Part 21

For me, I like better the huckleberries of cool glacial bogs and acid currants and benevolent, rosy, beaming apples and common Indian-summer pumpkins.

I wish you could see the holy morning’s Alpen glow of Shasta.

Farewell. I’ll be down into gray Oakland some time.

I am glad you are so essentially independent of those commonplace plotters that have so marred your peace, eat oranges and hear the larks and wait on the sun.

Ever cordially, JOHN MUIR.

Love to all.

The letter you sent here is also received. Emily’s I will get bye and bye. Love to color Keith.

Sissons Station, December 21st, 1874.

I have just returned from a fourth Shasta excursion and find yours of the 17th. I wish you could have been with me on Shasta’s shoulder last evening in the sun glow. I was over on the head waters of the McCloud; and what a head! Think of a spring giving rise to a river! I fairly quiver with joyous exultation when I think of it. The infinity of Nature’s glory in rock, cloud, and water! As soon as I beheld the McCloud upon its lower course, I knew that there must be something extraordinary in its Alpine fountains, and I shouted, “O where, my glorious river, do you come from?” Think of a spring fifty yards wide at the mouth issuing from the base of a lava bluff with wild songs, not gloomily from a dark cavy mouth, but from a world of ferns and mosses, gold and green.

I broke my way through chaparral tangle in eager vigor utterly unweariable. The dark blue stream sang solemnly with a deep voice, pooling and bowlder-dashing and an a-a-aing in white flashing rapids, when suddenly I heard water notes I never had heard before. They came from that mysterious spring. And then the Elk forest and the Alpine glow and the sunset,--poor pen cannot tell it.

The sun this morning is at work with its blessings as if it had never blessed before. He never wearies of revealing himself on Shasta. But in a few hours I leave this altar and all its----

Well, to my Father I say “Thank you” and go willingly.

I go by stage and rail to Brownsville to see Emily and the rocks there and Yuba. Then, perhaps, a few days among auriferous drifts on the Tuolumne, and then to Oakland and that book, walking across the Coast Range on the way, either through one of the passes or over Mt. Diablo. I feel a sort of nervous fear of another period of town dark, but I don’t want to be silly about it. The sun glow will all fade out of me and I will be deathly as Shasta in the dark, but mornings will come, dawnings of some kind, and if not, I have lived more than a common eternity already.

Farewell, don’t overwork; that is not the work your Father wants. I wish you could come a-beeing in the Shasta honey lands. Love to the boys.

Brownsville, Yuba Co., [Cal.,] January 19th, 1875.

My dear Mrs. Mother Carr, here are some of the dearest and bonniest of our Father’s bairns,--the little ones that so few care to see. I never saw such enthusiasm in the care and breeding of mosses as Nature manifests among these northern Sierras.

I have studied a big fruitful week among the cañons and ridges of the Feather, and another along the Yuba River living and dead.

I have seen a dead river, a sight worth going around the world to see. The dead rivers and dead gravels wherein lie the gold form magnificent problems, and I feel wild and unmanageable with the intense interest they excite, but I will choke myself off and finish my glacial work and that little book of studies. I have been spending a few fine social days with Emily, but now work.

How gloriously it storms! The pines are in ecstasy, and I feel it and must go out to them. I must borrow a big coat and mingle in the storm and make some studies.

Farewell. Love to all. Emily and Mrs. Knox send love.

How are Ned and Keith? I wish Keith had been with us these Shasta and Feather River days. I have gained a thousandfold more than I hoped. Heaven send him light and the good blessing of wildness. How the rains [?] splash and roar! and how the pines wave and pray!

1419 Taylor St., May 4th, 1875.

Here I am, safe in the arms of Daddy Swett, home again from icy Shasta and richer than ever in dead-river gravel and in snowstorms and snow. The upper end of the main Sacramento Valley is entirely covered with ancient river drift, and I wandered over many square miles of it. In every pebble I could hear the sound of running water. The whole deposit is a poem whose many books and chapters form the geological Vedas of our glorious State.

I discovered a new species of hail on the summit of Shasta and experienced one of the most beautiful and most violent snowstorms imaginable.

I would have been with you ere this to tell you about it and to give you some lilies and pine tassels that I brought for you and Mrs. McChesney and Ina Coolbrith, but alack! I am battered and scarred like a log that has come down the Tuolumne in flood-time, and I am also lame with frost-nipping. Nothing serious, however, and I will be well and better than before in a few days.

I was caught in a violent snowstorm and held up on the summit of the mountain all night in my shirt-sleeves. The intense cold and the want of food and sleep made the fire of life smoulder and burn low. Nevertheless, in company with another strong mountaineer I broke through six miles of frosty snow down into the timber and reached fire and food and sleep and am better than ever with all the valuable experiences. Altogether I have had a very instructive and delightful trip.

The bryanthus you wanted was snow-buried, and I was too lame to dig it out for you, but I will probably be back ere long.

I’ll be over in a few days or so.