Raymond Barnett

 

I've been struck by how many different ways folks will look back on their lives and pick out what most delighted them.  Let's take a look at what they say on their death beds, or on contemplating that moment.  We'll consider Georgia O'Keeffe, Claude Monet, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Charles Darwin, and the 18th century French writer Voltaire.

 

 Take Georgia O'keeffe.  "When I think of death, I only regret that I will not be able to see this beautiful country anymore," she said halfway through her life.  What a sense of place!  This wildly successful modernist painter, whose work ranged from flowers to cityscapes to surrealistic combinations of mountains with skulls and flowers floating huge above them, would miss spending her days in the distinctive New Mexico countryside.  It was a home she stumbled onto whilst fleeing her philandering, domineering husband Alfred Stieglitz and the tumult of his New York City.  She fell in love with the landscape of New Mexico instantly, and spent the rest of her life there, returning to New York City only for the wildly successful fall shows where Stieglitz demanded (and got) hitherto unmatched prices for her works.  (And where Stieglitz's exhibits of nude photos of Okeeffe shocked her into tears, and made her an instant celebrity.)  Upon his death in 1946, she didn't return to "the city" at all, but spent her remaining years in the landscape that was wholly enchanting to her:  her true home.

 

Roaming the northwestern New Mexico landscape, exploring the dry valleys, mountains, and towering cliffs, brought her happiness for over half a century.  She purchased an early Ford coupe, removed the front seat so she could mount a canvas there, and sat on the back seat painting what she saw as she roamed the countryside (echoing Claude Monet roaming and painting from his boat on the Seine).  Much of what she painted was direct and representational for the most part.  Much of it was surrealistic juxtapositions of what she saw.  Many days she merely walked the landscape, collecting flowers or skulls or hip bones of long-dead animals.  And painted them, in various spatial relationships, or looking up at the sky through the hip bone's obturator foramen, either in "real time" color or bright red and orange--playing, reveling in the world "as I see it."  She was perfectly content with living in and painting her beloved landscape during the day, then retiring with her hot tea and classical music in her Ghost Ranch or Abiquiu homes; then rising early the next morn to watch the sun rise from her rooftop aery.  Happy. 

 

Or the French impressionist Claude Monet.  On his death bed in 1926, he looked back on his long and incredibly successful career and admitted "All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it."  Somewhat earlier, he had observed that "I have no other wish than to mingle more closely with nature, and I aspire to no other destiny than to work and live in harmony with her laws."  This was a person entranced with the interplay of sunlight, wind, and waves at the Norman seashore, and with the Japanese bridge and water lilies of his pond created by the diversion of a tributary of the nearby Seine.  This was all he needed to inspire him to a career of 66 years of paintings of wind, water, skies, ponds, and flowers.  By broad consensus he was the apex of French painting.  Unlike Okeeffe, for whom a particular place entranced her, Monet was rather entranced by the interplay of natural processes, "to let my brush bear witness to it."

 

Water, sky, and flowers dominated Monet's work, whether at the seashore of Normandy or from his boat on the Seine or from his famous garden at Giverny.  When ponds were not available at Giverny he petitioned the local authorities and created his own, planted it with bamboo and water lilies, then doubled its size and added a Japanese bridge.  He had long been inspired by Japanese woodprints, and filled his home and kitchen with them on his walls.  He gardened incessantly.  "I dug, planted, weeded myself; in the evenings the children watered."  The kitchen garden provided food for the table; the flower garden provided subjects for his paintings.  Even as his eyesight failed him, he painted still, his canvases becoming larger and larger, filled to bursting with the beauty of the world.  By the end, he built a huge, high gallery to accommodate paintings six feet tall and 20 feet long, soon after his death to fill the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris and awe centuries of visitors—his witness to the beauty of the universe. 

 

American naturalist and cultural critic Henry David Thoreau led a troubled life alternating between the close study of his beloved New England, especially the Concord River, and his thorough disgust at the lives of "quiet desperation" of the people who lived there.  As a young man, he was deeply unhappy, and urged by his best (and nearly only) friend, the poet Ellery Channing, to move to Walden Pond: "go out upon that (land)…and there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."  In his famous Waldon, or Life in the Woods, Thoreau alternates between two moods:  exalting the intellectual life of books and spiritual explorations in Eastern civilizations through the centuries, on the one hand, and losing himself in the present daily beauty and rootedness of the natural world, roaming the rivers and forests of New England, on the other.  Early in his short life, and in the Waldon Pond book, he seems to favor the exotic, ageless intellectual glories of books. 

 

But later in life, Thoreau mellows, becomes more interested in the rivers and woods; he throws himself into a study of the native Americans and how they live immersed in the natural world, observing their daily lives and accompanying them on hunting and foraging trips. Thoreau had contracted tuberculosis at age 18.  Upon his death bed, at age 44, with Ellery Channing beside him again, he says in a low, gentle voice, "Now comes good sailing."  Finally, Thoreau is at home in the winds and waters of the world.  Then, whispered softly, "Moose," and, finally, "Indian."  Here is his home at last: the forest, and the animals and humans living there, in harmony with the earth, even as Thoreau joins that harmony at death.

 

John Muir kissed the cheek of death more often than perhaps any civilian who ever lived in his adventures throughout the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges on America's west coast and the huge glaciers of Alaska.  Environmentalist Bill McKibben has observed that Muir "invents, by sheer force of his love, an entirely new vocabulary and grammar of the wild…a language of ecstasy and exuberance."  Truly he is declared the Father of the National Park system and the Father of American Environmentalism.  Near the end, in his home in the Alhambra Valley north of San Francisco, he feels his lungs filling with fluid, and updates the home with new furnishings and conveniences for daughters Wanda and Helen.  He pens his last entry in his Journals, thinking of death: "The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—home-going.  So the snow-flowers (snowflakes) go home when they melt and flow to the sea, and the rock ferns, after unrolling their fronds to the light and beautifying the rocks, roll them up close again in the autumn and blend with the soil.  Myriads of rejoicing living creatures, daily, hourly, perhaps every moment sink into death's arms, dust to dust, spirit to spirit—waited on, watched over, noticed only by their Maker, each arriving at his own heaven-dealt destiny.  All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day they were first tried.  Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life's feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love.  Yet all are our brothers, and enjoy life as we do, share heaven's blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."  The masterful, assured Muir invites us to explore and rejoice in the natural places of our beautiful world, and to join him there in life and in death.

 

Muir's life was filled to bursting with these explorations and rejoicings.  As a youth, Muir walked a thousand miles from Indiana to Florida, collecting plants.  When a bout of malaria prevented him from his planned trip down the Amazon, Muir sailed to California and began several decades of exploration of the Sierra Nevada range, where he discovered relic glaciers.  Intrigued by glaciers, he spent another several decades exploring mature glaciers in Alaska, often alone.  He early learned (to his amazement) that he could make a living by writing about his explorations for Eastern magazines and newspapers, and his joy in the beauty of the natural world.  His writings were full of chapters devoted to water ouzel birds, or to the Douglas squirrels of Sequoia forests, or to the Wild sheep of the mountains, or to the glories of Sugar pines, "the noblest pine yet discovered, surpassing all others not merely in size but also in kingly beauty and majesty."  Through his writings and his life, Muir became the confidante of mountain men, Presidents, railroad magnates, and countless common folk encountered on his journeys.  He indeed teaches and shows all of us that the earth's creatures—including humans—"all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love…die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity."

 

Charles Darwin's last words are not particularly uplifting.  He had been shattered by the early death of his favorite child, ten-year-old Annie.  He avoided the funeral of his father and his great mentor, the geologist Charles Lyell—probably because all the graveside promises of life beyond death in the mansions of a loving (yet strict!) God seemed so utterly unbelievable, indeed repugnant, to him.  Darwin had looked forward to the birth of his first grandson in 1876, and was in attendance bedside with his son Francis for the event.  After the birth of the grandson, Bernard, Francis and Darwin watched, helpless, as the wife Amy suffered agonizing convulsions and died shrieking.  So as he lay on his own death bed in 1882, Darwin had no edifying words for us.  Amidst pain, nausea, and spasms, he retched blood for hours, which soon made his white beard red and sticky.  "I am not the least afraid to die" he said, anticipating that his friends and enemies would wonder.  To his wife Emma he said, "My love, my precious love."  As the night wore on, he muttered "If I could but die," again and again.  Then he was gone.  The photographs of the caped, elderly Darwin, with his ineffably-sad face staring somberly into the camera, give us an accurate record of the man.

 

The closest thing to inspirational might be Darwin's closing words of his great work The Origin of Species:  "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."  Yes, our world is marked by beauty and wonder, and we are nestled within it part and parcel, thoroughly at home even amidst its pains and heartbreaks. 

 

Finally, and very briefly, a description of the towering writer and philosopher Voltaire's last words.  Upon his death bed, the officious attending priest urged him to explicitly renounce Satan.  Replied Voltaire, "Surely this is no time to make new enemies." 

 

Indeed. 

 

I've had a couple of near-brushes with prison in my life, the first, almost comical; the second not at all comical.  Let's begin with humor, then go to drama. 

 

I was in my one year of seminary after graduation from Yale.  It was at the Union Theological Seminary, in New York City sandwiched on the Upper East Side between Columbia University a few blocks to the south and Harlem the same distance to the north.  This being spring of 1968, student protests were in the air, mainly against the ongoing war in Vietnam ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids you killed today?").  A large group of student protestors led by Mark Rudd of the Students for a Democratic Society (sic) had taken possession of Columbia President Grayson Kirk's office in the administration building, barricading themselves in and generally trashing the office and daringly smoking cigars throughout the week or so of the protests.  A few of my fellow seminarians had joined the protestors  It was, of course, of keen interest to all of us, being as we were merely a couple of blocks from the excitement. 

 

With amazingly bad timing, I decided to go see what was happening that day, on the morning of April 30.  As I arrived, NYPD officers stormed the campus with tear gas, roughly yanked the protesters out of President Kirk's office, and shepherded some 700 protestors to the rows of "paddy wagons" awaiting us, the acrid smell of tear gas hanging in the air.  Yes, "us."  Young Ray found himself in a large group of very disheveled, wild-haired, smelly protestors being herded toward the paddy wagons. 

