SEATTLE
The more than one thousand islands of the Alexander Archipelago—“so numerous,” John Muir once wrote, “that they seem to have been sown broadcast”—make up the French braid that extends down from the bulk of the forty-ninth state’s cranial landmass. They are actually the mountaintops of a submerged range that extends south, aboveground, all the way to the Cascades. If a voyage up the Inside Passage often feels more like floating down a river canyon than sailing upon the open seas, it is because in both instances you’re sailing between two walls of rock. Just to be certain, though, I booked the first leg of my journey on the MV Kennicott, one of only two Alaska ferries accredited for ocean travel.
The 126 persons aboard the newly refurbished George W. Elder set sail on May 31, along with their assorted livestock and poultry. Per Harriman’s exacting standards, the ship was in fine shape. Built of iron, 250 feet long with a fresh white paint job, the Elder gleamed like Alaskan snow beneath the plume of black coal smoke that she exhaled from her smokestack. She had two decks for staterooms and crew quarters. Above them sat the hurricane deck, with its pilothouse and a small brass cannon. In addition to the dining room and library, Harriman had arranged for a salon where lectures could be given, board games played, religious services offered, and magic-lantern slides of each day’s discoveries projected. A large derrick stood sentinel over all, in anticipation of lifting a trophy bear on board.
The specialists settled in, two men in each stateroom. The air was convivial, with several opportunities per day to mingle. John Burroughs, the official chronicler of the trip, was feeling a bit out of sorts. At sixty-two, he was accustomed to life at his “hermit’s retreat” in the Catskill Mountains. This was his first trip not just to Alaska but west of the Mississippi. Burroughs was not a great traveler, prone to seasickness and melancholy. He is a likely suspect as the anonymous perpetrator who nicknamed the ship the George W. Roller at the first sign of turbulence. Muir, whose cabin was nearby, was only a year younger but retained his boyish enthusiasm for adventure. The two men were perhaps America’s leading nature essayists and knew each other well. They were sometimes paired together as “the two Johnnies,” and in one photograph from the trip, their matching long beards give the impression of Father Time looking into a mirror. The two also shared an appetite for teasing with some bite. Muir once reacted to a letter from Burroughs explaining that current circumstances would not allow him to join a voyage to Europe by telling another friend that “the ‘circumstances’ are his wife.” In the Harriman Expedition’s official history, Burroughs noted, “In John Muir we had an authority on glaciers, and a thorough one—so thorough that he would not allow the rest of the party to have an opinion on the subject.”
Whereas most of the scientists aboard the Elder signed into the logbook with their academic or government titles, Muir identified himself as “author and student of glaciers.” In both cases, his expertise was largely self-taught, a lifelong act of rebellion against his father, Daniel, a fanatical Calvinist who required his eldest son to memorize Bible verses daily. If John made a mistake reciting the day’s selection, Daniel gave him a thrashing. By the time he was eleven, when the Muirs moved from Dunbar, Scotland, to the wilderness of Wisconsin, John knew all of the New Testament by rote and most of the Old Testament, too. No enterprising devil ever found idle hands among the Muir children. “Old man Muir works his children like cattle,” one Wisconsin neighbor observed. When the family needed a new well, John spent months chiseling through eighty feet of sandstone. Decades later, after he’d fought some of the most vicious battles in early conservation history, he could single out just one thing on earth that he hated without reservation: cruelty.
Though he is now revered as a nature druid, Muir was technologically gifted as a young man, a habitual tinkerer and inventor. At age twenty-two, he caused a stir at the state fair in Madison with one of his creations, an alarm clock that not only woke deep sleepers but tilted their beds, tipping them out onto their feet. (Muir heeded his father’s order not to read the newspaper, so that reports of his brilliance would not inflame his vanity.) He enrolled in Wisconsin’s new state university, where his love of botany and the mechanics of the natural world soon blossomed into a fascination with science.
After two years of university instruction and a long, solitary ramble around the Great Lakes collecting plants, Muir landed a job in an Indianapolis carriage-parts factory, where his mechanical skills helped him to rise quickly to supervisor. In March 1867, Muir was attempting to remove the belt from a circular saw. A file he was holding slipped and flew into his right eye. “When he opened the eyelid, the liquid filling the space between the lens and the cornea dripped into his hand,” according to Muir biographer Donald Worster. By day’s end, sympathetic blindness had left him sightless in both eyes.
While convalescing, Muir thought about a plan he’d secretly been nursing for years: to retrace the botanic peregrinations of the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who had been the first to comprehensively survey the flora and fauna of Central and South America. Among Humboldt’s radical ideas was that the species of the world were inextricably linked in a vast web, part of a single living organism. The natural order was not fixed, as scientists since Aristotle had argued, but dynamic. Only one species held the power to irrevocably disrupt the natural world: Homo sapiens.
Muir’s blindness was temporary. He resolved to take a long journey through the tropics just as his hero Humboldt had, to replenish his soul with “wild beauty.” In his bag he carried a change of underclothes, a few books, and a small notebook. Any stranger who happened to peek inside its front cover would have found this Humboldtian address inscribed there:
John Muir
Earth-Planet
Universe
In the fall and winter of 1867 and 1868, Muir walked more than a thousand miles through the postwar American South as he worked through a cosmic conundrum. Daniel Muir’s dogmatic Christianity held that God had created man in his own image and given him dominion over the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. John Muir always had a weakness for animals; as a boy, he’d accidentally choked a cat to death while attempting to remove a bird trapped in its mouth. “Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one,” he reasoned. To Muir, nature was not humankind’s servant. Nature and God were one. Within a year of settling in California, in 1868, he’d already formulated what would become the core of his philosophy: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”*
The shrinking of the American frontier had the effect of broadening the market for nature writing. Muir, who spoke in captivating paragraphs and thought nothing of scaling cliffs alone, found the act of composition almost too terrifying to contemplate. Slowly, he adapted his lyrical gifts to the printed page. In 1875, his byline appeared for the first time in a national publication, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. The article, which dealt with a subject on which he was becoming something of an expert, was titled “Living Glaciers of California.”