Classroom and cathedral

Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838. His father was abusive. In his memoir "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth," Muir claimed that his outdoors preference emanated from a "natural inherited wildness in our blood." At 11, he emigrated with his family from Glasgow to Wisconsin. Throughout his adolescent years he toiled on his father's farm and tinkered with building clocks, barometers and hydrometers. During the Civil War he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, inventing a student desk clock that retrieved a book, held it stationary for hours, then automatically replaced it with a different volume. (The illustration from the Wisconsin Historical Society confirms Muir drew one mega-weird contraption.) Muir also devoured the works of Robert Burns and Walt Whitman. The great seer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in fact, who encountered Muir in his dotage, deemed him as "one of my men," a true-blue Transcendentalist through and through.

Over time botany developed into Muir's true passion. In 1863, he took his first botanical tramp along the Wisconsin River to the upper Mississippi River. Hunting for plants liberated him from religious orthodoxy and family commitment. He drifted up to Ontario, Canada, working for a long spell at a sawmill and broom-rake factory. While in Ontario, he discovered the rare orchid Calypso borealis (this led to his first published article in the Boston Recorder). Odd jobs became Muir's specialty: It was his way to finance romps.

In 1867, however, a factory accident caused Muir temporary blindness. When his vision returned, Muir made a pact with himself to dedicate his life to nature ("the University of the Wilderness," as he called it). Off he went on a 1,000-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida (with Cuba and South America his ultimate destinations). Although a bout of fever disabled him from tramping south of the Tropic of Cancer, Muir contemplated the relationship between man and nature in profound new ways while his temperature soared and health deteriorated. Not until 1911, as Worster writes, would Muir fulfill his dream of exploring the Amazon.

It was Muir's arrival in San Francisco in 1868 that forever changed his life; from April to June he hiked around Yosemite. Walled in by range upon range of the Sierra Nevada, Muir was captivated by the enduring rocks, slow-moving glaciers and redwoods that Yosemite offered in astonishing numbers. There was a grace to Yosemite that defied language; it was a terrestrial manifestation of the Almighty: As Muir wrote to a friend in 1871, "Yosemite is the end of a grand chapter -- if you learn to read it -- go commence at the beginning. . . . The grandeur of these forces, of their glorious results overpower me and inhabit my whole being, waking or sleeping I have no rest."