"The Forgotten Peninsula": Joseph Wood Krutch's 1959 trek through the Baja

Now's a good time to think warm thoughts, or at least read about those magical places nearer the tropics where the weather is considered more a state of mind than something to survive. In 1959 the author and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch made a return visit to Baja California, the peninsula to the west of Mexico bordering the Sea of Cortez. 

The result was his 1961 book, The Forgotten Peninsula. Krutch, who lived in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, called himself "a collector of deserts"; he was in awe of the variety of plants and animals he found in the arid regions of the North American continent. Even as an experienced adventurer, he found the Baja's desolation and remoteness a challenge, best dealt with some humor:

"Even properly equipped, the traveler inclined to say 'I'll be in San Ignacio or Mulege or what-not next Tuesday' had better remember the oriental story of the pilgrim who, when asked where he was going, replied, 'To Damascus,' and refused to add 'God willing.' As a punishment for his impiety he was turned into a frog and spent nine years in a puddle by the roadside. When at last he found himself restored to human form and met again the mysterious questioner he replied to the reiterated inquiry: 'I am going to Damascus or back to the frogpond.' There are not many frogponds in Baja but one could easily find oneself stuck in the same arroyo."

I discovered his writing through a battered copy of The Desert Year, which I read during one of my first February trips to Tucson in the early 1990s. Although the march of time (and progress) was rapidly changing the landscape of the Sonoran desert then, I was still able to see much of the beauty and uniqueness of the land that had so captured Krutch's imagination. Of course, my initial trips into the desert involved much use of a Dodge van and a rented, shiny-red two-door Neon, with frequent stops at the ubiquitous Circle K markets that spring up like cactus roses in the wet season.
I did manage, eventually, to get to Organ Pipe National Forest and Joshua Tree, places where the Milky Way galaxy is a real, astronomical phenomenon and where it did get truly, beautifully, dark. It's a rare treat in these United States of Kilowatt Hours.

Krutch and friend, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life magazine

This vast emptiness was disappearing quickly back in 1959, after centuries of desert solitude. Krutch's final chapter describes, with some regret, the hotels and airport strip being constructed at the tip of the Baja ("eight thousand feet; obviously intended, ultimately, at least for jets," a companion informs him). Soon to become a wintertime haven for the footloose and fancy-free 1960s jet set, Cabo San Lucas is now the site of rock festival and spring break, where rocker Sammy Hagar meets you at the dock and personally escorts the visitor to his own Cabo Wabo Cantina. So it goes.

Krutch himself was aware of this dilemma between the demands of nature and the wants of civilization. It's a question that dogs man endlessly; one observer of Krutch's writings has called it, simply, "the right question." Krutch wrote: 

"Has anyone even raised the question of how populous, how mechanized, how complicated, and how abundant a society should be if what we want is not numbers, mechanization, complexity, and abundance for their own sake, but the best life possible for a creature who has the needs, the preferences, and the potential of the human being?"

In 1959, still, there was desolation and mostly-uninhabited Baja, with native flora and fauna.The Forgotten Peninsula traces the region's natural, political, and religious history with an expert eye toward irony and, eventually, resignation to encroaching progress and its economic benefits. As always, the secrets of a wilderness discovered are likely to disappear once the secret's out, but Krutch seems to be describing Baja just before the marketplace and time's march changed it forever.

Baja California, First view of the Sea of Cortez (Alex Brumbaugh Photography)

I opened the book to a chapter entitled "Seeing it the hard way" and was charmed by the easy way Krutch -- who was 66 in 1959 -- battled obstacles natural, mechanical and cultural in his Baja pursuit. Here is his description of his entry into the Baja country more than fifty years ago. February, it seems, has always been a good time to travel south.

"It was February 27, 1959, a little less than two years after my first introduction to Baja. Our company assembled at San Diego; we ran the 120 miles to Mexicali in a little over two hours and we were in Mexico by mid-afternoon. The first twenty miles of paved road crosses farming country, irrigated from the Colorado River, and not very different from the lower Imperial Valley of which it is an extension. It is part of the ancient delta, relatively prosperous and "developed." Then the population thins rapidly, poverty begins to take over, and soon the road, though still well- graded and paved, is running through some of the dryest, most barren and rugged country anywhere in Baja. ...

