John Muir. Frederick Turner

      In the space of twelve years Anne Muir bore her husband seven children. Margaret came first and then Sarah in 1836; two years later John was born on April 21, and he would be followed by brothers David (1840) and Daniel Jr. (1843), and by twin sisters, Mary and Annie (1846). An eighth child, Joanna, would be born in America. Amazingly, considering the region’s infant-mortality rates, all the children lived and were healthy in their young years.

      At the time of John Muir’s birth the family still lived in the house to which Daniel Muir had moved following the death of his first wife. In January 1842, however, Daniel Muir, described in the deed as a “corn dealer,” bought the house next door. To the seller, Dr. Charles Wightman, he paid cash, suggesting either that he had been doing well in business or that he had been left a substantial sum by his first wife, or both. Immediately after obtaining the house and property, Daniel Muir made over the deed to Anne Muir “for the love, favor and affection he has and bears [her]. …”

      John Muir’s childhood home in Dunbar was separated from the house in which he had been born by a narrow alley. Tall and broad, the new house had three stories topped by a slate roof out of which protruded three dormer windows, the fronts of which looked out on the high street, the rears looking beyond chimneys and gables to the country westward. Daniel Muir conducted business on the street-level floor while the family rooms were on the second. The older boys, John and David, lived in one of the third-floor rooms. In back was a long narrow garden, every inch of it in use. Flowers were banked the length of its high gray walls, and three elm trees were homes for robins. At the rear were several outbuildings and a combination laundry and stable in which a neighborhood widow had life-rent rights. Behind the Muirs’ property ran a street used by deliverymen and bordered by the sheds and warehouses of the shops on the high street; at the far end was an abattoir, and from their garden playyard the Muir children could hear the mortal screams of the doomed pigs.

      Among the thousands of scraps of paper John Muir left, the littered accumulation of years of random writings and scribbled notations, was this: “My first conscious memory is the singing of ballads, and I doubt not they will be ringing in my ears when I am dying.” It is a rich and suggestive fragment and may indicate, among other things, that in John Muir’s early childhood years his father had not yet become so soured as to put utterly away his fiddle and his memories of those songs of his high moorland youth.

      Whoever the singer(s) John Muir heard, he could have had no more direct introduction to his native culture and history than these stark, deceptively simple tunes, so wild you can almost smell moor and mountain and sea in them or glimpse the lonely vistas that went into their making. The narratives the tunes carry are wilder yet, and in them the somber Scots genius can be overheard brooding on the long dark tale that is the national history and that formed the tough national character so often remarked on—and too often misunderstood in caricature. Bright as Burns can be or Scott or James Hogg, still that brightness gains from its contrast with the hue and tone of Scots history, as these authors knew so well: Scott’s introduction to his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, for instance, is a skillful reduction of those gore-spattered chronicles that lie behind the minstrelsy he took such joy in collecting.

      The themes of the ballads Muir heard and forever after carried in his head are variations on violence: murder, incest, fratricide, revenge, suicide. In “The Douglas Tragedy” the bride’s father, seven brothers, and groom are all slain in combat. In “The Bonny Hind” accidental incest leads to suicide. “Mary Hamilton” tells of infanticide, “Lady Maisry” of fratricide. In “Young Hunting” a woman kills the king’s son after she has gotten him drunk and seduced him; she herself is then burned at the stake: “An it took on her fair body/ She burnt like hoky-gren” (green wood). In “Gill Morice” a husband murders his wife’s presumed lover and presents her with the head for a football only to learn that this was no lover but the lady’s son.

      There are also the border ballads celebrating the centuries of raiding and ambushing along the English-Scots border so close to Muir’s boyhood home. The heroes of these—Johnie Cock, Johnie Armstrong, Hobie Noble—are all men who live and die by the sword.

      And of course the sea: surrounded on three sides by it, the Scots had sea in their history, their blood, their imagination. The Atlantic, the Irish Sea, the North Sea—none are smiling waters, and the North Sea merges itself at last into the dark waters of the Arctic Ocean. So in much of the balladry Muir would have heard the sea is a vengeful tyrant, taking, holding, disposing. In “James Harris,” for example, the shade of the dead lover returns from its watery grave to carry off the young girl to her destruction: only when they are well launched on the waves does she realize that the shade is really the Devil himself and those far shores to which they are hurrying the shores of Hell. The sea washes all through such wonderful ballads as “Kemp Owyne” and “The Lass of Roch Royal” and through what is arguably the greatest of all Scots ballads, “Sir Patrick Spens,” which ends on the swell of tragedy:

Have owre, have owre* to Aberdour,

      It’s fiftie fadom deip,

      And thair lies guid Sir Patrick Spence,

      Wi’ the Scots lords at his feit.

      Such airs and the old but ever-current news they brought were part of the natural setting of Dunbar, exposed outpost on the North Sea with the Firth of Forth stretching to the northwest. The town seemed to drop directly off into the sea, and even in the most westward-lying sections you could smell it, salty in the nose, heavy with life and death. Running any of Dunbar’s west-to-east streets would have brought Johnnie Muir and his friends quickly to land’s end, where the waters gnawed at the town, its wharves and harbor walls. Here was the heart of Dunbar: the harbor with its old red stone walls whitened by the dung of the skimming gulls and cormorants and gannets whose cries punctuated the sea round of the day and rose to a shattering din at day’s end when the catch was brought in.

      For centuries men had lowered boats here and women had waited for them to come in with holds full of herring, though in Muir’s time the herring had mysteriously disappeared and now the men went after whitefish, lobster, and crab. Here were the trim smacks riding at anchor or snubbed up to the dock, their decks salt-bleached, their bows, long oars, and masts battered. Dunbar children would quickly and easily have become familiar with the apparent jumble of the ropes, nets, and crates, able to identify their proper uses and the owners of the smacks and skiffs that were canted or laid hull-up on the shelly strand.

      Amid all this were the weathered men, their eyes and faces screwed into an occupational squint against the North Sea winds and sprays, working at the ropes and sails with their rough, blunt hands, glancing up occasionally at the loitering boys, many of whom in their time might be expected to follow the sea. Every boy, Muir recalled of those harborside days, “owned some sort of craft whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite pains—sloops, schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships with their sails and string ropes properly adjusted and named for us by some old sailor.”

      Evening called the children home, away from the excitement of the harbor and shore, as it called the boats home, too, the catch to be unloaded, shiny, smooth-bodied, lying in waiting heaps; and the harbor now a bobbing forest of masts above which the headlands rose clear and naked.

      In Dunbar Johnnie Muir would have been certain to pick up his full complement of sea lore from the talk of the harbor, from those of his friends whose fathers followed the sea, as well as from the ballads. Hearing “Sir Patrick Spens,” for instance, a Scots boy on the North Sea would know that it was an ill omen for one of Sir Patrick’s sailors to have seen the new moon with the old moon in its arms. Not surprisingly, given the climate, much of that lore dealt with such ill omens. Sailors said that a fleecy, mackerel-backed cloud with a capful of wind in it presaged a coming storm. So did gulls flying inland or a halo around the sun. Creaking furniture or a scratching cat were signs of bad weather on the way. It was bad luck to be wished well on your way down to your boat. The boys were especially mindful of the shellycoats, supernatural creatures said to haunt coastal pools and believed by Muir and his friends to devour unwary beachcombing boys. They never