Allows to focus on that. All right. Thank you, ricardo. Thank you to the attendees. A round of please. A reminder. Also, the nowhere bookshop outside in the festival marketplace has book sales and signing the next event will come in shortly. And so theyre asking us to boogie out of here pretty quic i im logan ward a long Time Magazine feature writer, author of the memoir see you in 100 years. Its about an experimental year i spent with my Family Living in the shenandoah valley, using only the technology from the year 1900 or earlier. But were here to talk to dean king. Ive known dean for decades now, since my earliest days in new york. I consider him a mentor and a friend. Youve got his boilerplate info, so im not going to reread that hes written many books and magazine articles. He produces tv series. My five word description of his books are he brings history to life. Its a nonfiction writer of. One of the things i most admire about dean is how turns his personal passions into, his livelihood. Way back in the 1990s, he fell in love. The historical maritime maritime novels Patrick Obrian set during napoleonic wars, and he spent the next decade or more becoming a maybe the obrian expert. He published companion books, some of which i him with, and he eventually published the first biography of Patrick Obrian is a fascinating tale of. A man who pretended most of his life during research. He was in the new York Yacht Club library when he discovered an old leather bound volume with, the title sufferings in africa. And that was enough to spark another adventure. That was the 1817 account of an american captain whose ship was wrecked off the coast of africa. And dean spent the next number of years working on what the bestseller skeletons on the zahara. So were here to talk about his latest adventure in storytelling, guardians of the valley. John muir, and the friendship that saved yosemite. Thanks for being here. Thanks, logan. Yeah, thanks for the intro. So to set the stage for our discussion. Say a few words about john muir and what your book about. So john muir is considered father of our National Parks and was a scotsman born in 1838, migrated to the u. S. , wisconsin in 1849, and eventually as were going to talk about, we discovered Yosemite Valley and would create the sierra club and really lay the foundation for our modern environmental movement, inspire the likes of of president Theodore Roosevelt walt of also of even emerson, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson would come out to visit him in Yosemite Valley and and so so im interested always interested in where people where authors come with their book ideas. And i mentioned a couple of yours. What led you to write this book . In 1998, my mother in law booked a cabin. My father in laws 70th birthday. We went out Yosemite Valley. I took, in the view of point, i dont know if we have images of if were queuing up images today or not but anyway you probably know that view of Inspiration Point where you look out and you see a bridal fall on the right and el capitan on the left and true to its name, it inspired me and i knew that i wanted to spend time there and. Then as i was at the history of the and and how it came to be, you know, one of our Great National landscapes, id discovered that john muir was, the person who embodied the Yosemite Valley story. So he was also inspired i know from reading your book by Yosemite Valley, you have a reading about that. You want to tell us about his experience. Sure. You know, encountering it. So i i first experienced it as many people do through that gorgeous view from Inspiration Point. Muir went there, first of all, in 1868. He walked there from San Francisco and went into the valley in winter. There it was very snowy. There were bears. People said he might make it out alive, but he he decided he was he also fell in love with it almost instantly and decided he wanted stay there. He took a job with a working as a shepherd and went up into the mountains and the passage ill read for you is when he first looks over you. Yosemite falls into the valley. So hes over the falls. 5000 feet into the valley. There were no guardrails at this time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And theres a picture of it in the book if you know when, get to it. Wishing to be part of this god work is nearly as possible. Muir took off his shoes and stockings and his feet and hands against the slick granite worked his way down until head was near. The booming, rushing Energy Rising stream, noticing that it leveled before its dive, he hoped he could lean out over the edge and see down into the Falling Water and through it to the bottom. But when he reached the edge, he discovered it to be false another steeper ledge lay below it appeared too steep to allow him to reach the brink. However, he could not convince himself to abandon the effort. He could see the cliffs fully. Now spot a narrow rim just wide enough to hold his heels, studying the polished surface of, the river wall, he noticed a seam on the steep rock face a fault that might provide him the needed finger holes to reach the cliffs edge his nerves tingled as he considered his next move the reverberation of the water enveloped him, and he began to feel a part of it. A giddy mix of emotions, elation, wonder, fear swam in his head. He decided again not to move forward. But then he did some inner wildness taken over as he advanced, choosing his steps carefully. Tufts of artemisia from the cliffs caught his eye. He plucked a few leaves, bent down on them, and soon felt the sedative effect of their bitter juice time slowed. The slope was not his enemy. He was a part of it. He crept, and when he reached the small ledge, three inches wide, planted his heels on it. Then he shuffled sideways like a crab toward the precipice, 30 feet to go, 20 feet the water beside him now white and agitated as it sped to its threshold. Ten feet at last. The edge was right in front of him. Legs, firm, body