From the beginning, the Sierra Club had a lot of built-in contradictions. It was founded as a combination mountaineering and preservation society, because Muir and some of the other founders believed that those who spent time in the mountains would come to love them, and that that love would be an active love, a love willing to go into political battle to save them. Though the premise proved to be good enough, there are plenty of mountaineers whose love has no political dimension and plenty of environmentalists who, for various reasons, don’t travel in remote places. The other contradiction had to do with the fact that environmental devastation is usually done in the name of economic growth. The middle-class club found itself fighting innumerable battles in a war that dare not speak its name, a war against economic exploitation of the environment in the name of progress and free enterprise. John Muir took a stand against anthropocentrism, against the idea that trees, animals, minerals, soil, water, are there for humans to use, let alone to destroy, but by positioning wilderness as a place apart from society and the economy he avoided addressing the wider politics of land and money. For most of its history, the club would tender the milder, more anthropocentric argument that the exploitation of beautiful places destroyed them as recreational sites. Eventually it became clear that recreation was destroying Yosemite Valley almost as much as resource extraction had destroyed the neighboring Hetch-Hetchy Valley by damming it as a reservoir for San Francisco during World War I. The club would have to rescind the “render accessible” clause in its mission statement and begin advocating for survival of species, then ecosystems, then the planet, as nature began to be imagined as a necessity rather than a pleasure.
Most of the Sierra Club’s troubles and transformations were far ahead, however, when the first High Trip set out in July 1901. The world was far larger and less paved then than now, and they spent three days walking from relatively accessible Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows, accompanied by a vast caravan of mules and horses carrying stoves, blankets, camp beds, and quantities of food (nowadays, the Meadows are a few hours by car from the valley). Once arrived, they settled into their large camp, from which smaller parties made forays into the surrounding mountains and canyons. It was a strange halcyon era between the violent settlement of California by avaricious Yankees and the overdevelopment of the state later. Wrote Ella M. Sexton of that first High Trip, “There were solemn hours, too, when the mountaineers looked disdainfully at us feeble ‘tenderfeet’ as we set off with trusty alpenstocks, a light lunch, and much courage to conquer the jagged peaks, loose talus, and snow-fields of Mt. Dana. . . . The climbers were so delayed by ten long miles to the foot of the mountain, the hard ascent and a weary ten miles back to camp, that relief parties had to go out to kindle fires at stream-crossings, and it was nine o’clock before the last straggler was ferried over on the shaky raft.” With unbridged rivers and unmapped routes, it was a far wilder place than it is today. Few besides club members, fishermen, and the surviving Indians ventured into these regions then, and during those early years the club included many leading mountaineers among its members and sponsored many first ascents.
But it is the ordinary experiences that give something of the flavor of these mass expeditions into the mountains. Nelson Hackett was a high-school student when two of his female teachers recruited him, and the experience did exactly what it was supposed to: incorporate him into a community of activist nature lovers. He later became editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin and a member of the board. While on the 1908 High Trip to the Kings Canyon region of the Sierra, he wrote to his parents about the club leaders, “Mr. Colby goes like lightning and Mr. Parsons is very fat and very slow so there is no need of not finding someone to suit your pace. Of course when half a dozen are ahead you can’t miss the trail for the tracks they make. I sort of imagined that the 120 people would all walk along in a row but they are so scattered that you are hardly ever in sight of more than a half dozen or so.” Several days later: “Next morning we turned out in the cold star-light at 3:30 and started at 4:30 for Mt. Whitney. The climb is easy but tedious and the rocks are hard on the feet. I arrived at the top at nine o’clock. We ate lunch and made some chocolate sherbet, enjoyed the view for a couple of hours and then returned. We could see the desert, and Owen’s Lake, eleven thousand feet below us.” And in a second letter written that day, July 18, 1908, “I had a long talk with Mr. Muir this aft—or rather he did all the talking—about a thousand mile walk he took thro the South, the year after the Rebellion. Also, how he first became interested in Botany. Camp-fire ready. Good-bye. . . .”
