The Tao of Travel

He invokes Burton in this essay, saying, "Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveler Burton says of it, 'Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded ... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.'"

But Thoreau, who avoided traveling on ocean, in desert, or through wilderness, belittled foreign travel, persuasively insisting it was not necessary to the serious walker. It is this persuasiveness—the triumph of his prose style—that made him far more influential than men and women who lived heroic lives of travel. Never mind counting the cats in Zanzibar, Thoreau says: "There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you."

John Muir: "Fond of Everything That Was Wild"

LATE IN HIS life, when he was seventy-five and had only a year more to live, John Muir, one of the greatest of walkers, wrote The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), beginning it with this sentence: "When I was a boy in Scotland I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures."

The large family (Muir was one of eight children) emigrated from Scotland to America, settling first in a shack, then on a farm in Wisconsin. Muir's father, Daniel, was a severe disciplinarian: "The old Scotch fashion of whipping for every act of disobedience or of simple playful forgetfulness was still kept up in the wilderness, and of course many of those whippings fell upon me."

A combination of his strict religious upbringing and a love for nature seems to have driven Muir from home and given him a mystical love for the natural world and a way of understanding wilderness. He lost his faith in organized religion but never failed to see something spiritual in nature.

A tinkerer and an inventor, he dreamed of exploring the Amazon jungles, like Alexander von Humboldt, one of his heroes. But apart from a short spell in Cuba he remained in the United States and became an early advocate for the preservation of wilderness areas, a cofounder of the Sierra Club, and the moving force behind the creation of America's national parks.

He was by nature a wanderer, and even as a fairly young man he was as bearded and bright-eyed as an Old Testament prophet. In 1867, at the age of twenty-nine, restless after a series of setbacks, he decided to walk from Indianapolis to Florida. His diary from this journey was published after his death as A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.

"My plan," he wrote, "was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, least-trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest."

The forests of this great walk are lovely, but many of the people are distinctly menacing, for in the aftermath of the Civil War (unconscripted, Muir spent most of the war years sauntering in Canada), the South was in a state of derangement. He meets robbers, though he carries nothing worth stealing; he is confronted by "guerrillas" on horseback, ten of them at one point; and he encounters desperate former slaves. He stumbles upon a cotton plantation, three years after the war ended, still being run by a man known as "massa" whose field hands are "large bands of slaves."

What Muir had intended as a long walk through America was marked by hunger, danger, and uncertainty. Two years later he was in San Francisco, unhappy as always among crowds of people and eager to leave the city. He asks for the nearest way out.

"But where do you want to go?" a stranger responds.

"To any place that is wild," Muir says.

Directed to the Oakland ferry, he sets off for the wilderness on the first of April 1868, a walk that would change his life. He described his trek as slow, enchanted, easterly, toward the Yosemite Valley.

Muir was eloquent in his descriptions of landscape. He was also, like many other nature writers, something of a misanthrope, a trait noted in Driving Home by Jonathan Raban, who is a persuasive dissident on the subject of Muir's style. (Raban deconstructs Muir's sublime language as misleading, even subversive, the origin of today's "cult of 'pristine' wilderness.") Muir's charismatic personality aided his evangelism in the cause that wilderness must be preserved: Teddy Roosevelt became an important supporter after going on a journey with him. But it was Muir's prose, perhaps overegged, and his evocations of the Sierra that made his case and gave us the national parks as well as his shelf of distinguished books.