 

"Hey, I'm not a protestor!  I'm just a curious bystander.  Hey!"  I finally got a cop to look at me.  Quite in contrast to the others, I was wearing a coat and tie, had recently shaved and showered, even combed my hair.  He squinted at me, shook his head with a growl, and said, "Get outta here, you idiot."  I eagerly agreed that I was an idiot, and removed myself speedily from the group and retreated to the peace and calm of my seminary room to study Old Testament history.  I guess I'm not much of a protester; I was happy to concentrate on my studies from then on.  (Though Columbia and many other campuses these days are still seeing protests, aren't they?  I'm glad I'm retired.)

 

As it turned out, the majority of the 700 protestors at Columbia were from other colleges around the country, semi-professional agitators who fancied themselves to be saving America from a mistaken war in Southeast Asia.  In fact, they succeeded, as LBJ (Lyndon Baines Johnson) did indeed decline to run for his second term of the presidency due to the turmoil engulfing the country.  And by the second month of my 1969-70 tour of duty with the U.S. Army at Headquarters, US Army, Vietnam in Long Binh (but that's another story), I had also concluded, somewhat belatedly, that the protesters in fact were entirely right.  I even suspected that we (the U.S.) might be fighting a losing battle on the wrong side of the conflict; I had reason to think that I was not the only one harboring such a suspicion. But that's all ancient history.

 

However, my finding myself in a group of protesters being herded to a paddy wagon was somewhat comical, despite the agonizing history associated with the Vietnam War.  My second, not-a-bit comical brush with prison, occurred in Beijing, China, in the spring of 1984.  I found myself surrounded by several dozen Chinese soldiers armed with rifles, with a crowd of some 50 bystanders eagerly watching what was about to happen to the skinny young foreign devil who had most unadvisedly spied on the leadership compound in the Second "Sea" of Zhong-Nan Hai Park in the Forbidden City. 

 

What the heck was I doing in Beijing, China in the spring of 1984? I had co-led a tour to China two years earlier, with my buddy (former student, now close friend) Kyle in the group.  Kyle and I chafed under the restrictions of the tour, led by a Chinese lady whose responsibility was taking us to sanctioned locations, and generally keeping us out of trouble.  Kyle and I, characteristically, had come back to China to wander about the country on our own, not perhaps to get into trouble, but to do what we wanted.

 

I had corresponded with the Chinese scientist Ye Duzhuang, who had translated all of Charles Darwin' work into Chinese, wondering whether I might speak with him while I was in Peking.  To my surprise, he invited me to give a lecture on May 7 to the scientists of the Academia Sinica by invitation of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), concerning "Current challenges to the Darwinian view of Evolution."  (The IVPP was the successor to the paleontologists, including the Catholic priest Teilhard de Chardin, who discovered the Peking Man skulls in the late 1920's.) I gave my lecture to a crowd of over a hundred scientists, prefacing the talk in my rudimentary Chinese, then in English translated by a young Chinese fellow, Yu Xiaobo (with whom I have remained friends and corresponded for these 40 years). 

 

After the talk, and a fascinating dinner at Ye's home (see chapter 23 in my 2021 Forgotten World for an in-depth history of Ye's tumultuous life and my dinner with him and his colleagues), I got to work on my secondary agenda item for the trip: research scenes and locales for what would be my first novel: Jade and Fire (Random House, 1987).  In my research for the novel, I had stumbled across a reference to a small Chinese pavilion located some 15 yards off the shore of the Middle "Sea" constructed by Kublai Khan.  Within this "Sea" (Zhong-Nan Hai) is located the compound of China's leaders, now as well as then.  Though Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai had died in 1976 (prompting the massive demonstrations in Tiananmen Square soon after), in 1984 the top governing officials of China still lived in this compound, a sort of combined White House, FBI, CIA, and National Security Council gathering in one heavily protected place.

 

So here was the challenge:  to get the photo of this pavilion (and its extremely evocative inscription, which plays an important role in Jade and Fire), I had to direct my camera towards the Middle "Sea" leaders' compound directly behind and beyond it.  I reconnoitered the surroundings, noting the armed soldiers standing every 30 yards or so, keenly vigilant against those who wouldn't respect the leadership compound.  Hmmm.  Had to get a photo of that pavilion and its inscription.  I ambled casually around the perimeter, glanced at the guards to my left and right, then when their attention wasn't focused on me, very quickly aimed my camera and got a good photo of the pavilion.  No outcry, no nothing.  Whew!  I ambled a bit further, past another couple of guards to my right, and (I did a lot of stupid things like this, especially when young) I took another quick photo from what was marginally a different angle. 

 

Mistake.  This time I quickly found myself herded by two of the armed guards to a small open space on the side of the bridge separating the Middle "Sea" and the public park of the North "Sea".  Very soon another dozen or so soldiers arrived, weapons aloft, guarding me ominously.  Then their leader arrived, an old grizzled, hard-bitten fellow wearing a pistol at his waist. 

 

He glared at me a long moment, as if he regretted what he had to do.  He curtly told me to give him the film from my camera.  I understood the Chinese, but pretended not to.  I volunteered to take a photo of everyone.  He of the pistol elaborately pantomimed what he wanted me to do: take the film out of the bloody camera and give it to him.

 

Ordinarily, I would have been happy to do that.  But this particular roll was a 72-shot roll, and it had all my photos from Hangzhou and its tea gardens and Taoist temples on it, not to mention my precious pavilion.  I was very opposed to losing those shots.  So I offered to take everyone's photo again.  The fellow with the pistol became angry, and shouted something at me. He reached out for me, as if to take me into custody.  It was the make-or-break moment.  For some reason—this was my first novel he was about to torpedo!—I backed away from him, turned, shoved my way through the fifty or so bystanders, and walked shakily across the street toward the public gardens in the North "Sea", where my buddy Kyle was waiting.  I fully expected a rough hand on my shoulder turning me around to take me into custody.  I walked further.  No hand.  As I got into the public gardens, I ventured a look around.  I was already, miraculously, out of sight of the soldiers, the pistoled one, and the crowd.  I stumbled on, found Kyle on a bench.   

 

"What the hell's wrong with you?" he enquired when he saw my face and my shaky walking.  I couldn't answer.  With trembling hands I shakily but carefully rolled up the film to its end in my camera.  (Most of those reading this will not know how an old 1984 camera worked.  You could physically roll up the film and retrieve it from the camera, containing whatever photos you had taken until that time.)  I took the film out of the camera. 

 

"Take this.  Put it in your backpack," I croaked to Kyle.  He did so, to my relief.  I was still awaiting the pistol fellow to catch up with me and take me wherever they took enemies of the state.  I took out a new roll of film and put it in the camera.  If the pistoled one confiscated my camera for evidence, they wouldn't find anything on the (new) film.  I sat back on the bench, and recounted my misadventure to Kyle. 

 

He laughed.  Annoyed, I turned to him.  "See that high Dagoba behind us?" he asked.  I nodded at the faux Tibetan tower in the North "Sea" park.  "From there you can see everything.  Including your pavilion in the Middle "Sea".  I put my telephoto lens on, mounted the camera on the tripod, and got plenty of pictures of it for you!"

 

I groaned.

 

I never did understand why the fellow with the pistol didn't pursue me.  Perhaps he didn't think the whole ruckus was worth it; after all, it was just a skinny foeign devil that had merely taken a photo of the leader's compound.  Perhaps he had other more pressing things to do that day.  Perhaps he was late to meet his young wife for an afternoon liaison.  Whatever.

 

Why, you ask, did I get into these scrapes?  Those of us who were college-age in the late 1960's realized that we were living in unusually turbulent times in America.  I've been very cognizant during my teaching career from 1976 to 2008 that my students lived in such different times, times when you didn't face the unalterable threat of being drafted and sent to a war in Southeast Asia.  Those times were incredibly difficult for those of us faced with such drastic life choices. 

And a similar turbulence had ruled China since—well, since the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, actually.  Wars, warlords, kidnappings, assassinations; the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Gang of Four.  Unavoidable threats convulsing a whole society.

 

You want turbulence?  Several American Sinologists in the last year have come to the conclusion, based on various good reasons, that sometime in the window of 2025 to 2027, current leader Xi Jinping will decide China is strong enough to invade Taiwan and forcibly reclaim it for the Motherland, thus becoming the greatest Chinese leader since Mao.  At that point, America's president, whomever it may be, will be forced to decide whether the defense of Taiwan is worth a full-out war with China.  A nuclear-armed China, at that, perhaps aided by its ally North Korea, with our West Coast well within the range of their nuclear missiles. 

 

There are times when, lamentably, I'm almost glad I'm about to turn 80, and not expected to be so active in our national life.  Yes, we're living in a turbulent world.  Good luck to us all.

 

Postscript.  You can read Jade and Fire to discover the evocative inscription on the pavilion; pages 344-345 in the Random House hardcover edition. 

 

 

 

 

A Taoist?!  You're Kidding.

 

No, I'm not kidding.  Why in the world would I self-identify as a "Taoist" in my approach to living life?  Several reasons.  Some of them may offend some of my friends and readers.  Apologies for this.  But here goes. It's a longish tale, but we'll get to Ray becoming a Taoist, I promise.

 

Directly upon my graduation from Yale (focusing on Chinese Studies), I spent a (tumultuous) 1967 and 1968 (yeah, that 1968) at New York City's Union Theological Seminary, a non-denominational seminary.  I had been active in my Presbyterian church's youth league in high school, and, idealist as I was, considered the ministry a possible vocation.  But while at Union Seminary I discovered that many of the beliefs fundamental to Christianity just didn't seem to make sense to me.

 

Take the idea of a God who created humans, alone, in His own image, and gave these humans the whole rest of the created world for their exclusive and unrestricted use.  This tenet is vividly reflected in the early (un-"revised") King James version of Genesis 9: 2,3: 

.  "And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every fowl of the air and upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you."

