Tag Archives: John Muir

Monstrous Beauty at Loch Ness

by Woody

Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published on March 19 and available at all online stores or ordered at local bookshops.

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Like John Muir’s Scottish boyhood home-turned-museum in Dunbar, “The Writer’s Museum” on the historic Royal Mile in Edinburg was once a three-story residence. Dating to 1622, as Lady Stair’s House, the latter is now dedicated to the lives of three favorite-son wordsmiths: Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Time and again on our recent trip, My Better Half and I crossed paths with this famous literary trio—in parks with their statues, pubs with their portraits, even their footsteps in Edinburgh Castle where the 16th-century “Honours of Scotland” crown jewels are on display. Hidden from enemy forces, and lost, the priceless scepter, sword, and crown were found a hundred years later by Sir Walter Scott.

The Highlands, en route to Loch Ness, are gorgeous.

Mr. Stevenson’s words, meanwhile, can be found engraved on plaques and painted on public walls with commonplaceness throughout Scotland, including this popular quote: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

And yet, with apologies to the author of “Treasure Island,” I found the opposite to be true on our day of treasured travel through the Highlands to Loch Ness. To be honest, I had not expected much; certainly I did not anticipate seeing the famous monster; but I was awed by the ruggedly bucolic scenery and immenseness of the bottomless waters.

Loch Ness is nearly a marathon’s distance long, 23 miles to be precise, and so deep that only two humans, in a diving bell, have reached its bottom. That is 10 fewer people than have walked on the moon and here is an even more jaw-dropping figure: Loch Ness is said to contain more water than all the lakes and rivers in England and Wales combined.

Perhaps most startling of all is the color of the water—black, coal black, black as midnight even in daylight due to peat tannins runoff from surrounding foothills. Underwater you cannot see six inches in front of your nose, our guide Brian noted.

Speaking of water, no sooner had our Loch Ness boat tour begun when Brian informed us that “whisky”—with no “e” in Scotland, he emphasized—means “water of life.” He continued, with a wink and a raised flask: “The more whisky you drink, the better chance you have of seeing Nessie!”

Nessie, of course, is the celebrated Loch Ness Monster. Truth be told, even sober as a saint, for it was barley noon and neither MBH nor I had followed the wee impish Scotsman’s breakfast example from the previous day by adding a splash of “water of life” to our coffee, we did see Nessie…

…on T-shirts, ball caps, refrigerator magnets, tea towels and a thousand more items in the souvenir shop.

Instead of a Brontosaurus-necked tchotchke, my favorite Loch Ness keepsake is a short story Brian, wearing long socks and a kilt, shared in a tartan brogue as thick as his build which was as stout as a refrigerator on which to put a Nessie magnet: “I had an investment banker on my tour, a bigwig successful guy, who scoffed at what a boring job I had giving the same tour day after day.

“So I asked him,” Brian continued. “ ‘Do you go to the same office every day?’

“ ‘Yes, with a corner view, for 35 years,’ he answered, proudly.

“And I said, ‘Well, this is my office…’ ”

Brian spread his arms wide, wide as the wingspan of the bald eagle we saw moments earlier floating on an updraft, then swept a hand across the stunning Highlands landscape.

“ ‘…and it gets redecorated every day.’ ”

Next week: The angel’s share and Titanic tears.

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published on March 19 and available on Amazon and other online stores or can be ordered at all bookshops.

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Travels Begin With a Wee Side Trip

by Woody

“You gonna have a wee splash of whisky in that?”

There was no “e” in “whisky,” but perhaps four in weeee, for the question was posed in Scotland and thus a perfectly normal one even early in the morning.

Indeed, the sun was barely awake, My Better Half not much more so. She had walked to a café near our hotel in Edinburgh, in Old Towne to be specific, for her coffee fix while I was getting my caffeine-like jolt with a run. The query had come from a gentleman, weeee as a garden gnome and seemingly as old as a folktale, so Scottish his skin had a tweed texture and tartan liver spots. He was sitting on a stool at the counter and readily produced a silver hip flask with which he gestured warmly towards MBH. To the libations offer he added a wink that was purely playful, not full of flirtation, and MBH played along, quipping quickly: “Oh, not today, I don’t think…

“…but maybe tomorrow!”

The Scotsman, however, was personally having none not of this waiting until tomorrow business. As MBH shared in her laughing retelling to me: “The whisky on his breath almost made me tipsy.”

A trip, if you loosen the reins, will escort you to wonderful places you had not planned to go. And so it was that our four days in Scotland, followed by ten in Ireland, began with a side trip that was not on our mapped out Scottish itinerary that included Edinburgh Castle, the Highlands and Loch Ness, and historic St. Andrews Golf Course.

“Where’re you from?” the Scotsman with the flask asked in follow up.

“California,” replied MBH.

The Flaskman told her the most famous Californian he knew was John Muir and asked if she was going to go visit his birthplace and boyhood home in Dunbar, a quaint coastal town only half an hour away by train.

We had not planned to do so, an egregious oversight on my part for I always make a point of visiting famous authors’ homes when we travel. Indeed, we have been to Muir’s manor in Northern California, but I had not realized his birthplace was so close at hand. And so it was that on only our second day abroad, our trip took its first serendipitous detour.

Two fifteen-minute walks sandwiched around a relaxing train ride through beautiful countryside brought us to the center of town. Heading towards the North Sea on High Street we passed a towering bronze statue of Muir as a boy, one upraised arm pointing at three gulls in flight just beyond reach, and half a block later arrived at address 128.

The John Muir Birthplace Museum is much larger than I had anticipated, a boxy, three-story white building with eight front windows and a red-tile roof, a grand home in the early 1800s.