stiff, arching. He peered over his eyes, bored into the billowing freefall, and he watched the spill separate out into streamers, comets of water whose tails refracted sunlight as the flowed past him on its grand adventure, his body and soul seemed to hang somewhere in between terra firma and air infinitum. Another current emersons words he well knew in the woods we return to reason and faith. There. I feel nothing can befall me in life no disgrace, no calamity which nature cannot repair. Muir lost any sense of the passage of time and later could not remember his retreat from the ledge, although a slip of the heel could sent him over with the powerful creek, the magnificence of the fall its ever active and changing form its rumble and sudden silence, its action and refraction, its immediacy and its distance had him spellbound. So many stimuli bombarded his senses that there was no room for fear instead where earth and water met, air and light mirror with the religious fervor of his upbringing, saw god. He saw god in the fragments of the stream and in the rays of the sun passing through to make vivid rainbow beads, he saw god and the rebirth of the streams suddenly expelled from earth as death and a new life, a new journey where samuel tenuously manifest. Thats great. So yeah. So that was a Pivotal Moment for him. I mean, he had walked there to explore it. He had heard about it, that he devoted his life to it after that or yeah, well, series of events, the valley had become famous. Abraham lincoln actually gave it to the state of california to preserve and protect for for all mankind. Photographers were making their way out there. So he had heard about it. He initially planned to go on a long trek through south america, but on a walk through south, he caught malaria and had heard of Yosemite Valley. Went out there. And i think this moment that that he here and i didnt make any of that up this is nonfiction he gave me all this material and when i read in his writing how he looked through those water beads with the light coming through, and he would he would go back repeatedly. Hed go back to see those water. The light refracting through those beads. But in the idea, the stream came there to the cliffs edge to die and, was reborn in the river below as a new i mean, it kind of blew my mind. And i think, you know, what he saw there, he had a very strict upbringing. His father wasnt evangelical christian who the bible verses into him. He had memorized the new testament and most of the Old Testament as a youth. And but but he never lost his faith. He had this really deep faith. And i think he was looking for his own realization of that faith. It wasnt like his fathers. And and he you could see that he was finding it here. So you mentioned emerson had read the transcendentalists and you know i think of them back east Emerson Thoreau others he was a real wild man, you know, out here on the west coast where, you know, human settlement, westerners, i should say european settlement was relatively new and he was discovering places or experiencing them early on. I mean it in a way. He was sort of i mean, can you talk a little bit about that transcendental spiritualism he was finding in these really dramatic places . Yeah. Muir was something of an autodidact but he did go to the university of at madison for two years and his professors there were loved emerson and thoreau and muir started keeping a like emerson at the time which he he he wrote his name on one of his journals, john muir planet earth the universe. So hes a bit of a, you know, early hippie and and but but emerson carried of emerson around and also of thoreau and in burns poet and all these ideas about nature were of coming together of burns in his poetry talks, you know, about the sorrow of trampling on flowers or, you know, the mouse that has been branded, you know, something that that nobody wants and how sad that is, you know, because, you know, a living animal. And so that this sort of love of the small things in nature our appreciation for animals and trees, life all this is is kind of new. At the same time, america is, you know, destroying the the passenger pigeon. Its its wiping out the bison. Its its clear the trees from coast to coast. So these are new ideas in and mirror is going to echo what what emerson and throw believed in really bring it to a popular audience so of the things i was most surprised by reading your book you know i knew about muir from reading a few of his writings and, you know, his thousand mile walk to the gulf. And ive always thought of him as a naturalist, a conservationist. What i didnt realize is how brilliant he was and how varied his became. So can you talk a little bit about that . What wisconsin childhood and some of his other interests and then what led him to become, you, the voice of nature . Yes, sure. You might say he was somewhat peculiar. His father would let the bible in. The only book he would let in the house was a bible. But muirs neighbors in wisconsin came to realize, hey, this is a really bright kid hes working from dawn to dusk in the fields. He dug a 90 foot well for the family and almost died in the bottom of the well from the gases down there. But he was he was an amazing worker. And to actually read Something Else because he had an expansive mind, he he whittled a machine out of wood and using clockwork that would pull the legs out of the foot of his bed and dump them in a pan of cold water at one time. So he could get up to read before having to go to work at dawn. And so, you know, thats a little bit unusual, i guess. And then and then when he then eventually the neighbors were like, youre youre inventions are incredible. You have to take them. And exhibit them. In the state fair of wisconsin. So he went to madison and he would would never go home after that he was discover right there he was admitted to the university of wisconsin his was a museum slash freak show. I mean, all the other students would come to