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Show 197. sacred meat of squirrel, grouse, wild sheep, and bear. By partaking of these wild medicines, he hoped to grow wilder, finally "descending from this divine wilderness like a John the Baptist," a voice from the wilderness imploring all civilized people to "Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand!" He had learned from "squirrel Douglas, the master-spirit of the tree-top," that it was possible to live truly in Nature, and had observed that the electric energy of the squirrel came from constantly rubbing against the trees in his own true home. Muir was imbued with bog juices and heather, and so he felt at home in "endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better." No wonder he was loath to descend from the mountain: "You say, 'When are you coming down?' Ask the Lord - Lord Sequoia." Here was a wild and true voice which revealed the most radical, that is to say the most essential and deeply rooted Muir, pantheistic, ecstatic, and possessed by the cosmic vision. It was the Muir that America needed to hear. Indeed, his letter was written to civilization, not simply to Jeanne Carr. "Behold," said Christ in The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, "I come quickly." "Behold! Behold! seems all I can say," insisted Muir. John of the mountains might become a baptist, but not yet. Muir's allusion to his kinship with the other Johns reflected the ambivalence about his own role in a cosmic drama. Would he, like John the Baptist, "descend from this divine wilderness" and preach the gospel; or would he, like the John of Revelations, write from exile? For the time, |