 

Gosh; that didn't seem at all the way a fair and loving Christian God, creator of all the world and its marvelous creatures, would set things up.  Then I ran into Theodicy: the tension between the Christian omnipotent and benevolent God and the widespread existence of evil in human and natural history.  The most prevalent explanation for this apparent contradiction is that God has given humans free will, a gift sufficiently precious in His view to allow humans to make evil decisions.  Again: that just didn't seem something a loving, benevolent Christian God would do.  I'd been a history major at Yale, concentrating on American as well as Chinese history, and been struck by how very much cruelty and monstrous evil humanity had wrought throughout its history. 

 

Faced with what I, upon reflection, regarded as fundamental problems with Christianity, I wrote my draft board, rejecting my 4a exemption for seminary.  (What a stern idealist Ray was in those days; go figure.)  I was immediately put in the draft pool, with a very low number and thus the inevitability of being soon drafted and sent to the war in Vietnam.  So I enlisted for three years (rather than the two of a draftee) and thus was able to choose my military occupation.  If I was going to Vietnam, I was determined to go there in the medical corps. 

 

Upon arriving (in the midst of an incredibly intense monsoonal rainstorm), I was assigned to U.S. Army Headquarters, Vietnam, in Long Binh, as a medical records specialist.  Being the headquarters, there was a surprisingly adequate library at the base. There I stumbled upon several books about natural history, and became fascinated with the world of nature.  After my tour of duty, having developed a somewhat misanthropic attitude toward human history, I decided to get a PhD in biology, despite having taken no courses whatsoever in the subject during my four years at Yale.  (Again: go figure.)  Among a dozen curt rejections from various universities, Duke University took me on a trial basis, and 4 years later I had my PhD in Zoology.

 

Being a "certified" biologist at this point, I began reading about Charles Darwin, the central figure in biology (a pursuit I'm still engaged in).  In David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, Darwin's views on creation are given: "Special creation?  Divine providence? Godly design?  Darwin had found no support for those notions in biogeography, the taxonomy of barnacles, or the fates of certain innocent children.  (This latter referring to the heartbreaking death of Darwin's favorite child, Annie, at age 10, a watershed moment in Darwin's life.)  'Everything in nature, he concluded coldly, is the result of fixed laws.'  Had an impersonal First Cause (God) of some sort, a Supreme Being in the fuzziest sense, given rise to the universe and set it in motion according to the mechanics of those fixed laws? Maybe.  For much of his adult life, including the period when he wrote The Origin of Species, that's what Darwin felt inclined to believe."

 

Aha!  That was the moment I identified myself as a Taoist.  I immediately recalled the Chinese history class at Yale, nine years earlier, where Taoism had been discussed.  The Tao was (is!)  a mysterious (but utterly immanent and this-worldly) force that had brought forth the world and coursed, inherent, throughout the world, not giving a fig for humans, particularly. But most importantly: impersonal.  Not capable of anger or Commandments or human emotions, whether love or hate.  Here in the world, in all the "ten thousand creatures" as well as rocks and rivers and clouds and sunsets.  The Tao, as described in the ancient Chinese classics Tao De Jing and Chuangtze, provided exactly the ongoing, inherent creative force that set the fixed laws by which the world moved as Darwin "was inclined to believe."  And which made sense to Ray as well; Ray the newly-minted Taoist.

 

Maybe I've read too many mystery stories.  But like Sherlock Holmes in The Reigate Squires, I need to have things make sense.  As he put it, "I make a point of never having any prejudices and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me."For me, this tenet has led to my adopting the Taoist point of view.  It makes sense of the world, to me at least. 

 

Nor has this been merely an intellectual satisfaction.  This view of life thrills my heart as well as my head.  Knowing that I (all of us, actually) am part of a grand, ancient process of creation according to fixed laws gives a zest to life.  We're all in this together, humans as well as all the equally marvelous creatures and rocks and sunsets of the world, inextricably linked to each and to our lovely planet orbiting an obscure sun in an obscure universe at the edge of the Milky Way. 

 

Let us conclude by recalling the final paragraph of our Mr. Darwin's The Origin of Species, Darwin the unknowing Taoist himself:

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."  (Italics mine)

 

 

Note:  for readers wishing to know more about Taoism, you might consult my 2004 Relax, You're Already Home: everyday Taoist habits for a richer life.   As it turns out, my mentor John Muir was also, like Darwin, an unrealized Taoist.  See my 2016 Earth Wisdom: John Muir, Accidental Taoist, if interested.  Both available on Amazon.  Barnett—the Taoist—out. 

I had a very strange week in the Sonoran Desert here in southern Arizona in late January, about 3 or 4 days on each side of the Chinese Lunar New Year.  For the few months I've been trying to figure out what the devil was going on.  Though I was "neat, clean, shaved and sober," as Philip Marlow is described on the first page of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, my account of what happened sounds like something from an Uncle Remus ride in Disneyland (before the lovable old fellow was "cancelled" there recently).  So I think I'll just describe what happened—true story, no embellishment nor exaggeration—and end with some provisional interpretations. Feel free to think whatever you want about it.

 

It began one morning as I sat in our (east-facing) front courtyard enjoying the early sunshine over Arizona's Catalina mountains: movement between the homes across and up the street, those bordering the Sonoran Desert in which our retirement subdivision sits.  Yes; it was a bobcat, sauntering across the front yards, perhaps 150 feet away.  A gorgeous animal, tawny gold with the bright black and white stripes on the legs (that you never see adequately depicted in the field guides) and the same color spots on the ears.  John Muir often commented how clean wild animals are—always with bright colors and free of dirt or mud.  That sure was this fellow.  Bobcat sightings are not that rare here, due to our proximity to the desert, so I enjoyed it but didn't regard it as anything unusual.

 

Until the next morning, when Tammy and I were doing our stretches facing the picture windows looking into our back yard.  "Tam! Bobcats, to the right!" I announced in an urgent voice.  Yes, two of them, probably mother and yearling, ambling the length of our yard, looking alertly around them as they glided oh so gracefully by.  I watched, mesmerized by the two of them and their beauty, while Tam ran for her phone.  She got a photo of one looking back at us ("Hey! What's all the fuss?  Never seen a bobcat?" it seemed to be thinking) just before they disappeared over the wall into the neighbor's yard. 

 

Wow.  Three bobcats in two days; now that was a bit unusual.  It won't get any better than this, I thought. 

 

Until the next day, as I sat on a favorite bench ("Ray's laughing place") a ten-minute walk from our home, along a finger of the desert that stretches through the neighborhood. Before me stretched an arroyo some 60 yards across, pretty thick with cholla and prickly pear cacti, palo verde trees, and acacia shrubs.  Movement, close to my right.  And yes, another bobcat glides into my field of view not more than 10 feet from me.  I sit stock still.  Directly in front of me, he pauses, catching my scent, I bet.  He turns his head, looks straight at me, then leisurely resumes his fluid movement, and disappears into the desert terrain.  I sit there, bemused, wondering what I'd done to earn the good will of the bobcat gods.   

 

The next day, I walked my wonted loop through the full-on desert just north of our home, a route that takes me well away from any homes, with nothing but desert for as far as you can see to the north.  Someone has thoughtfully provided a crude wooden bench about a mile into the loop, on which I was sitting, drinking hot tea from my thermos.  Since we get an average of 12 inches of rain a year here, this desert has a very high species diversity of plant life, compared to the other three deserts in North America.  I was straddling the thin bench, facing west with 180 degrees of view from the north to the south, though limited by the cacti and thorny shrubs.  Movement to the north amongst the cholla and prickly pear cacti.  A glimpse of two large ears moving along, appearing then disappearing amongst the vegetation—a mule deer? No, our deer here are the white-tails from back east, smaller ears.  But these ears were huge.  A break in the cacti, and I see—what the heck?  Loping along, almost the size of a small deer, but no.  Loping.  A jackrabbit?  But the largest jackrabbit I've ever seen, coming almost straight toward me.  I'm frozen, steaming cup of tea halfway to my mouth.  The creature lopes up within 8 feet of me, and pauses.  Wind must be blowing toward me, because he takes no notice of me as he forages around on the ground for maybe 6 seconds.  Right in front of me; I'm obviously just an inanimate extension of the bench, though sort of funny looking. 

 

I gaze on the creature, thoroughly mystified as to what species he is.  Clearly, he's a very large species of jackrabbit, maybe 24 inches long, with those huge ears, at least 8 inches each.  But he's glowing with color and it isn't the color of the Black-tailed Jackrabbit that I'm very familiar with from California.  No, this critter is bigger than that jackrabbit, and not grizzled brown and black fur but gloriously white fur—again, spotlessly clean--on his flanks and belly, grading to grey speckled with black on his back.  Now, I'm a mammologist, who taught the subject for 32 years, emphasis on California, but this guy was completely new to me.  He positively glowed with health and color, and the naked interior of those 8-inch ears was a lovely soft shade of blood pink.  The most beautiful thing I've ever seen?  Close to it.  And 8 feet from me!  He soon loped away, leaving me very nearly breathless.  I finally resumed lifting my cup the rest of the way to my mouth, gulped the tea down, and poured myself another cup with shaking hand.  I didn't have my guidebook with me, so I had no idea what species of jackrabbit this fellow was (turned out to be Lepus alleni, the antelope (or "Mexican") jackrabbit, who's not supposed to be this far north and west).  But he had sure given me a treat.  I got up to resume my walk, and from the high ground on which the bench sat, I looked across the desert and, believe it or not, I could see him picking his way amongst the cacti as he loped along.  Amazing. 

 

But my strange week in the desert wasn't over, by any means.  A couple of days later I made my weekly car trip to Sabino Canyon, on the other side of the Catalina mountains.  On the walking road into the canyon, you pass a hill to the east, then dip down a long descending stretch of road.  Atop the hill is a rugged stone structure, used for water storage in the past.  Because my good wife and daughter #3 tell me I need to get some "cardio" workout in my walks, my routine is to walk to the low point of the road, then turn around and vigorously walk the 300 feet or so of elevation gain to the trail leading to the hill, then another 400 feet of elevation gain to the top.  No, 700 feet of elevation gain is not a lot, but vigorous walking—and doing the whole thing twice—gets my heart beating faster than usual. 

 

At the top of the hill, beyond the stone structure there, I typically sit on a rock overlook and enjoy the view.  The canyon and Sabino creek stretches far to the northeast, between high sloping walls on either side, stately saguaro cacti strewn over the hillsides.  To my east the creek flows down the canyon and away to my right, where it empties into the basin on which Tucson sits.  A picturesque dam interrupts the flow of the creek just below me. 

