The Last Empty Places (31 page)

Such was the case with John Muir and Jeanne Carr. The two met
through her husband, Ezra, one of Muir’s professors of geology and chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. Having moved to the Midwest from New England, the Carrs personally knew Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle, and knew the writings of Thoreau, whose
Walden
had recently been published, in 1854. Introducing him to Emerson’s writings, Professor Carr deeply impressed on Muir “the harmony, the oneness, of all the world’s life”
²⁴
—a view that Jeanne shared.

Daughter of a freethinking Vermont doctor and a mother of old New England stock, Jeanne Carr’s Puritan ancestors, like Emerson’s, had arrived in New England seven generations earlier, convinced that Satan inhabited the North American wilds and the devil possessed the heathen Indian. Like Emerson and others in the Concord circle, Jeanne Carr broke dramatically with that dark, hoary view of Wild Nature.

With her curious and progressive mind, she found herself frustrated by the constricted female role in mid-1800s America of home-maker and housewife and helper to her husband’s career. She chafed for ways to reach out intellectually, to transcend this narrow life, having at various points enrolled in a seminary, worked as a schoolteacher, and pursued amateur botany. When John Muir, working at the sawmill in Canada to escape the draft and feeling lonely and homesick, wrote a letter to Professor Carr, Jeanne quickly replied to Muir. She remembered him as standing out from other students for “your power of insight into Nature, and the simplicity of your love for her.” Jeanne proposed to John Muir, via letter, that they begin an exchange of ideas:

Thus began an intimate, ten-year correspondence between the two. She exposed Muir to her wide-ranging intellectual interests—from painting to feminism, to landscape gardening, to poetry, to psychic phenomena, to Asian philosophies. He was twenty-seven years old and an odd-mannered farmboy draft dodger, and she forty and a polished New England lady. She served as both his muse and his guide, a mother figure and sister, and offered him a kind of universal love as she loved the “humble honest wayside grasses and weeds.” It was as if Nature itself
provided the lush medium through which their feelings for each other flowed.

At the time, psychic readings were much in vogue across the United States. While John Muir lay in bed recovering his sight after poking his eye with a file, and deciding to follow the explorer Humboldt’s steps to South America, Jeanne Carr wrote him to say that a friend of hers, a psychic, predicted he would end up in the western United States and the Yosemite Valley.

Muir read the prediction with skepticism.

“My faith concerning its complete fulfillment is weak,” he wrote to Mrs. Carr.

T
HEY’D SEEN ME COMING
—my tiny Trooper in the distance kicking up a plume of dust far across the sagebrush valley. As I neared, bumping up through the sage, one of the riders sidled his horse to the edge of the corral. As I got out of the car, he dismounted and walked over to the fence, leading his horse by the reins, while eyeing me carefully. It wasn’t as if someone would just
stumble
across this place; you’d have to be way
beyond
lost. I’d be suspicious, too.

I gave him a jaunty little wave, hoping to look friendly, hoping to look
unarmed
. I approached closely enough so he could hear me above the bellowing, churning, dust-shrouded mass of animals behind him.

“Hey,” I said in greeting, as warmly as I could.

He watched me steadily with cool blue eyes from under his cowboy hat.

“Can I help you?” he replied evenly.

“Rob Sanders sent me,” I said, figuring that invoking the boss’s name might put him at ease. “Are you Stacy Davies?”

He said he was. I hurriedly explained what I was up to—my quest for the blankest, emptiest places in America. He listened carefully while his horse stood patiently beside him. A long lariat was looped over the saddlehorn. He wore dusty leather chaps on his legs, battered cowboy boots, an old tan coat.

I noticed the other riders, working their horses through the “pairs”—each consisting of a mother cow and calf—swinging lariats and throwing them down to rope the calves. It looked like a Western. They were
dressed
like in a Western: heavy leather chaps; dusty worn
boots; cowboy hats; bandannas knotted around their necks. They hadn’t dressed up for me, or for anyone else. They just were. I thought the American cowboy was dead. But here he was—cowboys and cowgirls—
vaqueros
, the old Spanish called them in California, or
buckaroos
as they were known here, a bastardization of the Spanish noun. There was a pretty
vaquera
, too, with tight jeans and leather chaps and white hat and knotted black bandanna around her slender neck, wearing silver earrings, and working near the fire. It blazed bright orange at the far end of the corral. Branding irons poked from it. I’d walked onto a damned movie set! It felt more surreal than a movie set, less explicable, because we were way, way,
way
out here in the desert…as if in the many intervening miles since I’d last seen another human and through that long sequence of empty sagebrush valleys I’d slipped through a rent in the fabric of time and emerged in the 1880s.

Davies pointed to a hole in the fence to crawl through, so I could stand in the dusty corral and talk more easily.

“So what do you want to know?” he asked.

Still the cows bellowed and dust flew and wind blew and the riders roped.

“Well, I want to know how a ranch like this works, and what it’s like to live here in such empty country, and how
big
it is.”

“This allotment we’re standing on is 640,000 acres,” he said, with some pride in its sheer scale. “One pasture is 427,000 acres. The whole ranch is one million acres. From here it’s forty-five miles back to ranch headquarters. It’s twenty miles to pavement. It’s eighteen miles to the Nevada border.”

A boy of maybe eleven walked up, wearing a sweatshirt with shoved-up sleeves. Dried blood, caked over with white dust, smeared his hands, forearms, face. Wind and dust matted his hair, like some Huck Finn of the High Desert, and in one hand he gripped a short, elegantly curved and very sharp knife, and in the other, a whetstone, on which he worked the knife blade back and forth, honing it.

He asked Stacy a question about what he wanted done next with some pairs.

