Geekrant vs the forest John saved.

Greetings Geekranters!

Sometimes I find myself thinking that the more I see of America, the homeland of my wife and the nation of my voluntary exile, the more I realise, that the thing that defines America more than anything else is stories. It is a land of stories, formed by ideas and shaped by dreamers, fought over by opinions, dominated by the myths of our modern times. 

It is true that for millennia before the creation of the United States, there were people living in the landscape that said mighty nation now covers and that whole civilisations rose and fell long before a single European foot stepped on an American shore. Still, the United States, itself, as a nation, is a nation invented by just such Europeans and added to by wave after wave of immigrants bringing their cultures to this place on the edge of the world.

The United States defines itself by dreams and desires, tall tales and family histories, proclamations and manifestos. The tapestry of this country’s society is where all these modern myths and legends meet.

Now I find myself part of that nation defining its future through the stories of its immigrant past and the hopes of previous generations longing for a better life. Its very different to where I’m from. The UK, is an old nation, but not one, in general, where people don’t have the mindset of the immigrant. Often, though we might love our own family history, it doesn’t contribute a lot to our day to day lives, our identity.

America, in my experience, is different. Here ancestry and family is how a person came to be here, not just in terms of this physical world but in terms of this new world. Each person’s family story building the collective legend of America. 

Case in point, my father’s grandparents on his mother’s side were Scottish, members of the Clan Douglas, yet I wouldn’t call myself a Scot. Still, I have met people here much further removed from their ancestral roots in the “Auld” Country than I, who will nevertheless tell me proudly that they are Scottish. It used to bother me a little, until I realised why they feel that. Their Scottishness is what their ancestors bought to the American story or to put it another way, they’re American because they were once Scottish.

I might have been thinking this, when I stood in the visitor centre of Muir Woods, just up the road from San Francisco, if I’d done my homework on just who the woods were named after and why they were still there. John Muir is the namesake of the woods, his life story influencing naturalists, conservationists and environmental activists all over the world..

John Muir was an immigrant, much like myself and he moved to the United States from his native Scotland 165 years before I travelled across the Atlantic towards my new home in America. John Muir’s fingerprints can still be felt on the landscape of this modern world and in the woods named after him.

The forested area that bears his name is a truly fantastic place. It is so popular a place, that it requires you to reserve parking in its parking lots, days in advance. The woods can best be described as a kind of wooded canyon, that lies in the hills across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Despite their popularity though they’re easy to miss. Its a good thing that my wife is a much better travel planner than I could ever be, because I would never have found out about this place on my own. 

Our second day in San Francisco, we woke up early and travelled through the gentle morning light of a San Francisco that was just waking up to a brand new day. The streets gently hummed with commuters on their way to work, workmen caused traffic jams with roadworks, excavating the tarmac right in front of the cars. It seemed that even at this early hour the city had no other purpose than to bustle. We were searching for the serene however and the wondrous wildness od nature so  we headed out of San Francisco the same way we had come into the city the day before. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and up into the mist covered hills of Marin County, heading for the slopes of Mount Tamalpais and its forested canyon of wonder.

 In this part of California, the mountains and hills often come right up to the Pacific Ocean and so the road is forced to take a winding course through them, as if gripping, through sheer force of will, the sides of the hills themselves. As we pressed on we were caught between two worlds, the green verdant wall of the hill on one side, the steep drop off into nothing-less on the other, all framed by the wispy embrace of the mist that was everywhere around.

Arriving at our destination, we rapidly realized that is was very different from the Redwoods National Park that we had visited earlier in our journey. There the environment had been defined by a stillness and a wildness so profound that it was possible to imagine that all the centuries that this continent has been settled had passed away and we were the only people left within its confines. Muir Woods, on the other hand, while definitely a place of conservation and great beauty, was full of tourists. Never, in my entire life, have I seen so many people in one place to look at… trees.

There were, it appeared, multiple car parks, although the forest made it difficult to see just how many. The place was different, unique to me. On the one hand it reminded me of a National Trust site back in the UK, with a visitor centre full of overpriced fleeces and those huge oversized pencils that no child has ever actually used but still will show off in their pencil case at school. On the other hand it was still a wild place, ancient, untouched and primordial. Nature standing as a bulwark against the ever increasing tendrils of human civilisation, determined never to fall the onslaught.

As I we walked along the assigned pathways, underneath the high canopy of the mighty redwoods and glimpsed moments of true beauty, I was struck by how, America, like all nations, is also defined as much by its contradictions and compromises as it is by its great dreams and successes. Here stood a monument to nature, a place specifically purchased and given to the government with the express purpose of conserving nature and it was nearly impossible to pass a tree that people weren’t posing in front of for selfies and family photos. 

It makes me think about John Muir, the Scottish emigre that I mentioned earlier and how his influence is still felt far and wide in this great country. Until he was well past 40, John Muir lived a relatively reclusive lifestyle, at least as far as people and the rest of the world were concerned. Scorning a conventional career, Muir chose to discover this new world through long jaunts into the countryside, mammoth journeys into places of untouched beauty and serenity that most of us will never see. 

He lived, mostly alone and for years, in what would become Yosemite National Park, in an effort to experience nature. He climbed mountains and he explored entire places so far removed from the Scottish countryside of his youth that they must truly have seemed like another planet. Eventually John Muir wrote about his experiences and everything changed. 

John Muir was a celebrity, he was sought out by philosophers and newspaper editors, writers and railroad barons. He was a legend. The first environmentalist, you might say. The Original Eco Warrior. Yet he still looked like an old bearded Scottish farmer who never lost his accent. H He helped found The Sierra Club, one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the world and he was tireless in fighting to protect nature in its most untouched form. 

America, is about stories, I mentioned earlier, and it truly is, for everyone has tale of how their family came to be here and what they did. Living here, I realise that I’m writing a story for my descendants, the ones will who come after me, with  my actions. Travelling through the wild unending forests of Northern California is a part of this and following the pathways through the managed wildness and beauty of Muir Woods, across strategically placed bridges and stopping for photo ops is another. 

Still, I have to wonder whether my descendants will understand my story as I understand it, will they choose to see things the same way as I? Muir Woods was truly beautiful and it felt like nothing else on Earth, even with the visitor centre and cafe and the gift shop make to look like an old mountain cabin, but is it what a conservationist like John Muir would have wanted?

When the government acquired the land from the private individual who gave them it, they called it Muir Woods, in honour of the great gentlemen himself. Maybe he was flattered and maybe not. Still I’m not sure that he could have foreseen how his legend would grow and this relatively small section of land become a national monument.

Muir was committed to the preservation of wild, untouched, landscapes. In his world, the intrusion of man’s endless pursuit of modernity into primal environment of nature was, in many ways, a bad thing. So it’s ironic to think that the place that bears his name and therefore his legacy, in some ways, was the least untouched of the landscapes that we visited in that area of the world.

It was, truly magnificent! A real otherworldly place of beauty and serenity, cathedrals of trees their branches reaching to the sky, capturing you in time and space. It was also full of the trudge of the tourist’s shoes and the endless longing to preserve, not the trees, but the moment of being with the trees.. 

America is a land of stories, legends that define both where this country has been and where it is going. So many of us, across the world try to take hold of the dreams of the great men and women of the past and take ownership of them. We seamlessly fold them into our own desires for our nation and ignoring any evidence that our ancestors might have felt differently to us.

America is an idea and a dream, but all come to it on these dreams on their own terms and in their own way. We are all writing our own stories in this life, in many ways to contribute to this beautiful world, just like John Muir, just like I am writing my words down now.

Till next time, 

Goodbye, Geekranters.