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Show 208. was a ranger at the Wawona grove of Sequoias for several seasons: Park Visitor: "Where's that dang tree you can drive through?" Ranger, looking at the visitor's twenty-five foot Winnebago: "You can drive through any of them, if you get going fast enough." It is fatiguing work, and one tends to become oppressed by the constant repetition and accumulated banality of interaction with a faceless horde. By the 1870's, Muir wasn't affectionate about the human animals he met in the mountains. But his time in Oakland, where he finished the Studies and prepared them for press, had a lasting effect on him. He did not like urban life, but gained a certain sympathy for the plight of city-bound people. He came to realize the kind of artifice he would need to influence this audience, though he still wished to keep his personal self out of his writings. He wrote in October of 1874 that he cared "only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness." In December of the same year he announced at the beginning of a newspaper article on Mount Shasta, I have seen Montgomery Street, and I know that California is in a hurry, therefore I have no intention of saying anything here concerning the building of this grand fire mountain, nor of the sublime circumference of landscape of which it is the center. He was willing to put aside his interest in geological history, in order to accomplish his final goal, to bring men to love Nature. This is the beginning of artifice; it represents a |