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Show 1. CHAPTER I: THE MACHINE AND THE FLOWER "I wish I knew where I was going," he wrote to his close friend, Jeanne Carr, "Doomed to be 'carried of the spirit into the wilderness,' I suppose." John Muir was twenty-nine years old in the early fall of 1867 when he left Indianapolis on the journey which was to bring him to California. This was no vacation. He was departing from old friends, and from an old life, on his way towards he knew not what. He would learn by going where he had to go, and as he departed, he was not certain that he would ever return. Something strange had happened to the eldest brother in the Muir family. After he left the farm seven years earlier in September of I860, his brother David wrote to him, "The folks think it funny that you never date your letters nor write your name at the end." As if he had become a voice with neither name nor time. And now, in September of 1867, he wrote to his |