 

As I approach "my" rock this day to drink tea and munch a granola bar, I notice something on the rock.  It's a roadrunner, the iconic desert bird, a large specimen, about two feet long counting tail, with dark brown-black coloration, and crested head.  He (probably, from his coloration) appears to be enjoying the view before him.  He doesn't dash away as I approach, as all other roadrunners have.  As roadrunners should.  Rather, he placidly turns and gazes up at me, some 10 feet away.  "Uh. That's my rock?" I stupidly inform him.  More gazing at me.  I take another step.  He calmly gets up, hops over to another rock some 6 feet to the right but with a short palo verde tree providing him some privacy, sets himself down on it, and resumes his contemplation of the view.  Ignoring me. 

 

I make some racket getting onto my rock (it's a pretty good fall beyond the rock, and I've got to be careful as I stow my hiking sticks and get out my thermos and so on).  Doesn't bother my neighbor a bit.  We sit there together, sharing the view, about 6 feet from each other.  This is very strange.  Definitely not roadrunner behavior.  Any more than my mystery jackrabbit was acting like a jackrabbit should.  The bobcats?  They're pretty blasé—top predator and all that—and generally not that spooked by humans.  Though not typically such close humans as me on the bench at Ray's laughing place several days before. 

 

I'm feeling weird, sitting there with my roadrunner neighbor atop the hill in Sabino Canyon, remembering my bobcat and jackrabbit experiences just days ago.  And I remember sinologist Mark Elvin's 2005 Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China.  That book contains Hangzhou nature poet Xie Lingyun's "Living in the Hills," in which he lists the large mammals abundant and frequently encountered around Hangzhou Bay in his day, the early 400's AD (aka CE):  gibbons, badgers, tigers, wolves, bobcats, two species of bear, jackals, big-horned sheep, elk, and muntjaks.  Xie Lingyun's list would have been even more extensive, of course, during the Neolithic, four thousand years before, when "civilization" had not yet so seriously impinged on the original wildlife.

 

Elvin observes: "All these species, without exception, seem to have vanished by (our) modern times (from the Hangzhou region)…It would be a folly to overromanticize this fifth-century world. Tigers and wolves are dangerous.  But human beings grew up for several hundreds of thousands of years with animals all around them (culminating in the Neolithic hunting-gathering-gardening period).  A strange silence has fallen (in the ensuing millennia since the end of the Neolithic). An emptiness.  One cannot help wondering what the long-term implications of this are for the balance of our minds."

 

The "strange silence" which has existed since the end of the Neolithic between humans and our fellow creatures, according to the American historian Lynn White in a pivotal 1967 essay, is grounded in the view of Abrahamic religions as expressed in Genesis 9, verses 2 and 3 (I give the original King James translation, not the "revised"):

"So God created man in his own image…And God blessed them, and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea-- into your hand are they all delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you" (italics and boldface in the preceding paragraphs are mine). 

 

It dawns on me.  Somehow, for some or for no good reason, it seems I've been granted a week in the Neolithic, when we humans still had an unusually close association with our wild neighbors, our fellow inhabitants of this good earth.  Before the "fear and dread" of humans came into being.  It's been thrilling. Sitting there on my rock with Sabino Canon stretching before me, I smile.  Then laugh. My roadrunner neighbor doubtless hears the laugh, and stirs a little uneasily, but doesn't move, continuing his amiable contemplation of the view. 

 

I drink my cup of tea, finish my granola bar.  "See ya later," I say, softly, to the roadrunner.  He doesn't acknowledge me.  I gather my hiking sticks and quietly leave, awed by this curious week I've been given in the Neolithic, smack in the middle of the Chinese Lunar New Year.

 

Make what you want of it, but it was quite week.

 

 

The sun was just cresting Haleakala to the east as I hefted my snorkel bag and Big Agnes collapsible camp chair and headed for Kama'ole 2 Beach Park.  With the trade winds revving up early each day here on southeastern Maui, I wanted to be in the water when the first light filtered down onto the reef, before the wind and waves roiled up the water (as had happened yesterday).  It felt great to be walking down South Kihei Drive, with hardly any traffic, the tourists and homeless campers not yet up, and perhaps the most scenic (and snorkeling blessed) stretch of beaches in Hawaii on my left the whole way from our rented condo.  

I dropped my shoes and chair against a dune at the north end of Kama'ole 2, and continued along the high ground of beach access across the point where I'd be snorkeling, a relatively recent lava flow from the aforesaid volcanic mountain several thousand years ago, the frozen rocks creating an incredibly varied and "friendly" reef habitat for creatures swarming the waters there.  A minute later I walked down into the south end of Kama'ole 1 Beach Park, left my snorkel bag amonst the black lava rocks there, and walked into the water with my mask and snorkel atop my head and fins in hand.  When the water deepened, I put my fins on, pulled my mask and snorkel down, and turned to swim out to skirt the shoreline rocks against which the surf was lapping.  

Not 60 seconds into my swim, with more sand than rocky reef below me, there it was:  a Spotted Eagle Ray pulsating slowly beside me, its undulating "wings" propelling it effortlessly through the water.  The holy grail of my underwater career, a creature unsurpassed for beauty of appearance and movement.  While my Scuba-experienced high school buddy Jim has seen plenty, I've avoided Scuba (yes, I'm at heart a Luddite) and seen only one Eagle Ray in my water-surface-snorkeling experience of half a century.  (See my blog for August 2019.)   And this morning:  my second Eagle Ray, flowing past me as gracefully and beautifully as the first time.  I broke my wonted rule and followed her for maybe a minute, until she showed some signs of being annoyed, then broke off with a benediction to her.  

It figured I'd see another Eagle Ray in the sandy-rich area; these rays are not filter feeders, like their more well-known (and larger) cousins Manta Rays.  Instead, the Eagle Rays search through the sand for buried molluscs, and upon finding one simply crush the (substantial!) shells with their fused teeth of each jaw (powered by sturdy jaw muscles, analogous to our masseter muscle).  Spit the shell fragments out and feast on the mollusc flesh! 

While a bit anticlimactic, the rest of the 45-minute snorkel was also good.  This area had been turtle-rich last year, and I wasn't disappointed.  Most of the dozen Green Sea Turtles I swam amongst had just awakened and risen from the sandy bottom when the sun's rays brightened their habitat, and cleaner fish were clustered around them thickly, scouring the shells of the algae encrusting it.  The smaller turtles looked almost like balloons, so thick were the feeding fish around them.  The big guys, though, sailed serenely through the early morning waters in their calm, unhurried way, ignoring the fish clustered about them.  I sensed something big beside me, and twisted about to see a large adult turtle, maybe four feet long, had glided up within a foot of me.  After my adrenaline rush had subsided, I swam along enjoying his company, visions of a St. Francis of the Sea glimmering in my head. Soon he veered down toward a tempting clutch of red algae, and I was just Ray again, rather than a soggy St. Francis. 

Eagle rays thrill me.  Sea turtles reassure me; they radiate an aura of certainty of their place in the scheme of things, going unhurried about their daily business with not a care in the world.  Sea water becoming acidified due to global warming?  It'll pass, give or take a thousand years.  Pollutants washing down from growth of coastal farms and businesses?  It'll pass too, in a millennium or two.  I'm doing my thing, they seem to say; and my kind will be here doing their thing long after you foolish humans are gone.  And you know what?  I think they may very likely be right.  

Lots of fish in the Butterflyfish family pass below me amongst the rock reefs, usually in pairs, all brimming with yellows, oranges, and black: the raccoon, four-spot, teardrop, threadfin and more.  Many sex-changing wrasses too, especially a breathtaking swarm of the red/green/blue ringed Christmas wrasse.  Lots of the blue and black, spotted trunkfish, with their boxy shape.  And large schools of the Yellowfin goatfish, their yellow stripes glinting from the white bodies massed together.  

Then, of course, my favorite, perhaps, the reef triggerfish, sporting whites and golds framed in black, with a touch of red, whose Hawaian name (humu-humu nuku-nuku apua'a) I required my Pacific Basin Natural History students to memorize.  (This was often the only thing the students remembered from the course a decade on, according to many I'd meet long after the course.)  

I was tiring; 77-year-old guys don't have the energy for long snorkels that they used to.  Swimming back to the shore, I noticed a moray eel poking his head out a hole in the rocky reef.  Then, my gear stuffed into the bag, I paused atop the beach access trail at the point between Kam 1 and Kam 2,  enjoying the feel of the sun on my skin as I gazed out at the waves surging over the emergent rocks of the point.  Yes, I think the sea turtles are right.  Everything is doing fine out there, and because the ocean is so huge with so much inertia, the creatures out there will take all the perturbations of climate change in stride and come out fine on the other side in a couple of thousand years.  Even if in our foolishness we stumble into a nuclear war and poison the air and water with radioactivity, that too will get absorbed, maybe even sparking some mutations that help creatures get through the tough period.  

But it will be alright, as it is now.  I take no pleasure in being persuaded to the conclusion--based on research for my last two books, and the scientific articles I've consulted--that our inadequate response to the various phenomena associated with climate change will very likely destroy human civilization, and very possibly extinguish the human species on our planet.  Here I join others similarly persuaded.  Certainly, whether our kind will be here after the thousand years or more of recovery from climate changes' catastrophes is an open question.  My hunch is probably not; we're very dependent upon the hugely intricate mechanical/electrical/computerized system that we've woven around ourselves.  But perhaps, just perhaps, some few of us in sheltered, out-of-the-way places will survive, and remember how to grow our own food and tend the soil, even how to fold the raising of chickens (and their manure!) into the system as my buddy Al does on his farm, to create a balanced, sustaining, self-enclosed practice.  Any survivors will have reverted to the hunting/gathering/gardening mode that modern archaeological research shows characterized our kind's first 10,000 years as settled villagers, before the momentous events of about 2,500 BCE (leading to urbanization, patriarchy, misogyny, extraction and production of luxury goods, and warfare) changed it all and led us directly and inexorably to where we are today.   

