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Gary Snyder, Poet
John Suiter, Writer and Photographer; Author, Poets on the Peaks
In conversation with Barbara Lane, Good Lit Series Director
Barbara Lane: What motivated you to take the fire lookout job?
Gary Snyder: At the age of 15, I started snow-peak mountaineering up in the Pacific Northwest where I grew up. The first snow peak I climbed was Mount St. Helens, back in the days when she had her pure and perfect form complete. I rapidly got connected with the Mazama Club, a mountaineering group in Portland, Oregon, and began both summer and winter climbs, meeting veterans coming back from World War II from the 10th Mountain Infantry, who taught me and my friends how to do serious winter mountaineering. Also I had grown up working in the forest with my father, crosscut sawing, bucking firewood, splitting shakes, and so working in the back country for the Forest Service seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. To be on the lookout, and to get up as high as possible, was an entirely natural inclination - plus a good place to read.
Barbara Lane: Tell us about how you got to the Crater Mountain lookout.
Snyder: From the Marble Mountain Ranger Station, you had to take a little electric train. Then we would go up to the foot of Ross Dam, on Diablo Lake, in a big barge, with a number of mules and horses and all of our gear and all of the hay on the barge. They would drop a cable from a crane over the top of Ross Dam. They would lift us and drop us over the other side, while we would peer down 900 feet. Then we had to go by launch and barge another few miles, and then we had to backpack to the Granite Creek guard station, then up the trail. We would have to unload all the mules on a little stone platform on the edge of the cliff, and the rest of the way to the lookout was done by a third-class rock climb, load by load, and then another quarter of a mile. It took a week to get everything up to the lookout.
Lane: Describe a day, once you got settled in and relatively comfortable.
Snyder: To have a roof over your head was comfort. My day was to get up at the crack of dawn, do my first morning Zen meditation, do a little chanting and then check in on the radio with the ranger station and see what was happening. Then, depending on the weather, go about my daily schedule of tasks, which involved calligraphy practice with Chinese characters, and then calligraphy practice in the Roman alphabet, and then study of my classical Chinese text, and then reading a portion of Chaucer in Middle English. After lunch, I would take a rope and descend to the top of the glacier below, chop ice and then fill it in a bucket and carry the ice back up on top, and put it in a tub so that it would start melting, because that was the water supply. I would do a little painting of landscapes with brushes and make some Chinese tea, and read some William Blake.
Around 5 o'clock, it was time to check back in with the Forest Service and give them a weather report, temperature and wind direction, then cook dinner. After dinner was free time for the lookouts to talk to each other on the radio. We had eight or ten lookouts who all chimed in, and we told stories to each other as it got dark over thousands of square miles of wilderness. That was when I would be talking to Philip Whalen.
I'd already gotten started in my interest in Chinese philosophy, Buddhism - particularly Zen Buddhism. I'd gone to Indiana University for a semester of structural linguistics study and then dropped out, because Buddhist studies became more interesting. So I headed north that summer to do a little more study and earn some money on a lookout.
Lane: John Suiter writes in his book about the roadside revelation you had en route to your graduate work in Indiana, and there was a point where you could have gone east or you could have gone west, and that was a real turning point for you.
Snyder: After my undergraduate studies up in Portland, Oregon, at Reed, I worked as a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation all summer. Then I hitchhiked down to San Francisco to meet my dear friend and poetic mentor, Philip Whalen, seven years older than me, who I got to know in college. Phil and I were wandering around San Francisco, and I walked into the Metaphysical Bookshop and picked up a book by D.T. Suzuki. I had heard of Zen, but I wasn't sure exactly how that school of Buddhism worked. A few days later, with only ten dollars in my pocket, I set out from Berkeley, hitching en route to Bloomington, Indiana. In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40, there was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through a chapter of Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on some phrases that turned my mind totally around. I knew that I wouldn't last at Indiana, and that I would soon be heading in the other direction back toward Asia, but I had to complete my short-term karma. So I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast.
Lane: John, your new book describes Gary's experiences as well as those of Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac. What was it that appealed to you about these experiences, and why did you decide to put them together?
John Suiter: My experience was journalistic at first. I went to Desolation Lookout - Jack Kerouac's lookout in 1956 - to do a magazine photo essay for a newspaper in London. I wasn't that aware of the fire-lookout world beyond the descriptions in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, but I lived for two weeks in Desolation Lookout, worked as a volunteer fire watcher, and basically did the things that Kerouac did there and that Gary and Philip did on their lookouts. When the article was published, I sent it to Gary, and he wrote me back and said, "That was good, John. Why didn't you go to my lookouts, Sourdough Mountain and Crater Mountain?" That was the opening for me to go back to the Northern Cascades. It's a very transformative experience to live there above the clouds when it's a cloudy day in the valley for everyone else, and you're above the clouds in the bright sunshine and the celestial atmosphere. When I came back down, I was looking for a reason to go back, and Gary provided it with his challenge. I went back to Sourdough and Crater the following year, and the magazine article became a book proposal.