Light on tradition and heavy on new juxtapositions, California has long been a wellspring of fresh cultural possibilities. At the turn of the century, a regional culture including painters, bad poets, and good architects was responding to the state’s distinctive influences and environment, and the early Sierra Club was part of this response. Unlike organizations such as the Alpine Club, which excluded women, the Sierra Club made them welcome and seems to have provided many with opportunities for mountaineering they might have found in few other places. At a time when a woman could hardly go unchaperoned around London, it says something for the freedom of the West Coast or the club that women seem to have gone wherever they liked, with whomever they liked, in the mountains. Populated by professionals of both sexes, the Sierra Club had some intellectual force behind it in its early days, and evenings around the campfire were lively with discussion, music, and performances. Muir was the most influential member then, but the club would later become a home for the men who invented American nature photography—Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter—and for many who redefined American wilderness in both law and imagination, such as George Marshall and David Brower. But California culture didn’t come out of nowhere. The campers on those early trips were making their own culture, but much of the material came from points east. It’s not hard to trace the lineage. After all the dean of New England transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had visited with both Wordsworth and John Muir, seeming to transmit—and transmute—the legacy from the peripatetic poet who had walked through the French Revolution to the evangelical mountaineer who died at the beginning of World War I. The members of the Sierra Club had imported their taste for nature, but it may have been the nature itself—the colossal wilderness of the West—that transformed that taste into something new.
That first High Trip in 1901 suggested how far the culture of walking had come from the aristocratic stroll in the garden and the solitary ramble in the woods when it arrived in the mountains of California. It had become not only mainstream culture but politics, and if landscape could shape its walkers, these California walkers were returning the favor by shaping that landscape through both legislation and cultural representation. In recent decades the Sierra Club has been excoriated by younger environmental organizations for its compromises and missteps and for having been of its time rather than ours on such issues as dams and nuclear power. But environmental awareness and the Sierra Club grew up together. In the postwar years the club began to expand its scope and eventually its membership. It went from being a regional club whose several thousand members were mostly participants in outdoor activities to being a national organization whose half-million members include many who have never participated in a club excursion. It was the first major force for environmental protection in the United States and remains one of the most influential, achieving major victories on forests, air, water, species, parks, toxics. And it still sponsors thousands of local hikes and wilderness outings every year.
Our own walk came out of the woods and proceeded across some beautiful meadows with streams running through them. Michael and Valerie had led some of the last High Trips the club held, in 1968, when “the old man of the mountains,” the legendary climber and curmudgeon Norman Clyde, still came by, but the impact of large-scale camps and expeditions was beginning to dismay the club, and soon afterward the tradition came to an end. As we approached Mono Pass, we came across the same wildflow
ers blooming here that I had seen in the Marin Headlands in March, not three hundred miles away. And then we reached the saddleback that the signpost announced as Mono Pass, 10,600 feet high, and sat down in the gravel and tufts of lupine. The crest of the Sierra Nevada is one of the few real borders in the world, besides the ebbing and flowing borders dividing land from water. These mountains scrape off the stormclouds sailing in from the west, and the clouds’ bounty becomes snowmelt running westward again to water some of the greatest temperate forests of the world, the sequoia, ponderosa, and fir groves of the Sierra, and thence to the valleys and salmon-run rivers to the ocean—and farms and cities—below. Though a little of the mountain runoff flows down the east side of the Sierra, everything east of the peaks is desert. At Mono Pass, we were sitting facing a bright green meadow full of tender wildflowers, and a few miles behind us began a thousand miles of aridity. We were also sitting within view of the results of two great battles over land. Yosemite National Park’s boundaries had been set in the 1890s, and John Muir had drawn them up. Mono Lake, the blue oval in the dusty east, had been saved in the 1990s when environmentalists, after many years of fighting, finally prevented Los Angeles from diverting some of the lake’s tributaries into the vast hydraulic system that waters the city.
