In the fall, John Muir Laws published “The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada.”
There is also something sweet and obsessive, and marvelously 19th century about the whole enterprise, the idea of a lone amateur, now 41 years old (living in a rented $600 apartment in San Francisco), spending season after season tramping around the mountains, painting mushrooms and moles.
“I’m a beauty junkie,” Laws adds. “And this book was done by somebody who is stunned by the beauty of the world.”^
The world, too much with us, afflicts us with this desire to be functional all the time. We justify vacations and TV because they relax us. It’s refreshing to see someone who just leapt ahead into something he found amazing in nature, and succeeded at it, to boot.
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