I am fascinated by John Muir and have gotten off the shelf, a too long neglected copy of his The Story of My Boyhood and Youth. I’ll share excerpts of his vivid recollections that he wrote, only a year before his death in 1914. We start out in Dunbar Scotland. He was born in 1838.
He describes a severely disciplined childhood, being forced to memorize all his lessons, “…by the time I was 11 years of age, I had about three fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore flesh.” And when he was (so rarely) free to run, he describes wild and daring play with his friends. When he is 11 we travel with him and his family to settle in Wisconsin, where the landscape fills him with joy. I’ve read many of his stories about Ontario, Alaska and California, which are all archived here on this page.
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