Customer Reviews

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As the human population expands the natural world around us disappears. This is a fact we mostly ignore as we go about our daily life. One day, you wake up, and discover that within your own lifetime things have been permanently altered.

When John Muir made his "Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf" the U.S. was not as heavily populated as it is today, although much had changed from the time when European settlers first moved through the area he explored -- a path that stretched from Indianapolis Indiana to the Gulf just north of what is Tampa Florida today.

Muir moved South in the aftermath of the Civil War, so he encountered much unrest, unhappiness, and destruction along the way. He describes not only the flora and fauna he found but the condition of humans as they struggled to rebuild their lives.

He says, "My plan was to simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest." To a great extent, he was able to do that, however, he could not escape some of the realities of the world around him. For example, in Georgia, he encountered the graves of the dead, whom he says lay under a "common single roof, supported on four posts as the cover of a well, as if rain and sunshine were not regarded as blessings." A bit further he says, "I wandered wearily from dune to dune sinking ankle deep in the sand, searching for a place to sleep beneath the tall flowers, free from the insects and snakes, and above all my fellow man."

Muir wonders at the teachings of those who call themselves God's emissaries, who fail to ask about God's intentions for nature. He says, "It never seems to occur to these far-seeing teachers that Natures'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. Why should man value himself as more that a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of the unit--the cosmos?"

Partly as a result of his writing, and the writing of other Naturalists, the National Park System came into being, and today, more trees grow on the East coast than grew in the late 1700s (American Revolution). The fight is not over, however, it has only begun. Many of those trees are "harvested" every year. Sometimes, even within National Forests they are all felled at the same time through a process called clear cutting. The lovely large oaks that Muir beheld are mostly long gone and have been replaced by Pine.

This is one of John Muir's best books (the other being _First Summer in the Sierra_). It's Muir's slightly-edited diary of his 1000-mile trip through the Southern U.S. to Florida, then Cuba. He traveled on foot observing nature and the people. The book holds your interest as it's written on the spot through the enthusistic eyes of a young man. It reminds me a little of Mark Twain's book _Roughin' It_, another story through the eye's of a young man latter to become famous (about working on antebellum riverboats).

John Muir (naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club) left his home in Indiana at age 29 and "rambled" 1,000 miles through the woods of the southern US ending in Florida in 1867/68. It was just 2 years after the end of the Civil War and he ran into "wild negros" and long-haired horse-riding ex-Confederate bandits who would "kill a man for $5". He passed through uninhabited stretches of burnt out fields and deserted farms and was often seen as a northern interluder mistrusted by his southern guests. He lived mostly on stale pieces of bread, almost dieing of starvation while camping in a graveyard outside of Savannah, GA. He caught malaria and was bed ridden for 3 months, cared for by a kind family in Florida.

This is a snapshot of the south right after the war and the contrast between Muir's beautiful nature writing and the devastation of war are just as striking today as they must have been for the many people who encountered this unusual walker in the woods. Muir's writing is under-stated - the book was published posthumously and is more a diary than a finished book, which gives it a truthfulness and matter of factness. Fundamentally a Romanticist world-view - the power of nature and mans relation to it - Muir delights in finding, sampling and discussing plants, animals and geography. The genre is best compared with Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes and Thoreau's The Maine Woods.

The title sums up quite a bit of the review for me. Not only was he a brilliant naturalist and visionary, but he was a better than decent science and adventure writer. This book, thousand mile walk to the gulf, is from Muir's younger days when he basically dropped out and went exploring. He walked from Wisconsin to the gulf, shortly after the war, and literally slept wherever he felt like- hedges, roadsides, and even the occasional house. His observations on reconstruction South are all the more insightful because they are unadulterated (is that a word?) by any agenda, and have the overpowering reality of truth.

While his time in the Sierras is what he is most famous for, and the mountains more rugged and inspiring, this pre-Jenkins "Walk Across America" is a tamer warm-up for reading his journals from Yosemite days. I highly recommend it as it gives the reader a bit of botany and a lot of background on Muir himself.

Shortly after the American Civil War, John Muir, a 29-year-old budding naturalist, set out on an epic journey across the eastern United States. Starting in Louisville, Kentucky on September 2, 1867, he walked southward through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, where he was delayed in Savannah. After crossing through Florida he finally reached the Gulf, but, unfortunately, his desire to continue on toward South America was hindered by an illness. Not fully recovered, he eventually made for Cuba, but went no further. Muir returned home only to set out for California a short while later. During his journey, he kept a journal in which he recorded his experiences and observations of the flora and fauna he came across. This journal, along with an article written in 1872 and a letter that he wrote while in California, constitute A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, which was originally published in 1916, two years following Muir's death. Although there are a few instances when the author reveals himself to be a man of his times, his observations of a natural world which in many instances have long since been destroyed, are priceless.

This diary account of John Muir's thousand mile walk to the Gulf deserves to be within the canon of transcendentalism. Not only does Muir travel through strange landscapes collecting plants and ruminating about the different species between biomes, he eloquently captures the ineffability of nature through his prose. This book in particular reveals how he experiences nature and how this experience allows him to comprehend the harmony within the vastly different landscapes.