There was acre after acre of purple sand verbena, and of a white evening primrose perhaps four inches in diameter, growing close to the ground. The Mojave in California is perhaps as nearly incredible in one of its best years, but I have never happened to be there at such a time and this was the most magnificent display of desert flowers I had ever seen. Now and again it would thin out, then recover its profusion, though perhaps it was never again quite so astonishing as over the first fifteen miles south of San Felipe.

Purple sand verbena, from the Backroads website

We had already said good-by to paved road, not to come upon it again for six days and 650 miles. Though the sandy road out of San Felipe continues fairly good for fifty miles we saw no car upon it and no human being until we came to the tiny sport-fishing camp at Puertocitos. Just south of Puertocitos the moderately good road gives out and during the next few hours we averaged only about twelve miles per hour despite a truck made for rough travel and capable of absorbing a good deal of punishment.

'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' So runs Tolstoy's famous pronouncement and one might borrow the formula to state an equally profound truth: All good roads are alike; every bad road is bad in its own way. We were to meet all of the latter in the course of the trip and several of them during this second day, including the terrifying sort which consists ofall but impossible grades strewn with boulder-sized rocks and clinging to the sheer wall of a canyon whose bottom lies hundreds of feet below. They are also, just to cap the climax, barely one car wide."

Reading description of desert, mountain, or jungle as well-written as this is a great tonic for the mid-winter blues. Whenever I get the urge to visit the Sonoran desert (or until I decide I've had enough of raking leaves, and just move to the desert and rake the sand in my front yard) the writing of Joseph Wood Krutch will do just fine. I'll probably miss the February jonquils, though I'll enjoy the winter's cactus roses.

"A is for Armageddon": do you feel lucky, punk?

The end is nigh -- the happiest time of the year!

Or so the holiday bookends of December 25 and January 1 are merchandized, pitched, advertised, and wrung (both "-out," after the Christmas wrapping is thrown away, and by New Years, with our party hats askew, back "-in"). What better time to think about the end of days? Humans have thrilled and terrified themselves fantasizing about an event which few of them will ever be unlucky enough to see, although mankind threatens every so often to come tantalizingly close: war, plague, fear, disease, and sheer human nature are capable of capsizing even the warmest holiday thought of good will toward men.

And then there's the ever-threatening volatility of nature itself: the butterfly sneeze in the forest that leads to ultimate planetary destruction. It's a wonder that most of us don't spend the next ten days trembling in bed with the covers pulled securely above our heads. As the great philosopher Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry Callahan once phrased our eternal, daily doubts about the human dilemma, do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya?

A is for Armageddon: An Illustrated Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World As We Know It (Harper Books), just released in paperback, is a funny, nervous laugh at the end of days -- whenever and however it should occur. The eternal, open-ended speculation on ultimate doom-and-gloom, as both religious and secular soothsayers have always emphasized, is a game with a singular escape clause: it will happen to someone else before it ever happens to us....that is, if we heed the warning signs.

The book and its accompanying website, a "veritable panoply of impending doom," is a needed tonic to the never-ending round of mall-shopping and enforced jollity of the holiday season. Of course it's a cynic's cornucopia of unknowably bad things that will happen to good people -- and unsuspecting too -- which provides the chill. Those unlucky folks will not be us, likely, so pour yourself another nog and put another log on the Yule fire.

Part of a colorful periodic table of man's possible Doom

The author Richard Horne is an equal-opportunity doomsayer: Divine wrath is here (as expected) but one ought to be wary of animal flatulence as well. There are untold ways The End might arrive, and no matter how we prepare and contemplate ultimate Doom, it will still catch us off our guard; for those who like to quantify and identify such unknowables Horne provides a handy periodic table of possibilities. In any event, how can a reader know if it's the beginning of the end? The fully-interactive website offers the nervous and worried a glass-half-empty measure of your own Doom-monger status.

Horne is a kind of one-man-disaster band, fixated more on endings than beginnings. He's responsible as well for the list-making success of 101 Things to Do Before You Die. So it's expected that the ultimate end of the inexplicable, irrational human race is presented in all of its widescreen Technicolor glory: the end of the end, so to speak.

And if Horne is even half-right it will be a party with a real bang. At this annual festival season of self-congratulation -- we've made it through another year! -- there's always the realization that January bills are yet to come. Or as one wag put it, we should get down upon our knees and all be grateful that we're still on our feet.

