Story of My Boyhood and Youth
1913, John Muir
We associate John Muir with Yoesmite and the West, but this is the story of his growing up in Wisconsin. (Between Muir, Leopold, and even Little House in the Big Woods, I can’t help but feel like Michigan is getting short-changed while our neighbors to the west are so well-chronicled. I guess I need to spend some more time with Hemingway’s northern Michigan stories. But really, what’s good early Michigan literature?)
Anyway, on to content. Parts of this story make you wonder to what extent Muir is mythologizing himself, and/or if some people just live bigger than the rest of us. Muir’s waking at 1:00 each morning (I’m reminded of recent research on short sleepers) to tinker with inventions and efforts at stealing time from farmwork to read borrowed books read like something very like an Abe Lincoln biography. I keep feeling like there are also resonances with Wordsworth’s Prelude, but I’ve not managed to make that idea textually specific.
Add to my earlier observation on domestic animals: birds. As wild as the country Muir’s family settled was, 100 miles from a rail line, crossed by Indians (whose loss of land Muir seems to sympathize with) and marked by Indian mounds… he spends a good deal of time being interested in birds. How striking to find John Muir to be someone who loves nature because he had a pony and a good dog and loved to watch birds…
Recent woodcut illustration of a young John Muir by Michael McCurdy for Story of My Boyhood and Youth.
