John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America Read online

  John Muir

  and

  the Ice That Started a Fire

  Also by Kim Heacox

  Memoir:

  The Only Kayak

  Biography:

  Shackleton’s Challenge

  Essays & Photography:

  Alaska Light

  Alaska’s Inside Passage

  In Denali

  Iditarod Spirit

  Natural History & Conservation:

  Visions of a Wild America

  Antarctica: The Last Continent

  History & Conservation:

  An American Idea: The Making of the National Parks

  Fiction:

  Caribou Crossing

  John Muir

  and

  the Ice That Started a Fire

  How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America

  Kim Heacox

  Copyright © 2014 by Kim Heacox

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Project editor: Meredith Dias

  Layout: Melissa Evarts

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heacox, Kim.

  John Muir and the ice that started a fire : how a visionary and the

  glaciers of Alaska changed America / Kim Heacox.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0867-4 (ePub)

  1. Nature conservation—Alaska. 2. Glaciers—Alaska. 3. Muir, John,

  1838-1914. 4. Climatic changes—Alaska. I. Title.

  QH76.5.A4H43 2014

  333.7209798—dc23

  2013050235

  for William E. (Bill) Brown,

  Historian (ret.), US National Park Service

  The Master Builder chose for a tool not the earthquake nor lightning to rend and split asunder, not the stormy torrent nor eroding rain, but the tender snowflowers, noiselessly falling through unnumbered seasons.

  —JOHN MUIR

  I learned from Muir the gentle art of sleeping on a rock,

  curled like a squirrel around a boulder.

  —S. HALL YOUNG

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For the sake of simplicity and to avoid confusion, John Muir is referred to in this book as a naturalist and a casual glaciologist, while during his time (and still today) he would more accurately have been regarded by friendly scientists as a glacial geologist, one who studies the impacts of glaciers on the landscape, as opposed to a glaciologist, who studies the physics and chemistry of glacial ice, its composition, and dynamics. As for the word Tlingit, John Muir and S. Hall Young used different spellings. This book quotes them as they spelled the word in various forms.

  Steeped in western thought, Muir and Young often wrote about Tlingit “chiefs,” whereas Tlingit hierarchy was more complex, honorary, and highly evolved. Today most Tlingits prefer the titles “house master,” “clan leader,” and “headman.” The term Hoonah refers to the Tlingit village on the north shore of Chichagof Island; the term Huna refers to the Tlingit people who lived there. Muir and Young used different spellings here as well.

  I refer to John Muir’s father, Daniel, as a Calvinist, a member of the Church of England, as he was raised. While he remained faithful to Calvinism’s basic tenets, in adulthood a disillusioned Daniel Muir joined the Secessionist Church and later the “Campbellites,” also known as the “Disciples of Christ,” before taking his family to America as a “preaching elder.” Because the term Calvinist broadly frames the core of his upbringing and lifelong values, and is more commonly known and understood, I chose it over Campbellite. Last, I refer to S. Hall Young as Reverend Young (as opposed to Minister Young, etc.), as that’s how John Muir addressed him in their correspondence.

  John Muir at about the time he first went to Alaska

  Photo courtesy of Holt-Atherton Special Collections, University of the Pacific

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  the gospel of glaciers

  PART ONE: 1879-1880

  CHAPTER ONE

  the heaven right here

  CHAPTER TWO

  a skookum-house of ice

  CHAPTER THREE

  it is not a sin to go home

  CHAPTER FOUR

  we must risk our lives in order to save them

  PART TWO: 1888-1890

  CHAPTER FIVE

  old friends, new friends

  CHAPTER SIX

  no lowland grippe microbe

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  moneyfest destiny

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  that masterful grasp of material things

  PART THREE: 1899-1906

  CHAPTER NINE

  author and student of glaciers

  CHAPTER TEN

  bully

  PART FOUR: 1906-1980

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  a temple drowned

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  in perpetuity

  EPILOGUE: 2012-2014

  blue ice and brown bears

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  the gospel of glaciers

  WAS IT MADNESS?

  A death wish of some kind?

  The five Tlingit Indians said little as they glanced at the quiet missionary sitting among them and stabbed the sea with each stroke, paddling their cedar canoe northwest into iceberg-filled waters where no man dared to go this time of year. No man, unless he was a seal hunter. No man, until this other man came along, their second passenger, the one up front who scribbled notes and nibbled on dry crusts of bread. No hunter at all. More of an observer, charismatic in his own way, a good listener, a real talker, this scrappy, bearded Muir, his blue-gray eyes drinking up the country. Half wise elder, half wondrous child, he seemed interested in everything.