May the new year bring you all of what you really need, and most of what you really want! (Armageddon optional.)

Gary Snyder, born May 8, 1930

Gary Snyder at home near Nevada City (photo by Dan Chung, Guardian UK, 2008)

Old Bones
Gary Snyder

Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,

no food out there on dusty slopes of scree—
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.

Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.

What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.

W.S. Merwin: "the natural world that includes us is sacred"

W.S. Merwin, now 83, is the poet laureate of the United States and twice recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. His neighbors in Hawaii are more likely to know the unassuming poet as the resident on his property near Haiku. As Rick Chatenever reports in a lengthy interview with Merwin in today's edition of the Maui News, that's fine. "Nobody knows who I am," the poet says. "They just know I'm a guy who plants trees."

Merwin recently spoke to a group as part of a new exhibit at Maui's Schaefer International Gallery, "The Legacy of Land." Chatenever's article reports how Merwin's childhood reading, enhanced by the poems his mother read to him, helped create in him a respect for the mystery of nature. "When we were kids, everyone wanted to grow up to be a fireman," he told the audience. "I wanted to grow up to be an Indian."

The interview is a gentle tracing of Merwin's path to self-discovery, from the poems of Longfellow to the Diamond Sutra, a journey from discovering the visions of William Blake to a meeting with Roshi Robert Aitken at the Maui Zendo in 1969. Here is an excerpt from the interview, which also includes several poems from Merwin's books The Rain in the Trees (1988) and The River Sound (1999). His most recent collection is The Shadow of Sirius (2009).

"There is a feeling in which the natural world that includes us is sacred ... Because we know, if there's anything sacred, that's it. You go out and spend two hours with the other forms of life around us, and you come back elated, feeling a great charge because this is basically what you wnt to be doing. Not to be cut off from it, but to be part of it." ...

"... We have made unnatural circumstances for ourselves, which are not good for us in the long run. The result is feeling cut off and superior. The way you justify feeling cut off is by saying, well, you're better than what you're cut off from. You think you have a right to treat it in any way you want." ...

"We've been doing that basically since the beginning of agriculture, when you start really disrupting the face of the earth ... Convenience is the bitch goddess of the modern world ... what people don't realize is, the faster you go, the less time you have."

"Hand tools were the beginning, and they're still part of us. ... Other tools replaced parts of our bodies, and they atrophied. Now they're replacing parts of our minds. We're becoming dependent on virtual reality, and that's dangerous."

(photo by Tom Sewell, Merwin Conservancy, from the Maui News)

"The Forgotten Peninsula" (1961): beating the mid-winter blues

Why does the year's shortest month always seem so long? That's a philosopher's question that refuses to be answered simply. Here in Georgia, the weather's a crap shoot. It's either too cold or, teasingly, surprisingly warm -- there's new color in the ground already, with more than a month to go before Spring officially begins. And the jonquils that will be appearing soon? They're sure to be smothered by March's cold snap and blackberry winter.

The only solace in February, really, is its brevity; imagine how long winter would seem if the month had a full supply of thirty-one days.

Now's a good time to think warm thoughts, or at least read about those magical places nearer the tropics where the weather is considered more a state of mind than something to survive. In 1959 the author and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch made a return visit to Baja California, the peninsula to the west of Mexico bordering the Sea of Cortez. The result was his 1961 book, The Forgotten Peninsula. Krutch, who lived in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, called himself "a collector of deserts"; he was in awe of the variety of plants and animals he found in the arid regions of the North American continent. Even as an experienced adventurer, he found the Baja's desolation and remoteness a challenge, best dealt with some humor:

"Even properly equipped, the traveler inclined to say 'I'll be in San Ignacio or Mulege or what-not next Tuesday' had better remember the oriental story of the pilgrim who, when asked where he was going, replied, 'To Damascus,' and refused to add 'God willing.' As a punishment for his impiety he was turned into a frog and spent nine years in a puddle by the roadside. When at last he found himself restored to human form and met again the mysterious questioner he replied to the reiterated inquiry: 'I am going to Damascus or back to the frogpond.' There are not many frogponds in Baja but one could easily find oneself stuck in the same arroyo."

