John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

by Heacox, Kim

  That same year, 1903, Svante Arrhenius, who ten years before had predicted global warming due to humans burning coal on an industrial scale, won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work in conductivity. When he began it, the work earned him only derision, like his prediction of climate change. That same year, the Wright brothers introduced America to aviation, making a single twelve-second flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk. Regular trans-Atlantic radio transmissions began between the United States and Britain. And Jack London published Call of the Wild, about a dog, Buck, stolen from his pastoral existence in California and taken north to work brutishly in the Klondike goldfields. The bestseller explored the paradox between the primal and the civilized, and it made London the nation’s first millionaire novelist.

  The median annual income for a family of four was little more than $500 in 1903. One hundred years later it would be $40,000, an eighty-fold increase. How long could such vigorous expansion continue? Economies grew, ecosystems changed. The planet was only so big. Forests regenerated, but there was only so much productive land, so much good soil and water. “Whiskey is for drinking,” men quipped in the arid West, “water is for fighting over.”

  Like Twain, Muir questioned the seemingly universal assumption that growth was progress, and such progress made us happy. He ate little, and often low on the food chain (though at the president’s insistence, he joined him in eating an inch-thick steak). He knew that economic growth, while good in many respects, like lifting people out of poverty, was also destructive and addictive. It plundered Nature and raised pampered people into absurd realms of excess, as those same people responded not with gratitude, but by jealously guarding their wealth and wanting more.

  After tens of thousands of years hunting, gathering, settling, planting, sowing, and reproducing, struggling through famine, fire, disease, war, and drought, the human race had reached a global population of around one billion in the year 1810. By 1930 it would be two billion. Every fifteen to twenty-five years thereafter would add another billion, with each generation living longer, consuming more, and sending greater and greater amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, first by burning coal, then oil and natural gas. No human society had ever experienced vigorous and sustained economic growth without burning fossil fuels. Now, at the beginning of the twentieth century, such accelerated burning was becoming the norm. It’s what everybody expected.

  “Disturbing as it sounds,” historian Steven Stoll would write, “growth on the scale known to industrial societies over the last two centuries is a historically exceptional condition that carries with it all sorts of doubtful ideas about the relationship between society and nature.”

  Over the next five years, 1903 to 1908, President Roosevelt would protect 230 million acres of federal land (in 53 wildlife reserves, 16 national monuments, and 5 national parks), an area larger than California and Texas combined. He had the long view, the courage to take criticism, and the wisdom to hear sage whispers among the howling dogs. He often spoke of society’s responsibility to “future generations,” of restraint as an essential ingredient in manly virtue. He would never stop hunting, but in the years ahead would carry his camera more often than his rifle. Powerful and calculating, he’d charm and inspire Muir but later disappoint him, seeing things more as Pinchot did, through the wide lens of utilitarianism. A forest, while beautiful, Pinchot had declared, was also a factory for trees. We can have both, he argued: beauty and utility.

  They had a grand time together, Roosevelt and Muir, the president fit for a Kipling novel, dressed in his khaki jodhpurs and a Rough Rider hat like he’d worn storming up San Juan Hill, a soiled bandana around his neck; Muir in his loose-fitting suit, the hobo intellectual, a sprig of cedar poked through a buttonhole.

  Waking up atop Granite Point the last morning, beneath a dusting of new snow, the president exclaimed, “This is bullier yet. I wouldn’t miss this for anything.”

  Riding into the valley that afternoon and dismounting at the Sentinel Hotel, Roosevelt and Muir were swallowed by a crowd. Governor George C. Pardee was there, as were members of the Yosemite Park Commission. Extravagant plans had been made to entertain Roosevelt.

