My Mount Rushmore-Part Four

I remember…driving to Fountain Lake, out in the Wisconsin countryside. It was really more of a pond than a lake, but I decided to walk around it on the trail, knowing this was where John Muir, the naturalist and “Father of the National Parks”, had grown up as a boy. It was at this place he grew to appreciate the wildlife he fought to preserve and although a tiny little lake might not look like much when compared to some others in our country, there was something special here, because I knew this was where it began for him.

I picked one bloom of every different wild flower I could, as well as a couple of leaves, so I could press them in my copy of his memoirs. As soon as I got on the trail I was dive bombed by mosquitoes the entire perimeter of the lake, but I didn’t care, I HAD to walk all the way around it.

Covered in welts by the time I got back to the car, I laughed, thinking, “What an idiot, I’m going to be itching all day and night.”

Picking up his book as I sat on a picnic bench, I skimmed to one of the many passages he wrote about his boyhood and this lake. Noticing the word “Mosquito” in a paragraph, I read how he used to be bitten up so often along that lake he couldn’t see straight.

I smiled and enjoyed a little moment where I bonded with John Muir, and for the first time in my life, was thankful I’d took on a swarm of mosquitoes.

To me, his views on nature held true, real religion.
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Interestingly enough, when I actually think about those four faces, I see a little bit of each one of them in my childhood memories of what I wanted my father to be, and on a few occasions, was. An armchair psychiatrist could have a field day on me, couldn’t they?

Annie Oakley, although talking specifically about Buffalo Bill Cody, could have been describing any one of the four when she said, “He was the simplest of men, as comfortable with cowboys as with kings.”