last Sunday I read The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and this Sunday I read A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. A bit of armchair travel is in order at a time when I have no certain travel on the calendar.
A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf is fascinating. The book chronicles Muir leaving his parents’ homestead in Wisconsin and walking south all the way to Florida where he contracted malaria, recovered and then hopped on a boat to Cuba. And finally, he makes his way to California. I had never really thought about Muir in the States before the Sierra.
He carried a bag with no much more than a plant press and essentially couch surfed over the span of a thousand miles. His sustenance? Mostly bread. Or whatever the households he was staying in were eating. Most cornbread and baking. At the end of the book, I really wanted a piece of cornbread and I felt more than a little embarrassed thinking of how well stocked my pack is for a completely inconsequential day hike.
Just before Muir heads to Cuba, there’s this wonderful piece of writing about the place of humans in the world. I’ve shared it below. Over the past week, I’ve really only ventured out of the house to run in the park. Compared to the hubbub of human life and social distancing and the declining economy, the park is so profoundly undisturbed. The extent to which everything is exactly the same stands in such sharp relief against a world where it feels like everything is changing. Of course, everything is not changing. That’s just how it looks from where I sit -- when I’m at the center of things.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man -- a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves…
Now, it never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit -- the cosmos? The universe would not be complete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge…
This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation’s plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.” - John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
( Photo by Anthony Chiado on Unsplash )
