The Terrible Beauty of Nature: John Muir’s “Stickeen”

John Muir is one of the most significant conservationists in American history. His books and stories cultivated a romantic fascination with the beauties and reverence of nature, and his activism helped preserve great swathes of the American wilderness. He founded the Sierra Club, an environmentalist organization which remains vital nearly 100 years after Muir’s death. Muir’s success as a conservationist was, in many ways, due to his skill as a storyteller. His story “Stickeen,” about his day on a glacier with a small dog, has all the classic elements of a great story—a valiant hero, a fantastic setting, mortal peril, and a satisfying resolution. Muir’s intent with this story is to use these classic elements to craft a tale that captivates the reader, subtly advocating for conservationism without ever mentioning the term.*

The title character of “Stickeen” is a “short-legged and bunch-bodied” dog of indeterminate origin who accompanied Muir as he explored the waters and coastline of Alaska in 1880. Though Stickeen is a young, small dog, he does not display “a single trace of the merry, tricksy, elfish fun of the terriers and collies that we all know, nor of their touching affection and devotion… His strength of character lay in his eyes. They looked as old as the hills, and as young, and as wild”. The dog shares Muir’s fearlessness and sense of adventure. The reader identifies with Stickeen as we both follow Muir on a daylong hike through weather conditions that would make most of us hunker down inside. Muir describes Stickeen’s wise nature, and Stickeen’s love of nature, and suddenly a parallel is drawn in the reader’s mind between a love of nature and wisdom. Our admiration for Stickeen evolves into an admiration for the natural world he enjoys.

Part of Muir’s success as a writer was that he ventured into places most people had never seen, and described those places in such a way that the reader as if they had adventured alongside him. The glacial formation that Muir explores in “Stickeen” is a barren, inhospitable landscape riddled with “tremendous traverse and longitudinal crevasses, many of which were from twenty to thirty feet wide, and perhaps a thousand feet deep--beautiful and awful” (). He casually estimates that the glacier is about seven miles wide; it is unmapped, unmanned, and the reader knows that any accident here could lead to a cold, lonely death. Muir makes it seem like the most glorious place on earth. Under patches of wintery sunlight, “the glacier was seen from shore to shore with a bright array of encompassing mountains partly revealed, wearing the clouds as garments, while the prairie bloomed and sparkled with irised light from myriads of washed crystals”. The reader is struck with a desire to see this natural monstrosity. The only way to see it, and ensure that future generations see it, is to conserve the land. Muir’s descriptions are so beautiful that the reader is compelled to love the landscape as Muir loves it.

After an easy morning crossing, Muir and Stickeen return across a different section of the glacier and find it much more difficult to traverse. Finally, they reach a point where they must carefully descend the wall of a crevasse, crawl across a skinny bridge of ice, then scramble back up the other side. Muir is characteristically calm about the situation, musing, “I have oftentimes felt that to meet one's fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident”. Stickeen, on the other hand, is terrified. Up until this point in the story, he has been unfailingly brave, jumping across crevasses without hesitation. Faced with this crossing, however, Stickeen is paralyzed by fear. Even after Muir has completed the crossing, the small dog continued to “look down again at the bridge, and shout his unshakable conviction that he could never, never come that way; then lie back in despair, as if howling, "O-o-oh! what a place! No-o-o, I can never go-o-o down there!"  In this passage, Muir reminds us that landscapes such as this glacier are fundamentally inhospitable for human life. For all their beauty, they are not meant to be co-opted into human society. The wonders of nature exist for their own sake, and should be preserved for their own sake.

Eventually, Stickeen musters his courage and carefully crosses the ice bridge. When he reaches the other side, the normally-stoic dog rejoices in his survival by “screaming and shouting, swirling round and round in giddy loops and circles like a leaf in a whirlwind, lying down, and rolling over and over, sidewise and heels over head, and pouring forth a tumultuous flood of hysterical cries and sobs and gasping mutterings”. After their adventure, Stickeen is a changed dog; he develops a closeness with Muir that he does not share with any other human. Muir, too, is changed, and he writes that “through (Stickeen) as through a window I have ever since been looking with deeper sympathy into all my fellow mortals”. Stickeen’s reaction after crossing the bridge demonstrates not only his joy in being alive, but also his triumph over his fears. Stickeen thought crossing the gap was impossible. Many people thought that Muir’s dream of preserving vast tracts of wilderness was impossible. Stickeen succeeds in the same way that Muir does—one step at a time. A person reading Muir’s works might think they are not capable of Muir’s stout bravery in the face of adversity, but little Stickeen proves that we are all capable of more than we can imagine. Environmentalists are constantly told that their goals are impossible, that the world cannot or will not change, but Stickeen’s bravery reminds us that even the humblest individuals could be capable of great things.

“Stickeen” successfully advocates for conservationism by creating in the reader a love of nature. Muir’s writing is more poetic than Jack London’s, creating an epic atmosphere that gives the reader the sense that his subject is significant and important. He has done as much for the environmental movement as Rachel Carson, but without being pedantic or overblown. “Stickeen” is an excellent example of using storytelling to affect a political opinion.