Gustavus author Kim Heacox dove deep into the life of an American icon to craft his stirring new title, "John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire." Heacox, whose highly regarded memoir "The Only Kayak" is a modern Alaska classic, takes readers along with Muir on his late 19th century journeys among the glaciers of the state's southeast region. It was there that he became, as his friend naturalist John Burroughs dubbed him, "Cold Storage Muir," and a nationally acclaimed authority on glaciers who inspired countless others to follow in his studies of the ice.
As Heacox recounts through references to Muir's own works and the works of his biographers and contemporaries, the naturalist first visited Alaska in 1879. Arriving in Fort Wrangell, he set out by canoe with Tlingit guides and missionary Samuel Hall Young to visit the country and "to seek knowledge," as Young explained. What he found was something he did not know existed, a place of mystery and grace that defied all reason. The lure of the glaciers brought him back to Alaska two more times in the years that followed and heavily influenced his writings and activism. The glaciers were a powerful inspiration. Heacox writes:
Muir wanted to inspect every glacier, as if each were a book like the others, similar in general characteristics yet distinctive in its specifics. Some were a deep, compelling blue, others pale and white. Some were heavy with burden, others clean and gleaming. Some were steep and twisted and tortured by crevasses as they spilled down tight mountain valleys; others ran straight and on a gentle gradient that enabled them to wear few wrinkles, as if they'd had an easier life.
In his sketches and notes, Muir made it clear that Alaska's glaciers were simply unforgettable.
After a second trip in 1888, which gave him the adventure with a small dog that inspired the book "Stickeen," Muir returned to the Southeast again in 1899 as a member of the famous Harriman Expedition. It was this journey, in the company of men such as paleontologist William Dall, Forest and Stream editor George Bird Grinnell, photographer Edward Curtis, geologist G.K. Gilbert of the US Geological Survey and naturalist Burroughs -- among many other eminent scientists -- that Muir took special note of the retreat of Muir Glacier. As the group traveled throughout what became Glacier Bay National Park, Muir was reminded of what he had see decades before and how the terrain had changed. Most significantly, sharing his experiences inspired the future work of Gilbert whose landmark title "Glaciers and Glaciation" was published after the group returned from Alaska and included his thorough analysis of how climate, topography and motion affected glaciers. What Muir was imparting was the big picture that glaciers provided about the climate, and the stories their geology held about the Earth's past.
Heacox weaves Muir's journeys around stories about his life back in California, his marriage and fatherhood, the years spent cultivating a successful orchard and the growth of his conservationist career which culminated in meeting President Theodore Roosevelt and establishing Yosemite National Park. Alaska, though, always infused his writings and speeches and as the Last Frontier invaded the American imagination, Muir continued to stress its natural beauty over the more obvious draw of material wealth. In his final years, Heacox writes that Muir was driven to complete a manuscript that would capture what his Alaskan journeys had meant to him.
It was hard work, as always. How to capture Alaska without hyperbole and syrupy language [Robert Underwood] Johnson had criticized him for years before? He didn't have to say Alaska was magnificent; just say Alaska. The name itself was another language, another time, when risk was daily bread and he remembered drinking the cool air like water, and the glaciers—always the glaciers—grand rivers of ice that textured his mind with their crevasses and seracs. How frisky and rambunctious he'd been back then, forty-one going on fourteen, still boyish, a tramp, curious about everything, imaginative, free.
"Travels in Alaska" was completed just before Muir's death in 1914.
There are many layers to Muir's Alaskan experiences and Heacox is careful to consider all of them, from the inspiration it provided his future conservation work, to the struggle he felt between his love of the northern spaces and his wife and children back home. The author manages to take a highly revered figure and place him in the realm of wide-eyed tourist, show how he was as filled with wonder as any visitor upon first sighting the walls of ice. But as much as Heacox's eloquent words and poetic phrases carry readers along on historic adventures, he is also careful to emphasize the science at the root of Muir's travels. Nothing the naturalist did was casual and the author's attention to detail is equally filled with care. Alaskans will likely be particularly struck by the final chapter where Heacox recalls the work to federally protect Alaska's landscape in the years after Muir's death especially in Glacier Bay ("A Monstrous Proposition," according to the Juneau Daily Empire). The story comes full circle, not only for Muir but Heacox as well.
How then to save Alaska? Let it be, said many disciples of John Muir, a growing legion of young, environmentally aware Americans. Slow down. Go softly with an open heart. Stop calling it a frontier. The last frontier is not Alaska, outer space, the oceans, or the wonders of technology. It's open-mindedness. Honor the land and its first nation peoples, and their ability to acquire wisdom, sustenance, and happiness from the wild plants and animals around them. Learn through story. Sleep on the ground. Listen.
Travel by kayak and canoe.
Supplemented with stunning archival photographs and a thorough set of endnotes, "John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire" is the best guide for such a trip and Heacox a literary companion that Muir would certainly endorse.
"John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America" is available at bookstores throughout Alaska and online. Autographed copies can be purchased from Hearthside Books in Juneau.
Contact Colleen Mondor at colleen[at]alaskadispatch.com.