Moving Beyond Muir: Part 1
On right-sizing our heroes, coming to terms with troubling inheritances, and creating change through small conversations (all while going for a hike)
“Deflation Without Dismissal”: On the Need for Right-Sizing Our Heroes
When I was a bookseller, I had the opportunity on more than one occasion to meet my literary and intellectual heroes. More often than not, I left those experiences disappointed. There was the author who tried to be friendly with me by mocking my customers for their enthusiastic fandom, and then managed to shut down the Q&A after the first question with a brusqueness I have not since seen emulated, leaving me as the event host flustered and embarrassed by their poor manners. Or the famous academic and radical organizer who arrived sweaty and with their shirt mis-buttoned in more than one place, leaving me, as I welcomed them to the store, slightly unsure if I should try to gently call attention to their appearance so they could clean it up just a bit before they got in front of the packed audience, which included a local film crew. (I did not; I decided that type of caretaking was not in the job description.)
In the world of climate activism, I likewise had the chance not only to meet some of my direct action heroes, but also to work with them. It was a hard lesson, but an important one, to see how a strength in one context—say, the quiet scheming and unwavering self-certitude necessary to pull off a risky and high-profile action—could be utterly destructive in another, such as organizational development or team-building, in which transparency and the ability to listen to and incorporate others’ perspectives generally stand as the more important strengths.
Advice to avoid putting others up on pedestals is easy enough to come by, but harder to implement in a culture that prizes fame and stories that center singular heroes. When we cannot have a hero, we must have a villain; and so we see a strangely Manichaean dualism play out everywhere, in both our polarized politics and our own social groups, where one can be either good or evil but never inbetween. Cancel culture is just one logical extension of an impulse already clearly embedded in American life, in which we demand perfection or declare you beyond redemption (sitting in a strange tension with that other impulse to offer those who can simply be famous enough pardons all scandals and offenses in advance).
One solution to polarization, then, might be to readjust our expectations and our own responses to public figures, to make them neither demons nor angels, and to understand the exaggerated emotional terrain that encourages us to do so. To practice what writer Maggie Nelson, after the psychologist D. W. Winnicott, calls “deflation without dismissal.”1 We may have valid emotions, but the mode of expression—a child’s tantrum or an adult’s self-indulgent pity party—get in the way of other important things. In our response to others caught up in such moments, it’s critical not to deny the impulse or the emotion leading to our public exaggeration, which can trigger defensiveness and lead the screaming toddler or moody teenager to simply escalate their stance. We want to recognize the emotion and the needs it represents, but neither buy into it all or get too worked up ourselves; to deflate but not dismiss.
I think of it as “right-sizing.” In the world of cultural heroes, it means to see both clearly what those I admire have achieved, and where their blindspots and self-indulgences, and even sometimes atrociously big failures, also exist. And it includes remembering that one’s own self-worth need not be bound up with our sense of connection to such figures; allowing for that connection to change, and once again, withholding our temptation to judge our past or current self as either completely bad or completely good. To also right-size, then, our sense of identification with public figures as we more deeply reflect on their full impact. As we struggle with questions of legacies in this country—whom to hold up and honor, and how to appropriately remember those who played important roles even as they remained complicit in, or sometimes more directly committed, great acts of violence—it seems an important personal practice, one that can inform the larger dialogue.
I’ve been trying, then, to try and right-size my heroes. It’s similar to the process many of us go through in adulthood, of readjusting our understanding of our parents—viewing them as people often dealing with difficult circumstances, the trappings or trauma of their own upbringings, and able (for those who are lucky) to provide for some emotional needs, but likely not all. Early and mid-adulthood is a process of reflecting upon what we hope to take and leave from our families of origin, as a way of trying to be better ancestors for the next generation.
I think many of us cling to our old heroes, and to beliefs in their infallibility, because it offers us a type of comfort we may otherwise lack, especially for those of us who find our families of or cultures of origin to be lacking in stability and everyday role models. Heroes give us authorities we can rely on and believe in, stories about leaving the world in a better place. Our stories about our heroes provide a sense of safety, and some security that there are good people out there moving things on in the right direction, when it feels so hard to do so ourselves.
