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By Root 2951 0

” had engulfed him. An outpouring of theological emotion about Alaska emanated from the great naturalist. All these Inside Passage glaciers regularly thawed and refroze as they muscled and ground downslope. Nothing lasted forever in glacier country. Using religious language, Muir declared the glaciers God’s temples, the theology of ice, frozen temples. Many of the glaciers seemed to have a heavenly blue lantern light glowing from within. Even in wild weather, with “benumbed fingers,” Muir had eagerly investigated the “shifting avalanche slopes and torrents.” With so much weird, picturesque, sublime ice all around him, Muir could barely sleep at night. Every minute he paddled around the Inside Passage, even with constant foggy precipitation, he felt “wet and weary and glad.”33

Regularly, Muir shouted “God Almighty!” and “Praise God!”34 when confronted with a spectrum, or crazy quilt, of icy green-blue hues. The colors of the bay were his stained-glass altar. With his narrow attentiveness to every detail of glacial ice, Muir might as well have had a full-immersion baptism in the Gulf of Alaska. In the surrounding waters Muir continued watching humpback whales showing their flukes, barnacles visible on their sleek backs. Nearly all of Alaska’s glaciers were within six hundred miles of the Pacific Ocean, so there was plenty of whale watching for fun.35 There was a glassy tranquillity to the currents of the Inside Passage that Muir hadn’t expected, adding to the spiritual aura. According to Young, Muir was a “devoted theist” at Glacier Bay, melodramatically paying homage to the “immanence of God in nature [and] His management of all affairs of the universe.”36

In the fall of 1879, Muir left Alaska a changed man. En route back to California, he first traveled around the Pacific Northwest, journeying up the Columbia River, preaching the gospel of the glaciers to anybody who would listen. Just a few months later, he married Louise Stenzel, the daughter of a wealthy agriculture businessman. As a wedding gift, Stenzel’s father gave the Muirs a ranch house with a twenty-acre orchard—including a lot of pear and cherry trees—in Martinez, California. Working as a fruit farmer now, Muir nevertheless remained committed to preserving the integrity, stability, and beauty of Alaska’s glacier community. When picking fruit and filling baskets for market, Muir daydreamed about Alaska, wishing he could slide down an ice sheet on his back, as he had done on a toboggan during his youth in Wisconsin.

II

The following summer of 1880, Muir returned to Alaska’s tidewater glacier land. The Reverend S. Hall Young, recently married to a fellow missionary, was very excited to see his naturalist friend. “When can you be ready?” Muir said upon greeting him in Fort Wrangell, cutting to the chase; “get your canoe and crew and let us be off.”37 Young hired three Tlingit guides in Fort Wrangell—the ones he had been Christianizing—to help him get around the Inside Passage. On this trip Muir, anxious to observe the summer moods, visited by dugout canoe Sum Dum Bay and its maze of tributaries, Taku Inlet, Glacier Bay, and Taylor Bay.38 Glaciers are particularly stunning when viewed from the water level of a canoe or kayak. And the arrogance of sightseers is likely to be squelched by the feeling of smallness that a boat’s-eye view induces. Sailing through glacial fjords was the outdoors thrill of a lifetime for Muir and the others. “Every passage between the islands,” Young wrote in Alaska Days, “was a corridor leading into a new and more enchanting room of Nature’s great gallery.”39

When hiking in Taylor Bay by himself, with only his mutt Stickeen as a companion, Muir had a hair-raising near-death experience. The higher they climbed, the less hemlock and spruce forest there was; then there was no plant life at all. Muir had brought with him only an ice ax and half a loaf of bread. Foolishly he had left his gun, rain gear, blankets, and matches back at camp. Impetuous enthusiasm had its shortcomings. A sense of doom now fell over the outing from the first.