Fuel 2009 Razor 1911 Crack
Tanja Freeze
"I am now writing up some notes, but when they will be ready for publication I do not know... It will be a long time before anything is arranged in book form." These words of John Muir, written in June 1912 to a friend, proved prophetic. The journals and notes to which the great naturalist and environmental figure was referring have languished, unpublished and virtually untouched, for nearly a century. Until now. Here edited and published for the first time, John Muir's travel journals from 1911-12, along with his associated correspondence, finally allow us to read in his own words the remarkable story of John Muir's last great journey.
Leaving from Brooklyn, New York, in August 1911, John Muir, at the age of seventy-three and traveling alone, embarked on an eight-month, 40,000-mile voyage to South America and Africa. The 1911-12 journals and correspondence reproduced in this volume allow us to travel with him up the great Amazon, into the jungles of southern Brazil, to snowline in the Andes, through southern and central Africa to the headwaters of the Nile, and across six oceans and seas in order to reach the rare forests he had so long wished to study. Although this epic journey has received almost no attention from the many commentators on Muir's work, Muir himself considered it among the most important of his life and the fulfillment of a decades-long dream.
John Muir's Last Journey provides a rare glimpse of a Muir whose interests as a naturalist, traveler, and conservationist extended well beyond the mountains of California. It also helps us to see John Muir as a different kind of hero, one whose endurance and intellectual curiosity carried him into far fields of adventure even as he aged, and as a private person and family man with genuine affections, ambitions, and fears, not just an iconic representative of American wilderness.
With an introduction that sets Muir's trip in the context of his life and work, along with chapter introductions and a wealth of explanatory notes, the book adds important dimensions to our appreciation of one of America's greatest environmentalists. John Muir's Last Journey is a must reading for students and scholars of environmental history, American literature, natural history, and related fields, as well as for naturalists and armchair travelers everywhere.
To say that conditions here in the western Great Basin are extreme hardly does justice to the apocalyptic weirdness we often experience out in this remote, high desert place. Since making our home on the Ranting Hill more than a decade ago, we've seen temperatures close to 110 degrees on the top end and 20 below at the bottom, while day-night swings of 40 degrees are not uncommon. We've had high winds blow up into impenetrable sandstorms of whipping alkali dust, while other periods have been so breathless and stultifying that it seemed the earth had ceased to turn on its axis. There have been wildfires on the nearby public lands almost every year, and we have twice been subject to fire evacuation. Earthquakes have on occasion rattled books off our shelves, and smaller tremors are fairly common. A number of blizzards have snowed us in up on our hill, with one memorable series of massive snowstorms forcing us to snowshoe up to our house during the better part of an entire January. One year hordes of shieldbacked katydids (a large, sagebrush country insect often called the "Mormon cricket") invaded, blanketing these hills so thickly that their mushed guts rendered the paved roads slick as ice, even causing some major thoroughfares to be temporarily closed.
As all Westerners know, the apocalypse du jour in our region is drought, and I confess that even in these extremely arid lands, where desiccation is a condition to which we're well accustomed, this drought has been especially severe and troubling. Recently, though, we've had the opposite problem: not too little water but far too much of it, and in too little time. A series of unusual summer thunderstorms has hammered our area, fueling flash floods. You might think that a lot of rain is a good thing in a place that receives so little of it, and perhaps an ennobling metaphor like "quenching the land's thirst" might come to your mind. Once you've seen a flood in the desert, however, a different metaphor suggests itself. Imagine being so parched that dehydration is a real threat, and then being offered a sip of water from a forestry hose blasting at 450 psi; you'll get your water, but it will likely take your face off with it. Needless to say, this choice may cause you to ask yourself: "Am I really that thirsty?" As fellow High Country News writer Craig Childs puts it in his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning." According to the USGS, in American deserts, more people drown than die of dehydration, which puts the immense power of flash floods in humbling perspective.
Because this landscape does not have regular rains to help keep ditches, culverts, and drains clear, floods here tend to be heavily laden with debris, which creates blockages that exacerbate water damage. This effect is clearly visible on our rural road here in Silver Hills, where the recent flash floods uprooted sagebrush, Russian thistle, and tumble mustard, jamming them into the mouths of culverts, where they formed a mesh that captured mud, clogging the heads, impeding water flow, and causing the runoff to jump the ditch and rip across the road surface, where it sliced through the roadbed, rendering it impassable. Perhaps most surprising and hazardous, flash floods in the desert often occur beneath clear skies. Localized thunderstorms somewhere above release the water load, which gathers force as it tumbles downslope through canyons, arroyos, and washes, eventually blasting into areas where no rain may have fallen.