I discovered his writing through a battered copy of The Desert Year, which I read during one of my first February trips to Tucson in the early 1990s. Although the march of time (and progress) was rapidly changing the landscape of the Sonoran desert then, I was still able to see much of the beauty and uniqueness of the land that had so captured Krutch's imagination. Of course, my initial trips into the desert involved much use of a Dodge van and a rented, shiny-red two-door Neon, with frequent stops at the ubiquitous Circle K markets that spring up like cactus roses in the wet season.
I did manage, eventually, to get to Organ Pipe National Forest and Joshua Tree, places where the Milky Way galaxy is a real, astronomical phenomenon and where it did get truly, beautifully, dark. It's a rare treat in these United States of Kilowatt Hours.

Krutch and friend, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt, Life magazine

This vast emptiness was disappearing quickly back in 1959, after centuries of desert solitude. Krutch's final chapter describes, with some regret, the hotels and airport strip being constructed at the tip of the Baja ("eight thousand feet; obviously intended, ultimately, at least for jets," a companion informs him). Soon to become a wintertime haven for the footloose and fancy-free 1960s jet set, Cabo San Lucas is now the site of rock festival and spring break, where rocker Sammy Hagar meets you at the dock and personally escorts the visitor to his own Cabo Wabo Cantina. So it goes.

Krutch himself was aware of this dilemma between the demands of nature and the wants of civilization. It's a question that dogs man endlessly; one observer of Krutch's writings has called it, simply, "the right question." Krutch wrote: "Has anyone even raised the question of how populous, how mechanized, how complicated, and how abundant a society should be if what we want is not numbers, mechanization, complexity, and abundance for their own sake, but the best life possible for a creature who has the needs, the preferences, and the potential of the human being?"

In 1959, still, there was desolation and mostly-uninhabited Baja, with native flora and fauna.The Forgotten Peninsula traces the region's natural, political, and religious history with an expert eye toward irony and, eventually, resignation to encroaching progress and its economic benefits. As always, the secrets of a wilderness discovered are likely to disappear once the secret's out, but Krutch seems to be describing Baja just before the marketplace and time's march changed it forever.

Baja California, First view of the Sea of Cortez (Alex Brumbaugh Photography)

I opened the book to a chapter entitled "Seeing it the hard way" and was charmed by the easy way Krutch -- who was 66 in 1959 -- battled obstacles natural, mechanical and cultural in his Baja pursuit. Here is his description of his entry into the Baja country fifty years ago this week. February, it seems, has always been a good time to travel south.

"It was February 27, 1959, a little less than two years after my first introduction to Baja. Our company assembled at San Diego; we ran the 120 miles to Mexicali in a little over two hours and we were in Mexico by mid-afternoon. The first twenty miles of paved road crosses farming country, irrigated from the Colorado River, and not very different from the lower Imperial Valley of which it is an extension. It is part of the ancient delta, relatively prosperous and "developed." Then the population thins rapidly, poverty begins to take over, and soon the road, though still well- graded and paved, is running through some of the dryest, most barren and rugged country anywhere in Baja. ...

There was acre after acre of purple sand verbena, and of a white evening primrose perhaps four inches in diameter, growing close to the ground. The Mojave in California is perhaps as nearly incredible in one of its best years, but I have never happened to be there at such a time and this was the most magnificent display of desert flowers I had ever seen. Now and again it would thin out, then recover its profusion, though perhaps it was never again quite so astonishing as over the first fifteen miles south of San Felipe.

Purple sand verbena, from the Backroads website

We had already said good-by to paved road, not to come upon it again for six days and 650 miles. Though the sandy road out of San Felipe continues fairly good for fifty miles we saw no car upon it and no human being until we came to the tiny sport-fishing camp at Puertocitos. Just south of Puertocitos the moderately good road gives out and during the next few hours we averaged only about twelve miles per hour despite a truck made for rough travel and capable of absorbing a good deal of punishment.

'All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' So runs Tolstoy's famous pronouncement and one might borrow the formula to state an equally profound truth: All good roads are alike; every bad road is bad in its own way. We were to meet all of the latter in the course of the trip and several of them during this second day, including the terrifying sort which consists ofall but impossible grades strewn with boulder-sized rocks and clinging to the sheer wall of a canyon whose bottom lies hundreds of feet below. They are also, just to cap the climax, barely one car wide."

