Just a quick post to say I wish I had discovered John Muir’s writings earlier. I started my trip reading Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, which was beautiful description but not so smooth to read. And the descriptions of nature are gorgeous, but I much more enjoyed Leopold’s commentary about conservation and the enjoyment of nature as a child, etc. The descriptions got a bit cumbersome.
But Muir is just amazing all-around. He is such a great storyteller, but it’s like he’s not even trying. At times he writes great narratives of his childhood, and at others he is simply publishing his journals from his travels, which are a series of sentence fragments, essentially. And they’re both fantastic. I actually had no idea that he was an inventor. But the first few stories in this book I got, Essential John Muir, are about his experiences growing up with an ardently religious father who thought reading and inventing were frivolous undertakings. So he would wake up at 1am just to have the time to work on his projects without his father’s criticism. And he invented countless little wonders – alarm clocks, full mechanical calendars, gadgets that would sit you up in the morning and turn on the light, machines that would automatically start fires at a certain time.
It’s all pretty amazing. And of course these are all supplemented with his biological descriptions of plants and animals that he encounters on his treks around the country. Truly a genious. I recommend it, and I’m only halfway through.
