In December 1874, John Muir was exploring the Yuba River in California when a windstorm struck. He’d been staying at a friend’s cabin. When the storm hit, he went outside to watch.
Muir wanted to see how the wind affected different kinds of trees.
The waving of a forest of the giant Sequoias is indescribably impressive and sublime, but the pines seem to me the best interpreters of winds. They are mighty waving goldenrods, ever in tune, singing and writing wind-music all their long century lives.
To get a better look, he climbed a 100-foot Douglas spruce.
The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed.
Part of the appeal was the sound. He wanted to hear the song of wind through evergreen needles.
Muir estimated that the tree swept an arc of 20 to 30 degrees in the blow. But he’d seen such trees tested by wind and by loads of snow. He felt safe and enjoyed the show.
When the storm began to abate, I dismounted and sauntered down through the calming woods.
Several notes on these pages have been about the sense of calm most people get from walking through woods. Muir’s essay is a reminder that sometimes the point is not calm but excitement.
• Source: Muir’s essay “A Wind-Storm in the Forests” was The Library of America’s Story of the Week. It’s in John Muir, Nature Writings; Library of America, 1984, pp. 465–73. It was originally published as “A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba” in the November 1878 issue of Scribner's Monthly Magazine and revised as Chapter X in The Mountains of California, 1894. It’s here:
https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/Muir-Wind-Storm.pdf
If this collection of notes has an editorial program, it might be that the world would be a happier place if public-spirited readers signed up for Library of America’s free Story of the Week.
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