see, you know, whats me are doing. He had a he he whittled a desk out of wood also using clockwork where hed line up his books and every 15 minutes it would move. So that he could stay on his study schedule, his even his he was, you know, a beautiful speaker and, but he had a sort of a farm lingo and an english i mean, a scottish dialect. And so people want to hear him talk. His professors were inspired by the poetry of his language, even then. And what i mean, what did he look like at the time . Was he tall and gangly i mean, im picturing him as his older years, but as a youth. What was he he was always a wiry, lean guy with a, you know, a big pace outdoorsman at that time. He had a pretty tightly cropped beard not the the the long bushy beard that you see. And, you know, of my goals with the book was to sort of bring him out of the woods. Were used to seeing those portraits of him with the long grizzly beard, but he was so much more than that. And thats what, you know, i really wanted to, you know, show all aspects of him. So in really nice review in the new york times, the reviewer wrote that guardians of the valley is, a book about the power of storytelling, the power of language to sway to change the minds of lawmakers and tourists alike. And really, this book is about how he turned writings and his inspiration into into action. And we can thank him for yosemite and much other. Well continue to talk about that. But you know, when did he become a writer and what made his prose so powerful . He kept a journal from ever, you know, starting it. It madison. He started keeping a journal. And a lot of what we see now are his journal writings, you know, and a lot of his books were not actually published late in his life when editors were saying, hey, youve got get this down, we have to publish this. But after he went to Yosemite Valley, lived there for a couple of years through winters, when most people would leave Yosemite Valley, its still a very remote place prone to you know, great snows. And theres some amazing events where it snows and then it heats up in the whole valleys, just flooding. And he is out there roaming through, you know, water, chest high water, taking it in. He had no fear. He lacked a fear gene. And he started writing stories for newspaper. He started studying how the valley was created at the time, the most common scientific was that a cataclysm had formed the valley and the bottom had dropped out. But he knew that he had he had studied, you know, various natural scientist and knew something of glaciation. And he looked for the clues and found out that there was Glacier Movement that had formed a lot of the valley. And he he went there and proved that and put in spikes into the glaciers that existed and so he was writing about that. And eventually he wrote for century magazine in new york city, which would become his chief vehicle, where he would discover Robert Underwood. Johnson perfect segue to my next question. So this this isnt just a book about john muir. The subtitle is john muir and the friendship that saved yosemite. So you mentioned underwood johnson. Who was he . How did they meet and why was he an especially effective partner for mirror that johnson was one of the fun discoveries. I came to this by wanting to do something about Yosemite Valley discovery. Muir and i didnt know when i first started researching it, which would go. He had an amazing relationship with a woman named jean carr was the wife of one of his professors who was also a botanist. And muir was very into botany and geology, and they became sort of soulmates. She would introduce him to emerson and a lot of the famous scientists who would come out, her husband eventually went to berkeley and she was in in that area and would send scientists to come find him to be their guide in Yosemite Valley. So i thought well maybe thats the story and then when i got sort of midway into muirs life, i realized, well, this editor, Robert Underwood johnson, would be the person who would empower muir. He would put down amazing ideas. And you asked me what his writing. Great. Well, he had this engineer doing scientific mind very keen observer, very incredibly patient. He could go out in the woods, into the valleys and stay for a week by himself just observing. So that power of Observer Mission in the discipline to put it down on paper. I think muir could be little tough to read at first, but once you develop a taste for it and realize, you know, its its almost like reading poetry every word is meaningful and beautiful and well thought out in descriptions are incredible. So johnson certainly, you know, as an editor at century magazine, realized that century magazine wanted anything he could. He could write for them. And so in johnson was he was a man action, really, where muir was well, muir was also a man of action was a great adventure, an explorer but johnson was a guy, i guess a political beast would be the right, right way to put it. He eventually went out and met with muir and and they would go into Yosemite Valley. Muir would say, hey, you got to come out here and see the valley with me because the state owned the valley. But muir could see that they werent taking good enough care of it. Logging was encroaching on it. There were still sheep grazing, massive industrial sheep grazing, and from his sheep herding days, he realized that the sheep didnt just eat the foliage. They they ate the roots. They ate everything. And and he quickly realized that, you know, if that happens, youre going to get youre going to get erosion. The streams and the valley is going to die. If you dont if you dont save the the land around the valley, the the valley is not going to last. So he took johnson out there to show how beautiful it was for one. And how also it was trouble. And johnson. So they go up on wall meadows is kind of the north part of the park out of the valley. They have a wonderful camping. Johnsons amazed at seeing muir in his real natural habitat ro