A Wind-Storm in the Forests

John Muir (1838–1914)
From American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

Interesting links:
John Muir Exhibit (The Sierra Club)
John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt (photograph)

Buy this book:
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (20% off)
Also available:
John Muir: Nature Writings

John Muir—the surprise star of Ken Burns’s recent PBS documentary, The National Parks (which will be rebroadcast Wednesday nights beginning January 27)—is most remembered for founding the Sierra Club in 1911 and for the preservation of Yosemite, but another of his great legacies is his prose, which introduced a new vocabulary to the genre of nature writing. Passionate and witty, his books and essays captured the national imagination and fueled support for the preservation movement. Originally published as a part of The Mountains of California in 1894, “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” exhibits Muir’s awe and love of the wilderness, twin feelings that motivated one of the most remarkable of American lives.

The mountain winds, like the dew and rain, sunshine and snow, are measured and bestowed with love on the forests to develop their strength and beauty. However restricted the scope of other forest influences, that of the winds is universal. The snow bends and trims the upper forests every winter, the lightning strikes a single tree here and there, while avalanches mow down thousands at a swoop as a gardener trims out a bed of flowers. But the winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten; the Mountain Pine towering with outstretched arms on the rugged buttresses of the icy peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of the dells; they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a leaf or limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove, now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests, the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the sure result.

After one has seen pines six feet in diameter bending like grasses before a mountain gale. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click the right button at the top of the reader to view the story in Google Docs or click here (PDF) to read it—free!