On a sunny afternoon at Meaford, on a bank of the Bighead River, I stood on hallowed ground.

It was where the man destined to become the founder of North America's environmental movement settled into his skin.

He was 26 years old, a member of the Disciples of Christ congregation which, like the Quakers, opposed military service, and he had probably left Wisconsin to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Civil War.

The year was 1864. The young man was John Muir, who later fought relentlessly to protect the Yosemite Valley in California and, in 1892, established the Sierra Club.

For two years he lived in a log cabin at Trout Hollow on the Bighead River, working at William Trout's sawmill and factory for brooms and rakes.

The cabin nestled into a small clearing within a cedar grove at Trout's millpond. Although archeologists have pinpointed the cabin's location, nothing visible remains. Spring torrents on the Bighead swept through in later years, even destroying a hydro dam built 40 years after Muir left.

I stood in the clearing, listening to the Bighead scurry over rocks and gravel, and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Muir on his first journey away from home, away from a tyrannical father who was focused on the battle against sin, a battle that required his son to memorize the Old Testament by the time he was 12 years old.

I imagined what it must have been like to live for two years as part of the Trout family, where he was admired as an inventor and lively conversationalist, where there were people his own age, and where the spirit of inquiry prevailed instead of a bitter struggle against ever-present sin.

And I imagined all this within the context of the forest and the river and his continuing ecstasy over having discovered the extremely rare calypso borealis orchid. William Trout would later say of him, "He examined nature with a lover’s eye...."

It must have been a time for blossoming.

How Muir got to Ontario, no one knows, although he was a prodigious hiker. On his way to Meaford, he walked across the Holland Marsh, which at that time was simply a huge bog. It was there that he found the calypso borealis.

"The flower was white," he wrote when he was 71 years old, "and made the impression of the utmost simple purity, like a snowflower.... It seemed the most spiritual of all the flower people I had ever met. I sat down beside it and fairly cried for joy

"I seems wonderful that so frail and lovely a plant has such power over human hearts. This Calypso (RICK: He uses capital "C") meeting happened some forty-five years ago, and was more memorable and impressive than any of my meetings with human beings excepting, perhaps, (Ralph Waldo) Emerson and one or two others."

The site of Muir's cabin is now part of the 14-kilometre Trout Hollow Trail, maintained by the Bighead River Heritage Association, with the cooperation of local landowners. The land at Trout Hollow is owned by Ron Knight, whose family has lived in the area since the 1840s.

"I love this area," he says, "and I just want to pass on to others what I've loved so much."

To arrange a trip to the cabin site, call (519) 538-5414. And to learn more about John Muir, visit www.johnmuir.org.

Now, more than ever, his words resonate. Such as this, written in 1912: "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike."