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Show 97, previous lives as lakes. And from Fairview Dome one seemed to look down on the end of a long glacial winter each June. But in deep fall, one wandered out onto the blue glacial ice of alpine amphitheaters. The Sierra seemed a sterner place, more of an alien world. One could hear the lonely sound of rocks falling in what Muir called the "cold bloodless solitudes." One journeyed into the deep past. So to Muir, every season had its reminiscent age, and the Sierra contained the zodiac of its own history. Each rock, each landmark, was burnished to its heart with the eternal history of the sun. A man entered his origins there, even his unrecorded glacial history. Muir felt the enchantment of these mountains, and imagined Indians walking through their silent depths for thousands of years, "mountain flowers stuck in their black hair and their wild animal eyes sparkling bright as the lakes." And so he suspected that his glacial eye also absorbed the light of the Sierra. In these mountain solitudes, in places where he thought men would never settle, he found the answers to questions essential to America's future. He knew what it meant to be reborn in the wilderness. This had never been considered by men who saw only the material uses of the wilderness; because they could not harness the spirit of Nature or run their trains on glacial power, they would never ask where their blessings came from. Was it true that understanding his place in the universe, a man might be made whole? Muir thought so, but he also found this enterprise easier in theory than in practice. |