Reading description of desert, mountain, or jungle as well-written as this is a great tonic for the mid-winter blues. Whenever I get the urge to visit the Sonoran desert (or until I decide I've had enough of raking leaves, and just move to the desert and rake the sand in my front yard) the writing of Joseph Wood Krutch will do just fine. I'll probably miss the February jonquils, though I'll enjoy the winter's cactus roses.

Vlad Nabokov (the butterfly impaler) finally gets his due

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer — and I want no other fame.

(Vladimir Nabokov, "On Naming a Butterfly," 1943)

Well, the old lepidopterist nearly got his wish at last. The Royal Society of London has decided that Nabokov was right in his theory of migration by butterflies called Polyommatus blues, which he proposed in 1945. The New York Times reports that the Russian author's idea of waves of butterfly migration, once discredited as simply being unbelievable, has been proven "absolutely right" by contemporary gene-sequencing technology.

Ironically, gene technology is a method with which the author would likely have taken issue. Stephen Jay Gould once famously called the writer a scientific "stick-in-the-mud" who never accepted that genetics or the counting of chromosomes could be a valid way to distinguish species of insects, preferring instead the old-fashioned method of simple observation.

Nabokov with his butterfly net (above, from the Saturday Evening Post, 1966) has been one of the more unusual images in literary history, but it was the writer's lifelong passion with a serious intent: as the Times reports, he was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and collected the insects across the United States. Carl Zimmer in The Times reports in the Science column that

... Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

In his European exile, Nabokov visited butterfly collections in museums. He used the proceeds of his second novel, “King, Queen, Knave,” to finance an expedition to the Pyrenees, where he and his wife, Vera, netted over a hundred species. The rise of the Nazis drove Nabokov into exile once more in 1940, this time to the United States. It was there that Nabokov found his greatest fame as a novelist. It was also there that he delved deepest into the science of butterflies.

Nabokov spent much of the 1940s dissecting a confusing group of species called Polyommatus blues. He developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia. He argued that what were thought to be closely related species were actually only distantly related.

At the end of a 1945 paper on the group, he mused on how they had evolved. He speculated that they originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait, and moved south all the way to Chile.

from Nabokov's Butterflies (2001)

Allowing himself a few literary flourishes, Nabokov invited his readers to imagine “a modern taxonomist straddling a Wellsian time machine.” Going back millions of years, he would end up at a time when only Asian forms of the butterflies existed. Then, moving forward again, the taxonomist would see five waves of butterflies arriving in the New World.

Nabokov conceded that the thought of butterflies making a trip from Siberia to Alaska and then all the way down into South America might sound far-fetched. But it made more sense to him than an unknown land bridge spanning the Pacific. “I find it easier to give a friendly little push to some of the forms and hang my distributional horseshoes on the nail of Nome rather than postulate transoceanic land-bridges in other parts of the world,” he wrote. ...

Nabokov's son Dimitri published a volume called Nabokov's Butterflies in 2001. He writes that "in a game that asked us to associate natural kinds and famous people, 'butterflies' would yield the answer 'Nabokov' as surely as 'hemlock' would trigger 'Socrates.' ... Nabokov looked at his world tirelessly and at close range, and for all the horrors he could evoke in the darker books, he found it swarming with inexhaustible diversity and delight. Not the least of his delights was Lepidoptera." As the butterfly collector delighted in revealing time and again in his fiction, human nature resisted all efforts to be so neatly pinned down.

(Nabokov drawing of a butterfly, at top, from The Atlantic Magazine, 2000)

Gary Snyder, Jim Harrison, and "The Etiquette of Freedom"

"The archaic religion is to kill god and eat him. Or her."

(Gary Snyder, from "Grace," in The Practice of the Wild)

"I had read somewhere that in the Middle Ages hell was envisioned as a place without birds."

(Jim Harrison, from The Road Home)

Luckily there are still birds along the California coast. Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder join together in a new book of conversations and an accompanying documentary, The Etiquette of Freedom, in which the two discuss ideas of poetry, art, and God (and, occasionally, Google) while trekking the California wilderness. The largely untouched wild makes a beautiful case for leaving well enough alone, but both men realize that man's imprint continues to shape the land and that one's own conscious attitude is a necessary tool of conservation.

