OCR Text |
Show 84 was learning how to reinhabit his body, reinhabit his soul and dwell in the mountains. Alone, he confronted the same wilderness which the giants of western exploration amassed expeditionary teams to evaluate. He was in the American West of Powell, King, Hayden, Whitney. And yet he was proceeding by totally different methods from the ones they were using. They brought the city into the wilderness: that was what an expedition had always been. He followed his wild body into the wilderness: that was what his lawless wanderings were. Just as the explorer differed from the discoverer in terms of his mission, so Muir differed from the explorers. Discoveries might be accidental, exploration might be "programmed" by some older center of culture, but Muir's way allowed him to reevaluate his mission constantly. The questions one asks largely determine the kinds of answers one can hope to receive, and Muir was asking more personal, and more basic philosophical questions than the government surveys. Muir was a majority of one and was responsible to his own conscience. He had no direct ties with Sacramento or with Washington. He was not even obligated to follow the doctrine of Emerson. Nature provided his direction, and enforced his integrity. That was how he came to take a place in the American imagination, along with the other explorers of the period. Though his search was more personal at first, it would come to address the same issues, "the proper nature, purpose, and future direction of western development." Indeed, none of these issues have been satisfactorily resolved, even as I write, in 1981. |