Lane: You were able to get access to letters and journals that hadn't been published.
Suiter: When I came back from Desolation Peak, Kerouac's literary executor provided me with the journal Jack kept. A lot of the passages I recognized as being lifted whole from his notebook into The Dharma Bums. Then there would be these great passages that he left out which were very similar to things that I had experienced: complaining about insects, dying for a cigarette.
Lane: Kerouac didn't adapt quite as well to the environment up there.
Snyder: Jack was a conflicted person who both wanted to be alone and wanted to have company, both wanted to be pure and wanted to indulge himself. So he was trying out one side of the equation there, and he had a great time tormenting himself with it.
Lane: Philip Whalen spent three summers up there. The reason that you didn't go back for a third summer is that you were blacklisted in 1954 from forest work. Tell us what kind of subversive you were.
Snyder: When I was 18, I hitchhiked to New York City with a friend whose mother was in the National Maritime Union. My intention was to get seaman's papers. So I went over to the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union's offices in Lower Manhattan, and with some prodding from friends, was able to get seaman's papers to the MC&S, a grand old union that was destroyed during the McCarthy era for its extraordinary and very sane radicalism. In 1948 Marine Cooks and Stewards had a sign on the wall that said, "No race baiting, no queer baiting and no Red baiting," and 40 or 50 percent of the men were either brown, black or queer. And that's 1948. So that was my union. It turned out that it was Communist Party dominated. The FBI picked up all of that, and during the McCarthy era, I was locked out of working for the Forest Service for that reason.
I was peeved. I liked working up in the high country. I actually set up an appointment with a FBI agent in Portland when I came back down from the forest, but he wasn't any help. All he wanted to do was ask me questions. We came to naught, so I shifted gears and went logging over on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east side.
Lane: "Gary Snyder, logger" seems somewhat at odds with "Gary Snyder, environmentalist," and you were green before anybody even used that kind of terminology. How do you reconcile that?
Snyder: It really is very helpful to know what work in the woods involves and, just by extension, to be an effective environmentalist, or to be effective socially and politically in any way at all, you need to know the terms of that which you are either supporting or opposing. I'm not per se against logging. It's all a matter of skill and appropriateness and technique and good forestry and a good silviculture. The work itself is charming and challenging, and it's well paid. I don't mind the logging part of it. The advantage it gave me is that I can go in and talk to people at both Sierra Pacific Industries - California's and America's biggest logging company - or to people in the Forest Service, and get a little credibility right up front. I say, "I've been a logger, I've worked for the Forest Service. Now let me tell you what I'm thinking." Plus, I am a local.
Lane: It's been said Thoreau would have made a fine fire watchmen under spartan living conditions. What qualities should good lookouts possess?
Snyder: A wide variety of individuals from a range of backgrounds, most young men right out of high school, have been good fire lookouts. The main thing is to be able to cook for yourself, to get up in the morning, and to handle tools. The next most important thing is not to be afraid of lightning. I've seen at least two lookouts quit their job and descend the mountain after the first lightning storm. The third thing is to not be troubled by being alone for a while. It helps if you like to read.
The lookout experience for Philip, Jack and me was absolutely transcendent. It was transforming. It's the most beautiful thing to be day after day that high in the sky, watching the changing light in the mountains, all day. But what's interesting is that not just some extravagantly overmotivated urban bohemians from San Francisco are going up there and doing it, but all of the guys who ever worked on a lookout, like my friend Shubert Hunter, who was a Makah Indian boy - working class kids, guys who had been working for the Forest Service all of the years since we got off the lookouts in 1952, and are still there - every one of them was transformed and still remembers their one or two or three summers on lookouts. It touches everybody.
Lane: Can you describe what it's like up there during a lightning storm?
Snyder: It starts coming over the horizon and the clouds get dark, and maybe it's just around dusk, and the lightning starts jumping around from peak to peak, and it glows and grows on you and then you know it's coming your way. And then it begins to move over into your own lookout area, your mountain. And when your hair begins to stand up, and when your beard straightens out, and you see blue light going up and down the cables that hold the lookout down from blowing away, then you decide to stand on the lightening stool, which has glints of glass insulators on each of the four legs. As the storm passes over, you can find yourself in the middle of a blue ball of light, with the crackling smell of ozone, and your skin absolutely tingling. It's wonderful. It's the closest you're going to come to being executed, and live.
Lane: Is there a place today that serves as a lookout for you, that allows the same kind of contemplation? Is there a place you go where you can get that same kind of solitude and pay attention to your work?
