OCR Text |
Show 165 liberated Tenaya Canyon, "exposing broad areas of rolling rock waves and glossy pavements on whose channelless surface water ran everywhere wild and free." This kind of glacial biography was necessary if one were to understand the legacy of a glacier. Muir described the Hoffman Glacier in Agassizean terms, as it crept back into the shelter of its fountain shadows and separated into its chief tributaries. It left soil, small basins, lakes, and a world of light. Thus Muir's glaciers developed the ground where life began to flourish, and he recorded their lives as a part of the dynamic history of the Sierra. However, there was another question which troubled him, especially in the early seventies before he wrote the Studies. To what extent could he say that the Sierra was a completed sculpture? In "Exploration in the Great Tuolumne Ca'non, " he wrote that the world, "not yet half made, becomes more beautiful every day." Later he revised that passage to say that the world "though made is still being made." He was strongly tempted to see the postglacial Sierra as a finished work of art. If it was completed, it could be read as the whole story of Creation. Nature would be a book largely written by glaciers. On the other hand, the glacial and post-glacial history of the Sierra suggested that Nature was an organic whole, a tree with roots and branches. The plan for the tree of life was inherent in the rock, which provided its roots. The glaciers brought it to light, but were succeeded by the life which flowed upward from the valleys. So there was a tension between two |