Both writers are acutely aware that even in an age when global economies are seen as increasingly contracting, the world's energy consumption continues to explode with an unstoppable demand for new resources. The political aspects inherent in twenty-first century stewardship of the land, however, are not the focus here. These talks are a give-and-take primarily on the individual's role in developing a stewardship of place and a larger sense of belonging through awareness.

A participant of Kerouac's original "rucksack revolution" foretold in On the Road, Snyder remains one of its eloquent spokesmen. The countercultural movement away from the cities and to more rural settings in the 1960s and '70s found the poet's essays essential reading and his poems an expression of tangible beauty that became increasingly difficult to find in the suburban sprawl along the interstate. Harrison's novels and poems of the American midwest are a naturalist approach toward family and place -- particularly in Legends of the Fall -- that echoes Snyder's larger themes. Together the conversational dynamic is pretty sprightly as the two strike sparks from each other.

Zen teaching is a common thread in their conversation, but the east-meets-west combination of Eastern philosophy and Western culture can require some heady, imaginative leaps for the reader. Here's one exchange:

JH: D. H. Lawrence said, "The only aristocracy is that of consciousness."

GS: What do you think he meant?

JH: I think he meant that the person who is most conscious lives most intensely -- if "intensity" is the real pecking order, since life is so limited in length, as we are both aware of recently. That the person who experiences life most vividly --

GS: The most vividly? I'm not sure I agree with how he meant that, but that's a good question --

(Director John J Healey, Snyder, Harrison, and S.F. Film Society executive director Graham Leggat at the May 5, 2010 screening. Photo by Steve Rhodes)

JH: Why would you disagree?

GS: Oh, because it's too spectacular, too romantic.

JH: Well so was he.

GS: Of course. At any rate, you could set that beside an East Asian idea of the aristocracy of consciousness, and a Chinese or Korean idea of that would be much calmer, much cooler. Not like a hard glowing gemlike flame, not like a flaming candle burning out --

JH: That's what Kobun Chino Sensei said; they criticized his friend Deshimaru because he said, "You must pay attention as if you had a fire burning in your hair." And Kobun said, "You must pay attention as if you were drawing a glass of water."

GS: Oh, that's better.

JH: This concept of the divine ordinary --

GS: Exactly. There's two sides of Zen, right there. Deshimaru's statement about hair on fire is something you might say to a koan student. You'd say, "This is in the literature; it's like you had a glowing red ball stuck in your throat. And that's how serious you have to be in order to do koan study. But, in the long run, you don't want to burn your tongue off."

JH: It's like Rene Char says, if you are a poet, all you have to do is be there when the bread comes fresh from the oven.

GS: I like that.

"Are you going to try to improve yourself, or are you going to let the universe improve you?" Snyder quotes Dogen Zenji at one point, nudging us to the realization that we all still have that choice to make.

It's wonderful to read as the two old lions occasionally roar back and forth at each other, trying to top one another as they make universal connection. "The practice is the path," another quote from Dogen Zenji, appears early in the book, and serves as a helpful guide to the two writers' sometimes oblique tangents; we are all learning as we go. The book (and one supposes the documentary too) is a reminder that old ideas may not be dead after all, and that the old mysteries are still alive to be solved in all of us.

"Poets on the Peaks," John Suiter (2003)

(BellemeadeBooks is on vacation during August. Here is a review originally posted September, 2008)


As the anniversaries of the Beat movement roll on (Kerouac's On the Road turned 50 in 2007) and its participants recede into American history -- if not its folklore -- there is something comforting in the fact that poet and lifelong Zen student Gary Snyder is still here, still with us, still quietly reminding the reader that Beat ideas of individual freedom and personal experience continue to have resonance in our daily lives as well as in art.

Although he has been linked with the Beats since the mid-50s, Gary Snyder is less the shaman or the showman than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and his writing shuns the wild word-is-a-virus pyrotechnics of William Burroughs. He shared the Beats' post-war restlessness: he studied in Japan, and learned Japanese and Chinese and traveled to India; his interest in Buddhism was coincidentally shared with Ginsberg and Kerouac when they came to San Francisco in the mid-50s, meeting up with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen. That became Beat poetry's East-meets-West moment, New York-to-San Francisco's transcontinental linkage. He was present at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg read "Howl" in October 1955, the first Beat cannon shot across the bow of 50s conformity.