Within, we were greeted by a docent with eyes bluer than the clear sky on this day, a sunny smile as well, and an accent thicker than local Cullen skink chowder. The latter made it easy to imagine one was conversing with Muir himself. Upon learning from where we hailed, Mr. Muir-sound-alike noted, “This is the first bookend of his life story,” and proceeded to cheerfully regale us with some early tales.

 That evening, raising a whisky – sans “e” and sans coffee – I toasted our travels ahead with a Muir quote I had seen on display: “The sun shines and the stars, and new beauty meets us at every step in all our wanderings.”

Our wanderings continue next week…

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Woody’s debut novel “The Butterfly Tree: An Extraordinary Saga of Seven Generations” will be published in late March.

Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Mining Gold In Yard’s Wildness

by Woody

In fifth grade, in springtime, in the afternoon, Mr. Hawkins, one of my all-time favorite teachers, grounded me from recess and instead gave me an assignment as a small punishment for talking in class.

While my classmates raced onto the playground, I was sent outside to the school’s front yard and told to fill a sheet of notebook paper with observations. I returned in about five minutes, bored and with an empty page, begging to go join my friends in kickball.

“Don’t come back until the page is filled,” Mr. Hawkins reprimanded, adding encouragingly as I remember it like yesterday: “Look up in the sky, look at the trees, get down on your hands and knees and really look.”

It may not be memory’s sweet exaggeration to report that I filled up two full pages, even three, with my findings. Certainly, long before reading these words by John Muir I learned their meaning that day: “There are treasures hidden in the glorious wildness like unmined gold.”

Hidden, too, in a schoolyard’s grass, bushes and trees.

This all came flying back to my mind, like a red robin alighting on a dogwood branch, the other day when I spent some time really looking at the drought-resistant wildness of my front yard.

This close examination was further tied to Mr. Hawkins, who doubled as the school’s science teacher. Whenever a spider intruded in our classroom he would capture it beneath an upturned coffee cup, slide a piece of paper below, and then release it outside. He explained that while spiders may seem scary, they benefit our ecosystem by eating insects and pests.

Ever since, except in the middle of the night when I choose the heel of a shoe instead of a cup, I try to catch-and-release spiders as I would a lovely rainbow trout.

This time, when I bent down to liberate the eight-legged guy – or gal – in the front-yard landscape, I sighted a beetle crawling on a decorative boulder. I proceeded to watch it seemingly defy gravity by climbing down the steep face like a rock climber rappelling Half Dome.

Next, my eyes followed the paroled spider as it slowly scaled the long arm of a cactus plant. By now, I was back in the fifth grade, literally back on my hands and knees, filling up a lined notebook page in my mind.

A single file of ants marched across a dry creek bed of smooth stones; a butterfly, black and orange but not a Monarch, flitted by; a bird chirped out of sight and leaves overhead fluttered like nature’s gentle wind chimes; a second butterfly joined the first and they did an aerial ballroom dance together; another bird, a crow I believe, made a short commuter flight from our rooftop to the top of a plum tree.

For a long while I observed a lone worker bee go from flower to flower to flower like a trick-or-treater from door to door. In the midst of this viewing, a stray cat, black as midnight with golden eyes that seemed neon-lit, strolled up beside me as if to ask: “Hey, buddy, have you seen any mice in there anywhere?”

To this I would have thankfully answered “no” for I am too phobic of rodents to rescue and relocate one with a coffee mug.

And so it went, for fifteen minutes or maybe it was 45, I do not know. I do know this, as Mr. Muir also wrote: “In every walk with Nature, one receives far more than he seeks.” Mr. Hawkins would have surely agreed.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.

Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and  “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com

 

If Ever Twain And Muir Had Met

by Woody

If Ever Twain And Muir Had Met

Sunday past, a special literary date passed by, as it does annually, once again as unnoticed by most people as a wildflower in the woods. John Muir was born in 1838 on April 21 and 72 years to the day later, in 1910, Mark Twain died.

Except for a story believed to be apocryphal of the two famous writers attending a dinner party hosted by Robert Underwood Johnson, a New York editor, there is no account of Twain and Muir having met. Below, using their own written words, is how I imagine the conversation might have gone had they shared a campfire in Yosemite.

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Muir: “Another glorious day, the air as delicious to the lungs as nectar to the tongue.”

Twain: “Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.”

Muir: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Twain: “The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one – to defeat the laws of Nature.”

Muir: “God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”

Twain: “Architects cannot teach nature anything.”

Muir: “Compared with the intense purity and cordiality and beauty of Nature, the most delicate refinements and cultures of civilization are gross barbarisms.”

Twain: “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”

Muir: “No synonym for God is so perfect as Beauty. Whether as seen carving the lines of the mountains with glaciers, or gathering matter into stars, or planning the movements of water, or gardening – still all is Beauty!”

Twain: “One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara Falls, to majestic mountains.”

Muir: “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.”

Twain: “There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.”

Muir: “One day’s exposure to mountains is better than a cartload of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers’ plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.”

Twain: “Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

Muir: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”

Twain, bombastically: “When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”

Muir: “Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”

Twain: “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”

Muir: “The power of imagination makes us infinite.”

Twain: “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

Muir: “The snow is melting into music.”

Twain: “Ah, that shows you the power of music.”

Muir: “I had nothing to do but look and listen and join the trees in their hymns and prayers. In our best times everything turns into religion, all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.”

Twain: “I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.”

The two wordsmiths’ conversation concludes next week in this space.

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Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com.

Check out my memoir WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and my essay collection “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” …