Exuberance: The Passion for Life Read Online Free

all defrauded civilization; for sick grangers and politicians; no need of Salt rivers. Sick or successful, come suck Sequoia and be saved.” The salvation of the wilderness was not an abstraction to John Muir. He understood nature, felt nature, and then illuminated her to those who did not. The slaying of the wilderness was to him personal and intolerable.
    With an almighty energy, Muir threw himself into saving the great groves of the sequoias and the mountain ranges of Yosemite. He brought into words the beauty he had seen and viscerally knew. He became an interpreter of nature, a prophet. “He sung the glory of nature like another Psalmist,” said Muir’s editor, Robert Underwood Johnson, and “as a true artist, was unashamed of his emotions.” Muir took Johnson camping in Yosemite in 1889 and together they drew up plans for a campaign to establish what is now Yosemite National Park. Muir’s writings and compelling enthusiasm were essential forces leading to the preservation of that partof the Sierra. When the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to preserve the American wilderness, Muir became its first president; he held that office until his death twenty-two years later.
    Muir branded others with his own almost painful awareness of the wilderness, attempting to make them feel some measure of what he himself felt so acutely. One friend, in discussing their exploration of Alaska, said, “Muir was always discovering to me things which I would never have seen myself and opening up to me new avenues of knowledge, delight, and adoration.…How often have I longed for the presence of Muir to heighten my enjoyment by his higher ecstasy, or reveal to me what I was too dull to see or understand … for I was blind and he made me see!” Person after person acknowledged a debt of profound comprehension: “To have explored with Muir the great glacier which bears his name,” proclaimed one, “to have wandered with him in Yosemite and the Kings River Canyon, is to have come, through his enthusiasm and vision, a little nearer the hidden mysteries of nature.”
    Emerson, who visited Muir in Yosemite, said thatMuir’s was the most original mind in America. Muir used this originality to advantage, pouring it into persuasive, exultant language. His speech was described by those who heard him as nonstop and magnetizing—it had a “spell of fire and enthusiasm and glowing vitality,” said one acquaintance—and Muir talked to all who would listen about the need to conserve the wild. He barraged lawmakers with letters and petitions and poured his heart into writing the books that would eventually bring the world’s attention to the spectacular Sierra Nevada and its great stands of sequoias.
    One of those who paid attention was the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. “I write to you personally to express the hope that you will be able to take me through the Yosemite,” he requested of Muir. “I do not want anyone with me but you.” Muir agreed, and in May 1903 he met the president and together they set off with packers and mules. For several days theyhiked and camped in the Sierra, an experience they both recollected with great pleasure. Muir wrote to his wife, “I had a perfectly glorious time with the President and the mountains”; to a friend he said, “I fairly fell in love with him.” Roosevelt, who declared he had never felt better in his life, was no less enthusiastic in his letter to Muir: “I trust I need not tell you, my dear sir, how happy were the days in the Yosemite I owed to you, and how greatly I appreciated them. I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the great sequoias; the next in the snow storm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand.”
    It is not possible to know the extent