We fell to talking about the Sierra Club again. Although I admire the club’s staunch work over the decades, I worry that equating the love of nature with certain kinds of leisure activity and visual pleasure leaves out those with other tastes and tasks. Walking in the landscape can be a demonstration of a specific heritage, and when it is mistaken for a universal experience, those who don’t participate can be seen as less sensitive to nature, rather than less acculturated to the northern European romantic tradition. Michael told me about a Sierra Club outing he led and Valerie cooked for in which some well-meaning members brought along two inner-city African-American boys who were totally bewildered. The wilderness alarmed them, and the point of exerting oneself in it escaped them. Only the man who took them fishing and the hamburgers Valerie made them every day redeemed the experience. Michael wrote about it in The Pathless Way, his book on Muir: “We were shocked to discover firsthand that the taste for wilderness was culturally determined, a privilege enjoyed only by the sons and daughters of a certain comfortable class of Americans. One could cultivate a sense of utopian community on the outings only by beginning with a group of people who already agreed closely about certain basic values.” (Since then, the Sierra Club and other organizations have sponsored “inner-city outings” better equipped to mediate the experience.) Afterward we left the trail and went cross-country, straying near a small lake tucked under a dark cliff face that seemed to increase its depths and then venturing through marshy green expanses of wild onion splashed with the scarlet of Indian paintbrush to a windswept slope above Bloody Canyon.
II. THE ALPS
One of the monuments to John Muir—along with the John Muir Trail from Mount Whitney to Yosemite Valley and dozens of California public schools—is the expanse of redwoods called Muir Woods, on the foothills of Mount Tamalpais, a dozen miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Tamalpais is the small peak where Gary Snyder and friends instituted the Buddhist practice of ritual circumambulation, but there are other ways to interpret mountains and walking, and this one has had many interpreters. Above Muir Woods, there’s an inconspicuous trail that runs for half a mile or so, then comes around a bend to a very different and disorienting monument on the steep slope above the woods. It looks like a perfect Alpine chalet, with its outdoor dance floor, pitched roof, and tiers of balconies made of pine planks cut out in folkloric designs, and it is one of the few surviving American outposts of the Austria-based organization Die Naturfreunde. The Naturfreunde, or Nature Friends, was founded in Vienna in 1895 by teacher Georg Schmiedl, blacksmith Alois Rohrauer, and student Karl Renner, at a time when the Hapsburg monarchy and other elites still controlled access to most of the Austrian mountains. “Berg frei”—free mountains—was their slogan. They were socialists and antimonarchists, and they were immensely successful. Sixty people attended the organization’s first meeting, and within a few decades there were 200,000 members, mostly in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Each local chapter bought land and built a clubhouse, which was open to all members of the Naturfreunde. They sponsored hikes, environmental consciousness, and folk festivals, and advocated access to the mountains for working people.
The late nineteenth to early twentieth century was a golden age of organizations. Some provided social cohesion for the displaced of a rapidly changing world; others offered resistance to industrialization’s inhuman appetite for the time, health, energy, and rights of workers. Many were organized around utopian ideals or pragmatic social change, and all of them created communities—of Zionists, feminists, labor activists, athletes, charities, and intellectuals. Walking clubs were part of this larger movement, and each of the major political walking clubs was founded in some kind of opposition to the mainstream of its society. For the Sierra Club, this mainstream was the rampant destruction of a pristine ecosystem by a rapidly developing country. In most of Europe, the remaining open space was in more stable but less accessible condition. For the Austrian Naturfreunde as well as many British groups, the aristocratic monopoly on open space was the problem. Manfred Pils, the current Naturfreunde secretary general, wrote me, “The Friends of Nature were founded because leisure time and tourism was a privilege for upper class people at that time. They wanted to open up such opportunities also for common people . . . it was the Friends of Nature who campaigned against the efforts to exclude people from private meadows and forests in the Alps. The campaign was called ‘Der verbotene Weg’ (the forbidden path). So the Friends of Nature achieved finally a legalistic regulation which guaranteed access by walking to forests and alpine meadows for everyone.” As a result, “the Alps are not a national territory, they stayed in private property but we (and all tourists) have access to all footpaths and generally to forests and alpine meadows.”
