Here he wandered about, comparing cañon with cañon, following lines of cleavage, and finding the key to every precipice and sloping wall in the blurred marks of the glaciers on the eternal rocks. Every boulder found a tongue; “in every pebble he could hear the sound of running water.” The tools that had carved the beauties of Yosemite were not, he concluded, those of the hidden fires of the earth, the rending of earthquake and volcanic eruption, but the slow, patient cleaving and breaking by mighty glaciers, during the eons when the earth’s surface was given over to the powers of cold—the period known as the Ice Age.
“There are no accidents in nature,” he said. “The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that keeps the stars in their places. Each bird-song is an echo of the universal harmony. Nature is one.”
Because he believed that Nature reveals many of her innermost secrets in times of storm, he often braved the wildest tempests on the heights. He spoke with keen delight of the times when he had been “magnificently snowbound in the Lord’s Mountain House.” He even dared to climb into the very heart of a snow-cloud as it rested on Pilot Peak, and it seemed that the experience touched the very springs of poetry in the soul of this nature-lover. He found that he had won in a moment “a harvest of crystal flowers, and wind-songs gathered from spiry firs and long, fringy arms of pines.”
Once in a terrible gale he climbed to the top of a swaying pine in order to feel the power of the wind as a tree feels it. His love for the trees was second only to his love for the mountains. His indignation at the heedless destruction of the majestic Sequoias knew no bounds. “Through thousands and thousands of years God has cared for these trees,” he said: “He has saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining and leveling tempests and floods, but He cannot save them from foolish men.”
It was due mainly to his untiring efforts that the “big trees” of California, as well as the wonderful Yosemite Valley, were taken under the protection of the Nation to be preserved for all the people for all time.
He discovered the petrified forests of Arizona, and went to Chile to see trees of the same species which are no longer to be found anywhere in North America. He traveled to Australia to see the eucalyptus groves, to Siberia for its pines, and to India to see the banyan-trees. When asked why he had not stopped at Hong Kong when almost next door to that interesting city, he replied, “There are no trees in Hong Kong.”
In order to make a livelihood that would permit him to continue his studies of nature in the mountains, Mr. Muir built a sawmill where he prepared for the use of man those trees “that the Lord had felled.” Here during the week he jotted down his observations or sketched, while he watched out of the tail of his eye to see when the great logs were nearing the end of their course. Then he would pause in his writing or sketching just long enough to start a new log on its way.
Sometimes he undertook the work of a shepherd, and, while his “mutton family of 1800 ranged over ten square miles,” he found time for reading and botanizing.
A very little money sufficed for his simple needs. Indeed, Mr. Muir once declared that he could live on fifty dollars a year.
“Eat bread in the mountains,” he said, “with love and adoration in your soul, and you can get a nourishment that food experts have no conception of.”