Given that, it’s no wonder that we find it difficult to face the harm that many of our heroes have inflicted. We don’t yet have a lot of other cultural forms that keep us grounded during these times filled by the onslaught of bad news and uncertainty and always more rapidly unfolding change, be it environmental or technological. But these attachments, I think, prevent us from finding the more genuine solid ground we might land upon in the future, should we seek a more clear-eyed view of the legacies of our idols. Releasing those emotional ties isn’t easy, and again, we don’t have a lot of popular models for doing this, ones that don’t simply shunt the former hero over into the “villain” category. This is why I tried to document one such process in the essay I shared again last month, “Getting Over Guthrie.”
We need models of right-sizing influential figures from our past, of deflating their grand status without dismissing their contributions—and without forgetting the harms they caused. After my hike through the High Sierra last month, I think we may be in a cultural moment in which we at last see what that right-sizing can look like, and maybe, a few years down the road here, walk away with a model to apply to other public figures in our recent past. The hero I think we’re ready to right-size, who I’d like to deflate without dismissing—while keeping a steady eye on the harm he caused—is John Muir.
John Muir: Not My Hero, Still My Inheritance
Having said all that, we come to a funny fact: John Muir has never been one of my personal heroes. He’s in that canon of male authors lionized within environmental and outdoorsy circles both but whose written works I find just a tad… dull, if not downright boring. Or overly florid. Or maybe lacking in any sense of how to build drama in a story? Or a whole lot of things that have prevented me from ever getting more than a few pages into a given work, until I felt compelled to actually sit down with them in order to write this particular essay. And honestly, I was a little uncertain I’d make it through them this week either; I’ve been using The Mountains of California to put myself to sleep each night.
Beyond his written work, I’ve not any real attachment to two of Muir’s other notable creations: the Sierra Club or Yosemite National Park. The organizations in which I’ve been involved have often cast a bit of side-eye at the Sierra Club (what else was one to do as they helped usher in the era of “green consumerism” under the aegis of corporate responsibility with none other than Clorox?) And Yosemite, beautiful though it may be, is not where my heart finds its home in the mountains; life circumstances have led me in other directions, and while I’ve curiosity about the area’s backcountry, the crowds of Yosemite Valley make it unlikely I’ll ever take too much time there.
So yes, maybe it’s easier for me to call for our continuing the reevaluation of his legacy, and I’m approaching this with a different set of attachments than some of you who may have come through traditions or institutions more caught up in Muir myth-making.
Even so, I don’t feel exempt from participation in this discussion. For even with all the caveats above, there’s no escaping that the very way most of us here in North America move through the mountains—the self image we carry of what it means to be an adventurer on a hike, the spaces we seek out, our affection for a set of lands managed in a very historically particular way—it all bears the mark of his thinking. We must wrestle with the inheritance Muir left us, its clear influence upon us, whether we’ve a bookshelf full of his writings or no.
As Fred White writes in the introduction to a new edition of Essential Muir:
“His writings about nature have shaped generations of thought about public lands for both good and ill, and as such his literary art remains a powerful source of insight that deserves continued reflection from our current vantage point.”
For that “continued reflection” to take place, those of us who find John Muir boring, or who simply feel as though we’ve already moved on, need to recognize that we’re not exempt from this public conversation; in fact, we have a critical role to play. Trying to step into that role is part of what I did on my three-week hike in the High Sierra earlier this summer. I finished my hike with a renewed sense that we’re in a moment in our relationship to Muir that we have not been before, one that allows us to right-size his legacy and heal harms in which both he, and many of us reading this piece, have been complicit.
Culture Shifting on the Nüümü Poyo, One Trailside Chat at a Time
To give you a sense of that moment, let me share some experiences from my time on trail.
