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Show Vll. at the outside of the heels. It was simply not possible for his spirit to come through in this context. I realized that Muir's spirit had been lost too. Just as it couldn't be imported to the cities, it couldn't be displayed indoors. Late in his life, Muir had told an interviewer, "You say that what I write may bring this beauty to the hearts of those who do not go out to see it. They have no right to it." This was not the only problem. The people who created the exhibits had not decided what they had to say about Muir or Tuolumne Meadows. I talked to Michael about this. We agreed that a Visitor's Center ought to teach people how to see, and ought further to explain what Muir had called "the right manners of the wilderness." It ought to explain what the needle miners were doing, what all of Nature was doing out there, he thought. I agreed and added that the focus could have been on a guide to vision, perhaps to Muir's vision, but in any case a means to turn the tourist into a visitor and a visitor into someone capable of dwelling in the meadows. A Visitor's Center ought, in the words of one of my friends, to allow humans who had been alienated from Nature to re-inhabit the earth. Wasn't that the purpose of National Parks? , Wasn't that what Muir had thought? Well, I wondered if that was what I had to say about Muir. Wasn't that, finally, his most important contribution? Hadn't he articulated for America just how important it was for men to live in and through a loving relationship to Nature? Somehow that scarcely seemed to be the theme of the Visitor's |