“This is my boy,” Stacy said to me. “He’s been doing the cutting. Do you have kids?”

“I do,” I said. “A girl thirteen and a boy ten.”

“Good,” he said. “I have three boys working here now, and my
wife. That couple over there, they’re getting married in a month. This is a place where families can work together.”

The Davies family, Stacy and Elaine and their sons, lived back at ranch headquarters, forty-five miles away, where I’d encountered Rob Sanders and the Citation jet in the pasture. Stacy said the boys went to elementary school in Frenchglen, about fifteen miles from headquarters. For high school, they’d go to Crane Union High School, a boarding high school in Crane, about seventy-five miles away.

“So exactly how big is a million acres in total?”

“The ranch is seventy miles north to south,” he replied. “It’s forty-five miles across at the widest point.”

He nodded the brim of his hat—nodding it across the broad valley floor, nodding it toward distant bluish hills, nodding it toward the utter, absolute absence of a dwelling or any sign of human life.

“This is the heart of the big empty, as you can see. I don’t know anyplace that’s farther from a highway.”

I had to smile. Wherever exactly the center of that “Long Way to a Latte” map lay, I was pretty sure I was standing on it.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1867, at age twenty-nine, Muir walked out of Louisville, Kentucky, pausing at the town’s outskirts to spread out a map and trace the wildest way to the Gulf of Mexico. From there, his plan was to follow Humboldt into the Amazon.

Across Kentucky and Tennessee and into Georgia he traipsed—into William Bartram’s old territory—through forests and along country roads, staying at sharecroppers’ shacks and trappers’ cabins. He slept several nights in one memorably peaceful and enchanting graveyard and gained a visceral understanding of how the human body is recycled into the natural world. Ending only two years earlier, the Civil War had left much of the countryside in ruins. Gangs of long-haired highwaymen on horseback prowled the roads. They found nothing in Muir’s meager sack—a plant press, botanical samples, crackers, a copy of Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Muir’s own journal, inscribed
“John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe”
²⁶
—worth stealing. One highwayman, after rummaging through it, thrust the bag back to him in disgust.

These encounters may have encouraged Muir to side with the wild animals and heathen Indians—also victims of ruffians and “honest” citizens
alike. The alligators of the Florida swamps were fierce and cruel in the eyes of man, Muir noted, but no doubt they were happy and beautiful in the eyes of God. “Lord Man” felt free to kill a bear or a savage heathen Indian, but if bear or Indian killed Christian man, no matter how worthless that individual, “oh! that is horribly unorthodox,
²⁷
and on the part of the Indians atrocious murder!…if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”

Reaching Savannah, he boarded a coastal packet for a short passage past Georgia’s seaboard swamps, disembarking on the Atlantic coast of northern Florida. Sticking to the only dry ground he could find—a railroad line—he hiked across the entirety of Florida, reaching the Gulf of Mexico at Cedar Key. While waiting two weeks for a lumber boat to take him to Galveston, Texas, from which he hoped to sail to South America, Muir went to work temporarily at a Cedar Key lumber mill. After three days at the mill, a fever came over him “like a storm” and he collapsed into a deep coma.

“I awoke at a strange hour,” he wrote later, “on a strange day.”

He could hear the mill owner, Hodgson, standing over him and asking if Muir had spoken yet. Someone replied that he hadn’t.

“Well, keep pouring in the quinine.
²⁸
That’s all we can do.”

Somewhere in the swamps of Florida, Muir, unknown to him, had been bitten by an anopheles mosquito carrying the malaria parasite, which then surged through his blood and reproduced in stupendous quantities; it would be decades before researchers discovered that malaria is a parasitical, mosquito-borne disease. One wonders how this knowledge might have changed—if it would have changed at all—Muir’s harmonious perception of the natural world, for it was during this “Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf of Mexico” and during his days in Florida, amid fever dreams and spectacular sunsets, that Muir underwent a religious conversion about the relation of God and Man and Nature.

He rejected his father’s severe Campbellite Christianity—that the world, and the human soul in particular, served as a battleground between God and the Devil, and that the victory of the former demanded intense and constant vigilance. Muir now asserted that God did not make the world for Man alone. Those who claimed to know God’s precise
intentions were charlatans and the God that they presumed to know was a puppet of their own imaginations.

Like John and William Bartram before him, Muir rejected conventional Christianity and speculated about a spiritual force in plants and minerals—beliefs held by many indigenous peoples including Native Americans. On he went in his journal, as he recovered from his malarial dreams in Cedar Key:

This, as Stephen Fox and other Muir biographers have noted, was the central insight of John Muir’s life. “Creation,” as Fox puts it, “belonged
³¹
not to a manlike Christian God, but to the impartial force of Nature,” and Man, in Muir’s words, was only one “infinitely small” part of that Creation.

Muir’s was a revolutionary thought in mid-1800s America, as forests were chopped and prairies plowed and lands “gobbled, gobbled” up because God, in the conventional Christian thinking, had put Nature on Earth for the benefit of Man.

From Cedar Key, Muir took a schooner south to Cuba. Still feeling too weak to explore Cuba’s inland mountains—much less South America—he then decided to turn north to colder climates until his strength returned. He hopped aboard an orange boat bound for New York, landed there briefly in winter’s refreshing cold, but felt overwhelmed by “the vast throngs of people, the noise of the streets, and the
immense size of the buildings.” On not much more than a whim, a young man at loose ends looking for some sort of a destiny, Muir booked passage to San Francisco. It was this whim that first brought him west. It would be home for the rest of his life, and the heart of his endless explorations—throughout the California mountains, to Nevada, to Oregon, Washington, and Alaska.