John Muir. Frederick Turner
his bedroom that John must go to bed along with the others, that he was tired of having to issue a separate order to John every night. If you must read, he added, get up early in the morning to do so. Here again the challenge, and Muir went upstairs into the cold dark, wondering how he could possibly meet it, how he might shake himself awake well before he and the other sleepers heard that stentorian voice from beneath the stairs summoning them to another day.
In the blackness of the bedroom Muir awakened hours later, how many he did not know, and, as he recalled it, “rushed downstairs, scarce feeling my chilblains, enormously eager to see how much time I had won. …” Holding his candle to the little kitchen clock, Muir read the incredible news its face gave back in the flickering light: it was only one o’clock. He had gained five hours on farm life. “I can hardly think,” he was to say, “of any other event in my life, any discovery I ever made that gave birth to joy so transportingly glorious as the possession of those five frosty hours.”
It was too cold in the night-and-winter-bound house for Muir to resume his reading, and he knew well enough that his father would begrudge him a fire, reasoning as the elder man would, that Muir would have had to take the time to chop the wood for it that he should have put in otherwise. No, it would all have to be done on his own time, every bit of it. So Muir went down into the mealy gloom of the cellar where, amid the potatoes and the cast-off, rusting tools, he set to work on an invention he had begun sometime previously: a self-setting sawmill. By the thin and wavering light of the candle he worked joyously through the remaining hours of night, hardly conscious of the cold or the damp or of the cramped and jumbled conditions of his shop. Here in this time and place and under the very floorboards of the paternal bedroom, he was again, if fleetingly, the arbiter of his own existence. Not merely a farm laborer, he was an inventor, at work on a device that in the very working at it would enhance his life. So he kept at it through the bleak winter mornings, rising with the incredible regularity that is the sure sign of a desperate determination to descend into the cellar and with his improvised tools fashion his inventions into realities.
At Fountain Lake, where the nocturnal work was first begun, and then at Hickory Hill, the sound of that subterranean hammering and the patient rasp of the homemade saw told Daniel Muir that his challenge had been accepted.
The self-setting sawmill was, to be sure, only a small-scale model, hardly of practical use. And in any case, it was not a device that would benefit Muir in the exercise of his daily tasks. But that was not the real goal, anyhow. The sawmill served the same purpose as his mathematical studies and his reading in elevating him above the circumstances of his life. Damming a small brook, he positioned his device and saw it work.
To Muir the act of arising so early and for such a purpose was almost equal in significance to the work he would then undertake, for it was a triumph of the will over the fiesh, of himself—John Muir—over his circumstances. With that pride that often comes from such lonely efforts and that in him could occasionally come close to braggadocio, Muir looked back years later on this act of sustained heroism: “Many try to make up time by wringing slumber out of their pores. Not so when I was a boy, springing out of bed at one o’clock in the morning, wide-awake, without the shadow of a yawn, no sleep left in a single fiber of me, burning and bright as a tiger springing on its prey.” Eventually he developed an ingenious sort of clock which would (had he needed it) assist him in his risings. At its appointed hour the contraption would cant the bedstead forward and noisily dump the sleeper onto the floor. Doubtless here, as with many other of his inventions, Muir was simply amused by the idea of the thing, its practical value being a secondary consideration.
Once fairly started on this course of inventing various wooden devises, Muir felt himself powerless to stop, and at an ever-increasing rate he fashioned waterwheels, door locks, latches, hygrometers, pyrometers, a barometer, an automatic horse feeder, and a huge thermometer with a scale of such amplitude it could easily be read from the barn where it rested to where Muir plowed in the fields below the house. He also devised a kind of guillotine for decapitating the farm’s ravenous gophers, though, as he wrote his brother David in 1870, he was satisfied to remember this invention as his least successful.
Now his mind ran on clocks. He had taught himself the time laws of the pendulum by reading about them, and during his daily tasks he imagined how they might be applied to the construction of a clock. He began to whittle the works from pieces of hickory he carried with him as he did the mending and fencing and carpentry about the place, stealing minutes to do so whenever he was out of sight of the man who sat all day in the corner room poring over Scripture.
When the machine was almost completely assembled and hidden amid the tools and lumber of a spare bedroom, Maggie Muir came upon her father on his hands and knees regarding the strange thing he had accidentally discovered while looking for a tool. That evening at supper when Daniel Muir broached the subject, John had reason to fear he would be ordered to destroy his invention before he could complete it and discover whether it worked. But Daniel Muir contented himself with nothing more than another severe lecture in which he said that he wished John to follow the example of Paul, who said “that he desired to know nothing among men but Christ and Him crucified.” On this occasion, anyway, Muir prudently refrained from engaging his father in debate and soon thereafter finished his clock. Like his other inventions, it worked.
Now that his clockmaking was out in the open he went on with it in a kind of joyous fury. He made one with a pendulum bearing an inscription pleasing to Daniel Muir, “All flesh is grass”; and another so huge its two-second pendulum was fourteen feet long. Here as with his other inventions he was unwittingly manifesting larger impulses at work in the nation. The pace of American life had measurably quickened in recent decades, and the country had taken as an article of faith Ben Franklin’s maxim that time is money. On the Muir farms, it was not, but Daniel Muir was determined every minute of it should count. John Muir was determined it should be improved.
There were other reasons why Muir was preoccupied with time as the decade of the 1850s closed. His own life, he had come to feel, was passing. His recent arrival at young manhood had made him aware of his own mortality, and this was further encouraged by his reading of the Romantics, who dwelt so lovingly on this theme. Then too the juxtaposition of his time of life with the apparently endless round of farm labor made him feel that his span of years was not only short but that it was even now growing shorter—as it so tragically had for some other newcomers who like himself had entered the New World full of bright hopes but who now lay beneath the kirkyard sod, all hopes stilled. Soon it might be too late for him. Too late for exactly what he did not know; only that he knew now and perhaps had suspected for years that he was not meant for this.
Such feelings of personal crisis are a predictable psychological feature of this passage of life—which is one reason why they could be so prominent a theme in Romantic literature. And yet in Muir’s case the feelings were more than the predictable ones of a young man troubled about his destiny or the apparent lack of one. They were rooted instead in a realistic assessment of his predicament, and they were the more acutely felt since he could hardly express them to anyone, not Maggie, nor his mother, nor David. Here he was, of age, and still stuck on his father’s farm and under a regimen that threatened the very center of his being. He had, so far as he knew, no prospects for anything different, no formal education, no training, no credentials of any sort, and no contact with the outside world other than his Scots immigrant neighbors.
But he was no ordinary farmer, and he knew it. His impulses and inclinations had been different almost, so it seemed, from that very moment he had plunged himself so joyously into the new earth of Wisconsin, and he had strengthened and nurtured these impulses and inclinations through the solitary and partially defensive exertions of his late teenage years.
He passed through those years almost wholly unafflicted with what he would a few years hence call the “colt & calf” exchanges between girls and boys. While his peers and even his younger brother David were engaging in the prim and terribly earnest rituals of rustic courtship, Muir appears to have maintained an almost scornful indifference to the entire business and regarded such behavior as frivolous. Perhaps, half in daydream, he had thought of himself as a Park or Humboldt, solitary, unwived, free, moving toward great adventures unencumbered by emotional commitments. Perhaps too he understood that to