John Muir is rarely taught in high schools or classes, but he truly is the most genuine writer of his discipline. He went out and experienced nature first hand, allowing him to understand and articulate it in an insurmountable way. Contrast this to Thoreau who merely spend time on one pond. John Muir walked across the country, followed sheep in the Sierra Nevada, trekked Alaska and climbed into trees during rainstorms just to see what the tree felt. He founded the Sierra Club so that he could build a community of people who can protect nature together by instilling awareness. He started a National Park movement to set aside land that cannot be developed, namely Yosemite National Park. He wrote books on many different ecosystems and even made scientific breakthroughs on some of his observations in addition to being eloquent. He protested and fought the San Francisco government to protect land in the Sierra Nevada from being dammed. His life is inseparable from his work because he embodied that same honesty, curiosity, and intensity that he wrote about.

One of John Muir's earliest works, this book traces his travels from Indiana to Florida, continuing on to Cuba, and ending up in California. At times, it is fascinating stuff. As he left in 1867, just after the American Civil War, he encounters many suspicious Southerners, although most are cordial to him. Muir wrote this as a journal of discovery, I think, to document the different flora and fauna he encounters in a part of the country with which he was not familiar. But this book is just as interesting as a social study - in other words, what was life like in America in 1867? How did the people act? How did they treat him? What were his impressions? If you have ever wondered about what America was like 150 years ago, you will find some answers here.

Additionally, Muir has some fine moments of nature writing. Sometimes he delights in just stopping and observing: "I used to lie on my back for whole days beneath the ample arms of these great trees, listening to the winds..." He calls the birds he observes "feathered people from the woods and reedy isles." And despite being a God-fearing man, he disagrees with those who take a fundamentalist view of nature, ridiculing the claim that the world was made especially for man..."a presumption not supported by the facts," says Muir.

Overall, I enjoyed this book. At times there is a little too much discussion on botany for my tastes, but that was OK. Muir's journal is rich with interesting anecdotes. With this journey, the founder of the Sierra Club was well on his way to making his mark in the world.

Four stars.

This last semester, I was having to write a research paper on John Muir, and the weekend before the essay was to be turned in, I decided that I just didn't have enough material. I needed to read more of Muir, and so I embarked on what I thought would be a nearly unbearable task: reading two of Muir's books, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, four hundred sixteen pages together, in a single Saturday afternoon. I do not relish desperation reading.

In this case, however, it would turn out being a wonderful day. I'm not sure that it's the content of the writing that's so enjoyable. I doubt that in years to come I'll remember many of Muir's specific stories or his descriptions of beautiful human and non-human encounters, but there's no doubt I'll always remember the feel of it. There's just such effusive joy in Muir's writing. And like in Whitman's poetry, there's such energy and love sparkling in every word.

Here's one sample passage from A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf: "To lovers of wild, these mountains are not a hundred miles away. Their spiritual power and the goodness of the sky make them near, as a circle of friends. They rise as a portion of the hilled walls of the Hollow. You cannot feel yourself out of doors; plain, sky, and mountains ray beauty which you feel. You bathe in these spirit-beams, turning round and round, as if warming at a camp-fire. Presently you lose consciousness of your own separate existence: you blend with the landscape and become part and parcel of nature."

I loved reading Muir. And I was very happy, when I finished the essay, to grab my copy of Thousand Mile Walk and take off into the woods.

I am currently writing a novel set in Cedar Key. In my research, I discovered that John Muir had walked there (recorded in this book) and that he had become ill there. I read that his words about Cedar Key were revealing of the era and the place, so I purchased it.

It was exactly what I was looking for. As someone who loves and visits Cedar Key, I felt that the writing was precise to the feel of the location.

But I also enjoyed the rest of the book. How adventurous of Mr. Muir to take on this task of walking 1000 miles to the Gulf. For fortunate for him that he was able to do so. And how fortunate for me that I am able to read about it.

Eva Marie Everson
Things Left Unspoken: A Novel

After an accident in a carriage factory while working as an inventor left him temporarily blinded, John Muir vowed that he would break the moorings of life in Indianapolis and embark for wilderness places to study plants. His intention, which he later acknowledged as foolhardy, was to find his way to a tributary of the Amazon and float down that great river. He never made it to South America. He was lucky enough to survive a bout with malaria and be diverted to California.

It's hard to imagine a much more dangerous undertaking than to set off alone soon after the Civli War to places unknown in the heart of the South. He was warned repeatedly by kind strangers and knew quite clearly of the dangers ahead: the guerilla bands of roving white bandits, displaced and desperate former slaves, a migration of rattlesnakes, the alligator-infested swamps, and the worst of all: catching malaria from mosquito bites (the thing that did catch up to him). It shows how single minded he was in his desire to study and learn about the natural world. As the blacksmith who took him in along the way characterized him: what a tough-minded man he needed to be in order to subordinate the dangers to what he wanted to do.

Some do get rather tired of reading Muir's descriptive passages, but for anyone with a love of plants, this book offers a very unique and special view of the native vegetation along the route that he took to Florida. The cultural observations are less common, but they are keen and say a lot about the times: the people and how simply they lived. Then, there are some amazing experiences such as the time he spent in the natural refuge of the St Bonaventure graveyard in Savannah waiting for a parcel from his brother to arrive. There's a prophecy by a friend along the way about the coming prevalence of electricity long before the light bulb was invented. And, there are Muir's observations that plants do have secret lives, unknown to man, who tends to blow himself up out of all proportion to the rest of Creation.