Through a Green Lens by Pyle Robert Michael;

Author:Pyle, Robert Michael; [Pyle, Robert Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oregon State University Press

The Journey Home

(Foreword to John Muir’s Last Journey, Island Press, 2001)

Many people believe that after John Muir lost the battle over Hetch Hetchy to Gifford Pinchot, he curled up under a rock and died. But this was not the case. He moped, then took heart, and set off on an epic journey long postponed: to see the distinctive trees of South America and South Africa. He kept extensive notes and drawings toward a future book, but the book never happened. At least, not until the writer and scholar Michael Branch got hold of the rough manuscript and brought it into being as an elegant and thrilling book. I was given the humbling honor of introducing John Muir’s last book—all the more so, as he had been my college idol.

When I went off to college in the mid-1960s, my greatest desire was to be like John Muir. The Rock of western conservation was well known among the young environmentalists at the University of Washington. We recognized Muir as a true radical, at a time when many of us were playing at radicalism. Also as a genuine naturalist, which was what I most aspired to become. I probed dusty secondhand bookshops on University Way for his writings, grew my beard long out of honorific emulation, and affected a Muirish exultation in my journals. My jottings, embarrassing to read today, produced neither good writing nor good mimicry; but at least they were honest in praise of both model and topic.

A fond conceit, this, and doomed from the outset; yet in many ways, John Muir guided all I did. We had Muir’s Yosemite in mind, for example, when our Conservation Education and Action Council fought for the North Cascades National Park. Focusing my revolutionary fervor on ecology as well as war, I joined Seattle Audubon Society and the local chapter of the Sierra Club, and these brought me still closer to the person of John Muir. The Audubon board meetings took place around an immense dining room table in the Capitol Hill home of Emily Haig, grand dame of Seattle conservationists; Sierra Club retreats also revolved around Emily, as we congregated in her country cabin on Hood Canal. When we broke for coffee and cookies at Emily’s sideboard, or to gather dinner from her own oyster beds, I gazed on her eggshell face with its honeysuckle smile and conjured on this one astounding fact: Emily Haig had belonged to the Sierra Club in San Francisco while John Muir was still president! She had known the man.

When Emily Haig shared her memories of John Muir, I shivered with a sense of reflected glory such as only a twenty-year-old idol-worshipper could manage. I recall her telling of Muir’s bright eyes, his youthful stride and spring, and his indefatigable energy when brought to bear upon conservation battles. Not that he had much ready appetite for fighting or politicking. He would far rather be afield, measuring the advance or retreat of glaciers, triangulating trees, plumbing the spiritual luminosity of the Range of Light.

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