American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

John Muir's "Glad Tidings" at Ashland -- and Elsewhere

Fireside Chat: John Muir's "Glad Tidings" at Ashland -- and Elsewhere 
J. William T. Youngs
9/24/2012
The “heroes” of History 498 are the landscapes encompassed by the national parks and the men and women who worked so hard to protect those landscapes. Again and again in our film and book on The National Parks we hear how important they are to our spirits. And all of this is true. One of John Muir’s most famous statements captures that sentiment well: "Climb the mountains and get their glad tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.”

When we read that passage, we assume that John Muir is writing about the National Parks. After all, the book in which that statement appears is called, Our National Parks.

But those “glad tidings” are available sometimes anywhere on the planet. That thought struck me this weekend at the humble “campground” where I am staying at this moment in Ashland, Oregon. It is an asphalt and gravel parking lot at an Econolodge motel with small spaces for RVs -- not much of nature right here. Look closely and you can see a tiny tree beside my rig. But there will be no campfires here, and no listening to a calming stream flowing by. In fact the only thing flowing by nearby is the traffic on Interstate 5!
Picture
Looking out from my office on wheels, the first thing that catches my eye is the trash area for the motel and a seemingly abandoned truck trailer.
Picture
Not much of nature here, apparently. But wait....When I step out in the morning I feel a welcoming breeze, I hear birds singing, and when I lift my eyes to the hills, I see above the clutter these rocks and trees and trails. 
Picture
And what I sense in that moment is those "glad tidings"!

Now, I don't mean to suggest that we should abandon our study of the National Parks and turn our attention instead to this hillside in Ashland, Oregon! I'm only suggesting that in the Course of studying the big parks, we should also study our own reaction to the nature around us, that we should become students of our own feelings and relate them to the statements about nature that we study in History 498. When do each of us feel the "glad tidings" of nature?!

By the way, I haven't forgotten the National Parks. In about an hour I'll be driving my Spyder into its stable (aka trailer) and driving south into California and Lassen Volcanic National Park.

September 30, 2012

Afterward Before working on this "chat" I searched John Muir's "glad tidings" remark on Google, and I learned something interesting. Apparently what he actually wrote was "good" tidings and not "glad" tidings. But I got lots and lots of Google "hits" for "glad tidings." I think that sounds better, and even more like John Muir, and so I used it in this "chat." But to be thorough, here is the full quotation:

Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer. Camp out among the grasses and gentians of glacial meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of nature's darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. As age comes on, one source of enjoyment after another is closed, but nature's sources never fail.