The Last Empty Places (34 page)

“Solitude is a sublime mistress,”
⁴⁷
Emerson had warned him, “but intolerable wife.”

For his part, Muir wondered if he would end like Ulysses, “always roaming with a hungry heart.”

Louie Strentzel and John Muir married in April 1880 on the Strentzel family ranch in the Alhambra Valley. For the next decade, Muir ran the orchards and vineyards, expanding them, growing prized grapes and other fruits, while he and Louie raised two daughters. Each year, from the time the bulk of the planting and tending was done in July, until the harvest in October, Muir—by agreement with Louie—would embark on a wilderness sojourn.

He visited the basin-and-range country of Nevada, about two hundred miles south of Fields Station, seeking evidence of glacial sculpting. During their engagement he had traveled through Oregon, Washington,
and Puget Sound, and up to Alaska by commercial ship, then explored Glacier Bay by canoe paddled by Indians.

The “Ice Chief,” they called him.

He loved to hear their stories and legends. He felt a deep kindred spirituality when they explained that their deities inhabited natural features such as mountains, rivers, and waterfalls. “Instinct with deity,”
⁴⁸
he called it.

But mostly he worked on the ranch as a hardheaded businessman and talented grower who threw himself into the tasks and made considerable money for his family in doing so. The business life wore on him, though. Formerly wiry and fit, with a lightness to his step as he climbed the Sierras, Muir now suffered digestive and other health problems. He spoke of the “grind, grind, grind” of running the business.

In 1888, while on his annual summer wilderness jaunt, he climbed Washington’s massive volcano, Mount Rainier. The climb infused him with some of his old “mountaineering” spirit. Louie, at the same time, had thought about John’s future and his flagging health and spirits.

“A ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice
⁴⁹
of a noble life, or work,” she wrote to him in a letter, “ought to be flung away beyond all reach and power for harm…The Alaska book and the Yosemite book, dear John, need to be written, and you need to be your own self, well and strong, to make them worthy of you.”

On his return, he started the shift away from the ranch toward fulltime writing. The following summer, 1889, Robert Underwood Johnson, an editor of
Century
magazine, traveled from New York to San Francisco in search of writers and material. He and Muir visited Yosemite together. Muir was appalled
⁵⁰
at the condition of the Yosemite Valley he found, now run by a state commission in conjunction with the commercial tourist hotels. In 1864, to preserve its grandeur, the federal government had given some of the Yosemite lands to California for a public state park. But now trees had been cut and meadows plowed for hayfields for cattle to support the hotels and in the Tuolumne Meadows they found great charred stumps and a forest floor eaten as “bare as the streets of San Francisco.”

Johnson proposed that they start a campaign to make Yosemite a national park—Yellowstone had been established as the first national park seventeen years earlier, in 1872. At first Muir resisted—earlier attempts at national park status for Yosemite and Kings Canyon had
failed, and he felt Californians were obsessed with making money over preservation of wildlands. Johnson finally convinced Muir to write two articles for
Century
describing Yosemite’s splendors in his poetic language and proposing a park. Once word was out, Johnson and Muir would spur officials to introduce legislation to protect it.

When Muir’s
Century
articles appeared the following summer, they were picked up by newspapers around the country and inspired citizens to write Congress to preserve Yosemite as a national park. On October 1, 1890, only a year after Underwood and Muir began the campaign, a law championed by President Harrison and passed by Congress awarded Yosemite national park status. Soon, a contingent of cavalry was en route to protect it from squatters and timber poachers.

This was the first of Muir’s major battles to preserve wildlands as national parks and monuments. Starting from his old base in Yosemite, the fight spread outward to Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon, the Grand Canyon, and beyond.

B
Y THE TIME
I
LEFT
southeast Oregon, I’d seen Steens Mountain from many angles. I’d made two full circuits of the sixty-mile-long escarpment by car. I’d talked to ranchers who grazed their cattle on it, and outfitters who packed tourists on horses up it. One night, I’d tried camping below its clifflike eastern face where it dropped to the dry, dusty Alvord Desert. I hoped to gaze up that night at the intense desert stars, but it was not to be. A powerful spring storm swept over the mountain’s brow and tumbled down five thousand vertical feet onto the desert like a breaking wave of wind and spray. Even the white pelicans on pondlike Mann Lake huddled in tight clusters along the shore where I camped, heads down, as downbursts of wind splayed and frothed over the lake’s surface.