Yet Snyder's individual impact on twentieth-century poetry and ecology -- the actual sinew, flesh and bone of man's place on the planet -- has been considerable, and has continued so for more than 50 years. Reviewing The Gary Snyder Reader in 2000, William Pitt Root puts Snyder's contribution pretty nicely: "Except for Gary Snyder, post mid-twentieth century American poetry might never have gotten further out-of-doors than the nearest garbage dump, golf course, or catfish farm." And Snyder's essays on nature (Earth House Hold, The Practice of the Wild) prove that these ideas are not the stuff of airy, lost-Edenic poetry. To the careful reader, his essays reveal exactly what America is losing more rapidly with every passing season.

Writer and photographer John Suiter trekked to the mountain lookouts where Snyder and others spent several summers in the mid-50s and captured images of the western mountains that inspired them. Poets On the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) is a literary and photographic recreation of the Beats' original sojourn in the wilderness. Snyder began his long poem, Myths and Texts; Kerouac found inspiration for The Dharma Bums (Snyder was the model for the book's main character, Japhy Ryder) and Desolation Angels; Whalen's Sourdough Mountain Lookout was published in 1957. Suiter pulls together the books, notebooks, letters and diaries of poets and writers creating a wilderness ethic in mid-century America, away from the cities and highways that were beginning to mark the country, and into one of the last great wilds on the continent.



When The Dharma Bums was published the year after On the Road, Suiter writes, Jack was tremendously excited and wrote to Snyder that 1958 would be "the Year of the Dharma." Snyder, in his fashion, was planning another trip to the wild, but wanting to include Jack in his plans. Returning from sea aboard the oil tanker Sappa Creek, Snyder wrote:

"Maybe this is the Year of the Dharma. Now Arabian Sea and heading in for last load and trip home. Tiger, if you like, join me in the mountains this summer. I mean to wander the Sierras and Cascades both. Also, bhikku cabin around SF area -- we'll look into it."

To Whalen, Kerouac wrote that Gary's arrival would spark big changes:

"With Dharma Bums I will crash open the whole scene to sudden buddhism boom and look what will happen closely soon ... everybody going the way of the dharma ... then with the arrival of Gary, smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America."

It was telling of them both that Kerouac's comments envisioned a grand change in American values, while Snyder was planning a return to isolation and the high mountains. For Snyder, there was the real work to be done of living, creating and conserving. Kerouac's wild enthusiasm was not bound to last; within ten years he was disillusioned and drunk, full of despair -- even if his roman candle of a book inspired a generation, he was not part of the social revolution it created, and he despised the unintended counterculture that came up around On the Road.

What a contrast to the ecological awareness Snyder's work has encouraged. His poetry and essays have been enjoying a rediscovery, with a lengthy appreciation in the October 20 issue of the New Yorker ("Zen Master") being the most recent. Snyder's long career as a poet, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan and others from the Japanese, and his ecological essays have made him, in a way, the remaining Beat presence. It's ironic that his quiet and unassuming poetry (and his life away from the literary spotlight) would continue to give meaning to Kerouac's "rucksack revolution" and its subsequent 60s fireworks.

Now 78, after a lifetime of writing and contemplating what he once called "the real work", Snyder is still at it -- though his tools have changed from those he used at his Sourdough Mountain lookout in 1953. Here's an excerpt from "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer":

... Because its keys click like hail on a rock & it winks when it goes out,
& puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds,
identical seedpods strong on a vine,
or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly layed out
and then highlighted, & vanished in a flash at "delete"
so it teaches of impermanence and pain ...

Suiter's book is a valuable (and very beautiful) addition to Beat literature, putting into pictures as well as words what made this brief period of 1952-1956 so important to the scene that followed. He is currently at work on the first full biography of Snyder, to be published in 2010.

Gary Snyder, born May 8 1930

Gary Snyder at home near Nevada City (photo by Dan Chung, Guardian UK, 2008)

Old Bones
Gary Snyder

Out there walking round, looking out for food,
a rootstock, a birdcall, a seed that you can crack
plucking, digging, snaring, snagging,
barely getting by,

no food out there on dusty slopes of scree—
carry some—look for some,
go for a hungry dream.
Deer bone, Dall sheep,
bones hunger home.

Out there somewhere
a shrine for the old ones,
the dust of the old bones,
old songs and tales.

What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.