  Shouldn’t somebody say something? Insist on turning around? They could all die, be overturned and drowned by Kushtaka, the trickster land otter man of Tlingit legend. Or, if they continued on, they might receive mercy from Gunakadeit, a benevolent sea monster.

  Onward, Muir compelled them. Onward to the glaciers, he would say. Never mind the wind or rain or ice or cold.

  A DOUR SKY pressed down. Rain occasionally lashed them. Pieces of floating ice, calved from tidewater glaciers up ahead, tapped an ancient, forgotten language against the canoe. Ice everywhere, and little sign of life in a land that was once rich in salmon, berries, forests, and firewood. Most of that is gone now, the land’s richness and bounty having been destroyed by an advancing glacier that evicted the Tlingits and entombed the bay for many generations, in some places swallowing entire mountains. Only recently had the glacier begun a dramatic r
etreat, unveiling a vast, raw, woodless, ice-chafed land in somber shades of gray. A foreboding place.

  Summer was over. It was yeis, autumn time, the month Americans called October. Soon it would snow, and the cold, carved moon would turn brittle in the tangle of winter stars. The glaciers would grow still under deep blankets of snow, and darkness would strike all moisture from the air; stillness would pound the land silent, and stretch all the way to the Arctic.

  John Muir was forty-one that autumn, engaged to be married the next spring to the only daughter of a prosperous California fruit merchant. With her reluctant blessing—“do not be vexed with me,” she wrote him—he had come to Alaska to see glaciers firsthand, to find out how they worked and shaped the land, how they carved rock and moved mountains. All to help buttress his theory that glaciers, not catastrophic down-faulting, had shaped his beloved Yosemite Valley and much of the Sierra Nevada, the mountains Muir called “the Range of Light.”

  While Muir often rode in the front of the canoe, the other white man, S. Hall Young, a Presbyterian missionary, rode farther back. If anybody were to argue for turning around and getting them out of there, it would not be Young. In Muir’s company he was a follower. Young had met the effervescent California naturalist more than three months before, in early July, in Fort Wrangell, some two hundred miles by water to the south; he saw in Muir a man to be admired, not questioned. It would be up to Toyatte, the Tlingit chief and captain of the thirty-five-foot canoe, to bring this adventure to an end. But Toyatte might have seen in Muir the same thing Young saw.

  They pushed on.

  Camped that night on the west side of what we know today as Glacier Bay, near Charpentier Inlet, with Muir off somewhere climbing a mountain by himself, the Tlingits huddled around a wet, smoky campfire and confided in Reverend Young: This Muir must be a witch of some kind, a nakws’aati, to be so crazy happy in this lean, hard country. Why does he climb mountains in such miserable weather?

  “To seek knowledge,” Young told them.

  THE YEAR was 1879.

  Across the continent, and in western Europe, industrious men went about the exciting business of progress. For ten years, a railroad had spanned the young United States from Boston to San Francisco, and every year more tracks spidered their way over mountains, deserts, and plains, “obliterating great distances,” said one historian, to make the land safe for commerce and cows. No task was too great, no vision too absurd. Thomas Edison invented the incandescent lightbulb to make cities shine at night; Andrew Carnegie introduced the open-hearth blast furnace to mass-produce American steel. The first canned fruits and meats would soon appear, along with the world’s first electrostatic generator. Out west, camps became forts, forts became towns, towns became cities, and cities grew. Custer and his men had been massacred only three years earlier, and quickly avenged.

  America must be harnessed and put to work, people said. Natural “capital” must be turned into consumable products. Materialist expansion must sweep away misery and social inequality and put us on the road to universal abundance. It was the right thing to do, our destiny, written in books, newspapers, the Bible, and the stars. To argue against such improvements was a fool’s errand.

  Yet the great American novelist and Muir contemporary Mark Twain was beginning to do just that. An eloquent gadfly on the sticky paper of progress, he would be Muir’s soul brother in more ways than one, noting that Shakespeare created King Lear’s fool for a reason: to express a wisdom others did not.

  Twain and Muir, only three years apart in age, would both live three-fourths of a century. In that time, from their births in the 1830s until their deaths in the second decade of the 1900s, America would transform itself from an agrarian democracy into an industrial oligarchy that brought with it feasts of conspicuous consumption—an era that Twain called the “Gilded Age.” He further used a term not unfamiliar to Muir: “citified,” an epithet, Twain noted, “which suggests the absence of all spirituality, and the presence of all kinds of paltry materialisms, and mean ideals, and mean vanities and silly cynicisms.”

  Alaska would be to John Muir what the Mississippi River was to Mark Twain, or the mountains of Assisi, in central Italy, had been to Saint Francis. It would be his wildest dream, a place of healing distances and deep silence and blessed meditation. While California was Muir’s home, Alaska would be his hope, his escape, incomprehensible in its beauty, vastness, and unforgiving ruggedness.