I hurriedly pitched my little mountain tent on the gumbo mud, struggling with the yellow fabric against the gusts, and climbed inside to read, sure that the storm would subside. Three hours later I was still damming the rivulets of water that the roaring downdrafts off the escarpment forced under the rain fly and up through the aging tent seams. I sat there on my shrinking island of dry sleeping bag, pondering what to do. I pictured a long, wind-roaring night in a cold, soaked bag. I’d never been daunted by leaky tents before. I’d been to so many remote
and wild places in my life—the mountains of Tibet and the ice fields of Greenland, the forests of Manchuria and the rivers of Mozambique, the highlands of New Guinea and the lowlands of Sumatra. They were always worth—more than worth—the difficulty and discomfort. Why did this prospect look so unpleasant? Why was this different?

Sometimes turning back was more difficult logistically (and sometimes emotionally) than going on, and once you retreated, there was no second chance. Not this time, I realized. The car sat fifty feet away, although its tires had begun to sink into the softening desert ooze. Burns, and a warm, dry motel room, lay a hundred miles up the road. I was by myself and accountable to no one, not part of a team or trying to impress anyone, not passing on to my children the example of the need to persist. They and Amy weren’t with me, which gave this empty spot a different kind of emptiness.

I’d learned, over the years, that to be truly there in these wild places, in these blank spots, you had to earn it. Guided tours could get you into the wilds—I’d been on some of those, too, and they could be very rewarding—but, to my mind, they didn’t fully get you there. They didn’t take you to that totally on-your-own psychic place. A blank spot—a wild place—is as much a state of mind as a geographical reality. In a truly wild place you have no one to rely on but your own little party or yourself. You, personally, carry the weighty uncertainties—route, weather, unknown hazards—unlike traveling with a guide who may have visited this place dozens of times before. Uncertainty—a quality of unknowing, the “unknown”—gives wildness or blankness its special feel.

But I wasn’t there. Part of my mind was not in this place at all, but with my family. So many of the explorers over the centuries who truly threw themselves into blank spots on the map were young men, unattached, whose focus was single-mindedly forward and deeper into uncertainty. I could see little uncertainty here, only the certainty of discomfort and the knowledge that I had a simple option to escape. The car was within easy reach, the dirt road leading out of this place ran just around the lake, and two hours’ drive, partly on gravel and partly on pavement, and I’d be eating a steak dinner somewhere warm and dry.

So what was the point of lying all night in a wet bag in a leaky tent?

There wasn’t one. Or at least there wasn’t one at this point in my life.

I pulled up stakes, literally, spread my arms wide to gather up the mud-soaked tent like a flapping bedsheet on a clothesline during a gale,
balled it up in a tangle of fabric and cords, stuffed it into the back of the Isuzu along with my sopping sleeping bag, and retreated to Burns.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, sun flitting in and out between wet clouds, I again, as I had several days earlier on my way to the Frenchglen Hotel, drove past the swampy arms of Malheur Lake and through the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. A clump of birders in khaki vests stood along the narrow highway, binoculars shoved to eyes, watching a lone white Ross’s goose and a flock of darker coots feeding in the green flooded marsh.

In a roundabout way, John Muir had helped with the preservation of the Malheur Refuge. In May 1903, he hosted Teddy Roosevelt, who was much more game for sleeping under the stars than Emerson and his fellow Bostonians, for four days of camping in Yosemite. Roosevelt, who had pledged during his campaign to fight the huge monied monopolies, hoped to get Muir’s opinion on conservation issues, in particular what to do with Yosemite Park and millions of acres of national “forest preserves” that had been designated—in considerable part due to Muir’s efforts—in the 1890s.

“It was clear weather,”
⁵¹
Roosevelt later recollected, “and we lay in the open, the enormous cinnamon-colored trunks rising about us like the columns of a vaster and more beautiful cathedral than was ever conceived by human architect.”

