“A ROAD RUNNING SOUTHWARD: FOLLOWING JOHN MUIR’S JOURNEY THROUGH AN ENDANGERED LAND” by Dan Chapman (Island Press, 256 pages, $28).
In September 1867, when John Muir was not yet 30, the future founder of the Sierra Club set off from Louisville, Kentucky, on a long trek into Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. His diary of the trip became “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf,” published in 1916 – two years after his death and half a century after the arduous journey it describes.
Dan Chapman, a Georgia-based environmental reporter, retraces Muir’s path on foot and by Subaru in “A Road Running Southward: Following John Muir’s Journey Through an Endangered Land.” Over the course of several trips, he traces the 1867 walkabout as closely as he can, interviewing environmental experts along the way and, as did Muir, bearing witness to Southern nature under siege from development and pollution.
The book opens near the end of Muir’s journey, in Savannah, Georgia’s Bonaventure cemetery, made famous by John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” While Muir camped there for three days in November and awaited a money order from his brother, the coastal fauna “invigorated Muir’s mind,” Chapman writes, “and made the 29-year-old wanderer reconsider long-held notions of life, death, nature and man’s twisted relationship with all three.” After pointing out that other biographers consider the cemetery sojourn transformative to the man who would one day help establish Yosemite as a national park, Chapman pockets a flashlight and flask of whiskey to camp among the tombstones and mosquitoes.
“I take another sip of rye and channel my inner Muir,” Chapman writes, “but not in a creepy, séance-y way. I picture him, like me, staring vacantly skyward and thinking Big Thoughts.” But Chapman’s reverie is soon interrupted by fireworks in the distance, a ship’s foghorn and rain. When he seeks a dry crypt, he is “freaked out” by an eerie running woman who turns out to be an oxidized bronze statue. And while the humid October night allows Chapman to reflect on the measurable and serious effects of global warming on low-lying Savannah, his mishaps set a comic tone that emerges throughout the book.