  Just the way he liked it.

  Over the next twenty years, until the eve of the twentieth century, Muir would make seven journeys to Alaska. In that time he would evolve from a self-taught naturalist, glaciologist, and ecologist into a best-selling author and unapologetic preservationist, America’s preeminent fang in the fight against irresponsible industry and runaway development.

  “Nothing dollarable is safe,” he would say. Alaska inspired him to battle the universal conceit that nature was here for us to use as we please.

  TRAVELING by canoe into the icy wildness of Glacier Bay in October 1879 was not madness, as the Tlingits might have thought. For John Muir, it was a joy, a revelation.

  Madness was out there, all right, but not in the temples of wild nature. Any student of natural history could see that nature was beautiful and brutal. Witness how the swallow skims the river and catches bugs on the wing, how the cougar takes down the deer, how the eagle snaps the duck. It’s a lethal, bloody affair. But none of these animals create a machine to magnify their killing. None invent an economy that can never be satiated. None create corporations that at all costs—the loss of dignity or even human life—must keep growing.

  It was a simple matter of how you saw the world, and your place in it.

  Where others found gold, John Muir found glaciers; where they saw timber, he saw trees. Where they sought profit, he sought a prophet, an expression of God’s greatest creation, nature, the wisest of all teachers, not to be chopped up and sold, but left as it was, held in deep regard. Never mind utility. Wild nature had value in and of itself, what he called “mountain nourishment.”

  Clearly, glaciers had shaped Alaska, and were shaping it still. How then did Alaska shape Muir? And how did he reshape us?

  To Muir, glaciers had character, power, and grace. They were alive and deserving of our deepest understanding and respect. In their presence, he became a Druid, of sorts, a Celtic priest. More accurately, he was the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe of his day, a holistic thinker who challenged the modern scientific revolution to find a balance between the rational, quantitative mind, and the intuitive, qualitative mind. Muir could have done this with wolves or bears, or with flowers, as Goethe had. But he did it with glaciers, cold rivers of ice that appeared static but in fact moved dynamically over the land and shaped everything around them. They would become the perfect piece of symbolism in the twenty-first century’s warming world.

  “THE ONLY THING that counts is that which can be counted,” said Galileo three hundred years before Muir. Together with René Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others, Galileo gave us our modern scientific revolution, our Age of Reason, the triumph of the rational mind. And while he and his brilliant contemporaries carried us forward, they also crushed things in our path. They separated us from nature, rather than making us participants in nature. They made us clever and powerful, but not wise.

  Muir was a revolutionary of another kind; he said there’s much more to good science—and right livelihood—than connecting data and dissecting frogs. There’s a deeper meaning than conventional analytical reason. Experiment is not enough. Good science also requires experience, a deep knowing and sense of wonder that comes from being out there, barefoot in the meadow, alone on the ice, naked in the storm. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” Muir would write, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

  Galileo and Descartes had rational knowledge acquired from books and experimentation; Muir had
intuitive wisdom acquired from the smallest flower and the largest glacier. He didn’t merely learn about the natural world, he learned from it and in it. He went out there and slowed down and listened until his intuitive mind could dance with his rational mind. By doing so, he could “feel” the qualities of things around him. This enabled him to widen his circle of compassion. And with this wisdom and compassion, with this deep sense of the sacred, he would begin to write about the natural world. While the rest of America hypnotized itself with a thousand clever devices that consumed nature wholesale, Muir would honor Nature and campaign for its defense.

  THERE WAS NOBODY quite like him. John Muir popularized geology, especially its young subset science, glaciology. He gave America a new vision of Alaska, and a new and brighter vision of itself. He suggested a reordering of our priorities, and contributed to a new scientific revolution picked up a generation later by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, and championed today by E. O. Wilson, Carl Safina, Stephan Harding, and others. He was a gentle rebel, a talkative hermit, an enthusiastic wanderer, a distant son of the Scottish Enlightenment, inspired by ice.

  YOU CANNOT STARE into the eyes of a glacier. It’s not a wolf. But you can stare into its face, its tidewater terminus, a stunning, imposing ice wall rising from the sea, two hundred feet high, deeply weathered, a threshold where the glacier ends and everything else begins, where blue seracs collapse into the ocean and primal thunder booms down rock-ribbed inlets. In rare cases the glaciers might advance. Most often, though, in today’s changing world, they retreat; they shrink back and die. Sometimes they hold steady, as a few do in Glacier Bay. John Muir found inspiration in these blue ice faces, as if the glaciers, like wise elders, had stories to tell and warnings to give.