Perhaps.  But either way, the oceans and their creatures will remain, tho perhaps a bit changed genetically to cope with the new conditions.  Life will continue to pulse and flow serenely onward amongst the sun rising over Haleakala and the tides pushing in and pulling out.  Eagle Rays will glide effortlessly along the sandy bottoms, and fish will clean sea turtle shells, and all will be well.  I grin in the sunlight overlooking the wave-splashed point, adjust my snorkel bag on my shoulder, and stroll toward Kama'ole 2 and an hour lolling in the morning sun on my Big Agnes chair until my good wife passes by on her morning beach stroll.  All is well.  

 

(For an account of the momentous events clustered around 2,500 BCE, see Raymond Barnett's Forgotten World, available from Amazon.)

 

 

For a fellow who grew up in land-locked Oklahoma—maybe because of it—my happiest times out of doors have always centered on water.  I don't discriminate; the water can be salty or fresh.  Hawaii has provided the former; by the time my son was 11 years of age he'd traveled there 12 times with us.  Tide-pooling and snorkeling the reefs have always been at the top of the agenda, there (see my blogs of Nov. 6, 2014; Aug. 3, 2018; Aug. 24, 2019).  Most of the year, of course, it's fresh water activities for our family, back on the "mainland." One favorite such spot is in Yosemite Park, where the Lyell and Dana creeks come together to form the Tuolumne River in the famous Meadow.  We've had many marvelous times alongside Lyell Creek, particularly, in the campground there. 

 

But for most of the year, for the past 46, it's been our home-town Big Chico Creek that emerges from the Sierra Nevada foothills that my family and I have frequented.  My wife Tammy and I were married by a rented minister on the banks of the creek, whose cooling breezes comforted the volleyball and horseshoe players after the ceremony.  Our two kids ("second family," following my "first family" of two daughters) celebrated most of their birthdays in picnics with their CoHousing friends in shady groves alongside the creek.  Every 4th of July the Barnetts would host a gathering at Raspberry Hole in the creek, watermelons kept cool by the waters.  Even the hard days involved Chico Creek.  When my daughter Holly died at age 23, her mother and sister and I bicycled into the upper region of Chico Creek above the turbulent Iron Canyon, hiked a creekside trail far into the narrow canyon there, and tenderly placed some of her ashes on a sharp slope above Salmon Hole, amidst many tears.  Holly and her sister had spent many summer days swimming and sunbathing in that creek.

 

So when Tammy and I moved from Northern California to Southern Arizona recently (see my blog of Sept. 9, 2022), many things changed, but one did not:  I found a favorite creek at which I'm spending much time, and took our two kids there when they visited.  The interesting thing is that while of course Sabino Creek is located in the Sonoran Desert rather than the oak woodlands of the Sierra Nevada foothills, in many respects my new creek is extremely similar to my old creek.

 

How so, "similar"?  Well, the vegetation bordering the creek—the riparian zone—is composed here largely of Fremont Cottonwoods, Arizona Sycamores, and two species of Willow.  In Chico, the riparian zone along the creek is largely Fremont Cottonwoods, California Sycamores, several species of Willow, with White Alder thrown into the mix.  As you tromp up the creek in Chico, hopping or swimming from rock to rock, you notice territorial patrolling by the Flame Skimmer and Green Darner dragonflies—the same dragonflies that also patrol along Sabino Creek here!  And the petite Bluet Damselflies are much in evidence here, as they also are in Chico Creek.  Ditto for the insects in the creek:  water striders and water beetles, for example, as well as the larval forms of the dragonflies.

 

It's no surprise, upon reflection, that the creeks and their riparian zones are so similar:  whether a creek in Arizona or California, there's a relatively constantly supply of fresh water, and the wind-blown propagules of trees and shrubs spread from creek to creek to creek over long distances.  These same environmental conditions give you the startling similarity of creeks and riparian zones across the entire continent. 

 

But as I float on my back down a calm stretch of Sabino Creek here, gazing up at the slopes of Sabino Canyon, I see a very different sight than I would see floating down Chico Creek.  There in Chico, the canyon floor and walls featured patches of valley oak and blue oak woodlands, interspersed among thick grasslands composed of species brought by the Spaniards five centuries earlier.  Here, the dominating trees are the stately Saguaro cacti, reaching 40 feet tall with anywhere from two to a couple of dozen "arms" stretching upward around the central column.  The late spring demonstrated that these bizarre-looking plants belong to the same "Angiosperm" clade of flowering plants as our California cottonwoods and willows, when their white flowers bloom atop the arms, and develop into the sugar-rich, seed-containing fruits which the Sonoran indigenous peoples gathered at festive late summer gatherings. 

 

While the Saguaros dominate, the Palo Verde trees are also common, looking much more "normal" to our eyes; they are not cacti.  But the tiny leaves of the Palo Verde are sparse and soon drop; the tree can't afford the water lost by evaporation.  How do they accomplish the photosynthesis fueling growth and seed production without leaves?  Easy!  The chlorophyll that powers photosynthesis has been moved to the outer surfaces of the trunk, branches, and stems.  The trees are green all over!  And happily making sugars and proteins and DNA from the abundant Arizona sunshine, leaves be damned

. 

And of course Sabino Canyon's slopes also feature abundant species of the smaller (than Saguaro) cacti.  Like the Saguaros, all cacti have long abandoned leaves and relocated their chlorophyl to their stems, similar to what the non-cactus Palo Verdes have done.  Some cacti have relatively flat, disc-shaped stems: the Prickly Pear species, which are effectively protected by arrays of formidable thorns.  They also are flowering plants, remember, so they have spectacular, colorful flowers on the perimeter of the flat stems, of which Tammy has taken many dozens of photos, and depicted many in her paintings.  These flowers develop into masses of high-calory carbohydrate fruits, which the indigenous peoples would also harvest and eat, in addition to the young disc stems.  (Note:  these original peoples of the Sonoran Desert were adept at methods for removing the thorns before ingestion!) 

 

Cylindrical stems are present in the big Barrel Cacti and the smaller Hedgehog cacti, each with many species and armored also with thorns.  But the most formidable (many would say "vicious") thorn-protected cacti are doubtless the chollas (or "choyas").  These exhibit thinner cylindrical stems, and the species of chollas vary from relatively small (the "Teddy-bear Cholla", which is anything but cuddly) to the 20-foot Staghorn cholla and "Jumping" cholla.  This latter plant produces easily-detachable segments whose plentiful thorns seem to leap onto your arms or legs or any clothing you might think would protect you, and thus make you a disperser of the clonal segments—all upon the slightest hint of contact.

 

So, yes:  the plants on the slopes of the canyons in which Sabino Creek and Chico Creek merrily flow are as startlingly different as the riparian zone plants and insects are startlingly similar.  What about the mammals you may encounter in the riparian and canyon slopes?  Some are found in both habitats:  pocket gophers, packrats (tho in Arizona the white-throated woodrat, instead of the dusky-footed), ground squirrels (tho here the Rock and Harris Antelope ground squirrels, rather than California's Beechey); but the very same bobcat and mt. lion prowl both canyons, as well as Raccoons and Ringtail "cats".  Surprisingly, a variety of the Eastern White-tailed deer is found in these portions of the Sonoran desert, just as the Black-tailed deer is in Chico Canyon.

 

Sabino Canyon also contains two rather spectacular mammals not found in California at all, tho.  A mainly arboreal member of the raccoon family common in Central and South America, the Coati Mundi, ambles throughout the upper reaches of Sabino Canyon, tho it is not commonly seen.  (My son Louis spotted one his first saunter alongside Sabino Creek; but then Lou also spotted the only Cloth of Gold cone shell I've ever seen in a Hawaiian tidepool.)  I finally evened-up with Lou on my first rock-hopping jaunt up Sabino Creek high in the canyon, where after swimming through a deep 40-foot pool in a narrow spot between sheer rock walls, I emerged, sat on a rock to rest (Hey! I'm 77 years old!), and heard a Coati foraging in a cottonwood some 20 feet away, all oblivious to any human presence in such a high spot.  He soon caught my scent some seconds after I saw him, and promptly did the only sensible thing, fleeing clumsily away from the weird, dangerous naked ape.

 

The other mammal in Sabino Canyon you won't find in Chico Canyon is the Javelina, or Collared Peccary.  This scruffy but amiable fellow is a New World member of the Suidae, a cousin to our domestic pig and the wild boars of the Old World.  He's only 30 to 50 pounds and not a yard tall, but he's unmistakable.  Unlike the Coati, he's comfortable around humans, and groups of a dozen or more regularly barge into our neighborhood in search of food to complement the Prickly Pear stems and Palo Verde pods found in the Sonoran proper.  (This commonly happens on mornings when the garbage containers are waiting to be picked up and emptied, a task to which the Javelinas are only too happy to contribute.) 

 

Birds?  Southern Arizona is famous to bird-watchers for its incredible diversity of birdlife.  Sabino Canyon is full of Gila woodpeckers, Cactus wrens, and Roadrunners, all unknown to Chico Canyon.  But you will find the occasional Phainopepla (a striking black bird with a crest and red eyes) in both canyons.  Mourning doves are common in both canyons, tho the White-winged Dove only in Sabino.

 

Ah, the reptiles.  The Sonoran Desert Tortoise is common here, and a very appealing fellow, but not remotely a denizen of the Sierra foothills.  Diamondback rattlesnakes are found both places, but southern Arizona is also famous for its dozen-some additional species of rattlers.  I've encountered the Ridge-nosed Rattler (Arizona's "state reptile") on one of my jaunts up Sabino Creek, tho my encounters with Diamondbacks have only been in the desert surrounding our community.  I am acutely conscious of the fact that perhaps the most elusive and fascinating Arizona reptile, the (so-called) Gila Monster clothed in dramatic orange/red and black bead-like scales, has been seen (so far) by only one Barnett:  my good wife Tammy (whose family nick-name is "Hawk-eye," and rightly so). 