Snyder: Yes there is, but you need to be less literal about it and be able to conceive a virtual solitude, rather than actual solitude. As one of the old Chinese Zen monks once said, "There are those who think they have to go off in the distant mountains to be alone, to practice their meditation and achieve purity. But for a mature person, sitting on the second floor of a little room in the city is all they need, because they can do their meditation and accomplish solitude anywhere they are." Now that is true also, but not nearly so easy, and not so pretty.
Lane: There's another book that you collaborated on that deals with the High Sierra. What is there that's distinct about the North Cascades?
Snyder: I grew up just north of Seattle, where you could see the North Cascades. You could see Mount Baker from our little dairy farm. Then look in the other direction and see some of the peaks in the Olympic Mountains. That's what I thought mountains were for a long time. But now we're talking about the mountains of the whole West Coast. There's this wonderful spine of mountains that comes on down out of Canada, runs all through Oregon, drops off just a little bit towards Mount Shasta, picks up again and then transforms into the granite Sierra Nevada type, right around Interstate 80, where it goes over Donner Pass and continues all the way down into Mexico. It's just an extraordinary range of mountains all the way. I got to know the Oregon and Washington Cascades pretty well. Then I went into Berkeley to study Chinese, Japanese and East Asian languages at graduate school, and the only way I knew how to make a living was to work in the woods in the summertime. The Park Service and the Forest Service apparently were not sharing security information, and when I applied to the U.S. Park Service two years after I got booted out of the Forest Service, they took me. I went out to trail crew in the Yosemite high country. You are out for weeks and weeks, supplied only by pack strings filled with food and dynamite, and you work on the trails with a little crew of men. That was my first taste of the High Sierra, very different from the Cascades. It was like going to bed with a new woman, unfamiliar and scary, and you weren't sure it was the right place to be.
There was a difference in the scale of elevation - you have to get higher in the Sierra - different botany, although when you get to the timberline, you still get alpine fur and foxtail pine, bristlecone pine and so forth. But the Sierra is warmer, and it's less brushy and the light is different. John Muir called it the "range of light." That white, hard granite that is characteristic of the Sierra is just an extraordinary thing to be in the presence of. It's only eight or nine thousand years since the glaciers retreated, and the rock still shows the polish of the ice on it. For much of it, no soil has built up yet, so it is hard rock, snow, beautiful, clear, blue lakes and an impressively clean sky. It is not available anywhere from a car, which is fortunate. You can't see it without hiking in. Most people have not seen what the High Sierra is.
Lane: You went in 1956 to Japan, once your passport application was approved. You spent some time in the mountains in Japan. What was the difference there?
Snyder: In a monsoon climate, most precipitation is in summertime, and winters are relatively dry. That's true of all East Asia. What that means is that you don't get an ice age. Without winter precipitation, you don't get a big buildup of snow. Consequently, the mountains of Japan are unglaciated, and they have very steep channels up to canyons, and they are brushy up to a very high elevation. Having no glaciers, they never gauged out any basins to put lakes in, so it's a very different kind of mountain habitat, very different hiking, totally different botany. I had a hard time getting used to that.
Lane: Was there the same kind of enthusiasm for mountaineering and hiking in Japan that you found here in this country?
Snyder: Much more. More backpacking, although not as much high-peak mountaineering. But it astonished me in 1956, the first summer I went up backpacking in the northern Japan Alps, to see a single-file line, in a trail maybe 300 Japanese young people, boys and girls alike, all carrying heavy packs, laboring along in an endless line. They were all over the mountains.
Lane: You were the person that brought reading of the Zen Buddhist texts and sensibility to the movement of poetry and literature that was beginning to emerge.
Snyder: I made a contribution, of course, but interestingly enough, in the mid-'50s and onward, there were a large number of people in the arts, in particular, who were picking up on Zen Buddhist ideas and sensibilities. Look at all those Japanese-style gardens turning up in Sunset magazine in the 1950s. Or Jackson Pollock, connecting his kind of free-flowing spontaneous work with the brush with Japanese Zen painters. It probably has something to do with what you do after you win a war against a culture. You start being absorbed by the culture in some way. I am just one of many contributors to that. Possibly the first contemporary person who pointed me in the direction of the Zen sensibility, when I was just a kid, was Morris Graves, the Seattle painter, who went to Japan to study Zen before World War II.
Lane: John also writes about your reading of Hui Neng's Platform Sutra, when you were on the mountain.
Snyder: All of these texts were available from before World War II. One of the great classics is what's called the Platform Sutra of Hui Neng, a very basic statement of the non-dualist and paradoxical philosophy of Mahayana Buddhism, as framed in Zen terms from the 7th century; great text - still used everywhere in East Asia. As I came out of China in 1983 and was back in Hong Kong, I dropped in to a tailor shop and noticed the tailor was reading a book on the 7th century Zen master Hui Neng. I said, "You guys are still reading that?" "Of course, everybody reads that."