Early on June 16, I packed up my camp at the Whitney Portal campground and slowly made my way up the eastern side of Tumanguya with a 45-lb pack. It would be nearly two weeks until my first resupply, but that did not mean I would be lacking for company. That first day, I crossed paths with a seemingly endless stream of hikers coming down from their summit attempts. And once I made it over the crest and headed northbound, I would be in the company not only of weekend and week-long backpackers, but the flood of PCT thru-hikers also heading north, as much of what people call the John Muir Trail overlaps with the Pacific Crest Trail in the High Sierra.
Knowing that there would be this many people on trail, I came prepared to talk, to ask others if they knew more about the history of the route we were all on and to see what it would be like to try and de-center the trail’s present namesake. Only I hadn’t quite worked out yet exactly how I intended to do that, which is why, early on June 17, I found myself without the words to respond to the man in front of me, hands and hiking poles waving. He was describing the ecstasy he’d been in the last few miles, coasting along the gentle up and down through the sequoias. “I felt like I was channeling the spirit of John Muir!” he crowed.
I managed to respond with an eloquent, “Huh.”
To be fair, it was still early morning. (Close friends know the extent to which my social abilities in the morning hours are… limited.) I managed to answer some of his questions about my own trip and glean some useful info about the trail ahead, as he had just covered the terrain I’d be passing through. But the conversation let me know I was going to need to be a bit more intentional about developing a rap.2
A week later, and I was starting to get the hang of bringing it up in conversation. The spiel was becoming something like, “You know, I began trying to learn a little bit about the history of the trail before I started my hike, do you know much about it?” Most people would admit they did not, allowing me to continue on: “Well the route is based on trails that were already here, made by Indigenous groups for trading but also for travel, before Muir decided to come play around up here and call it a ‘wilderness’ without anyone in it. Some folks are trying to revive use of one of its original names, the Nüümü Poyo, or ‘the people’s trail.’”
There was the occasional blank look or silent pause after this, as someone didn’t quite know how to process the new information. Older men, I found, were the ones most likely to ignore it all, and move the conversation on to something else. Frequently, though, people were appreciative of the chance to learn more context. Often, they maybe knew vaguely that displacement had occurred to create the national parks but didn’t know any specifics, hadn’t yet had a chance to pause and connect the dots about the trail we were all walking.
In stark contrast to some of those blank stares, one younger fellow immediately said, “Thank you! I’m going to start calling it that right now!” Our exchange had been so short I was taken aback. “Really? Just like that?” I said. He confirmed his earnestness and his happiness at having learned a bit more of the route’s history and the ability to use one of the original Indigenous names for the trail and headed off practicing pronouncing the words. I stood there staring after him, marveling over the interaction. Sometimes, the work of changing our hard-headed culture takes so long. And then sometimes, it’s a single 60-second conversation, and there a person goes, doing something in a new way. (Or a new practice of an old way, as the case may be here.)
Reminders of that hard-headedness were there to be found, though. At one ranger station in Kings Canyon, I stopped and spoke with the person on duty. I introduced myself as “hiking the Nüümü Poyo,” to test the waters and see their response. “Thank you for calling it that,” she told me. This, too, was exciting, to see someone in NPS so openly on board, and I was happy to take the opportunity to ask what it was like, working for the National Park Service while trying to support Indigenous sovereignty issues. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that it’s complex; she lamented over the fact that even people who agree that change is necessary often don’t try very hard, or shrug their shoulders and give up in the face of the giant and often slow-moving bureaucracy. I inquired about even the simple use of land acknowledgments, as I had seen one posted at the station one valley over. It wasn’t standard practice, just something individual rangers opted to do. She had one up too, she told me, until someone had come by and torn it up.
I left the conversation emboldened, feeling like these tiny chats I’d been having were of value. The trail was clearly contested terrain, and I could play at least one small part in changing the conception of who belonged and of making small destructive acts like defacing the acknowledgment less likely.
So onward I went, sometimes awkwardly and sometimes less so, asking people if they knew the history of the trail, if they’d heard of this other name that wasn’t for one lone adventurer but a whole people with a much longer connection to the place.
