Ed. note: Below is a blog post from Ian Woollen, author of Muir Woods or Bust, published by Coffeetown Press. Muir Woods Or Bust ($14.95, 216 pages, ISBN: 978-1-60381-597-0) is a work of literary fiction and social satire. In a near future plagued by global weather weirding, a psychologist is forced by a manic actor to travel from Bloomington, Indiana, to California for the sake of an audition. You can find out more about the book here.
A comic novel about climate change? Anymore, it’s either laughter or tears. The comedy here works as a sweetener to help the reader swallow a harsher message. That climate change threatens not only our external Mother Earth, but also our internal planets. Thus, the main character, Gil Moss, a psychologist, proposes a new category of DSM diagnoses: Eco-Mood Disorders. One symptom being the loss of any ability to feel ‘at home’.
I grew up in Indianapolis, hearing an anecdote at family gatherings about a Civil War nurse ancestor who helped a young John Muir recover from a grisly industrial accident in a local factory in 1867. The accident left him blind. Much later, I learned the full tale. Muir was a conscientious objector. He moved to Canada to avoid the war. Afterwards, he landed a job at the Indianapolis factory, determined to prove himself by becoming an industrialist. The factory owners liked him. He received a promotion to foreman and supervised a Time and Motion study. He wrote a letter to his sister, essentially swearing off his passion for nature and casting his lot with city life.
It didn’t last long. One night, while trying to fix a sanding machine…the belt broke and Muir accidentally thrust a screwdriver into his eye. Puncturing the eyeball. His other eye went dark too from a condition known as ‘sympathetic blindness’.
Talk about an archetypal wounding, and self-inflicted at that. The Hero had lost his Vision. And when the Hero finally regained his Vision (thanks to my great-great-aunt summoning a leading ophthalmologist from Chicago), he realized his Error. Muir refused a management offer from the factory owners and reclaimed his identity as a naturalist and embarked on his great Hikes of Penance, first to Wisconsin and then to Florida. Eventually, getting on a boat for California, where he became the John Muir that everybody knows.
His story mirrors our own. The culture blinding itself in the pursuit of Consumerism. And, one hopes, slowly recovering a Vision for Sustainability.
This message of transformation is also part of the novel’s comic structure. The historical Muir events are woven into a contemporary plot about Gil the psychologist (a descendant of the Civil War Nurse) and his son, a scruffy gamer, and a cast of Eco-Mood Disordered characters who lose and rediscover their true callings on a road trip west.
Teaser Photo Credit: By King of Hearts – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28519137