Lane: I came across an online poem of yours, "Smokey the Bear Sutra."
Snyder: Sutra is a technical term for a classical Buddhist text. I stole the form, and Smokey the Bear just came to me. I had a vision that Smokey the Bear was one of the great Buddhas, up from the past, and manifested in North America as a mystical teacher to introduce us to our new understanding of our landscape, and taken over by the Forest Service without their even knowing it, to help instruct us. So using the Sutra form, I wrote this weird and funny text, which I'm quite happy to say is still around.
Suiter: It's got that great line in it: All true paths lead through mountains.
Snyder: There's a nice chant in the "Smokey the Bear Sutra." The way you deal with enemies is you chant, "Drown their butts, crush their butts, drown their butts, crush their butts." That's Smokey the Bear's war spell.
Lane: It's probably not possible to do an interview with Gary Snyder without talking about that famous Six Gallery reading. You actually followed Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" with your poem "Berry Feast." That's a tough act to follow.
Suiter: I was able to interview the surviving readers of that event in December 2000. It wasn't all from secondary sources that have already been published. I was able to check with Gary, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure. The other person was Philip Lamantia, who hasn't really contributed to a lot of books on the Beats, and was very helpful.
Lane: What emerged in your research which is new or that casts a new perspective on the events?
Suiter: The Six Gallery Reading was a poetry reading. The featured event was Allen Ginsberg reading his poem "Howl" for the first time. He had written it about six weeks before. It took place on a little gallery on Union Street, a little bit up from the Marina. Five poets read, and Kenneth Rexroth was the master of ceremonies. Rexroth ran a salon for many years here in San Francisco, and all these poets had been influenced by him to one extent or another, but somehow managed to miss one another. Then you had this reading where they all came together. Ginsberg gave this incredible cathartic reading of his poem, and then Gary followed. Allen had only been in San Francisco for about a year. He had never been to California before. He was a solid East Coaster from North Jersey and New York City. Gary was coming down from the Pacific Northwest and had lived here in San Francisco for several years. So it was a coalescence of these regional energies. It was the Beat Generation of the East Coast and the West Coast poets joining.
Lane: When Teddy Roosevelt spoke here at The Commonwealth Club, he spoke on the need for the federal government to play a role in preserving our forests. What role do you think they should play?
Snyder: The public lands do not belong to the federal government. They belong to the people. They are ours. That the public lands were set aside was not some federal conspiracy. It happened as a natural evolution of the public domain, following the decline of people's interests in the Homestead Act. At a certain point in the late 19th century, people were no longer taking out homesteads; all of the decent land had been taken. We were looking at millions of acres of land that nobody was going to homestead. By default, that became the public domain. It was formalized a little bit later, during Theodore Roosevelt's time primarily, into the forest reserves, which became later the U.S. Forest Service, with the intention of maintaining watershed, forest and biological values for the people, on behalf of the people, forever. The Bureau of Land Management spun off from that as the territory of deserts and grazing land, rather than forested lands. This is an extraordinary treasure the American people have, though the lands are subject to the whims of Western congressman, who in turn push industry interests their way. There are obvious abuses of the public land, like the Mining Law of 1872, which still permits mining companies to take minerals off the public land without paying any royalty to the people. That still goes on. Gore tried to stop that when he was senator and he was whacked down. We should first of all value and cherish and stand up for the values of the public lands. Second, we should critique the management to make sure they're not dominated by industry, and to make sure that they respect biological values. That's what I do in my spare time.
Lane: How do you feel about the Westernization of Zen Buddhism?
Snyder: It'll take a few centuries. At the moment, there are many wonderful intentions all mixed in, but there are some needed corrections. The first needed correction is not to call it Zen Buddhism, but to call it Buddhism, and to say the Zen practice within Buddhism, because that's what it really is. Zen is just a practice within the marvelous ocean of Buddhist philosophy and practices that is so rich and so sophisticated. From there, we have things which we can give to Buddhism. We already have begun to give much more power to women. We've begun to make it a lay practice, a family practice, rather than a purely monastic practice. And we've moved towards engagement and action in terms of social issues, in a way that historical Buddhism did not do so much, although to give them credit, there is social activism in contemporary Japanese Buddhism, too, particularly on nuclear power and nuclear war issues. Buddhists are the leaders in the peace movement in Japan, and have been ever since World War II. But the truly non-dualist, non-discriminating, openhearted, playful style of Buddhism will take a while.
Suzuki Hiroshi, who founded the Zen Center in San Francisco, said to me when I first came back from Japan in 1969, "Do you know what's wrong with Americans? They're too serious. They don't have enough sense of humor." I knew just what he was saying, because the Japanese Buddhist world has this knack for seeming very formal and very strict on the surface, and then just having a freewheeling, very tolerant time behind the surface. That's a trick. A lot of American Buddhism is still crypto-Protestantism.
