Authors: Bill Barich
“Nevada is desert,” Laura said, with certainty. She’d just got her first fishing rod, but fishing perplexed her. “One thing I want to know?”
“Yes?” said I, the aged angler-muse.
“How come only boys can catch a fish?”
T
HE PATRON SAINT OF
Yosemite National Park, John Muir, had set sail for San Francisco from New York in 1868. On the docks in Manhattan, he bought a dozen large maps from a dealer who convinced him that they could be sold for twice the price in California, where everything was scarce.
Muir was a Scot from Glasgow. His father had brought him to the United States when he was eleven and had raised him on a Wisconsin farm. At the university in Madison, he studied chemistry, botany, and geology, and became in his youth a tireless hiker and explorer, once walking from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and keeping a journal that was inscribed with his name and address—
John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe
.
His fascination with Yosemite Valley began while he was recuperating from an accident in an Indianapolis hospital. He’d been employed at a factory where carriage wheels were made and had nearly blinded himself with a file. Machines were his nemesis from early on. An illustrated brochure about the valley caught his fancy, and he started for it as soon as his ship had landed, trekking into the Sierra Nevada on foot.
Muir was as captivated by Yosemite Valley in reality as he had been by images of it. He took up residence on its fringes and supported himself with short-term jobs. He broke horses, harvested grain, ran a ferry from Mariposa to Stockton, and sheared sheep. Throughout the fall and the winter, he tended a flock for Smoky Jack Connel and hired on as a shepherd for Pat Delany in the spring. Come summer, he took Delany’s sheep into the High Sierra to graze.
“We are in the mountains and they are in us,” he wrote of his journey, “kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”
In the Sierra, Muir hiked and kept notebooks and listened to the sounds around him. He lay in green meadows and slept on a rock in the middle of a creek and knew in those moments out of ordinary time the true character of his calling, simply to exist and to pay attention to existence, close attention, although he did not quite know how he could make it happen.
In the crispness of September, first leaf fall, Muir returned with the sheep to the San Joaquin, but he was back in the valley a few months later and signed on as a jack-of-all-trades to J. M. Hutchings, who, faced with abundant customers, was upgrading his hotel and actually putting wood partitions between the rooms instead of just dividing them with a blanket.
Muir cared for the livestock, pounded nails, led guided tours, and ran a sawmill where, on August 5, 1870, Professor Joseph Le Conte stopped by accident to ask directions to Yosemite Falls.
Le Conte: “Here found a man in rough miller’s garb, whose intelligent face and earnest, clear blue eyes excited my interest.”
He had heard about Muir from his fellow academics, but he was still impressed with Muir’s scientific knowledge, particularly of botany.
Le Conte: “A man of such intelligence tending a sawmill!—not for himself, but for Mr. Hutchings. This in California!”
Muir agreed to hike to Mono Lake with the university crew later in the week. He had his reasons. He believed that Le Conte, as a pupil of Agassiz, the world’s foremost expert in glaciation, might be open to his theory that glaciers had helped to form Yosemite Valley. The theory went against the conventional wisdom. Professor Josiah Whitney, for instance, considered it to be claptrap, in spite of some evidence that his survey team had dredged up.
William Brewer: “We have found so much of interest here [in Yosemite], among the rest finding enormous
glaciers
here in earlier
times, first found on the Pacific slope, that we have been detained much longer than we expected.”
Whitney still held that the work of glaciers was incidental. The primary cause, he said, was violent faulting, the earth uplifted and tilted. Le Conte, in five days of wandering with Muir, accepted the importance of glaciers, though with some reservations, citing in
his
journal the equal importance of preglacial forces.
Not until Muir located an actual glacier at Red Mountain did he receive his satisfaction. He sent an article about it to the
New York Tribune
, and it was published in 1871 and rocketed him into the public arena. The author got two hundred dollars, no mean sum for a man who lived on beans and bread.
Ralph Waldo Emerson came to call that year, seeing in Muir the same independent spirit as he had in Henry Thoreau. Though Emerson declined an invitation to camp out—his minders were afraid that he might catch cold—the two men became friends and corresponded with each other. Muir always included, not surprisingly, “Self Reliance” among his favorite essays. His favorite books were the poems of Robert Burns, the New Testament, and
Paradise host
.
