Kindred

This story is dedicated to those who love us, truly love us in as perfect and unconditional a way as any human can; love us because of, not despite, the insatiable thirst for wildness that dwells in our hearts.

Kindred

By Ray Purcell

Standing on the summit of Mt. Whitney I was bathed by the Easter sunrise, on the one hand redeemed by the sunrise that celebrates the resurrection, and on the other the salvation, the clarity, the peace that this summiting yielded for having done it. Yes, summits do matter, they matter in a way that is beyond my capacity to fathom and I accept this as I do any other matter of faith. Turning to the west, horizon to horizon, the Sierra Nevada was literally laid out beneath my feet; it looked like a gigantic sheet of Devil's Food chocolate cake that had been dropped, severely broken, and then pushed back together and then thinly iced with cream cheese frosting so that craggy bits of the dark chocolate poked through the mantle of white.

As I stood on the summit I became aware of a change in the weather, it was suddenly still and cold, fine filaments of clouds like the wisps of a thin straggly gray beard were becoming teased across the sky. A storm was clearly building from the feel of it but probably wouldn't be of concern until evening, and by then I'd be long gone and sheltered at a lower altitude. I became lost in thought, mesmerized by the expansive view, the soft crunching of snow beneath my crampons, and the squeaking that the tip of my ice axe made as it dangled from it's leash, the kind of squeak that a rusty chain on an empty swing makes in a vacant playground on a blustery day.

Having just summited Whitney via the snow filled gully of the Mountaineer's Route, I thought about John Muir. He had first ascended Mt. Whitney by this route on what I presumed to be a day with little or no snow on the ground in October. Muir has always been a hero of mine, but more so. Perhaps because of the enthusiasm we seem to share about wild places and the Sierra in particular. I wondered to myself if people could reach out to each other across time or if it's just the notion that having been aware of a life that seems kindred one adopts a filial bond; a bond that's purely romantic, at best notional. After all time can be an awfully long way between people.

But then it's a long way from Martinez, California to the Sierra Nevada. Even more so if its 1873 and you're John Muir, living in a world just connected by the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph, and where that fastest mode of travel is the steam locomotive. Of course if Muir traveled by foot to Independence, where he began this particular journey to the summit of Mt. Whitney, then for all intents and purposes he lived in a four-mile-an-hour world. Regardless, compaired to my 70-mile-an-hour (give or take) world I feel whiney when I complain that I can't get to the mountains for the weekend.

Were Muir here, and privy to these musings he'd surely chide me for the very concern over the speed at which one travels in the wilderness since he was loath to "hike" instead preferring to "saunter", stopping frequently to drink in a particular view or tarry with his "plant people". Never the less small points of curiosity such as these are lost to history. But then so too are questions of greater concern, like what kind of woman would have a self-proclaimed tramp, like Muir, for a husband, though clearly one did.

Louie Wanda Strentzel was by all accounts a proper, well-educated Victorian woman and celebrated pianist. The daughter of the renowned horticulturalist and medical doctor, Dr. John Strentzel, and mother Louisiana Strentzel, Louie Wanda lived with her family on their ranch in the Alhambra Valley near Martinez. She was introduced to John Muir during a social gathering of mutual friends, the Dr. and Mrs. Carr, at their home in Oakland on September 15th, 1874. Dr. Carr was one of Muir's professors at the University of Wisconsin and Muir and Mrs. Carr had kept in correspondence through out Muir's travels to California.

Mrs. Carr's match making, after persistent effort, lead to the engagement of Louie Wanda and John Muir on June 17th, 1879, the day prior to John's departure on his first trip to Alaska. The couple was married in the Strentzel family home on April 14th, 1880. Though 33 years old by the time she was married, well past her prime for the day, Louie Wanda was by no means desperate, and under no misconception regarding Muir. Lovely, talented, and independently wealthy, Louie choose John, and the "tramp" choose her. Clearly this was no marriage out of misrepresentations since Muir left on his second trip to Alaska that year, the very same trip that inspired the story of Stickeen.

Much to John's credit he largely put up his hiking boots and assumed the persona of respectable husband, gentleman rancher, and ultimately father to Wanda on March 21st, 1881 and Helen January 23rd, 1886. History and the recollections of Muir's children recall the man as a loving husband and involved father. Not surprisingly he became an acclaimed horticulturalist in his own right and innovated new methods of fruit production. Though, clearly, in his heart John Muir was a wanderer, an adventurer, and thirsted for all things wild.