As they lay side by side on their fern beds, Muir spoke of the natural world, of its trees and plants, of the way glaciers carved the mountains, of the lumber barons and sheep ranchers who were destroying the pristine places of the West, of the great, unifying spirit of nature.

Roosevelt, though a great talker himself, mostly listened, absorbing Muir’s point about the need to preserve forests and other lands before it was too late.

“John Muir,” he later remarked, “talked even better than he wrote.”

It was President Roosevelt who, in 1908, designated Malheur Lake as a bird refuge—only one small part of an enormous amount of federal land he set aside for conservation.

M
Y FIRST ATTEMPT AT CAMPING
had washed out at the base of the eastern escarpment of the mountain, so, a day later, I pitched my tent
on the second attempt partway up the gentle western slope of Steens in a juniper grove with a little brook trickling by. On the open hillsides below I’d seen wild horses—“painted pintos”—grazing. In the morning, I rose early, packed my tent, and drove farther up the graveled Bureau of Land Management road that loops fifty-two miles up to the 9,725-foot crest of Steens where the summit looks far down onto the Alvord Desert. That’s where I’d attempted to camp before.

It had rained again during the night. I guessed it had fallen as fresh snow up above. As my Isuzu climbed the steep section above camp, it slithered and spun in four-wheel drive through gumbo mud and lurched over boulders. At the top of the steep, the road swung around a hairpin bend to a northern slope. Here fresh snow from last night and the night before suddenly blocked my way—at first, only three or four inches deep. I stopped the car, slipped on my backpack, and started hiking up the snow-covered road toward the Steens summit, another seven miles away up a long, gentle ridge.

After a while I turned to look the way I’d come. I could now see forty or fifty miles across the valley to the west. There was not a sign of human habitation in all that country, except—maybe,
maybe
—a single tiny white spot, which may have been some kind of distant ranch building.

As I hiked, I felt the altitude in my shortness of breath. Soon I came to deeper, firmer drifts—winter’s old snow. The sky whipped over my head in a patchwork of sun and cloud. I sweated in the sun patches and shivered a bit in the cold. The ridge opened up, the junipers giving way to alpine terrain. Looking back, toward the northwest, I estimated I could see one hundred miles out across the sagebrush flats and rolling hills. Way out there, on that high desert, the Lost Wagon Trains got lost.

After two hours’ hiking, I stopped for lunch. Clambering over the deep snow of the ridgetop, I made my way to the edge of a cliff overlooking a deep gorge. I sat on a chunk of bare, jagged rock at the lip. Two thousand feet below me the Donner und Blitzen River tumbled, sounding like the distant rush of wind, fading and strengthening, as if ululating. Heavy snow cornices hung off the cliffs like thick, white eyebrows, and avalanche tracks spilled down toward the river. Here worked the dynamic forces of the earth. I could plainly see that ancient glaciers had carved this U-shaped canyon. John Muir helped us all to understand that. He would have loved this spot.

He, too, grew less intrepid with age. After his years as the wild man of Yosemite, and amusements like clinging to the slender whipsawing top of a pine tree during a blizzard (describing the ride in detail to Mrs. Carr), Muir had settled down to start a family, manage his in-laws’ fruit ranch, and, in his fifties, throw himself into writing and lobbying for the wilds. Likewise, Henry Thoreau. Except for his two years in the woods at nearby Walden Pond and his brief sojourns to Maine, he spent virtually his whole life in his peaceful village of Concord, mostly employed at the Thoreau pencil factory.

Billy Bartram showed a similar arc. After his four-year exploration through the wilds of the Southeast, he returned in his forties to the family gardens outside Philadelphia, and for the rest of his life pottered away in the soil and wrote. In his sixties, he declined invitations from Thomas Jefferson to accompany various exploring parties to the West, including perhaps the Lewis and Clark expedition. Bartram died quietly at home in 1823 at age eighty-four.

They all found—as did I—that the intensity of the truly wild experience is harder to sustain as one grows older. But that makes it no less valuable for having had those experiences, and to keep pursuing them, insofar as you’re willing. I’d heard aging Montanans hobbling around with canes say about wilderness, “I can’t go there anymore, but I feel better knowing it’s out there.”