Freedom Gate

From “Rediscovering America,” a biography of naturalist John Muir, by Frederick Turner, Frederick Turner, 1985 . Used by arrangement with Viking Penguin Inc.:

In the early portion of the Yosemite years, the dominant feeling in Muir’s letters and journal entries is that of release and freedom. The chronic tensions of the past were relaxed, he felt his body to be as sound and transparent as a crystal, and he was capable of almost incredible feats of physical skill and endurance. Late in life, he set down in casual form recommendations for those who would hike the trials and routes of the Yosemite region . . . a fine, easy two-day saunter is 50 miles, a three-day hike, 60. A constant level of spiritual excitement amounting almost to ecstasy can produce an athleticism otherwise unobtainable, and for Muir the gateway into this freedom, this excitement, had been the mountain rock, the murmuring stream, the untouched stands of woods. Later, he would write that between every two pine trees there is a door leading to a new way of life, and for him this was no literary conceit . . . it was a live, literal fact.

Others dreamed of becoming the archetypal New World Man, escaped into the wilderness beyond the confines and the comforts of civilization: lone, womanless, released into the wilderness, owing no allegiance. In America the dream persisted, even as the possibilities of it were steadily abridged as the wild places where it might be achieved shrank before axes, plows, the steam-powered sawmill, the locomotive. Our great writers--Thoreau, Melville, Twain--lived enough of that dream to write of it imperishably, but very few actually lived the dream fully, deeply. Muir was one.