LITMIR.BIZ

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was, as Muir said, the traditional Scots one “of making every duty dismal.”

      Naturally, the yard of the grammar school reflected the values of the school proper and the national culture. And as the demands and punishments of the school were more severe than those of the primary school, so were the schoolyard games. The individual fights were now often serious fistfights that resulted in bloody noses and black eyes. The evidence of the former, said Muir, could always be washed off in a fountain before going home. But the latter mark was more lasting, and it was no good to tell his wrathful father that the other boy had struck first. Whatever the case, Daniel Muir struck last, and so the boy was likely to suffer two beatings on any given day—three if Master Lyon had occasion to punish him.

      Kindred diversions of the schoolyard included a game in which two boys would stand toe to toe and thrash each other’s bare legs with limber switches, the object being simple, sober-faced endurance. The boy who winced or showed the least bit of discomfort was the loser and the object of savage ridicule. “Wee Willie Wastle,” a game in which a boy would defend his sandhill against one challenger after another until knocked off it, was also popular. The game had its genesis in Cromwell’s siege of the Castle Hume in 1651, during which he indeed knocked Willie Wastle off his castle.

      Still, after all these thrashings at home and school, John Muir was later able to find some redeeming quality in it all, for, he said, the thrashings had been “admirably influential in developing not only memory but fortitude as well.” Here, whatever the origins, were two qualities Muir was to need and display abundantly in those solitary adventures of his mature years for which he was now unconsciously preparing.

      Cromwell and his defeat of Willie Wastle were facts of history, and as such Johnnie Muir and his fellows were compelled to learn them. But it is doubtful that such book facts were as exciting to them as that wider, more immediate history text that was their surroundings. Dunbar, geographical outpost though it was, had been a historic crossroads, and the crumbling hulk of Dunbar castle was both fact and metaphor of just how much history had been enacted here. A thousand years old, the castle lineaments were almost shapeless now, and little lawns of flowers and sod had grown in places where the masonry had at last grown tired of the centuries of effort and had sunk down to sleep. Through its remaining sagging arches the boys could see Bass Rock lumping up out of the Firth of Forth while the sea surged and ebbed through what once had been lower rooms but were now dangerous, sucking grottoes the boys dared each other to enter.

      They knew in a general way the highlights of the castle’s history, and in later life Muir could recite these: his college roommate recalled Muir scaring the Wisconsin youths with ghostly tales of the castle and its inhabitants. They might have known, for instance, that Edward I had besieged the castle in 1296 while its defenders hurled insults at the invading “Sassenachs,” calling them long-tailed curs after the Scots belief that the English actually did have tails. And as good Scots boys aspiring to become soldiers themselves and perhaps recapture some of Scotland’s lost glory, they would have known that it was this campaign that had ended in Edward’s theft of the Scots stone of possession, the Stone of Scone, an action that launched the career of the great William Wallace. On the castle heaps the boys played Wallace, whose legend, Muir was later to note, was a sort of Scots Bible. They relived his great victory at Stirling Bridge, his single-handed slaughter of the Sassenachs as recounted in legend and ballad, and lamented his betrayal to the English, after which, said Holinshed in his famous Chronicles, the patriot chief was drawn and quartered and parts of him dispatched to various public places as a warning to potential Scots troublemakers.

      Dunbar castle had also been the place of Edward II’s retreat after the Scots had defeated him at Bannockburn, and this event, too, was transformed into a schoolyard and castle game. Indeed, so many battles had been waged here that the boys believed that every bone they found about the ruins was the last relic of some ancient warrior, martyred in Scotland’s cause.

      Daniel Muir did not approve of these informal lessons of the castle, the harbor, or the seashore. To him they could not prove anything but destructive, for in such random, unsupervised freedom John and David might easily learn bad words (which they did) and worse ways. He attempted to make a sort of prison-playground of the high-walled back garden and keep the boys in it whenever they had time on their hands. He was, of course, unsuccessful, and at some point he must have given up in all but a pro forma way. For when spring came to the Lothians and the birds—larks, mavises, and robins—began to call from the westward-lying meadows, the boys could not be kept home.

      With their friends, Willie Chisholm, Bob Richardson, and others, they would go out into the countryside to hear the singers, run the country roads, snatch turnips from farmers’ fields, whittle wood into whistles, perhaps catch a young lark and bring it home to a cage in defiance of the children’s rhyme that warned against such behavior:

      The laverock and the lintie,

      The robin and the wren;

      If ye harry their nests,

      Ye’ll never thrive again.

      Perhaps they would go south out of town past the mysterious standing stone set alone in its field, an indecipherable reminder of ancient races who had inhabited this place before the old castle had ever been built; past Doon Hill, where Cromwell had littered the sward with the bodies of Leslie’s Covenanters, and on to Brunt Hill. Then down its far side and on to High Wood and the meadowlands along Elmscleugh Water. Or they might go out Bob Richardson’s way by Belhaven and then westward to Beesknowe and Grangemuir.

      Whatever the route, whatever the consequences for a late return home, for John Muir the disobedience was creative and absolutely essential. Considering the ways in which his father’s severity compounded the confining regimen of the Dunbar schools, these long runs and rambles into the heart of that landscape were mental and spiritual escapes as much as they were physical ones. Here the boy developed the intuitive ability to take instruction, comfort, and deep pleasure from the natural world, an ability that did so much to convert his childhood in Dunbar and in Wisconsin from blight to lasting spiritual treasure. The runs began, as he would later recognize, a lifelong pattern of personal salvation. Whenever the deadening or seductive routines of settled life threatened his inmost nature; whenever he felt the shadows of traditional obligations and ways of thought spreading into his mind, then John Muir would contrive some escape as now he did on the days of spring and summer when with brother and friends he raced on out of the old town.

      Thus the real locus of his Dunbar memories is not the sea, wild and wonderful as it was in its moods, but the hill country he could see from his back window: the long, broad folds of the Lammermuirs, the deep greens, the copses like shadows, the brown, regular lines traced by the stone walls. And as if in prefiguration of his whole life—emigration, peregrination, and solitary explorings—it was westward he was drawn, like his later hero, Thoreau, who claimed that unconsciously his steps always tended westward.

      Outward he and the others would go, first down the sloping street under the kirkyard hill, outward into the Lammermuirs sung by Scott and shepherds and birds. The land rose steadily away from the coast, the roads bending inward, inward to the slopes, following their imperative contours, hedges, stone walls, or just the trees bordering them. On the ridges there were rows of beeches, their massive, smooth and green-iced trunks standing separate while their spreading branches interlaced into a dense braid with their neighbors. Waiting out a shower in the shelter of these beeches, they would listen to a burn gurgling into fullness at the foot of the hill, the grasses deep or cropped close where a flock of sheep browsed, looking like stars amid the greenness. There were the bird calls, too, the larks in the fields and the woodier notes of the copse singers. Then, the rain ended, they would run on again, passing the farm folk with their reddened hands and faces and shapeless dark clothing, hearing their threatening calls fading behind, smelling the hay in the ricks, the dung in the barnyards.

      And among his fellows John Muir was perhaps a bit more given to moods. Sitting under the trees or running the roads or walking the meadows, he might have heard something more than they did, something inside the raindrops, inside the leaves upon which they fell: a larger music, even a call … something that urged and compelled. A vision commenced here of life in its fullness, of a way of living that held

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