I had a memorable experience of this kind of flood twenty years ago while backpacking in the Escalante Canyons of southern Utah. If you've never seen this magnificent country, it is perhaps best imagined as an immense labyrinth of fissures carved into the exposed face of a vast tableland of mesas and plateaus. For the hiker, navigating these canyons means meandering through a maze of narrow slots, beneath sheer walls of Navajo sandstone painted with carbonate patina and streaked with desert varnish. The narrowness and depth of these sinuous canyons creates their undulating beauty, but also ensures that those of us walking within them have little idea what might be going on beyond the slice of sky we're able to see between the canyon walls.
On the day I witnessed the surprise flood, bright sun illuminated the red cliffs of the canyon I was following, while the sliver of sky visible above me remained pure azure, save for an occasional, puffy cloud drifting innocently across it. Despite these ideal conditions, by mid-afternoon I heard the distant rumbling of thunder, which was my cue to peel a weather eye and devise contingency plans. After hiking for another hour I reached a bottleneck in the canyon, and I knew that in entering it I would risk being trapped without an escape route in the unlikely event there was water running somewhere above me and beyond my sight. Instead, I decided to wait it out, remaining in a wide amphitheater of the canyon bottom, through which the small creek slid first against one wall, then snaked gracefully across the cobble of the broad wash to run gently against the other. I sat down on a sandy bench that seemed safely elevated above the creek, leaned back against my pack, and enjoyed the beauty of the place.
I grabbed my pack and clambered up to a broad notch higher in the cliff side. From there I watched as the coffee-colored snout led a wave that swept the canyon bottom, overrunning the shallow creek bed and spreading out over rocks and sand, tearing through reeds and bushes, encircling boulders and swirling around the trunk of a cottonwood tree that had formerly stood thirty feet from the creek. I watched in amazement as the canyon of dry cobble became a cliff-to-cliff river, shallow but roiling, spitting brown foam and ploughing forward with a tumbling load of upcanyon debris.
In the next moment something equally remarkable and surprising occurred. The sky darkened as I heard the wind rise and felt the temperature begin to drop. And then the rain that had been heralded by the flood exploded above me in a cloudburst so sudden and intense that it hammered the cliffs in deafening sheets. Water also began to run down the canyon walls and spout from their tops. Within moments the canyon bottom was being pounded by a series of spontaneous waterfalls, as the mesa lands above gathered the runoff and shot it over the canyon's sandstone brow. Squinting through the blast I counted eleven simultaneous waterfalls, one of which was launching from the cliff beneath which I had taken shelter, catapulting itself over me and into the canyon-wide torrent below.
At the same time, however, we have always wanted the West to symbolize freedom, independence, and openness; we fantasize that it is a landscape perpetually free from constraints, whether geographical or social. In the back of our minds, where we keep the indelible images from old John Ford films, the West will always be a place with infinite room to roam. To move "out" West from "back" East has always implied a movement from bondage into freedom, and nothing is as powerful a symbol of that liberation as the sublime fencelessness of the iconic western landscape. This desire for liberty from constraint, which is expressed in so many western novels, films, and songs, is at the heart of the much-covered 1934 Cole Porter classic "Don't Fence Me In," which includes these lyrics:
Here on the Ranting Hill I too have a complicated relationship with fences, one brought to my attention recently when a new neighbor on our rural road had his property fully fenced before moving in. He chose a six-strand wire fence, 52" high with a bottom strand just a few inches above the ground. I should add that this approach of immediately fencing one's property with five- or six-strand barbed wire is the default approach here in Silver Hills, and that in choosing to leave our property unfenced I am expressing a dissenting opinion on the subject. I have done so because we are close to public lands that extend to California, and because our property is on pronghorn antelope routes and mule deer winter range. "Oh, give me a home . . . where the deer and the antelope play." It is an old idea, and still a good one. One of the pleasures of sitting at my writing desk gazing out over our property is seeing pronghorn and deer move freely across the land. After all, if they didn't I might have to quit looking out the window and actually work.
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