When German and Austrian radicals arrived in the United States, they brought their organization with them. In San Francisco, immigrants who met at the German workers’ hall on Valencia Street went forth in big groups to hike on Mount Tam. After the 1906 earthquake, local Naturfreunde historian Erich Fink told me, many more craftsmen arrived in the region, the number of weekend hikers mushroomed, and they decided to buy property to start their own branch of the Naturfreunde. Five young people bought a whole steep hillside on Mount Tam for two hundred dollars, and the members built themselves a rural outpost. Fink’s wife told me that until the 1930s you had to show a union card to join. This Bavarian lodge perched above the redwoods provided a workers’ alternative to the Sierra Club, a local place for people who had only the weekend in which to escape the city.
The Naturfreunde paid for its success. Its socialism provoked the Nazi regime to repress it in Austria and Germany, while the Germanness of the organization made it suspect in the United States during that era. After the end of World War II, socialism became an issue in the United States too. McCarthyism in the United States so traumatized the organization that one local leader was still reluctant to talk to me about the club’s history. “They are very political today in Europe,” he said in a heavy Teutonic accent, “which we cannot be. We stay away from any politics because they almost took away what we built up through all the years.” During the years when being or having been a socialist or Communist was a dangerous offense, all the branches of the Naturfreunde in the eastern United States collapsed, and the clubhouses bought, built, and owned by the members fell into private hands. Only three California outposts survived by being adamantly apolitical, and a fourth one recently opened up in northern Oregon. Of the 600,000 Naturfreunde members in twenty-one countries, less than a thousand remain in the United States, and they are anomalies for their apolitical stance.
The German youth movement, the Wandervogel, did not survive World War II, but its history d
emonstrates that no ideology had a monopoly on walking. A reaction against the authoritarianism of the German family and government, it began inauspiciously enough in a suburb of Berlin in 1896, where a group of shorthand students began to go on expeditions together to the woods nearby and then farther away. By 1899 they were setting off for weeks at a time to wander in the mountains. The most charismatic member of that circle, Karl Fischer, transformed the organization, formalizing its behavior and spreading its ideas. When the Wandervogel Ausschuss für Schulerfahrten (Wandervogel Committee for Schoolboys’ Rambles) was founded on November 4, 1901, it was a Romantic rambling society. Wandervogel means a magical bird; a word taken from a poem, it suggests the free and weightless identity the members would seek. Medieval wandering scholars were the first role models for the thousands of boys who joined up, and rambling on long excursions together was their principal activity. There were other cultural activities—the lasting legacy of the Wandervogel, and, according to historians, its only first-rate cultural contribution, was the revival of folk songs. Most of its members were in the throes of adolescence’s heady idealism, and heated philosophical debates as well as music filled their evenings. The movement seemed to be forever splintering over some minor point or other. “On the main thing—rambling—we are in complete agreement,” concluded a Wandervogel statement.
Theirs was an odd antiauthoritarianism, since the Wandervogel was exclusive, hierarchical, organized into small groups giving unquestioning obedience to a leader, with semiformal uniforms (usually shorts, dark shirts, and neckerchiefs) and initiation rituals of various degrees of difficulty and danger. Though the Wandervogel was detached from practical politics, most members subscribed to an ethnic nationalism, and so the folk culture that meant working-class culture for the Naturfreunde meant ethnic identity for the Wandervogel. The members were almost exclusively middle-class; girls were admitted to some groups after 1911 or encouraged to form their own groups. “The Jewish problem” meant that Jews—and often, Catholics—were generally unwelcome (though certainly one prominent Jew, Walter Benjamin, was involved in a radical splinter group of the youth movement in his own youth). At its height, the Wandervogel had about sixty thousand members. The Wandervogel seems to have started out as a real rebellion against German authoritarianism, and to this extent it was a political club, but it had neither the strength nor the insight to truly oppose its country’s slide toward fascism.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 21