Muir spent the winter of 1873 in Oakland writing stories for the
Overland Monthly
, but he wasn’t happy. Cities tore at him. He hated the concrete, the poverty, the filth, and the absence of plant life. What city dwellers missed were the seeds of freedom sewn in nature, he thought, but he was troubled by what people did to the wilderness once they’d discovered it. Sheep and cattle were decimating the meadows in Yosemite, and timbermen were topping its virgin stands of trees.
Muir began traveling widely to pursue his botanical studies. He went to Mount Shasta, to Utah and Alaska. In 1880, during a thunderstorm that thrilled him, he was wed to Louie Wanda Strentzel. He was forty-two, and she was thirty-one. Her father, a dentist, had a home in Martinez, in Contra Costa County, where he grew pears and table grapes, and his new son-in-law gradually assumed the management of the farm.
Evidently, Muir felt he had to prove himself to Dr. Strentzel, putting the lie to any notion that he was merely a dreamy mountaineer. The archetypal loner strapped himself into the harness of the Good Provider and threw himself so vehemently into marketing his crops, hassling with brokers and other middlemen, that his health deteriorated. He looked drawn and sickly as he delivered his profits to the bank in laundry sacks. One of his sole pleasures was taking his two little daughters on nature walks.
Muir was ultimately forced by his conscience to rejoin the fray. In 1889, Robert Underwood Johnson, the editor of
Century Magazine
, visited California to solicit some writing and went to Yosemite Valley with Muir, who was appalled at the continued devastation there—corrals and pigsties, more meadows gone, more trees felled, the landscape altered and looking artificial.
Enraged, Muir did one article for Johnson about the destruction of wilderness areas and another about the need to create a new national park that would include Yosemite Valley and afford it more security. His stance earned him some enemies. Preservation was not a concept that most westerners clasped to their bosom. It belied every notion of land use in the West, but Muir had his way, and the U.S. Congress passed the requisite bill in 1890. The boundaries of the new national park were expanded again in 1905 to encompass a total of 1,189 square miles of acreage.
Muir’s defense of the valley would prove to be his last big victory, and out of it would come the Sierra Club, formed in 1892 with Muir as its first president. By then, too, he had knitted a final version of himself as a bearded, lanky, roughhewn proponent of the wilderness, who was cordial and garrulous and affected a Scot’s burr when he had to lay something on thickly.
Although Muir had strong ties to the wealthy and the powerful, such as Teddy Roosevelt, he couldn’t stop San Francisco politicians from flooding and damming Hetch Hetchy Valley, the park’s other jewel. It was located some twenty miles northwest of Yosemite Valley, between Lake Eleanor and the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne
River. The deal was so firmly in place when a public outcry occurred that it couldn’t be derailed. Along with many others, Muir argued that there were alternative sources of water available, but the press portrayed him as an irascible old coot out of step with the times.
O’Shaughnessy Dam was built in 1923, impounding the river behind a curvilinear concrete arc. Hikers still go to the valley for picnics or to fish, sometimes on the same trails that the Awani and the Pauites used when they gathered acorns to grind in mortars for
atch atchie
, an edible mixture of grains, grasses, and seeds.
Muir did not live long enough to see the dam. He died of pneumonia at his daughter Helen’s house in the Mojave Desert, in 1914, passing from the earth into the universe with his memories of an unspoiled Hetch Hetchy Valley still intact.
E
VERY SUMMER IN HIGH SEASON
, John Muir’s worst predictions for Yosemite National Park came true. About fourteen thousand men, women, and children were in the park on an average day, and they transformed it into a place unlike any other in California, afflicted with a host of difficulties and subject to its own peculiar dynamic.
Hikers, for example, got lost in the wilds and had to be rescued. Novice rock climbers had to be rescued, too, and so did the kids who fell from trees and broke their arms and their legs. Swimmers drowned in the Merced River. Campers neglected to stash their food at night, and hungry bears roared down out of the mountains to scavenge and growl and bang on cars.