On July 4, I made it up and over Donahue Pass, officially entering Yosemite’s backcountry. And it was in Yosemite that I would feel the rightness of this moment for reevaluating the simple adulation many feel for Muir—that change was beginning to happen, even as more was still needed. I had a longer-than-usual conversation that day with a Muir defender, who noted the astute natural observations of which Muir was capable, and the likely results of what might have happened to the land were the parks not created. But he listened as I tried to talk about what I imagined it felt like, to be a descendant of someone whose family had been violently forced off this very land, to see the name of someone plastered all over the place, on maps and signs, while knowing this person had made racist remarks and furthered the belief that your people did not belong here.
In contrast, on July 6, my last full day of hiking, as I began the first part of the long descent into the Ahwahnee Valley (what we now call Yosemite Valley), something completely new happened: party after party—almost all backpackers just starting out on their long journeys, doing the route I was finishing, just in reverse—already knew what I had to tell them. Knew the history of displacement, knew the trail could also be called the Nüümü Poyo, all of it. They were, however, probably confused at both my surprise and excitement over this fact. But I tallied it up afterwards: I’d likely spoken with more than 200-plus hikers about this, trying to highlight these sidelined stories and suggesting that we might call the JMT the Nüümü Poyo as a way of beginning to be more truthful about that history and respect the ongoing relationship with their traditional territory that Indigenous groups have throughout the High Sierra. And in those prior three weeks, maybe a handful knew a portion of what I had to say. But here, back to back, were folks who already knew, and were already adjusting the way they saw things.
This is how change happens: one conversation after another, until what was new and novel is just the norm.
So What About Muir Again?
In these conversations, I rarely went after the figure of Muir himself, save for that sometimes snarky remark about his declaration of an already-peopled place as “wilderness.” My focus, instead, was on expanding shared understanding of the history of the land, with what slim knowledge I had of that myself, and only as an outsider, not as a member of any of the groups whose relationships with those mountains goes back generations, “to time immemorial.” Personally, I find this deeper knowledge of place and calls for restorative justice both meaningful enough for the changing of names, not to mention the changing of our practices pertaining to land management and governance. But again, Muir’s not my personal hero.
But—those last interactions in Yosemite aside—he remains a hero for many. And where I encountered direct resistance to reinstating Indigenous names for routes and places in the Sierra Nevada, it was from those who clearly held Muir up as someone worth remembering and honoring.
So I returned to Muir’s work once I was off trail, thinking maybe they wouldn’t be that bad. Maybe I was missing something. Maybe Muir wasn’t quite as racist as I’d heard; from multiple people on the trail I was told something along the lines of “it’s only a passage or two, and it’s not really representative of his thinking over time.” Maybe the whole unhelpful dichotomy of nature vs. culture and wilderness vs. human wasn’t as sharp as I remembered, either. I could suspend judgment for a while until I’d had a chance to verify it all myself.
Muir fans, I now have to ask you: have you really read those texts? Because I have, at last, and the racism isn’t subtle; it’s glaring. And it very clearly helps structure the entire worldview that shapes Muir’s conception of nature, and gives us the wilderness vs. people divide that has made it even more difficult for us to address the environmental and climate crises we find ourselves facing.
That worldview, though, is one which we’ve all inherited, whether we ascribe to it or no, and it shapes a great deal of the world around us. That’s why it’s something we all need to wrestle with, even if Muir never made it into our personal pantheon of heroes.
So in upcoming posts we’ll be taking a look at some of Muir’s writing and other legacies. Potentially, by deflating Muir’s stature as a hero, we can begin to see more clearly what pieces of his thinking we want to hold on to, and what we can—and ought—let go of. Might doing so change our own relationship to the lands over which he has had an oversized influence? Entirely possible. I hope you’ll join me for the rest of this short series to see.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg
Nelson introduces and then calls back to the term “deflation and dismissal” in her 2015 book, The Argonauts.
A ‘rap’ is just an organizer’s elevator pitch, your very short way of both introducing a topic and possibly following it with an ask, such as a signature on a petition.