Books: Tramp with a Difference

SON OF THE WILDERNESS — Linnie Marsh Wolfe—Knopf ($3.50).

When the file slipped, flew up and pierced his eyeball, John Muir walked to the window while the milk-white aqueous fluid dripped out into his cupped hand.

“My right eye gone!” a friend heard him murmur wonderingly. “Closed forever on all God’s beauty.” God’s beauty was spread wider for John Muir than for most men. He absorbed and reveled in it as his vital element. With passionate volubility and in sinewy prose, he brought it vividly alive for more short sighted mortals. He fought for it, hard and successfully, against the invasion of commercialism. Emerson named the bearded Scot in his private list of “My Men.” His most notable victory was the long, touch-& -go battle for the conservation of Yosemite Valley. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have seen his best monument: the national parks of the U.S.

In Son of the Wilderness, Linnie Marsh Wolfe, editor of his journals (John of the Mountains), has stitched together a wealth of fact to make a readable, if somewhat shallow, biography of the naturalist.

Eleven-year-old John Muir came to Wisconsin with his Scottish immigrant parents in 1849, worked hard on the family farm. In his spare time he built from wood and metal scraps a series of locks, clocks and other gadgets that were much admired by curious neighbors. At 22 he went to the State Fair at Madison to exhibit an “early rising machine” that dumped its victims out of bed with split-second accuracy. His next stop was the University of Wisconsin, where fellow students crowded his room to see such contraptions as his “student desk,” which whirred and banged a rotation of books at 15-minute intervals under its inventor’s nose.

Two and a half years of college were enough for John Muir. Then he set out alone into the Canadian wilderness, “not as a mere sport . . . but to find the Law that governs the relations subsisting between human beings and nature.” He never found the Law, but he never stopped searching. Until 1914, when he died of pneumonia at 76, John Muir traveled up & down America’s wonderful wilderness, later toured the whole outdoor world. Watching him grow restless after seven years in the confines of civilization, his understanding wife packed him off again to his mountain wanderings. His books & magazine articles won him admirers among the great and famous (Teddy Roosevelt ditched a political banquet to talk to him).

Mountains were John Muir’s particular delight. Once he wrote: “I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer. . . . Civilization and fever & all the morbidness that has been hooted at me have not dimmed my glacial eye, & I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature’s loveliness. My own special self is nothing.”