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Show 228. of a young tree, rocking and swirling in wild ecstasy, his outlook became that of the branch, and he finally began to participate in the cosmic as his "eye roved over the piney hills and dales as over fields of waving grain." A grown man climbing into the branches and spending a day aloft "like a bobolink on a reed?" Child's play, of course. He closed his eyes, absorbed the sounds, until he could hear the different trees talking in their own voices. He smelled the spicy tonic of the wind, steeped with trees. He enjoyed himself thoroughly. Do we really need to be reminded? I go out of my office and go into the wind. I am in the midst of the trees of our campus. The sounds! The smells! They flow around and through me. It is all right here. What shall I do? Return to my office, under my roof, and write about Muir who tells me to experience this wind, or shall I climb a noble blue spruce which advertises so well the winds of Utah? I know the answer, yet I return to my office. Muir was a year older than I am when he climbed his tree. Apparently we need to be reminded. So Yosemite National Park has planted a series of signs along the asphalt trail which leads from Happy Isles to Vernal Falls, telling the walker to stop, look, listen, smell. That is how estranged we are. On a spring day, how many hikers turn back on the Mist Trail above because windblown spray from the falls will bathe them? Perhaps the wonder is, how many hikers do not |