He was eleven when his father, seeking harsher religious doctrine, brought the family to America, away from the Scottish hillsides and rocky seashore young Muir loved and walked. His father made him work for years in a machine factory in Wisconsin, where Muir was blinded in an accident with metal tools. He hid for months in a blackened room, scared he would never see again. When he emerged, depressed but with his sight miraculously restored, he was so grateful and hungry to see every tree and mountain and river and lake and ocean and blade of grass, he swore never to live within walls again if he could help it. He walked outside and did not stop.

Made haste with all my heart, bid adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery and determined to devote the rest of my life to studying the inventions of God.

He packed his bread and compass and books and walked a thousand miles, to the solace and beauty of the natural world, and lived to save Yosemite Valley from destruction; he saved the redwoods and sequoias of California and the alpine wilderness of Washington’s Mount Rainier. He gave those places his life in return for saving his, with Joellen-level dedication to protecting vulnerable, innocent nature, emboldened by fury at his fellow white men who would harm it. He would have been an excellent social worker.

The Salishwood road widened into a small parking lot, and beyond it was what looked like a cathedral, made of cedar, with a glass ceiling that reached into the treetops and seemed part of the forest. Jane—white, with a long gray braid and a young, smiling face, dressed like me but with dangly beaded earrings—walked to me and took my hand in both of hers.

“Muiriel,” she said, “come inside.” She led me in, talking the whole time. “So, we’re in the great hall.” The whole wide cedarwood room glowed in the sunlight streaming from the vaulted glass roof. I stared up into the trees.

“Beautiful.” An understatement.

“Inspired by Suquamish architecture. Suquamish were the first people who lived on the island. The tribe has education centers and a museum near Agate Pass and the Port Madison Indian Reservation. Cut to: not how it should be, but now here we are.”

I sat beside her on a wooden bench bathed in sunlight.

“So,” she said, “want to help us teach a bunch of kids that the land and sea and sky are not now and never were ours and the least we can do is learn how to respect and care for them?”

“Yes, please.”