 

Access to Sabino Canyon is dramatically different than that to Chico Canyon.  You can of course bicycle and/or hike into Chico canyon, even its upper reaches, which I often did.  But only a rough dirt/gravel road is available for vehicles, which is often closed in the rainy winters.  Sabino Canyon?  Private vehicles into the canyon are prohibited, but there is a daily open-air, electric-powered tram/shuttle which will take you on-the-hour (for a small fee; better make a reservation online) from the Visitor Center up into the Upper Canyon, the well-maintained asphalt road crossing 10 bridges over Sabino Creek as it hugs the creek all the way up.  There are nine stops on the route, and you can hop on and off at any place.  For first-time visitors to our new home, we take the ride all the way to the top, and walk the 4 miles back, a leisurely stroll which is very near the top of my favorite things.  Ray being Ray, I often stop and take a dip at water-fall-featuring spots or, really, any particularly scenic swimming hole, which tries the patience of my dear wife.  Fortunately for me, since she has taken up painting, she whiles away the time by making sketches of the flowers and scenery.

 

The open-air shuttle is used mainly by tourists, tho.  All the day long, the citizens of Tucson and surrounding areas walk up the road into the canyon, by the hundreds and hundreds every day.  All types of folks: Anglos, Hispanics, Asians, all types of Americans and foreign visitors, lone males and females, groups of friends young and old, and families galore.  You won't believe how many babies are pushed into the canyon in strollers by their moms and dads every day. The strollers are left on the road a mile or two in, as the families take short side trails to the always-nearby creek and set up umbrellas and picnics.  In sum, Sabino Canyon is heavily used by a complete cross-section of the citizens of the Tucson area, with nary a spot of litter ever visible. Tellingly, restrooms and trash bins are available periodically all the way into the canyon.  And because the canyon's entrance is a dozen miles from downtown Tucson, perhaps, the chaotic tents and social turmoil that, alas, is so often associated with the lamentably poorly-met challenges of homelessness are, so far, absent from Sabino Canyon. 

 

The availability of water in which to enjoy the creek and canyon differs between the two spots also.  There is almost always water in Big Chico Creek in Chico Canyon.  Sometimes there is too much water, and turbulent spring flows amongst the large rocks of Iron Canyon (Bear Hole (aka Bare Hole!) and Salmon Hole) claim the life of a young, over-eager but under-cautious swimmer every couple of years.  But typically it is only as Chico Creek enters the Sacramento Valley and flows through the city of Chico that the creek frequently de-waters in the summer.  But the rest of the year, it flows clear into the Sacramento River, and thence out San Francisco Bay into the Pacific.

 

Sabino Creek marches to the beat of a different drummer.  It sits within the Sonoran Desert, remember, an area that typically gets only 12 inches or so of rain a year—less than half what the foothills of northern California typically get.  This rainfall is split between gentle winter rains of December thru February, and the intense late summer afternoon "monsoon" rains of mid-June to mid-September.  So the creek tends to be flush during the winter and early spring (I have swum it in mid-March), but drops rapidly in the dry late spring and early summer, to stagnant pools here and there.  The "monsoon" rains come, tho, and the creek fills rapidly, permitting swimming throughout the late summer and early fall.  Then it dries up again in the fall, until the winter rains come.  So:  you have to know your creek, and be aware of the rainfall, particularly of flash floods after heavy monsoon rain days, which can be deadly.  I'm still learning, but even only being here from February to now (mid-September), I've had plenty of wonderful times.

 

And I confidently look forward to many more wonderful times swimming the deep pools, rock-hopping up the rough, turbulent stretches, and floating down the placid stretches of Sabino Creek in the future.  Depending on how many years I've been given, I hope to accumulate a store of heart-filling experiences in Sabino Creek winding its way down Sabino Canyon.  Who knows?  Maybe some day my wife and kids will tenderly place my ashes in this creek, and watch them swirl and spread amongst the dragonflies and past the foraging Coati Mundis as the Saguaros bear witness from the slopes.  I look forward to that happening—at the proper time.  Barnett out. 

 

 

(Warning:  this is a story of how two otherwise sensible people turned their lives upside-down.  Then having done that, they proceeded to turn their upside-down lives on its head—again—and ended up somewhere even more unexpected.  Fasten your seat belts.)

 

Part One.  It seemed such a simple, innocuous notion as the summer of 2021 dragged on.  Tired of Northern California's past three years of summer/fall wildfires and bad air? Of the realization that the fire that destroyed Paradise in 2018—19 miles from our Chico home—was not a one-time aberration but merely the first of a predictable new summer reality?  Tired of air purifiers chugging away inside your home and donning masks most of the summer whenever you go outside?  Leave it!  Drive east from California until you find fresh air, and then camp in that glorious, deep-breathing freshness for six weeks of July and August! 

 

We invested a thousand dollars in camping equipment, jammed it into our all-electric Chevy Bolt, and headed east over the Sierra Nevadas for Reno, where we struggled to lucidly explain our solution to summer California wildfires to Tammy's Dad.  No matter.  The next day we resumed our eastward escape.  Halfway through Nevada's Great Basin Desert, the Air Quality Index (AQI) had begun to drop toward safe, healthy levels.  By the end of the day, as we entered Utah, we could roll the windows down and take big, deep gulps of healthy air.  "Fresh air!" became our byword as we ploughed further east out of Utah to the Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado. 

 

Our Wawona 6-person tent (with added vestibule providing cover for cooking or just lounging out of rain or too much sun) was our Colorado home for the next two weeks.  Fresh air every morning—and all the rest of the day!  The camp grounds were huge, sites large, and a free (hot!) shower was a pleasant five-minute walk away.  Pinyon pines and Gambel oaks surrounded us, and the ancient cliff-houses of Pre-Pueblo peoples awed and inspired.  "Monsoon" thunder storms also awed us, with incredibly dense rainfall several afternoons a week. But the new tent held up fine, and the storms cooled everything off.  We experimented and finally perfected healthy, simple meals on our two-burner Coleman stove.  Lots of walks to the surrounding mesas and mountain flanks.  And infinite quantities of—yes, fresh air. 

 

But Santa Fe and Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch beckoned.  Ray had explored both with his travel-buddy Al on several trips, and had promised Tammy she'd soon see them.  So we reluctantly left Mesa Verde and made the short-day drive to a campground/RV park outside of Santa Fe, pitched the Taj Mahal of tents there amidst more Pinyon pines and now Western junipers, and soaked in the fresh air of northern New Mexico.  But here, in addition to golden sunsets dazzling us from our lawn chairs outside the tent, we had culture aplenty to enjoy.  The old Plaza in Santa Fe's historic center; the nearby St. Francis Cathedral with roots stretching to 1598; the anthropology museums on Museum Hill south of town; and most important the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum just west of the Plaza.  It was all wonderful.  Short drives took us to the Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings in Bandelier National Monument; the old village of Chimayo in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range, with its cathedral dispensing healing soil; a bit further to the old village of Abiquiu, where O'Keeffe lived in the winters; and to Ghost Ranch, where the indomitable artist invented a new, iconic genre of American landscape painting—the surrounding skulls, flowers, mountains, and mesas. 

 

It was in the evenings, watching the sun set in glory and the stars emerge from the darkening sky above our Santa Fe campground, that it happened.  Completely unforeseen, we began to wonder: could we have more of all this than just six weeks a year?  Why not escape the drought and heat and wildfires of California—altogether?  We laughed, skeptically, as we both admitted to these weird notions.  Ridiculous.  True, our kids and my daughter from my first marriage had all left Chico.  True, Chico was still crowded with refugees (and traffic) from the 2018 Camp Fire that had destroyed Paradise.  True, Tammy had just retired from three decades of teaching, only weeks before our Fresh Air Tour began.  And the future in Northern California promised nothing but continued—expanding—occurrences of wildfires, drought, congestion, and dropping levels of water in our beloved Chico Creek two blocks from our home. 

 

But—ridiculous.  Tho Tammy was still in her 50s, Ray was in his mid-70's, and had solemnly vowed that our last move 12 years ago would be his last.  People in their 70's don't pick up and move to a new state, leaving friends and locales cultivated since 1976 (for Ray) and 1984 (for Tammy).  They just don't.  But the notion wouldn't die.  We were genuinely sad as we packed up the tent outside of Santa Fe.  We journeyed a day's drive north to Boulder, Colorado, where our daughter Ashlyn was in the grad program at U. of Colorado.  As we left the arid southwest of New Mexico, we heard of fires in the great forests of central and north Colorado.  We had a hint of elevated AQI.  We had a marvelous time with Ash and her partner Steven, but were glad when range anxiety about traveling over the high Rockies in our electric vehicle (and spotty distribution of recharging stations) persuaded us to return to our Southwest route to get back to California; we had become rather fond of Utah and New Mexico.  We stopped at southern Colorado's Pagosa Springs, and swam in the San Juan river bisecting the town.  We climbed up to the massive red-tinted sandstone Wilson Arch south of Moab in Utah, and stayed in Green River just beyond. The incredible Black Dragon Canyon (rocks over 250 million years old) west of Green River bowled us over. All these portions of the Southwest, so closely clustered together in easy drives, provided not just fresh air, but beauty and a distinctive landscape; yes, we had indeed become very fond of the region. 

 

The upshot:  during our return drive to Chico after 6 weeks of camping and enjoying the American Southwest, the notion of relocating, of beginning a new chapter in our lives, had shifted from something ridiculous and laughable, to something worth exploring seriously.  Both of us were retired, with a living income appearing in our bank account the first of every month—why not?  It was a push/pull sort of thing.  California drought, wildfires, congestion and social unrest pushing, and the Southwest's awesome (and novel) landscape, history, and culture pulling.  Returned to Chico, we had two weeks before leaving for our annual month in Hawaii.  We took a deep breath, thought it through again, then contacted a real estate agent: let's just gingerly dip into the market while we're gone.  Nothing serious, of course.  No prepping our home, no big repairs or painting.  Just informally, tentatively, see what might happen. 

 

We had our usual marvelous time on Maui.  Snorkeling, walking the beaches, swimming, lying in the sand learning the constellations gleaming brightly above us at night.  The Southwest grew a bit dimmer over the month.  Moving to Hawaii also seemed attractive, but the finances really, really didn't make that feasible.  Moving to New Mexico?  Only slightly less outlandish. 