  “We slept in a snowstorm last night . . .” TR told them, “just what I wanted.” Later he added, “This has been the grandest day of my life. One I shall long remember.” So grand that he and Muir mounted their horses to ride away for yet another night together of camping, storytelling, and philosophizing. The commissioners begged him to stay; they had a searchlight show planned for him. “Nature faking,” Roosevelt called it. He wanted the real thing. “John Muir talked even better than he wrote,” Roosevelt said, adding that camping “amid the pines and the silver firs in Sierrian solitude, in a snowstorm, too, and without a tent,” was one of the greatest experiences he’d ever had.

  So he and Muir left behind the flabbergasted dignitaries once again, left them quietly cursing Muir and his Druid spell over the president. The two new friends camped in Bridalveil Meadow and let the dusky sunset surrender into a million winking stars in the great dome of embracing night sky.

  “GOODBYE, JOHN,” the president said the next morning. “Come and see me in Washington. I’ve had the time of my life!”

  Roosevelt had done what Emerson’s handlers forbade him from doing with Muir thirty-two years earlier among the great sequoias: He slowed down and stayed awhile. Became a sequoia himself. Slept among his brethren. In a letter to Louie, John wrote, “I never before had so interesting, hearty and manly a companion. Camping with the President was a remarkable experience. I fairly fell in love with him.”

  Muir later told his friends about his remarks to Roosevelt on federal protection for Yosemite Valley (still within the state’s jurisdiction) and the need for strident forest preservation, adding, “I stuffed him pretty well regarding the timber thieves.”

  Would it be enough?

  “We are not building this country of ours for a day,” Roosevelt announced in Sacramento, after his time with Muir. “It is to last through the ages.”

  As much as he championed the bully pulpit and loved his time with Muir, the president couldn’t stay there. He lived in a world of political compromise. He believed Americans could and should have it both ways: preservation and growth, city and farm, forest and factory . . . and forests as factories if that’s what moved America forward into its rightful ownership of the new century. With one hand he’d preserve the past, with the other he’d grab the future.

  Muir had his own contradictions; he fought for forest preservation while living in a large house made of wood and on land once Eden-like with flowers and trees, before industrious men put it to work as a commercial fruit ranch. He knew the road from idealism to practicality was rocky and long; that all great institutions and new ways of thinking suffered through adolescence, a difficult coming-of-age into maturity. He’d covered a great distance in his own personal journey, leaving behind the shadow of his father’s Calvinism to embrace a brighter world wherein men of greatness and leadership operated out of civic virtue, not personal greed, and did the right thing for the right reasons. In effect, Muir believed in the power of government to save the American landscape, and thus America itself. He kept a photograph of Roosevelt on his wall in his scribble den, but Muir would never visit him in the White House.

  John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt standing atop Granite Point, high above Yosemite Valley, May 1903

  Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

  TWO WEEKS after his time with Roosevelt, Muir began his epic round-the-world botanizing trip. With all its logistics, baggage, clutter, and confusion—beginning with his friend Charles Sargent losing their passports (they slipped into the lining of his suitcase and would not be found until his return to Boston)—Muir did not at all enjoy the early part of the trip. In fact, it made him sick. In Europe he plodded through an endless parade of urban gardens,
stuffed museums, and the shallow trappings of the aristocracy.

  The capital of Russia, St. Petersburg, dispirited him with its “huge yellow public buildings, war memorial, barbaric colored churches & cathedrals & palaces full of armor jewelry & some fine paintings.” To Robert Underwood Johnson, he wrote, “I’m still alive after this monstrous dose of civilization—London, Paris, Berlin, etc. with their miles of art galleries, museums full of old armor and murder implements . . . Glad to leave holy Moscow, Kremlin, and all.”

  A short distance away, in Finland, he encountered “the tallest and most uniform patch of manufactured forest I have seen,” and while the trees lifted his spirits, the forest itself haunted him as the kind of monoculture Muir feared would one day cover America if Gifford Pinchot got his way: forests as farms; trees as crops in tidy rows like consumer products.

