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Show 344. the fish's habitat which resulted from mining, but was more concrete when he referred to the poisoning of fish by "those strangely complicated filths for which our civilization is peculiar." One did not make direct reference to sewage when speaking to the readers of a middle class newspaper in San Francisco. Certainly a good part of Muir's disgust with city life came from the changes he observed in himself during that year. So LeConte had prophesied about him, "I think he would pine away in a city or in conventional life of any kind." However, the underlying assumption in Muir's journal and his articles for the Bulletin was that all men were immersed in invisible poison when in the cities, and were deep in those poisoned pits. Only those who stood above in the clean and healthy air had the sense to pull the dying ones out. He compared city life to his own near disaster in "choke-gas" while digging a well for his father. The comparison worked nicely. Urban people were digging their own graves, but didn't know it. Muir had undergone a significant change in his attitude toward the city dweller as prospective tourist. Such a person, as Muir saw him, was an innocent, trapped by an environment beyond his own control. Only a year before, Muir claimed to be tempted to "adopt the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity." Now he thought that even if he could not send them to his own radical baptism on Ritter or Shasta, men would awaken to Nature, if only given a moderate chance. Of all the overworked and defrauded toilers of California |