Even though Muir devoted himself to family and ranch in 1882 he had to have been getting itchy feet. Louie Wanda placed no conditions on John regarding his travels; she knew the wildness in his heart and there had been no intention of hobbling him with this marriage. In fact, having noticed that his writing had fallen into a doldrums Louie Wanda had written her husband a remarkable letter in 1888, which he received in Seattle after having climbed Mt. Rainier: "Dear John, A ranch that needs and takes the sacrifice of a noble life, or work, ought to be flung away beyond all reach... The Alaska book and the Yosemite book, dear John, must be written, and you need to be your own self, well and strong to make them worthy of you. Ever your wife, Louie."

Several years ago Lisa and I visited the Muir home in the Alhambra Valley of Martinez, now a National Monument. It was a sunny winter day, we arrived early, and the monument just having opened, we had it to ourselves. I had made the pilgrimage to John's home several times when I was much younger and on fire myself to save and embrace wildness. On one such visit, on a day much like this one, I had the home to myself. I stood in "Old John's" "scribble den" which had been arranged in the cluttered way that "Old John" might have kept it. A crust of bread on the mantle, odd memorabilia of Sierra travels scattered about, a granite boulder on the floor, a hawk feather on the bookcase, a clutch of acorns, and most notably, stacks and stacks, teetering towers of his journals arrange on the floor like the granite spires of the Sierra peaks that he found so irresistible to climb.

On this most recent visit I stood in the same room where so much of his writing had occurred, writing that by Muir's own recollection he felt he was pressed into by the weight of the conservation movement and latter the campaign to save the Hetch Hetchy Valley. Works he labored through because he believed they would fuel the cause conservation and generate public support to expand the National Parks. He wrote,"I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention.... One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books."

The lives of people as they are portrayed by historians are often painted with a bland palate of color leaving the most vibrant lives seeming like a vacant house with the furniture dressed in dust covers. I stood in the Muir's first floor library surrounded by the cases of leather bound volumes of poetry, philosophy, and a great many selections of natural history. The sun was just peaking around the corner of the house and shown onto the porch outside the floor to ceiling sash walk-through windows. I turned to look out at the orchard through the white lace that draped across the glass and a shadowy curve caught the corner of my. A curve that my imagination conjured into the bustle of a crinoline skirt.

With little more effort I had lifted Louie Wanda from a family photo so that she too stood at the glass gazing wistfully out the same window while I watched in omniscience. I follow her attention to the figure of a tall gaunt though sinewy man with penetrating intelligent and inquisitive eyes who is walking down the path from the house to the orchard. A bird in flight has captured his attention so that his bearded face is lifted to the sky, feet in a broad stance, and right hand shielding his eyes from the sun. He is suddenly enraptured, the universe containing only the bird in flight, his face betraying at once the identity of the species and the poetry of the birds soaring grace, perhaps the envy of it's freedom.

Louie Wanda smiles at the momentary return of the man enlivened by the mists of Yosemite Falls and who had one night clung tightly to the top of a Ponderosa Pine tree while it danced and whirled to the music in the heart of a storm. The man who's words would eventually transport me to those falls and who's prose would make my face cool and moist as the spray blasted from the pages, would make me dizzy as I held tight to the wildly swaying crown of the pine. I see the recognition in her eyes, the kind of recognition that only a spouse can have who shares their mates soul, the recognition that they must return to the mountains to become whole.

I know only because I know the same look in my own wife's eyes. It's a reflection of an understanding that even I am often too close to recognize. Day to day civilization provides too little, to borrow Muir's own words, "good bread", the kind of substantial nourishment we need to feed our souls. We occupy the civilized life like a room in a tenement where we compete with the mice for crumbs while our spirits slowly starve and wither like a scurvy.

I step over the edge of a small consolidated cornice that has built on the edge of the summit plateau, sinking the shaft of my ice axe to the hilt as I kick the front points of my crampons into the snowy slope. Between my legs the slope falls away thousands of feet past the notch at the top of the Mountaineers Route. I am wholly absorbed in a world entirely occupied by this process. Reaching the rock band I set the curved pick of the axe into a crack and delicately step down seating the points of the crampons into the rock and verglas. Several moves and I'm past the descent crux and can plunge step to the notch.

Once in the snowy notch I drop my butt into the softened snow, scoot several time to break the adhesion, and begin a glissade. The pick of the axe is levered into the slope like a rudder as the granite walls of the gully start to blur as I sail down the fall-line to Iceberg Lake. The couloir opens onto the broad alluvial slope at it's bottom where I stand looking across the East Face of Mt. Whitney and the cirque that's completed by the spiky Keeler Needles to the South. My soul is full and my pockets have "good bread" to take home, enough for some time and enough to share- Devils Food chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting too.

April 21st, 2003

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