John Muir. Frederick Turner
wing-dipping routes above the lake, how it would suddenly swoop, splash, and disappear beneath the surface and then emerge hundreds of yards farther on, beating the water from its feathers in flashing beads. Once he shot and wounded one of these magnificent creatures and brought it into the house, where he was able to study its anatomy at close range.
After the loons’ appearance came the bluebirds, bright and tuneful harbingers that told the sure advance of the new season on the thawing land, then the song sparrows, thrushes—those grand singers—the bobolinks, and the handsome red-winged blackbirds. It was a memorable day to Muir when he beheld for the first time the fabulous passenger pigeons of which he had read in Dunbar days. They arrived on a spring day just after the snow had melted, thousands and thousands of them, sweeping the woods clean of acorns in a few minutes. Despite the fact that, as Muir said, every “shotgun was aimed at them and everybody feasted on pigeon pies,” for years they kept coming, spring and summer, and no one could have foretold that this apparently inexhaustible species would be hunted to extinction by the turn of the century.
Far less spectacular but equally awesome in their grace and clearly intelligent behavior were the flocks of Canada geese that broke their northward journeys to alight warily in the Muir wheat fields. After feeding on the young leaves they would mount again into the softening skies and assemble into harrow-shaped formations, leaving the plowboy behind in the fields gazing after them and musing on the mysteries of animal ways, perhaps already beginning to feel that “blind instinct” was not an adequate explanation of the behavior of such wonderful creatures as these.
Through the gradually lengthening days he worked on, kept company by birds busy with nest building and babies, the peepers beginning again to sing in the rushy margins of the lake, and the smaller creatures of the field who had come out into the warming sun—like the gophers who ate so much of the seed corn before it could sprout and whom Muir and his brothers were commanded to kill.
Spring ripened into summer and with it came the hardest labor as the heat intensified. The Muirs had settled far enough south in the state to experience corn-belt summers: hot, hazy days of high humidity punctuated by explosive thundershowers that cooled the air only momentarily before the sun rolled out again from behind the clouds to shine down fiercely on the wet lands. Such days began for them at dawn when gauzy mists hung low over the waiting fields, lake, and woodlands. Muir sharpened tools, fed the stock, chopped stove wood, and struggled up the slope from the spring under the slopping water buckets. Then there was breakfast, and then the fields. In the early years before Daniel Muir bought cultivators, all the cleared land had to be hoed, and the business of corn hoeing was a deadly, heavy one. Daniel Muir insisted that the hoes be kept busy at a machinelike, unvarying pace, that there be no talking or loitering when the children were in the field. Sickness was not allowed. Only once could Muir recall that he had been excused for illness, when he had a case of pneumonia from which he almost died. On another occasion, he had a severe case of the mumps but had to bear a hand anyway, though he often staggered and fell among the wheat sheaves.
In the deeps of the fields the sun streamed down on the boy and his brothers and sisters, the only shade being a solitary shagbark hickory or oak—underneath which they were forbidden to pause—and the occasional big and bossy Wisconsin clouds that drifted lazily across. Grasshoppers droned a steady, reedy accompaniment to the chink-chinking of the hoes. The friable soil was so hot the children scratched for cooler holds with their bare toes. When the breeze rustled the broad leaves of the corn, a heavy, milky smell engulfed the young toilers and seemed to intensify the heat.
If there was still enough light left after the evening chores, Muir and his brothers might have the luxury of fishing in the plank boat their father had made for them. Bullfrogs bellowed from the reeds, mosquitoes sang in their ears, and the placid lake was delicately laced with the zigzagged lines of the water bugs. The boys trailed their blistered, swollen feet in the darkening waters and trolled for pickerel and sunfish, black bass and perch.
Harvest was the hardest part of this hardest season. Wheat shatters quickly on the stalk, and it was watched anxiously as it ripened toward fullness, first the roots turning gold, then the necks, and at last the matured heads. Now there was a furious haste to cut and bind and store it, so Muir and the others were called from their beds at four in the morning and were in the fields at first light. All the long forenoon they relentlessly cut and bound, the oldest boy bent in cruel posture above the crooked snath, pulling the blade toward him through the bright stalks while the August sun crawled to the heaven of the noon dinner, perhaps announced to anxious eyes by the flutter of an apron from an upper window. Coming in to dinner, they would greedily seize upon the watermelons and muskmelons left cooling in the spring since morning. The sweet and juicy meats of these, Muir said, “were a glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm boys can ever know.”
At such times they worked the fields until dusk and sometimes even after and went to bed utterly drained. “In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights and dog-mornings,” Muir recalled, “when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing-suits of swimmers, and remained so all the long, sweltering days” that were loaded with as much as seventeen hours of heavy labor.
Sunday afternoons were the only times they could call their own. After the Bible lessons, the Sunday school lessons, and the church services through which they struggled to stay awake, they could fish or swim in the lake or wander the nearby countryside in company with neighboring farm kids. In the early summer they might go strawberry picking or go after the dewberries or huckleberries whose hearts, as Muir remembered them, were colored like little sunsets. They might roam as far as the wild-rice marshes on the Fox to get a shot at the fat mallards that feasted there in flocks of thousands. They might climb Observatory Hill, the highest point around, and gaze off at the blue Baraboo Hills to the west; or climb the loose, glacial slopes of Wolf Hill, up through the oaks and red cedars to the high fields cleared long ago by the Indians, inhabited now only by crows and red-tailed hawks whose sailing cries seemed to add distance and dimension to the increasingly cultivated landscape that unrolled beneath them.
But best of all was the lake on the homestead. Ringed around with marsh grass and jeweled with white water lilies, its brown waters were so clear you could see bottom even at considerable depths, the sun rays filtering down through it in long, angled shafts. They drifted over it in their plank boat, watching the skittering of the water bugs, feeling the sun hot on their backs and luxuriating in the sense that they could cool off at any moment by simply dropping over the side. They fished lazily and learned to swim in a southern cove bordered with purple swamp thistle, cattail rushes, and tamaracks. Wading in here, their feet sank quickly and softly into the lime ooze. Then they pushed off, feeling the reeds trail the lengths of their bodies, tickling at last their toes until they were free of them and into deeper water.
When the wheat had been harvested and the hay as well, the pace of work slackened a bit and the weather too began to mellow toward fall as if in sympathy. John Muir now had to plow for winter wheat, chop wood, and shuck Indian corn. There was also the drudgery of stump grubbing, a task that fell to him as the eldest boy. Some days he spent more on his knees than on his feet, bent in the furrows over the tough old oak and hickory stumps, digging and chopping at the huge, gnarled roots. Splitting rails for fencing was another of his special chores, his father having tried it briefly and failed. Muir said he used to cut and split as many as a hundred logs a day of knotty oak, “swinging the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to night.” Meanwhile, the colors came out in the woods, pumpkins turned bright against the slow fading of the grasses, and asters, goldenrod, sunflowers, and daisies put forth their special glows. In the shady portions of the meadows, ferns—to which Muir was especially sensitive all his life—unfurled their lacy banners.
Sometimes, too, more than these autumnal flowers glowed on the land, for in the early years of the Muirs’ settlement great grass fires were a common feature of this season, as predictable as the turning of the leaves and the flowering of the late plants: huge expanses of prairie were swept up and the night skies reddened like an angry sunset. An English immigrant to Wisconsin in 1847 wrote excitedly back to the Old World about the sight of these prairie fires, which he described as burning “day and night for months together.” As more and more of the country came under cultivation,