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Show 78 Muir was consciously dramatizing his departure from Tyndall's method of study. Certainly Muir could not separate his exploration of self from his exploration of the mountains. They were simultaneous and intermingled. His narratives would demonstrate why a man had to inhabit his own body and follow it into the wilderness. "[We] live with our heels as well as head, and most of our pleasure comes in that way," he once wrote. THE EXPLORER SIMPLIFIES HIS TOOLS Probably Muir was not responsible for the title, "A Geologist's Winter Walk." But it was an apt name for his essay because of its fine sense of understatement and because it invited comparison with Thoreau's "A Winter Walk," wherein young Henry began to explore his own higher latitudes. Thoreau could imagine that he was a polar explorer as he skated along the frozen river behind Concord. So too, Muir had imagined, as he ran through the canyons of Yosemite, that he dwelled in the glacial age of the Sierra. Though the Transcendental tradition flowed from Emerson to Thoreau and Muir, neither of the younger men were strict followers of Emerson. If the self they began to discover was suggested in Emerson's essays, both men found in practice that they had to entrust themselves to Nature far more than Emerson did. The old sage had argued that Nature was the first influence upon the mind of Man, but for Muir, Nature became the alpha and omega of life. And so he parted with his teacher when he realized that he |