Riding the Giraffe

I wish I were more like John Muir. This guy used to grab a blanket and some hardtack and take off across the desert or up a mountain or down into a canyon. He never feared not having enough. “’Oftentimes,’ he writes in some unpublished biographical notes, ‘I had to sleep out without blankets and also without supper or breakfast. But usually I had no great difficulty in finding a loaf of bread in the widely scattered clearings of the farmers. With one of these big backwoods loaves I was able to wander many a long, wild mile, free as the winds in the glorious forests and bogs, gathering plants and feeding on God’s abounding, inexhaustible spiritual beauty bread.’

“On these expeditions he had disciplined himself to endure hardship, for his notebooks disclose the fact that he often went hungry and slept in the woods, or on the open prairies, with no cover except the clothes he wore,” writes William Frederic Badé in the introduction to Muir’s A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf.

In one of his most famous essays, “Snow-Storm on Mount Shasta”, Muir describes the night he and a fellow naturalist spent in blasting snow, huddled over volcanic vents that spewed intense heat and foul gases from the side of the mountain. It was such a cold night that they had to continually turn their bodies so that one side could be boiled by the steam from the fumaroles, the other side freezing. While his companion was wishing he had a minister to pray with and dwelling on their certain imminent death, Muir was optimistic: “With a view to cheering myself as well as him, I pictured the morning breaking all cloudless and sunful, assuring him that no storm ever lasted continuously from day to day at this season of the year.”

Muir was fearless; during a strong windstorm, instead of taking refuge indoors, he climbed to the top of a hundred-foot Douglas spruce and whooshed back and forth wildly, perfectly happy. The last thing he was thinking of was food or where he would sleep that night. Meanwhile, I go into a panic attack if I’m not sure when my next meal is coming.

When I camp, I have a huge pack, a tent, a sleeping bag and pad, food, cooking gear, bug spray, sunscreen, a towel, a bathing suit, water… I can imagine setting off with just a blanket and some biscuits, but I also imagine myself shivering, hungry, and miserable. I have never even fasted for an entire day. I often can barely make it from breakfast to lunch without a snack.

The closest I’ve ever been to Muir’s self-sufficiency was when I was three years old. In the big house where we lived was a room that I think was supposed to be a dining room, but it didn’t have a table in it, or at least for a while it didn’t. All it had was a large circular braided rug. At the time, one of my favorite toys was a Playskool riding giraffe. It was a little scooter, with handles on each side of the giraffe’s head. I remember packing a lunch and a blanket and riding my giraffe from the outside edge of the rug around and around the spiral to the center. I had my supplies, and when I got to the center I would eat my lunch and lie down on the blanket. Eventually I’d pack up and ride back out to the edge.

When I think about those “trips”, I remember how satisfied I felt that I could pack what I needed and take it with me. I didn’t need much, and I had my giraffe to take me where I wanted to go. Many years later, when I started to read John Muir’s writings, I was brought back to that feeling. To this day I would love to be so free, so unneeding of anything beyond the very simplest provisions.