Anywhere that's wild

May 15, 2007 | The planet is putting on its most spectacular show right now in Yosemite. Over an ancient sun-soaked cliff, a river that moments ago was as staid and obedient as you and me is hurling itself over the edge like a runaway roller coaster, turning into a hundred-headed shower of white downward-streaking comets, twisting and turning and dissolving and embracing and vanishing and reappearing, falling 500, a thousand, 1,500 feet before it collides with the rocks and disappears into a maelstrom of foam and mist. And that's only the top half of the springtime epic that is Yosemite Falls, a no-two-shows-alike performance that ends another thousand feet lower in a seething whirlpool at the base of the north face, where we little humans sit and look and are baptized in the mist and try to remember the mystery of this world.

I have been to Yosemite, and deeper into the majestic mountain range that John Muir called the Range of Light, many times over the last 35 years. The wilderness draws me for lots of different reasons, but the one continuous thread is a desire to find bedrock -- something enduring, something quieter and stronger than the everlasting din of my own mind, or the misshapen life of Bush's America. The Sierras are for me what the sea was for Melville's Ishmael. "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can," Melville wrote at the opening of "Moby-Dick." Call me Ishmael. I've been much too grim about the mouth. I needed to follow the prescription of the good Dr. Muir, who wrote, "Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

The great Scottish naturalist and visionary, as he looked back upon the ecstatic waterfall of his first summer in the Sierra Nevada from the tranquil downstream river of his old age, cried out, "Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever." Muir was stunned into permanent happiness by his discovery of this planetary garden spot: The stars seem to have been happily aligned in his soul in such a rare way that nature's magnificence instantly filled him up, brimming over into prose that seems scarcely able to restrain itself from being just one endless shout of joy.

When Muir arrived in San Francisco, he asked a carpenter he met on the street "the nearest way out of town to the wild part of the state." The astonished man asked, "Where do you wish to go?" Muir replied, "Anywhere that's wild." He went there, and he was never the same.

When Muir first walked to the edge of the vast Sierra coniferous forest, in the gold country above Coulterville at 2,500 feet, he wrote, "We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams and rocks, in the waves of the sun, -- a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal. Just now I can scarcely conceive of any bodily condition dependent on food or breath any more than the ground or the sky. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scarce memory enough of old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from! In this newness of life we seem to have been so always."

Few people have souls as shaken up and fizzy as John Muir's, and I am far from being an exception. His nonstop cork-popping can be intimidating, baffling, even exasperating, to those of us normal types who grow old and wear the bottoms of our trousers rolled. How could this guy have been filled with constant joy? Didn't he ever take a break, for chrissake? Muir's glorious conversion may have been so complete that he could scarce remember "old bondage days," but for most of us, it's the old bondage that comes up with the sun every day, and the thrilling newness that's occasional and hard to remember. As the years pass, I am forced to admit the muttony truth that I resemble Muir far less than I do the brainless sheep that he watched over that first summer in 1869. Of these creatures he wrote, "Having escaped restraint, they were, like some people we know, afraid of their freedom, did not know what to do with it, and seemed glad to get back into the old familiar bondage." To which I can only reply, "Baaa, humbug."

But not even a Prufrockian sheep can escape the spell of Yosemite on the first day of spring. I spent two nights and a day there last week with my mother. The old May magic was afoot. The dogwoods were in full bloom, the aspens rustling, the Merced flowing like snowmelt champagne, and always there loomed those incredible cliffs, as blazoned and enigmatic as dreams. It is a place so theatrically primordial it looks like the forge in which the gods started to make a bigger, brighter world before they got distracted and fell back into old bondage. And as always after seeing it, I feel a little bigger and brighter too.

The great national parks like Yosemite, or Yellowstone, or the Grand Canyon, or the Grand Tetons, are strange and self-contradictory places. They are shrines to nature at its most extravagant. The biggest waterfalls, the most massive rocks, the deepest gorges, the biggest trees, the highest geysers. They smash us over the head with their mind-blowing excess. We stand with our mouths open and our shutters clicking, and when our regular life programming resumes, when we return to our stop signs and mental graffiti, we cling to the afterimages like mental Ansel Adams postcards inscribed "wish you were here." But the very grandiloquence of nature in such places can cancel itself out, can mislead us into seeing the wild world as a kind of Wagnerian performance, a gigantic spectacle utterly unconnected to our normal lives.

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