A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf - John Muir

This is the journal John Muir kept on his journey from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in the second half of 1867. He took a train from Indianapolis to the Indiana/Kentucky state line, then hiked to Savannah, Georgia, before taking a ship into Florida, then hiking across that state and ultimately taking another ship to Cuba.

While the book is broken into broad chapters, it's arranged within those chapters as daily entries he made. These can involve Muir describing different plants he saw, waxing at length about how palmetto groves lack the grandeur of Wisconsin oak forests, or fretting about alligators once he's far enough south to be stumbling about in a swamp after dark.

The book includes some pictures, albeit not ones Muir furnished, but they're few and scattered, so this is nothing like a field guide. It's more a travelogue, and interesting for the way in which he travels. Most of the trip he's reliant on strangers being willing to share food and shelter with him, so their personalities or topics of discussion may be the focus for a given day. Most want to discuss the recently-concluded Civil War, or complain about the North, but Muir occasionally meets someone that shares his interest in botany, or will at least listen politely while he talks about it.

He's briefly robbed once, only for the guy to return the satchel once he finds nothing worth taking. Later Muir encounters a gang of horsemen, and it's probably only his scruffy appearance that causes them to leave him be. There's a fairly lengthy section where, to save money until the funds his brother forwarded arrive in Savannah, Muir makes himself a little shelter in the Bonaventure graveyard. He describes how peaceful and clear he finds the air, and how the songbirds initially gather at the entrance of his shelter to raise the alarm, but gradually grow accustomed to him and go on about their days.

I found a person sleeping in a cemetery once. I assumed, once I was close enough to hear snoring and know they weren't dead, they were sleeping off a rough night. Maybe they were on their own trek to some distant coast.

Sometimes Muir digresses into thoughts on humanity, particularly man's relationship with Nature, or how certain people perceive that relationship. He's lightly amused by those who insist everything on Earth was placed there by God for Man's use, when it's abundantly clear there are plenty of plants and animals that weren't. Plenty of plants can kill a person if ingested, as can any number of animals. Yet the notion that all organisms, including humans, are part of an interrelated world, rather than a hierarchy with us at the top, doesn't track.

Even reminding myself of the era this was written in, it's still jarring when Muir comments favorably on how 'well-behaved' the black folks in Savannah are, because they take their hat off if they see a white man on the street, and leave it off until he's out of sight. Or when a couple share some water with him around their campfire and he sees their child playing naked in the dirt and regards the whole thing as some incredibly primitive thing. Maybe they don't want to have to wash the kid and the clothes, Muir? Maybe money's tight, and maybe there's a reason that would be the case for a black couple in the South in the 1860s?

When it comes to people, Muir might be better off sticking to plants.

The last 20 pages are actually a letter he sent after leaving Cuba for New York, then sailing from New York to California, and describe his time in the Yosemite region. The prose gets a bit too purple for me there, and something about the break in the tale threw me to where I couldn't get fully invested in that section. It would have been better served to act as the introduction of a book solely about his California experiences, and leave his departure from Cuba, or at least his arrival in NYC, as the end of this tale.

'I think that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify us are morbid productions of ignorance and weakness. I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I have seen them at home. Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty!'