OCR Text |
Show 204. Yosemite, then he held such a person in low regard, as he wrote to Jeanne Carr in May of 1870. For him, the "human stuff" which was "poured into the Valley" was only a "harmless scum" which collected in eddies at saloons and hotels. He was disgusted with its "blank fleshly apathy:" They climb sprawlingly to their saddles like overgrown frogs pulling themselves up a stream bank through the bent sedges, ride up the Valley with about as much emotion as the horses they ride upon - are comfortable when they have "done it all" and long for, the safety and flatness of their proper homes. This grim view of the American public was not likely to be useful to an aspiring writer. And it was buttressed by a kind of wilderness elitism which assumed that the tourist would remain at the bottom of the Valley. It is echoed, for instance, in the preface by David Brower, for the Sierra Club's Climber's Guide to Yosemite Valley. Brower's attitude is as tangled and ambivalent as Muir's, since on the one hand he does not want to "overadvertize how satisfying the cliffs can be" but on the other hand he thinks it unlikely that "any mere book could lure excessive numbers from the throttle and cushion." This is a troublesome rhetorical stance, since the writer of the guide invites the public to come and enjoy the wilderness, while undercutting his invitation. On a purely personal level, Muir did not wish to see more people running around in his wilderness. When he was bothered by the congestion, he simply escaped, as he wrote two months |