This Eden Thing
John Muir was ever on the lookout for the primal garden. Yet when he thought he had found it, the reality turns out to be a lot more complicated.
Such a fan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost that he packed the epic along for his walks on the wild side, Muir always hoped to stumble upon the lost Garden of Eden. When he took his thousand-mile trek from the Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico, he found inklings in the primordial South.
First came Kentucky’s forests: “Here is the Eden, the paradise of oaks.” Then it was the Hiwassee River, along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, “its forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden. And how fine the song it sings!” When he caught a ship to Cuba and was frightened by a “snake” that turned out to be nothing more than a long, looping vine, Muir called down upon it “the curse of Eden, ‘Upon thy belly shalt thou go and dust shalt thou eat.’” Muir was laughing at himself in the key of Genesis.
Soon after he arrived in California and headed out of San Francisco in search of “anywhere that is wild,” Muir again felt he was discovering a place untouched since the first days of creation:
The sky was perfectly delicious, sweet enough for the breath of angels; every draught of it gave a separate and distinct piece of pleasure. I do not believe that Adam and Eve ever tasted better in their balmiest nook…. Hundreds of crystal rills joined song with the larks, filling all the valley with music like a sea, making it Eden from end to end.
Muir’s embrace of the Garden was more than literary window dressing. Raised as a devoted Disciple of Christ, he understood the loss of this perfect refuge as the opening scene in humankind’s long Biblical morality play. By sharing the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve cut themselves off from God, who cast them out of Eden and into a life of toil and pain. Now humankind, as the descendants of creation’s first couple, was laboring to find a way back and regain what had been lost. Muir’s wild walks embodied this pilgrimage of longing and return.
Muir was hardly unique in centering his thinking about the wild and natural as the return to Eden. As environmental historian Carolyn Merchant points out, “The Garden of Eden story has shaped Western culture since earliest times and the American world since the 1600s. We have tried to reclaim the lost Eden by reinventing the entire earth as a garden.”
Henry David Thoreau — whom Muir admired — fit himself into this tradition when he depicted Walden Pond as Eden:
Perhaps on the spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was already in existence … and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall.
Drawing on ancient traditions that depicted the soul of the wild world as female, Thoreau cast nature as both spotless virgin and nurturing mother. Muir borrowed his thinking and expanded it. Thoreau’s Eden was a green New England farmscape of cultivated fields, tended orchards, and selectively harvested woodlots, while Muir saw untamed nature, raw and exuberant, as Eden’s re-creation.
That was what he was looking for as he escaped San Francisco and walked south through the Santa Clara Valley toward what is now the city of Gilroy. There he turned east to cross the Diablo Range over Pacheco Pass and descend into the San Joaquin Valley just as its spring wildflower bloom was bursting forth. This, he knew, was it.
An ecstatic Muir proclaimed the valley “the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast, level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers.” He was convinced that he was beholding an Eden-like landscape, natural and pristine, just as God had made it and humankind had yet to touch.
In fact, he was seeing nothing of the kind. Rather, Muir had come upon the well-tended gathering grounds of the Miwok and Yokut nations. Like many Native Californians, these peoples actively burned and pruned their homelands to favor seeds, bulbs, withes, and greens desired for food, medicine, and basketry and to create forage for deer, elk, and other game animals.
Muir was, indeed, looking at a garden, lush and well tended, but not the untouched Eden fresh from the Divine Hand that he imagined. This was nature shaped and cultivated toward human purpose through a deep wisdom of place, without agriculture’s need to conquer and uproot, without axe and plow or urge to dominate.
And Muir, like almost all his contemporaries, had no idea. That’s the sad part.
Cast out of Eden Visits Livermore
I’ll be presenting from and about the book, answering questions and comments, and signing copies on Sunday, June 23, 2 p.m. PDT, at the Livermore Civic Center Library, 1188 South Livermore Ave., Livermore CA. In person only, no advance registration required, free and open to all.
50% off Summer Reading Sale!
When you’re looking for those just right books to take to beach or mountains on vacation, here’s the place to shop: the Univ. of Nebraska Press’s half-off sale. Between now and July 31, thousands of books are marked 50% off list, including Cast out of Eden (just named True West Magazine’s top nonfiction summer read), The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (now in paperback), and bunches of other great titles, nonfiction and fiction alike [https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/summer-reading-sale/]. To claim the discount, use coupon code 6SUMM24 at checkout.
Love this! Thanks Bob.
Thank you Bob.