  In Chechnya, he’d fallen ill after eating bad food in bad hotels. Now day after day crossing Russia on the incomplete 6,000-mile Trans-Siberian­ Railway found him taking morphine and brandy to fight abdominal pains from ptomaine poisoning, his weight falling below one hundred pounds while he and Professor Sargent (and the professor’s son) never got off the train, the wheels clacking, the forests flashing by. Stands of spruce and “indomitable birch” intrigued Muir and compelled him to stay, but the professor had them on a tight schedule, moving, always moving. Muir wrote how Sargent “never seemed to think of me sick or well or of my studies only of his own until he feared I might die on his hands & thus bother him.”

  From Vladivostok, they sailed down the Korean coast, where Muir’s spirits brightened, first to be off the train, second to stand on deck and admire mile after mile of glacial topography: finely sculpted mountains above elegant fjords. He parted company with the Sargents in Shanghai, cabled his friend Edward H. Harriman for help with steamship arrangements, and was soon sailing the China coast for India, home of the Himalaya. “I feel alive with mountains in sight once more,” he wrote to Louie. “Glad to be free . . .”

  Every morning in Darjeeling he would climb a ridge or a hill to watch dawn play its symphony on the highest mountains in the world, the mighty melting glaciers feeding the rivers of the Himalayan Plateau that ran into China and India and sated the thirsts of tens of millions of people. Soon Muir’s appetite returned, and he was well again among the banyans and monkeys and gilded temples, the dark-faced women in their colorful saris, the rich people with faces furrowed, always worried about money, while the poor people smiled all the time, knowing they’d never be rich. A premonition vexed him that Helen, his youngest, now eighteen yet always a bit weak and prone to pneumonia in a time before antibiotics, had fallen terribly ill and needed him. He cabled home and received a stoic reply from Louie: “All’s well.”

  Relieved, he berated himself as an old worrywart and bought a ticket to Egypt, telling Louie by cable, “There are a few more places I should see before I die.”

  DEATH was no longer an abstraction—if it ever had been, given Muir’s pioneer upbringing with its share of sickness, toil, and disease. Jeanne Carr, after years of dementia in a nursing home, died that winter while Muir was overseas. One biographer noted that Muir should have dedicated his first book to her (he dedicated it to nobody), the woman who “had once befriended, taught, loved and inspired him . . . for more than anyone else she had encouraged him to write down his thoughts and share his passion with nature with the public.”

  Two years before, in 1901, the deaths of other friends had rocked him, together with the loss of his unmarried sister, Annie, his only sibling left in Wisconsin. The geologist Joseph LeConte died of a heart attack during the Sierra Club’s first big annual camping trip to Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, LeConte had explored the Sierra Nevada with Muir in the early 1870s and acknowledged the young Scot as the discoverer of many glaciers, albeit small ones, where none were thought to be. A gracious man, LeConte had taken special care to give credit to Muir, who alone had ventured into the high country, followed silt-laden streams to their source glaciers, and used wooden stakes to measure the movements of the glaciers at about one inch per day during summer. Muir had recommended to the US Coast & Geographic Survey that the southernmost tidewater glacier in North America (near present-day Petersburg, Alaska) be named after his benefactor and friend.

  MUIR LEFT INDIA and sailed west to Africa. Skipping the Holy Land due to a cholera epidemic, he focused on the “dusty antiquities” of Egypt, where he found the pyramids and the Sphinx impressive in their size and proportions, and enjoyed sailing up the Nile on a steamer. One night while back in a Cairo hotel, as he regaled three sisters from Philadelphia about the mighty sequoias of the Sierra Nevada, an Englishwoman overheard him and interrupted to ask if the wood of the sequoia made nice furniture. “Would you murder your own children?” Muir shot back. She quickly left, casting a dark eye over her shoulder at such a madman.

