OCR Text |
Show 50. as an accountant. But it would be ten years before he could clarify what this wealth was good for. In 1868, he was only passing through. Perhaps one might think of him mining the plant gold of the Central Valley, as Thoreau had plumbed his Walden Pond. But the walls of Muir's Valley awaited him. Thoreau had to wait until winter for his pond to freeze over, but Muir was continuing his walk that April into the winter of the Sierra. Thoreau could never find the source of Walden, but Muir was rambling into the mountains, following the tenuous path which led from the rich land of the Central Valley to its source in the Sierra. Muir was going beyond the transcendental tradition, and into the flow. He continued to speak in a tentative tone of voice as he recorded his thoughts in his journals. He may have been collecting specimens and sensations, he may have been drifting in a random path, yet he knew that one day his observations would cohere. So too, when writing his geological observations for publication in 1871, and again in 1873, he began to describe the Sierra as a kind of book. Its glacial history was "blotted and storm-beaten," with chapters "stained and corroded," but still readable. And so too, when he concluded an essay about a "raid" to the Tuolumne country, he described the grand rocks as "books never yet opened" to which he would go in the future, "a library, where all kinds of rock-structure and rock-formation will be explained, and where I shall yet discover a thousand water-falls." |