 

The day we arrived back home from Hawaii, we received an offer for our home that would be hard to reject.  We accepted it.  Called the kids and told them we were moving to Santa Fe.  The word quickly spread around our CoHousing community.  Universally, the reaction was either a stiffly polite "Really? That's interesting" (the kids) or a stunned, stammering "Ahhh…" (the friends, who later admitted that it translated to "You guys must be out of your minds!").  We persisted.  Having received bids from moving companies to pack and move us for $14,000, we decided to do it ourselves.  The kids agreed to gather in Chico over Christmas to help us pack what we'd take with us to our new home (close of escrow was January 4).  They duly gathered: daughter Ashlyn and Steven from Boulder, son Lou and daughter Heather with our two grandkids from the Bay Area.  The evening of the first day, one of the gang tested positive for Covid.  All scattered, as per common sense and Covid protocols, leaving only Lou with us. The young fellow knew he was coming down with the disease (which he did), but was determined to pack up those books of Dad's vaunted library which were coming with us to Santa Fe (which he also did). 

 

Tammy did an incredible job of selling a very large portion of our belongings (our lives?) on Facebook Marketplace.  We piggy-backed on the yard sale of a neighbor.  It was still a huge, formidable job to pack up what we had determined to bring with us to Santa Fe into boxes—plates, bowls, utensils, clothes, photo albums, wall-material (photos, paintings), furniture. Und so weiter.  We threw away tons of things into the dumpsters behind schools, at least until we very nearly got arrested for doing so.  Finally the home was empty, and our belongings (our lives?) sitting in a Chico storage locker.

 

Exhausted, and not at all sure that we were not, in fact, "out of our minds", in early January we put our beloved (and by this time thoroughly spooked) cat Inky into her travel cage in the backseat of our rented car (no way the little Bolt was remotely large enough) and drove in three stages to Santa Fe, where we wearily unpacked our bags into the lovely home of Brenda and Kent, former Chico CoHousing friends who had moved to Santa Fe a few years previous and were about to visit grandkids in southern California.  We began to acquaint ourselves with the real estate market in our new home town.

 

Part Two.  To make a long and agonizing story short, Tam and I within ten days in Santa Fe realized two things.  Several snowstorms and many frigid mornings brought home the fact that Santa Fe winters were quite unlike balmy Santa Fe summers. We had moved into a distinctly colder winter climate.  Beyond that, houses in our price range were few, and you had to add 10% onto the asking price and be prepared to hand over cash promptly to even be included in the frenzied bidding for a home.  In other words: winter temperatures too low, home prices too high. 

 

Gulp.  Yes, we ideally should have figured this out before.  But remember:  we were in the very middle of what the Prussian von Clausewitz had described as "the fog of war."  In any enterprise of importance, you make your plans as best you can, and then when the enterprise begins and you are quickly enveloped in uncertainty and unanticipated catastrophes, you just remain nimble and imaginative and make your way boldly through the fog.  I reminded Tam and myself of General George Patton many times in the ensuing days: driving his Third Army tank corps brilliantly through the debris of war toward Berlin in December of 1944, he defied all known laws of military tactical logistics and abruptly wheeled his forces 90 degrees north to rescue 101st Airborne paratroopers facing annihilation by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium.  He succeeded.  Then got his tanks to Berlin.  We would do the same.  We would visit and camp outside Santa Fe every summer—but we wouldn't reside there.  We would, instead, live in—in—uh…   Where the devil were we going to live? 

 

Our new home would be somewhere in the Southwest, clearly. We researched and pondered possibilities in New Mexico other than Santa Fe.  Up north in the countryside around Abiquiu, our much-loved Georgia O'Keeffe country? Down south in Las Cruces, a lovely university-town near the Mexican border?  In the Jemez mountains to the west of Santa Fe, close to Bandelier?  Or—how about checking out that "active retirement community" our friends Harold and Janet had moved to a year ago, and described with enthusiasm in their Christmas letter?  Where was that?  Oh yes: Arizona.  Hmmm. Just north of Tucson, a small burg called Oro Valley. Where the heck is Tucson?  Oh, here it is, way south in Arizona, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, yet.  We investigated all the possibilities, both New Mexico and southern Arizona:  the winters, the water supply, the recreational opportunities, the housing market.  Southern Arizona proved especially intriguing. Tucson had been stockpiling water from the Colorado River for decades, and was flush with the stuff.  (Oro Valley hadn't, tho.)  Of course, where our friends lived, one of the Del Webb "Sun City" developments, was by definition full of old people (or at least 55 years of age, which wasn't really old).  Best of all, we discovered that Tucson and Oro Valley really did have very mild winters.  You could hardly call them "winters," in fact. 

 

So into the rental car goes Inky, again, 1,200 miles under her feline belt and another 500 to go to Tucson.  Two things are clear to us:  we are going to seriously investigate living in water-rich Tucson, and we aren't going to live amongst a bunch of retirees in water-dicey Sun City.  Arriving in southern Arizona, to be polite we have lunch with our friends in the Sun City community restaurant.  Food is delicious; a bright red Vermillion flycatcher flits about in the nearby trees; a tour of the shared community facilities reveals several swimming pools; ceramic studios with virtually free clay and kiln use; a watercolor studio whose artists painting that afternoon welcomed Tammy with open arms; a well-stocked woodworking shop the size of a shopping center; a stained-glass studio; a pool room with excellent tables; tennis courts galore.  But most surprising:  active, attractive, lively residents happy to show you around these facilities, not just making things but learning the ukulele or swimming or bicycling or walking around the community.  All yours to enjoy for a monthly home-owners fee of—prepare yourself—$178. 

 

Tammy and I return to our car after our tour.  We sit silent in the front seat, both staring straight ahead. She finally speaks.  "Well, what did you think, Ray?"  I reply, in a tentative, hoarse voice.  "I want to live here, Tam."  She turns to me quickly, her face alight.  "Me too! I never want to leave!"  So we canceled our upcoming meeting with a Tucson realtor, found a Sun City realtor and soon a home in our price range (no 10% addition required) that we really liked (and so did our kids, when they viewed its Zillow entry). We made an offer the day we toured it, and by that evening were the proud owners of a new home in sunny southern Arizona.  Three weeks later, Ray and his friend Bruce drove a rental truck stuffed with our belongings 20 straight hours from Chico to our new home, where Bruce's wife Jody was keeping Tam company.  After Bruce and Jody's departure, we stared at the ocean of boxes crammed into our new home for another two weeks, until Ashlyn arrived from Boulder, and promptly unpacked all the books Lou had packed back in Chico, which got us started. 

 

As of this writing, we have lived here six months, and love it more every day.  All the kids and grandkids have visited us, and approve of the new home.  We play pool, we swim, we explore the surrounding parks and trails.  We belong to the Tucson Botanical Gardens, and visit regularly. Our neighbors in Sun City, Oro Valley are wonderful, and uniformly friendly and interesting folks.  Tammy and I walk together around our new community every evening, she taking dozens of photos of the stunning sunsets.  Tam is a regular at our immediate neighborhood's Happy Hour on Friday afternoons.  In the mornings, Tam takes long exploratory walks in the community, while Ray traverses two blocks to an entrance into the surrounding Sonoran Desert, and completes "Ray and Tam's double-loop desert walk."  As a biologist, Ray is completely fascinated by the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert, far and away the most diverse and interesting of the four North American deserts.  Tammy has taken up painting again, and is exploring the discipline with characteristic verve and imagination (check her Instagram page).  Ray is a desert rat, and also spends a day a week exploring Sabino Creek in Sabino Canyon (google it!), where he swims and spots wildlife to his heart's content. 

 

So that's the story of how Tammy and Ray took a fresh air tour, which turned into a journey, as we had the eyes to see one chapter of our life together closing, and another opening. At times the journey was frightfully difficult, both physically and emotionally. We stubbornly moved forward, and amidst some stumbles kept searching until we found a place that felt right to us. Somehow we landed on our feet. We understand that this sort of journey is not for everyone.  But it worked for us, our marriage stronger by virtue of our shared struggles and decisions.  We are happy here in southern Arizona.  And yes, it is definitely a new chapter.  Come visit.  Barnett out. 

 

 

 

Guest blog by Edinburgh, UK editor and publisher Jacquetta Megarry; see note at end

 

Michael Brune's 22 July 2020 manifesto accusing John Muir of racism embodies four dangerous fallacies. They are not unique to the Sierra Club. Indeed, in the wake of the George Floyd's brutal death in Minneapolis in May 2020, worldwide reactions have included statue-toppling, cancelling of distinguished names and reputations, and attempts to rewrite history. The proposal to take John Muir's name off an elementary school named in his honour in San Francisco and elsewhere should be seen in this context of over-reaction to a tragic event that took place over a century after Muir's death in 1914. The proposal rests on four fallacies, which must be avoided:

 

1. Don't rely on a few words quoted out of context: evaluate the man's whole life.
Brune's attack relies on a few negative phrases quoted from the young Muir's unedited and unpublished journals. He ignores Muir's many other positive comments and, throughout his long life, his campaigns and travels. Later he travelled and spent time living with Native Americans, and commended their stewardship of the environment.

 

2. Never find somebody guilty by association.
Brune criticises John Muir for his friendship with "people like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who worked for both the conservation of nature and the conservation of the white race". Muir respected Osborn's work as a zoologist and paleontologist. Osborn's role in founding the American Eugenics Society, though, was years after Muir's death. Muir had a very wide circle of friends and colleagues; nobody is responsible for opinions other than their own.

 

3. Don't attribute prejudice to a person for words that became pejorative long after his death.

Fashions in language evolve over time. Words such as "negro" were at first purely descriptive, only later acquiring racist overtones. According to the Jim Crow Museum, until "black power" was coined in 1966, "negro" was how most back Americans described themselves. From the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson promoted the term African-American. Nowadays in some countries it's common to refer to people as black, in others as BME or BAME (black, asian and minority ethnic), BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of colour), and in others simply as people of colour. Before too long, any or all of these may become unacceptable as new words are adopted as "correct".

 

4. Beware of anachronistic judgement and woke rewriting of history.
Muir lived at a time when unthinking racism was the norm, and yet he challenged it by his words, deeds and campaigns. His radical thinking and pioneering conservation should be celebrated, not grotesquely rewritten by people who have barely studied him.

 

--Jacquetta Megarry is the founder of Rucksack Readers, a successful publisher of trail-handy guides to hiking paths in Ireland, England, and Scotland--including The John Muir Trail there.