  Homeward bound, he sailed east for Australia and New Zealand, intrigued by every new landscape and its geology and botany, the finer features that gave it character. With fellow botanists he spent four months Down Under collecting specimens (more than one hundred new species), taking notes, and having the time of his life. If he had thought sheep were a scourge on the native vegetation of California, it was nothing compared to what he witnessed in Australia and New Zealand. He put on his old weight and made many new friends. After a jaunt north to the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Japan, he crossed the Pacific, stopped in Hawaii, and arrived in California to the warm greetings of his family. He’d been gone a full year. He weighed nearly 140 pounds and pulled pranks and danced about the home as if he were young John back on the farm making his mother and sisters laugh. Only this time it was his wife and daughters, an even greater delight.

  Muir (l) and Burroughs (r), the “two Johnnies,” admirers and critics of each other

  Photo courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific

  Though tourism was beginning to spread its wings as an international phenomenon in the early 1900s, it still belonged to the wealthy. Less than 1 percent of 1 percent of Americans had been around the world. America’s largest cities were crowded, dirty, smelly, mean, and corrupt—and only getting worse. People worked long hours for meager pay, including school-deprived children condemned to the sweat and grime of factories, foundries, and slaughterhouses. The Boer War had ravaged South Africa. And Imperial Japan, beginning to flex itself into mainland Asia, had already provoked war with Russia. As the Victorian era ended, with its strict rules, formal manners, and pious conventionality, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and then The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901).

  Meanwhile, John Muir extolled his fellow man to get back to Nature, our ancestral home. As the world seemed to bifurcate into realms of rich and poor, hope and despair, altruism and selfishness, many people nonetheless believed in a bright future that was already showing itself, where buildings got higher, bridges stronger and longer, ships larger, medicine better. Life, in general, improved. Every year brought new revelations in science, industry, and exploration.

  WHILE Muir returned from his epic overseas journey, Robert Falcon Scott returned from Antarctica, completing the first British expedition into that icy realm since the 1840s when James Clark Ross discovered the sea and ice shelf that would one day bear his name. We can only imagine how Muir would have responded to Antarctica, home to 90 percent of the world’s ice. In Alaska, he’d found a mountainous landscape punctuated by glaciers; in Antarctica, Scott found an icescape punctuated by mountains. Antarctica was Alaska twenty thousand years ago. It was the Ice Age itself.

  “Terra Australis Incognita,” said the early maps that hypothesized the continent’s existence, anchored somewhere at the bottom of the world. Men had been going there since James Cook first circumnavigated it in the 1770s but never actually sighted the mainland. But
with Scott’s 1901 to 1904 expedition, men began to probe the interior. Scott launched the “Heroic Age” of exploration in Antarctica that would star himself as the eloquent loser, Roald Amundsen as the tragic winner, and a strong supporting cast of Ernest Shackleton, Frank Wild, Douglas Mawson, and others. While the Arctic was an ocean surrounded by continents, Antarctica was a continent surrounded by ocean—big, mysterious, and bitter cold.

  Both poles had yet to be claimed. Scott had attempted to reach the South Pole and didn’t get remotely close. Traveling with two companions, he nearly died and never got off the Ross Ice Shelf, a massive coastal body of ice the size of France, the largest of many ice shelves that embroidered Antarctica. Next time, his pride and poor judgment would get him killed; he’d freeze to death in his tent. Everything in Antarctica was a superlative: the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and loneliest place on Earth, filled with glaciers that throughout the next century would render many secrets about the past and help foretell the future with things called ice cores, thin slices, and isotopes.

  Perhaps a man could be transformed by travel only when he was young, as Scott was in Antarctica. For John Muir, now thirty years older than Scott, Yosemite had once been his transformation, back when he was young, and Alaska his terra incognita. But by the time Muir traveled around the world from 1903 to 1904 as an older man, he’d calcified into who he was, as most old men do. If anything, overseas travel confirmed his prejudices rather than shattered them. “Going around the world had not changed Muir’s thinking substantially,” Donald Worster would write: