Landmarks

by Robert Macfarlane

  become so adhesive … that pine needles, thin flakes and fibers of bark, hair, mica scales and minute grains of quartz, hornblende, etc., feathers, seed wings, moth and butterfly wings, legs and antennae of innumerable insects … flower petals, pollen dust and indeed bits of all plants, animals and minerals of the region adhere to them and are safely imbedded.

  Brilliant! Where anyone else would see greasy trousers, Muir sees an archive of the Sierra. He concludes his riff with a flourish: ‘Instead of wearing thin they wear thick, and in their stratification have no small geological significance.’

  There is little Muir does not perceive as significant – except the Native Americans of the Sierra Nevada, whom he is disturbingly unwilling to include in his vision of the wilderness. Otherwise, his prose is rich in generosity and precise of image. He sees a snowfield ‘as trackless as the sky’ (an image that tellingly pre-dates aviation), he exults in ‘the wild gala-day of the north wind’, and he describes squirrels in their pines as ‘fiery, peppery, full of brag and fight and show, with movements so quick and keen they almost sting the onlooker’. He enjoys existing technical language, especially dendrological (‘pistillate’, ‘bract’, ‘bole’, ‘taper’, ‘axis’), but delights also in his own coinages. He often refers to the sky as ‘cloudland’, a terrain in its own right that contains ‘hills and domes of cloud’, and the topography of which is re-made every hour.

  Muir’s joyfulness can, like Jefferies’, spills over into effusion. ‘How fine the weather is!’ he cries; ‘Nothing more celestial can I conceive! How gently the winds blow! Scarcely can these air-currents be called winds! They seem the very breath of Nature, whispering peace to every living thing!’ E. M. Forster once compared the use of exclamation marks to laughing at one’s own jokes, but for Muir the exclamation mark was a means of notating rapture. The thousands of pages of his published prose demonstrate scant self-regard – the landscape is never tilted flatteringly to reflect his own image. One of his favourite adjectives was ‘showy’ – the ‘showy and fragrant’ azalea – but he used the word in its innocent form: to suggest gleeful extravagance rather than immodesty. Muir the writer was ‘showy’ in the best sense of the word.

  Muir the man was exceptionally intrepid. Iain M. Banks once speculated on the leisure activities of the future: they would include, he imagined, lava-rafting and avalanche-surfing. He should have read Muir, who, a hundred years earlier, was already inhabiting Banks’s alternative future. In 1873 Muir surfed his first avalanche:

  I was swished down to the foot of the canyon as if by enchantment. The wallowing ascent had taken nearly all day, the descent only about a minute. When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking. Fortunately, though the grade of the canyon is very steep, it is not interrupted by precipices large enough to cause outbounding or free-plunging. On no part of the rush was I buried. I was only moderately imbedded on the surface or at times a little below it, and covered with a veil of back-streaming dust particles; and as the whole mass beneath and about me joined in the flight there was no friction, though I was tossed here and there and lurched from side to side. When the avalanche swedged and came to rest I found myself on top of the crumpled pile without bruise or scar. This was a fine experience. Hawthorne says somewhere that steam has spiritualized travel; though unspiritual smells, smoke, etc., still attend steam travel. This flight in what might be called a milky way of snow-stars was the most spiritual and exhilarating of all the modes of motion I have ever experienced! Elijah’s flight in a chariot of fire could hardly have been more gloriously exciting!

  There is much to admire here, whether it is that ‘veil of back-streaming dust particles’, or the ‘milky way of snow-stars’, or that trio of peculiar verbs – ‘outbound’, ‘free-plunge’ and ‘swedge’: typically Muirish neologisms for actions. What might, in another’s hands, have become a self-vaunting story of a life nearly lost is for Muir an experience midway between scientific experiment and sacred epiphany.

  Reading Muir, I feel invulnerable. He gives me seven-league boots, lets me climb high mountains in a single paragraph. Rockfall, blizzard and avalanche cannot harm him. Even his metabolism is superhuman – when he goes off to attempt a big peak, he ‘fastens a hard, durable crust to my belt by way of provision in case I should be compelled to pass a night on the mountain-top’. When a blizzard engulfs him at dusk on the summit ridge of the volcanic Mount Shasta, he survives by locating a fumarole from which ‘scalding gas jets’ hiss and sputter. He spends the night trying to avoid being frozen to death by the blizzard or burnt to death by the vent. And when an earthquake strikes the Yosemite Valley at night in March 1872, Muir is woken by the shaking, realizes what is happening, and responds remarkably:

  The strange, wild thrilling motion and rumbling could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, near the Sentinel Rock, both glad and frightened, shouting, ‘A noble earthquake!’ feeling sure I was going to learn something. The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, one had to balance in walking as if on the deck of a ship among the waves, and it seemed impossible the high cliffs should escape being shattered.

  The cliffs escape their shattering, and Muir escapes his. Two years later he would publish his first article about the Sierra Nevada in a journal called the Overland Monthly. It was entitled ‘Mountain Sculpture’, and it began by comparing the form of the range to ‘a vast undulated wave’. So started Muir’s late-onset writing life.

  ~

  In the final pages of The Mountains of California (1894), Muir describes exploring the San Gabriel range to the north of Los Angeles. Having made an afternoon ascent of a ‘knife-blade’ peak, he returns through the chaparral to a canyon whose lower reaches hold ‘boulder pools, clear as crystal, brimming full, and linked together by glistening streamlets’, their margins adorned by ten-foot-high lilies in full bloom, as well as larkspur, columbines and ferns. A single old Mountain Live Oak spread its boughs over the pools, and Muir camps beneath it, ‘making my bed on smooth cobblestones’. Having evoked this miniature Eden, he ends the book by denouncing the ‘destruction of the forests’ of California, ‘now rapidly falling before fire and the ax’.

  Seven years after its publication, a copy of The Mountains of California found its way into the hands of Theodore Roosevelt, who in 1901 had been sworn in as President of the United States following the assassination of William McKinley by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York. Roosevelt was a naturalist, outdoorsman and explorer as well as a politician, and an admirer of Muir’s writings. He was in sympathy with Muir’s belief in the spiritual value of nature, and his conviction that wild landscapes should be estimated in terms of not only what they might do for us, but also what they might do to us. So he wrote to Muir to see if he would be willing to meet in Yosemite to discuss conservation in person. Muir proposed a three-night camping trip, and on 14 May 1903 Roosevelt arrived in the Sierra Nevada dressed in rough hunting clothes. The next day he and Muir set out, and they camped that first night at the Mariposa Grove, near the south entrance of the valley, among the 500 or so giant sequoias of the grove. The two men had talked as they walked, and their conversation continued around the campfire of ‘rosiny logs’, which released in their flames ‘the light slowly sifted from the sunbeams of centuries of summers’. The next night was spent near Sentinel Dome, during a late-season snowstorm that added five inches of fresh snow to the five feet of lying snow: Roosevelt kept himself warm by burrowing into a pile of forty woollen blankets. The third campsite was under the shelter of the pines that fringe Bridalveil Meadow in the heart of the valley. That night Muir urged the president to take Yosemite Valley under federal control as a national park, and to include within its area the Mariposa Grove.

  Muir spoke and Roosevelt listened. Or, as Muir would have had it, the trees spoke and Roosevelt listened. ‘Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees,’ Muir had said in 1895. ‘Their sermons on the mountai
ns go to our hearts; and if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish.’ Certainly, this worked with Roosevelt. After leaving Yosemite, he stopped in Sacramento and gave a speech in which he exhorted the citizens of California to preserve the natural wealth of their state, and to use their forests and rivers wisely. Three years after his trip with Muir, he signed the Yosemite Recession Bill, which placed the valley and the sequoias of Mariposa under federal protection. He also legislated decisively to proclaim certain landscapes as monuments in the public interest: in 1908 800,000 acres were set aside as the Grand Canyon National Monument, the first such designation. In the course of his presidency, Roosevelt would sign into existence 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 55 national bird sanctuaries and 150 national forests.

  In her fine Hope in the Dark (2007), the Californian writer and activist Rebecca Solnit reflects on the nature of social and political changes, and especially those brought about by literature and art. Hope, she suggests, is a function of uncertainty, of not-knowing. It is a longing for change, experienced in necessary ignorance of when that change will come or what form it will take. ‘A lot of activists expect that for every action there is an equal and opposite and punctual reaction,’ Solnit writes, in a passage to which I find myself often returning:

  and regard the lack of one as failure. But history is shaped by the groundswells and common dreams that single acts and moments only represent. It’s a landscape more complicated than commensurate cause and effect … Politics is a surface in which transformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences …

  Writers need to understand that action is seldom direct. You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might just rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire.

  Among those trees whose reproduction is fire-dependent is the lodgepole pine, the cones of which are sealed with a resin that is melted away by fire, releasing the seeds for dispersal. The giant sequoia also requires fire to burn gaps in the canopy, letting in light that allows their seedlings to compete with the shade-tolerant seedlings of other species. But I think that the specific seeds Solnit has in mind are those of the bristlecone pine, whose wood glows orange and gold, and the oldest living specimens of which are nearly 5,000 years old – having begun their growth when the Pyramids were under construction. The seeds of the bristlecone lie dormant in the soil profile until their germination is triggered, usually by the blazing passage of wildfire, which also clears the terrain of competitors. Muir loved the bristlecone for its extravagantly torqued and gnarled form, and for its extreme resilience to the adversities of gale, avalanche and flame that the mountains threw at it. He was a bristlecone himself in that respect, and though his words lay dormant for decades, they would eventually germinate and grow with astonishing consequence.