 

John Muir a Racist?!

Scholars, Sierra Club Leaders Refute Charge

(Online at http://www.raymondbarnett.com/blog/posts/37785)

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes"-Mark Twain

 

     On July 22, 2020, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune stunned the club by unilaterally publishing a manifesto ("Pulling Down our Monuments") accusing founder John Muir of being a racist and the Sierra Club of being complicit ever since in defending and furthering systemic racism in American and the Sierra Club itself. 

     Within hours, a chain of emails began which linked 40 or so Sierra Club members, former officers, and academic scholars who were familiar with Muir's life and writings. Prominent among the themes recurring in these emails (which are ongoing today) was the obvious ignorance of Executive Director Brune regarding John Muir.

 

     The first email in the chain was from former Sierra Club national president Richard Cellarius, who promptly emailed Brune that very day: "Before you further continue the cleansing of John Muir from the Sierra Club…please read and reflect on the essay by Raymond Barnett, 'John Muir: Racist or Admirer of Native Americans?' "

     That essay carefully and at length considers Muir's life and writings, and concludes that "John Muir was not a racist, but to the contrary an admirer and staunch defender of North America's Native Americans, all the while honestly portraying the terrible burden they endured during their Sierra Nevada holocaust, and its affect upon them. Isolated instances in his journals or private letters when he occasionally expresses distaste for the appearances or manner of the holocaust-scarred Sierra Nevada Native Americans cannot be taken out of the much broader context of his many expressions of admiration of the Sierra Nevada and Alaska tribes; his touching enthusiasm for Alaska's Native American life, especially; his insistence that Native Americans were fully human "brothers"; and his heated in-the-face defense of California's Native Americans to a U.S. Army Colonel involved in extirpating them."

 

     The preeminent Muir biographer, Dr. Donald Worster, soon published an article coming to the same conclusion:  "Muir has been dead for more than a century, but if he could speak from the grave, I can easily imagine him agreeing that systemic racism is bad and should be repudiated, for he never published a word in support of black slavery, racial segregation, the Confederacy, forced sterilization of minorities, or genocidal policies toward Native Americans."

 

     And the former President of The Sierra Club Foundation, civil-rights attorney Guy T. Saperstein, also corrected Brune's mis-characterization of Muir in a widely-circulated July 29 email to Brune: "I applaud your efforts to make the Sierra Club more inclusive and to reflect the diversity of America…But I am appalled at the hatchet-job attack by you and the Sierra Club Board on John Muir's legacy. Muir may have made ill-considered comments about Native Americans and blacks as a young man, but he became enlightened about both races after living with black families on his walks in the South and living with Native Americans in Alaska.  How many of his era were even open to living with different races?  He decried the unfair treatment of blacks, and he expressed understanding and appreciation for Native Americans, while denouncing how whites had abused them with alcohol…Rather than the low-life racist you and the Board portray him as, Muir was high in the ranks of enlightened men of his time. Your attack is political correctness run amuck."

 

     Dr. W.R. Swagerty, Director of the John Muir Center at the University of the Pacific, was also dismayed by Brune's actions.  In a widely-circulated October 27 email, he said "I am so disappointed in the Sierra Club's leadership on this…Just as we are seeing so many wonderful children and young adult illustrated books on Muir make their way into the hands of students in elementary schools and junior highs…Sierra Club officers have decided to undermine that effort…May the Club survive, but may the leadership change."

 

     As Muir scholar Lee Stetson (better known for three decades of live portrayal performances of Muir) has put it, "To attribute racist comments to Muir…You'd have to disregard his entire lifetime of considered thoughts and good deeds, and to turn your back on any kind of historical perspective. It's unjust and stupid, but you could do it."

 

     The ignorance and injustice of Brune's mis-representation of Muir outraged leaders of the British hiking community as well; quickly Rucksacks Readers founder Jacquetta Megarry published an article entitled "Should the Sierra Club Apologise for John Muir?"  "My answer to the question in the title is a resounding NO!  The anachronistic self-flagellation of the club's present leaders does nothing to serve its long-term goals. They are displaying considerable ignorance of their founder member's early life, his nuanced writings, and above all of the attitudes prevalent when he lived. They have been seduced by the modern fad for rewriting history, preferably combined with some statue-toppling and feet of clay."

 

     Even some members of the Sierra Club's Board of Directors were upset by Brune's wrong-headed portrayal of Muir.  From Board member Chad Hanson's essay "Who Was John Muir, Really?": "This is the John Muir who is worthy of honor and respect—the Muir who evolved beyond his upbringing and worked to protect Nature while simultaneously promoting admiration for Native American culture and speaking against racist government policies…As we join together to create a more inclusive and just environmental movement, and to bring about needed societal transformations to increase environmental protections, racial equality and social justice, defining people by the trajectory of their lives, rather than by the worst or lowest versions of themselves across the history of their experience, is going to be important. Why? Because we are going to need people to evolve, to become better, if we're going to succeed. John Muir's evolution as a person can serve as an example of this."

 

     In view of these thoughtful statements from a multinational group of Muir scholars, outdoors people, and Sierra Club members, officers, and former officers, it seems clearly hasty and ill-advised to expunge Muir's name from any school, park, trail, or glacier. All those quoted here agree that systemic racism exists in American society and should be corrected. But they also agree that, based on full consideration of John Muir's life and writings, "cancelling" John Muir's name is not warranted, and in fact nonsensical. Certainly, for example, the name "John Muir Elementary School" should be maintained.

     

    Links to complete essays, articles referenced above  (5 to 15 minutes  each):

         Worster article: https://www.californiasun.co/stories/john-muir-biographer-he-was-no-white-supremacist/ (Distinguished historian Worster's A Passion for Nature: the life of John Muir is the preeminent modern biography of Muir)

     Megarry article (includes full Stetson quote): https://www.rucsacs.com/should-the-sierra-club-apologise-for-john-muir/ (Megarry is the founder of Rucksack Readers, a successful publisher of trail-handy guides to hiking paths in Scotland, Ireland, and England). See also her short essay Four Fallacies to Avoid in Evaluating Historical Figures: http://www.raymondbarnett.com/blog/posts/38068 .

     Hanson essay: https://johnmuirproject.org/2020/07/who-was-john-muir-really/ (Pacific Crest Trail veteran Hanson founded the John Muir Project and is a Sierra Club Board member)

     Barnett essay: http://www.raymondbarnett.com/blog/posts/37037 (Retired Biology professor at Calif. State Univ., Chico, Barnett has authored essays and a book on Muir)

The recent wave of protests over the brutality of some police to Black people, and its blooming into a wider protest over the indefensible treatment of Blacks in America and colonialism in general, has been long overdue and thrown a harsh light on a subject that America needs to confront—and resolve. 

 

Deciding what exactly needs to be done, however, is not something that street protests are well-equipped to do.  Toppling statues of Confederate generals and slavery advocates is one thing; but many wonder about statues of Ulysses S. Grant and prominent abolitionists (because they didn't go far enough).

 

Throughout the nation, committees of NGO's (Sierra Club, for example) and local governments (school boards and city councils, for example) are preparing to eliminate prominent names from their monuments and schools. Here I acknowledge the contributions of the protests and the urgent need to begin the righting of wrongs. But I also suggest criteria for these committees to consider, means to ensure that schools and monuments honor not only appropriate Americans, but that the process of making these decisions is also a source of pride and honor. 

 

Three criteria ought to be considered integral to that process.  First and foremost, factual accuracy and context must be assured.  America these days is rife with partisan distortions and outright lies. These should have no part in decisions of import with lasting consequences. 

 

Any assessment of John Muir's attitude toward Native Americans, for example, must include his fulsome and detailed praise of Alaska's tribes after much time amongst them; his long support of Indian rights activist Charles Lummis and his Sequoyah League; and particularly his actions at an 1880 San Francisco dinner party hosted by Mary and John Swett, when he got in the face of Colonel Boyce of the Indian Extermination Campaign and denounced the "mean, brutal policy" as something Boyce should be "ashamed of."

 

A full and representative array of factual information must be acknowledged on any matter being considered, rather than "cherry-picking" isolated episodes out of context. Let's be sure we've got the facts straight before we judge.

 

Secondly, we must keep proportionality in mind; the consequence should "fit" the offense.  To do this, a gradient of offense should be established.  Should the consequence be different for someone who pens an unflattering description of Blacks, than for people (in the port city of Bristol, England, for example) who transported captured Blacks in horrible conditions to the American colonies? 

 

Is our natural revulsion at Muir's occasional unflattering descriptions of Sierra Native Americans affected by our realization that these unfortunate people likely appeared and acted very much as he describes them? They were, after all, in the very midst of a holocaust, their people murdered by White militias, the survivors scraping a living in marginal habitats.  Muir in fact was one of the few Californians of his time to actually look closely and see their suffering. Does it matter that in nearly every instance Muir follows his descriptions with praise of their positive accomplishments, and sometimes a reminder that all men are brothers?

 

In judging offenses and consequences, an offense at the low end of the scale might have the consequence of a prominent plaque at a site acknowledging the offense and its context forthrightly; an offense at the other end of the scale might merit stripping the name of the individual from the site altogether.  And of course, many consequences between these extremes can be devised.

 

Thirdly, we should consider whether relatively minor offenses might be balanced by signal achievements in other, positive areas.  I have read that U.S. Grant fell in love and married a women who owned slaves. As we judge this blemish, should we take into account that General Grant was instrumental in the victory of the North in the Civil War which ended formal slavery? Or that Grant as President was vigorous in his prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan throughout the South after the war?  Are these contributions perhaps more important than the offense of a slave-owning wife? 

 

We must remember: this is not about finding saints and casting aside as fatally flawed everyone who falls short.  Most of us have done some things we're not proud of. But we don't make a career of those shameful acts. Is it appropriate to honor decent, high-achieving folks in spite of relatively minor blemishes? Might not that be more real and inspiring than demanding sainthood? 

 

Every committee of people making these judgements will haves its own way of going about it. But I suggest that these three criteria be carefully considered. Selecting—and de-selecting—our models and heroes is serious work. And so we must have serious, thoughtful people doing that, people experienced in making graded judgments about their fellow Americans.