Raccoons in the park ate garbage and grew as fat as sows. Squirrels learned to beg for corn chips and popcorn and lost their ability to forage. The human bacteria in streams could cause the fish to go belly up. Accidents and arrests for drunk driving abounded on the two-lane roads. Thieves worked the campgrounds, while pickpockets worked the valley. Occasionally, a tourist was murdered.
There was little that anybody could do to control Yosemite. The budget for operating the park had been slashed to the bone over the
past few years, and a dispirited skeleton crew was in charge of things. Rangers who had joined the Forest Service because they loved the great outdoors wound up playing Smokey-the-Cops and having to do the job of an urban police force.
At the park headquarters, I talked one afternoon with Lisa Dapprich, a public affairs officer. She was from Marin and had moved to Yosemite when her husband took over a school for environmental education that was located there.
Lisa told me that about 70 percent of the visitors to Yosemite were Californians, 20 percent were from overseas, and the other 10 percent were Americans from elsewhere. The average stay in the park, whether at a campsite, a tent-cabin, or a hotel, was one-and-a-half days, or just enough time to take some photos and a guided tour and buy a Yosemite coffee mug or a Yosemite T-shirt.
About 89 percent of the land in the park was designated as backcountry, Lisa said, but hardly anyone used it. Permits to camp there had topped out in 1979 and had been declining ever since. People felt safe in the valley, in a California suburb.
I
SPENT THREE MORE DAYS IN YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK
, and they were good days, unexpectedly good.
For two days I camped by myself in the backcountry off the Pacific Crest Trail. The long, rugged hike in tired me in a wonderful way, and I fell asleep like an old dog in the afternoon, waking at twilight to a flurry of butterflies around my head.
On the second day, I hiked to a little alpine lake and passed two young women setting up camp not far from me. Yvette and Marie were from a town near Paris and wore smashing outfits in cotton and khaki. They were touring California for a month or so from their base at Marie’s uncle’s house in the Napa Valley.
“What do you think of Yosemite?” I asked them.
“Magnificent, no?” Marie looked to Yvette, and Yvette nodded
in agreement. “We have camped in the Pyrenees, but that is not this.”
“I like your outfits,” I said.
They giggled. “Ba-na-na Ree-pu-blique!”
They invited me to supper that evening. They had a bandanna spread on a rock, and on it were some bread and some cheese and a bottle of red wine. We became terrific friends in our isolation, and when I returned to my own camp a bit giddy from the wine and the altitude I decided that I wanted to marry them both and run away with them forever.
On the third day, I reserved a campsite in the valley, just to see what it would be like. The cars went round and round, and I moped and fiddled with my gear until the guy next door came out to light his barbecue grill and started chatting. He was from Modesto and recently divorced, and he had his three daughters with him for a week’s vacation. His tent was as commodious as a tract house. He was happy, carefree, briefly released from his job and his worries, enjoying the mountain air—I don’t know, it touched me.
All around the campground, people were lighting their barbecues. Families were joking, playing Monopoly, listening to music, and even watching battery-powered TVs. Yosemite Valley was growing ever more weary, I thought. The wilderness ideal and all that it represented in California was vanishing from our hearts.
D
ROPPING DOWN FROM THE SIERRA NEVADA
through scrubby brown foothills and stray little mountain towns, Oakhurst and Coarsegold, I made for the San Joaquin. There were barns, farmhouses, and railroad tracks, hawks perched on telephone wires, some cattle and some horses, the earth no longer tilted upward in granite blocks but flattened to a gentle plain—acre upon acre of dry grasses and wild oats, the fabled sun of the valley burning low on the horizon, evening, and all I could think of when I passed Twenty-two Mile Roadhouse, a solitary shack at the edge of Highway 41, was an ice-cold beer.
Twenty-two Mile Roadhouse was a marker on the road to Fresno, maybe left over from stagecoach days. Inside, it was smoky and cramped and only a few degrees cooler than the sweltering air outside.
Two bikers in soiled motorcycle leathers sat at a small bar staring into fourteen-ounce draft Budweisers as a form of meditation. One man had tattoos running up both his arms, flames and pitchforks and horned devils, the Book of Revelations dancing on his skin. The other was younger and cleaner and appeared to be less doomed. He was about six-foot-four and had a moustache and long, wavy hair, Buffalo Bill returned from the dead to sit astride a Harley.