February 2007, The Country Today
To saunter or hike? Advice from the nation’s leading conservationist
By Dena Wortzel
As I write this, Wisconsin is the in midst of a good old-fashioned cold spell of the kind that makes everyone reminisce about previous life-and-limb threatening bouts with sub-zero blasts. Stories of those past winters remind us that since we survived those times, we’ll probably get through this one too. And as awful as it is to fight freezing pipes and livestock waterers, there are few of us who won’t admit to a certain feeling of triumph when, at last, whatever it is that got frozen or busted gets fixed. For me this week, it was my horse waterer and a toilet that were freezing up and giving me fits.
The other thing about all of this cold that really gets to me is how hard it makes it to do anything outdoors other than take care of the bare essentials. To relieve the cabin fever, my boyfriend brought over a game of Scrabble—which was good entertainment for an evening, even though he beat me. But the next day there I was again, forced back indoors after chores and not interested in putting pictures in photo albums, sorting through closets full of old clothes, or any of those other indoor tasks that, in summer, we all say we’ll do when the days are shorter and colder. I just paced, fretted, and wondered whether it was really too cold to try to get some firewood in, knowing full well that it was.
Today I finally settled down, after several visits from folks who know a lot more about livestock waterers than I do (and who had all the necessary spare parts). Turning to this month’s column, I began poking through writings by and about John Muir, who is considered by many to be the nation’s most influential naturalist and conservationist. Muir’s formative years were spent on a farm in Marquette County, Wisconsin where his family moved from Scotland in 1849 when Muir was eleven. Muir’s name is perhaps more closely associated in many peoples’ minds with California, where his advocacy resulted in the federal legislation that created Yosemite National Park. In fact, Muir is often called the “Father of the National Parks.” But it was on Fountain Lake Farm near Montello that his fascination with the natural world was first awakened.
Muir wrote copiously for the leading magazines of his day about his passion for the American wilderness and all the flora and fauna that make it their home. He also found other avenues for his activism, including the creation of the Sierra Club, an organization dedicated to conservation—a new idea at the time that Muir did much to develop, and the need for which he brought to national attention.
With the Sierra Club, Muir led groups on educational outings into the Sierra Nevadas. Many participants wrote of those experiences, among them Albert Palmer, a young pastor from Oakland, California. In The Mountain and Its Message (1911) Palmer tells of Muir’s disapproval of “hikers”: “I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike!” Hikers, Palmer explains, are the people who rush along the trail, concerned with speed and distance. Muir’s sauntering was quite the opposite. “He never hurried. He stopped to get acquainted with individual trees along the way. He would hail people passing by and make them get down on hands and knees if necessary to see the beauty of some little bed of almost microscopic flowers,” Palmer recounts.
Feeling the cold air radiating from my kitchen window, fantasizing about being outside (and warm), I thought about this sauntering idea. It felt both familiar and rather alien to me. I’ve certainly been known to fling myself at unfamiliar flowers and rush back to the house to look them up in one of my reference books on plants of the upper Midwest. But I rarely walk out my front door with no other object than to experience nature. Rather, I find the flower or glimpse the piliated woodpecker while I’m on my way to check on a fence, repair a washed out section of field road, or chop thistles. It is not as a visitor in nature, but a laboring participant in my little corner of it, that I have most often been filled with love of all that is powerful and precious, fragile and resilient in the beings with whom I am lucky enough to share this place. Which is not to say that sauntering is a bad idea. When I have time for a stroll, on a late summer evening, the pleasure I take in being on my farm without trying to get something accomplished is different from the pleasure of getting things done, but often just as profound.
All of this leads me to wonder how the ways we spend time outdoors—whether working, playing, sauntering or hiking—really change how we think about what “nature” is, who we are in it, and what we should conserve. When we experience it like the saunterer, passing through it with admiration, what does that do for our sense of kinship with trees and flowers? When we mow thistles to make room for plants we like better, what are we saying and what do we learn—about the plants, soils, and ourselves? And if we are like the hiker, blitzing through it all, who have we hurt and what have we missed?
Dena Wortzel is co-director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and makes her home on Birch Run Farm in Iowa County. 608-265-5593, dwortzel@wisc.edu.