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Show 75. on his intercourse with "stupid town stairs and dead pavements." But now that the "town fog had been shaken from both head and feet," he was prepared to enter Nature's realm on her own terms: "I determined to guide my humbled body over the most nerve-trying places I could find; for I was now awake. . . . " Once Nature had disencumbered him of superfluous paraphernalia, he could rescue his fallen body and become whole. So the essay became more explicitly about "getting into shape," and dramatized Muir's successive movement through states of fitness and states of mind. He was "determined to take earnest exercise the next day," and was free to confront his true self. In his first bivouac he reacquainted himself with the rock. No plushy boughs did my ill-behaved bones enjoy that night, nor did my bumped head get a spicy cedar plume pillow mixed with flowers. I slept on a naked boulder, and when I awoke all my nervous trembling was gone. On the second day he was prepared to find flowers where others might only find terror, and he even parodied the gothic style of landscape description. Here was beauty, "Ay; even here in this darksome gorge, 'frightened and tormented' with raging torrents and choking avalanches of snow." His own clumsiness was due to his lack of fitness, just as a gothic perspective was a result of fear. The canyon itself provided more than enough of "the one big word of love that we call the world," and provided more than Muir had a right to expect, considering the condition in which he approached it. |