Traveling through the two domains that shaped the patron saint of conservation, John Muir.

BY BRIAN DOYLE

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Yearning for the Land: A Search for the Importance of Place
By John Warfield Simpson Pantheon Books, 292 pages, $24

On a wet cold night in february 1849—a dreich night in Scots Gaelic—John Muir's deeply religious father Daniel informed his family that they would leave Scotland the next day for America. In the morning they went by train to Edinburgh and then to Glasgow; soon thereafter they were on the roaring winter Atlantic Ocean, aboard the tiny packet ship Warren, which carried, along with 68 other passengers, pig iron, beer, ale, cotton, linen, and calfskins. Five weeks later, after a "long voyage [with] not a dull moment," according to John, the Warren landed in New York. A day later the Muirs were on the move again—to Albany, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and finally deep into Wisconsin's then-wild countryside. By May, the Muirs owned 160 acres of America: oak and hickory and tamarack forest, marshes, and sand prairie. "This sudden plash into pure wildness—baptism in Nature's warm heart—how utterly happy it made us!" wrote John later. "Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we were still at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us."

From his adolescence on a Wisconsin farm Muir would go on to world fame as a tireless traveler, graceful writer, and powerful voice for preserving wild land—the colorful, eloquent, and passionate patron saint of the modern conservation and environmental stewardship movements both here and abroad. Nearly a century after his death in 1914, his legacy is felt in many spheres: literary, political, cultural, scientific. In a sense Muir's strong presence can be seen in such disparate phenomena as the books of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, the urge to plant only native species, the boom in organic foods, the undamming of America, and the worldwide growth of Green parties.

John Warfield Simpson, also a descendant of Scottish emigrants and a student of the intricate relationship between people and land (he teaches landscape architecture and natural resources at Ohio State University), felt Muir's cheerful legacy so powerfully that he set out to find Muir's roots in Scotland and Wisconsin. The book that resulted is a curious beast: part travelogue and oral history, as Simpson wanders through Wisconsin's Marquette County and Scotland's East Lothian region chatting with farmers, fishermen, earls, dukes, and Ho-Chunk Indians; part history, with Simpson fascinated by the hoary reach of Scotland's story and the equally dense weave of Indian life in Wisconsin; part musing on land and economics (both locales are grappling with declining traditional economies and new identities as tourist destinations); and part essay about stewardship of land, about human responsibility to that which sustains life.

A fussy reader will find flaws in Yearning for the Land, foremost among them the glaring lack of Muir's own voice. A book entirely devoted to Muir's twin homelands would have done well to bring the rugged and exuberant John of the Mountains more to the front of the stage. Similarly, a brief introduction to Muir and his work would have been helpful, although Simpson does append a wonderfully detailed and dense bibliography in which interested readers can wander happily for months.

But this is nitpicking. Yearning for the Land is a ruminative walk across the two regions that together created a man who helped create the modern United States. Simpson takes us to Muir's roots, helps us understand the way these lands educated and carved a remarkable man, and with grace and tact introduces us to the people who live there now—their work, their dreams, their fears, their character. He brings us not only the places that helped shape one grand voice, but the many voices being shaped there still.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, in Oregon. He is the author of three essay collections: Credo, Two Voices (with his father, Jim Doyle), and Saints Passionate and Peculiar.

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