There is Muir the activist, successfully lobbying Congress for the creation of a National Park in the Yosemite region. There is Muir the botanist, striding through the pollinous bee-meadows of the Sierra, counting the ten thousand flower-heads in a square yard of sub-alpine pasture, and worshipping in the crypt-light of the sequoia groves. There is Muir the explorer, opening up unmapped regions of Alaska in his fifties and living with Native American peoples. There is Muir the geologist, decoding the glacial origins of the Yosemite Valley. There is Muir the mountaineer, stalking the high ridges of the Sierra Nevada range in California, and making the first ascents of several of its biggest peaks. There is Muir the long-distance tramp, vagabondising a thousand miles from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico. Looking back over his long life, one sees why he had to weld together such a compound description of himself – for there are so many John Muirs. and ornith-natural, etc.!!!’ he wrote gleefully to a friend in 1873. Muir (1838–1914) himself never knew quite what he was, and it delighted him not to know. Heis part Victorian patriarch, part geological extrusion. The tones of his shirt and the colour of his beard rhyme with the pale grey of the rock beneath him.
The most famous photograph of the elder Muir – the guardian of Yosemite, the family man, the esteemed essayist and memoirist – shows him in profile, seated on a boulder of his cherished Californian granite. John Muir also grew into likeness with his chosen terrain. One thinks of Hughes’s great granitic head, more tor than skull, and of the Auden of the 1960s, his face deeply creased and grooved laterally, like the limestone pavements of Yorkshire in which much of his poetry is grounded. Auden, resembled the landscapes they loved. Two of the greatest twentieth-century British poets of place, Ted Hughes and W.
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