  Glossary IX

  Woodlands

  Branches, Leaves, Roots and Trunks

  atchorn acorn Herefordshire

  balk cut tree Kent

  bannut-tree walnut tree Herefordshire

  beilleag bark of a birch tree Gaelic

  biests wen-like protuberances on growing trees East Anglia

  bole main part of the trunk of a tree before it separates into branches forestry

  bolling permanent trunk left behind after pollarding (pronounced to rhyme with ‘rolling’) forestry

  brattlings loppings from felled trees Northamptonshire

  breakneck, brokeneck tree whose main stem has been snapped by the wind forestry

  browse line level above which large herbivores cannot browse woodland foliage forestry

  burr excrescence on base of tree: some broad-leaved trees with a burr, especially walnut, can be very valuable, the burr being prized for its internal patterning forestry

  butt lower part of the trunk of a tree forestry

  cag stump of a branch protruding from the tree Herefordshire

  cant-mark, stub pollarded tree used to mark a land boundary forestry

  celynnog abounding in holly (place-name element) Welsh

  chats dead sticks Herefordshire

  chissom first shoots of a newly cut coppice Cotswolds

  cramble boughs or branches of crooked and angular growth, used for craft or firewood Yorkshire

  crank dead branch of a tree Cotswolds

  crìonach rotten tree; brushwood Gaelic

  daddock dead wood Herefordshire

  damage cycle narrower rings in the stump of the tree, indicating the accidental loss of branches which are gradually replaced. Useful in helping to work out when and at what intervals a tree has been pollarded/coppiced forestry

  deadfall dead branch that falls from a tree as a result of wind or its own weight forestry

  dodder old pollard Bedfordshire

  dosraich abundance of branches Gaelic

  dotard decaying oak or sizeable single tree Northamptonshire

  eiry tall, clean-grown sapling Cotswolds

  ellern elder tree Herefordshire

  flippety young twig or branch that bends before a hook or clippers Exmoor

  foxed term applied to an old oak tree, when the centre becomes red and indicates decay Northamptonshire

  frail leaf skeleton Banffshire

  griggles small apples left on the tree south-west England

  interarboration intermixture of the branches of trees on opposite sides (used by Sir Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, 1658) arboreal

  kosh branch Anglo-Romani

  Lammas growth second flush of growth in late summer by some species, e.g. oak forestry

  leafmeal tree’s ‘cast self’, disintegrating as fallen leaves (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic

  lenticel small pore in bark or a leaf for breathing forestry

  maiden tree which is not a coppice stool nor a pollard forestry

  mute stumps of trees and bushes left in the ground after felling Exmoor

  nape when laying a hedge, to cut the branch partly through so that it can be bent down East Anglia

  nubbin stump of a tree after the trunk has been felled Northamptonshire

  palmate leaves that have lobes arranged like the fingers of a hand, e.g. horse chestnut forestry

  pank to knock or shake down apples from the tree Herefordshire

  pollard tree cut at eight to twelve feet above ground and allowed to grow again to produce successive crops of wood forestry

  raaga tree tree that has been torn up by the roots and drifted by the sea Shetland

  rammel small branches or twigs, especially from trees which have been felled and trimmed Scots

  rootplate shallow layer of radially arranged roots revealed when a tree has blown over forestry

  rundle hollow pollard tree Herefordshire

  scocker rift in an oak tree caused either by lightning blast or the expansive freezing of water that has soaked down into the heart-wood from an unsound part in the head of the tree East Anglia

  scrog stunted bush northern England, Scotland

  slive rough edge of a tree stump northern England, Warwickshire

  spronky of a plant or tree: having many roots Kent

  staghead dead crown of a veteran tree forestry

  starveling ailing tree forestry

  stool permanent base of a coppiced tree forestry

  suthering noise of the wind through the trees (John Clare) poetic

  tod stump of a tree sawn off and left in the ground; the top of a pollard tree Suffolk

  wash-boughs straggling lower branches of a tree Suffolk

  wewire to move about as foliage does in wind Essex

  whip thin tree with a very small crown reaching into the upper canopy forestry

&nb
sp; wolf bigger than average tree which is dominant in the crop, often removed at first thinning forestry

  Fallen Wood and Cut Wood

  batlings brushwood, too small for timber and too big for faggots Essex

  biscuity, frow wood which is crumbly, with broken grain forestry

  brosny dry sticks for lighting a fire Northern Ireland

  creathach brushwood for fuel Gaelic

  dharrag log or stump of bog oak Manx

  droxy of wood: decayed Cotswolds

  fairy butter,

  scoom, star jelly,

  witches’ butter yellowish gelatinous substance, found on rotten wood or fallen timber, once reputed to have dropped from the sky Herefordshire, Northamptonshire

  fox-fire phosphorescent light emitted by decaying timber Lincolnshire

  musgan dry, rotten wood Gaelic

  shakes cracks that form in timber as it dries forestry

  silk-ash flakes of fine grey ash that gather around wood embers that still cover a core of orange heat (Gerard Manley Hopkins) poetic