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Show 96 came to call his "glacial eye." MUIR'S GLACIAL EYE, THE MANY BAPTISMS, AND THE MEANING OF WILDERNESS Indian summer was the season of this baptism in the glacial womb. And Indian summer has always been a special time in the Sierra. The tourists had gone back to civilization, and Nature was left to her own life. The Sierra seemed to hang suspended in time and space, between life and death. Muir noticed that in the flat light of the season, "the sun melts all the roughness from the rockiest landscapes." Indian summer seemed a time of eternal stasis, when the seasons were stilled. In the mind of a god, all natural history was less than a moment. To the glacial eye born in this still moment, the seasons always recalled the ages. Following them, one followed the path of natural history as it spiraled through creation. First of all, this was true of one season and another: When after the melting of the winter snow, we walk the dry channel of a stream that we love, its beds of pebbles, dams of boulders, its pool-basins and pot holes and cascade inclines, suggest all its familiar forms and voices, as if it were present in the full gush of spring. And in the same way the wanderer who walked the glacial pathways could hear the sound of moving ice. The seasons recalled the ages. in the spring, Tuolumne's meadows returned to their |