American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (22 page)

Coming down through the woods on a soft winding track, two minutes shy of the time when we have been instructed to arrive, 10 a.m. on a bright Sunday morning, we see the man already out there in the clearing, his right hand on the dog’s collar. Two minutes later, you feel, and he’d be gone. But this is the right person, without question, the one we have come to see. The one we have talked about and quoted on our ride down the coast, through Oregon, into California and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

The man in the clearing, silver hair lit from behind, unstructured French-blue workshirt over pink undershirt, over black T-shirt, is lean, of modest height, and steady as a post. The dog is more enthusiastic, a superior hillbilly poodle. She bounds forward to lick the passenger window, avid for society. As the man is not: he can take it when it comes, assess a situation, shape unshapely events to a predetermined programme, and deliver what’s required, before returning to his proper business, a measured life in a portion of territory he has made his own.

The dog is called Emi. Beyond that pointy elongation of nose, and the wet welcome, this promiscuously affectionate, warm-breathed female is a canine in sheep’s clothing; a tumbling knotted rug of a thing, all flapping ears and thumping tail. Emi has a supporting role in
The Practice of the Wild
, a documentary featuring her human companion and the writer Jim Harrison, shot on Hearst property at San Simeon; a leisurely senior-citizen conversation on wilderness, Native American myths, the Beat Generation, mortality and memory. ‘Nature is not a place to visit,’ the man says, ‘it is home.’ The film is a long weekend of walks, meals, chat. The subject of all this attention is courteous. Talk is the price he pays for hospitality. Some of the figures I have tracked down in America,
after so many years of visibility and fame, are playing themselves, wired to well-grooved reflexes, seeing ill-matched Hollywood infants ape their mannerisms, so that they no longer possess their own copyright. They have become spooks, flown in for publicity shoots, tolerated visitors to the set. The man in the clearing is not like that. He has always stood his ground, questioned the easy fables.

He is Gary Snyder: poet, bioregionalist, teacher. And now, having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and self-constructed. The land was purchased in 1966, after Snyder returned to California, following periods as a Zen Buddhist monk in Kyoto; in the engine room of an oil tanker; travelling through India with his second wife, Joanne Kyger, in company with Ginsberg. And then revisiting Japan. Participating in the ‘Gathering of the Tribes’, that finger-cymbal, Dionysiac, hippie rally in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. And establishing through conferences, lectures, readings, a solid reputation as a direct and inspired spokesperson for a new ecology based on pushing the ceiling back to the Palaeolithic and beyond.

A hundred acres of ground is a substantial mind-map for a poet. Snyder’s friend and colleague Lew Welch saw eternity in an inch of lichen on a rock. ‘These are the stamps on the final envelope,’ he wrote, zooming from his alcohol-fired metabolic extremity to a yellow-green cluster of organisms existing at a speed accessible to red-eyed witness. And accessible to this driven and difficult man, who looked, as many of the Beat originals did, like a not-quite movie star. Like, say, Steve Cochran. Or Rory Calhoun. Or Scott Wilson as one of the killers from
In Cold Blood.
Like someone who might have got a ride in an early Peckinpah western.Welch, a career drinker, was tall, red-haired; a cross-country driver of legendary finesse (an upmarket Neal Cassady), a military-trained marksman. He had been at Reed College in Portland with Snyder and Philip
Whalen, a formidable Pacific Rim triumvirate of youthful poets. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and inspired by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider: cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit.

The poet Charles Upton, who has written about Welch’s shamanic Buzzard Cult, about suicide as a journey towards being ingested by a native predator, said that the essence of this teaching was: ‘Kid, don’t end up like me.’ All the seekers we encountered on our drive down the coast, from solitary forest dwellers to Californian communards, faced the Pacific. They lay down, after spiritual exercises, on their sides, the chain of mountains as a spine. Whatever Europe left them, by way of poets, mystics and visionaries, was tested against the particulars of local knowledge, the practice of tribes who had been culled, pensioned off. Welch wanted language to work as magic. He alerted Upton, by way of ‘Sufi Sam’ Lewis and Carlos Castaneda, to a ‘lifelong sensitivity to dark psychic forces’. The Buddhism of China and Japan had to be fitted against the rituals of frontier life: making space, getting by in the military-industrial state. Gary Snyder, attending Philip Whalen’s memorial service at Green Gulch Zen Center, expressed the view he shared with Welch: ‘Face it, Charles – Buddhism is
atheism
.’ What troubled Upton was the seductive nature of the death cult he located as the underlying theme of Welch’s poetry. ‘Meat is rotten meat made/sweet again.’ Devoured is reborn. Immortality is a memory-system encoded in the rhythms, breaks, silences of achieved poetry. Upton mentions the Mexican Day of the Dead, tortillas and tequila laid on the grave to feed hungry ghosts. Disaffected wanderers travel south to salute, but never quite reach, dormant volcanoes. This is where the Buzzard Cult thrives. After Welch stepped away from the jeep, two copycat suicides were recorded.

Unlike Snyder, Lew never found his place. One day, according to rumour, he walked into the forest, and he didn’t come back. I’d forgotten where this happened, but I thought about it as we drove for days through the overwhelming shade and eternal drizzle of the Olympic Peninsula and the Oregon coast. We had to take the ocean
on trust, hearing the roll of the breakers, but seeing nothing, blinded by the spray of enormous rigs carrying logs to rail-side wood yards.

Taking responsibility for a portion of Sierra ridge, once occupied, river valley to densely forested upper slopes, by Indian tribes, was a major statement of intent from Snyder. ‘We were cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on reading tours and an academic position at UC Davis, fifty miles down the road in the state capital, Sacramento. He called his land, this place where he had lived for forty years, Kitkitdizze, after the Wintu Indian name for the aromatic shrub known as ‘bear clover’. Sliding down the electric window of the Impala, to give Emi’s snout the opportunity for a proper greeting, you get that smell; what the actor Peter Coyote, visiting the community, called ‘witch hazel’. It drifts in from the surrounding bushes.

To maintain his ‘permeable, porous life’, the dissolution of artificial barriers between homesteader and terrain, Snyder rides out, driving down the track for research, pleasure and duty. He spends time in Alaska, in Portland with his son Kai, and in San Francisco. Kitkitdizze has become, he reports, ‘a well-concealed base camp from which I raid university treasuries’. This Thoreau-inspired wilderness encampment, real as it appears, is underwritten by the requirement to present itself as a topic for thesis writers, a reluctant paradigm. A magnet for approved visitors, students, localists, or anyone needing to understand if this thing can be managed: a self-funding, functioning centre that is not a retreat, but a resettlement, in a land Snyder calls Turtle Island. Turtle Island is that old America, mountain and desert, before the European colonialists and exploiters, before strip logging and the rapacious industrialism of the gold-mining operations. Or the present hunger for natural gas.

A lot of public land,’ Snyder told me, ‘has to be converted, in the most organized fashion, into hundreds and thousands of gas wells.
It’s like the original oil era. They’ve tricked a lot of public land by offering inducements that haven’t been followed up on. It’s rocks and hard places for everybody, in terms of energy, from now on.’

Anna drove the first hour, sitting stiffly, managing the pain in her neck, while I did some filming and tried to absorb the sounds of my early-morning walk. Sights lacked outline in the downpour. That rock on Cannon Beach might be a stranded whale. I bought a name-check cap to wear on the future swan pedalo voyage with Andrew Kötting, and a bag of oranges (most of which were confiscated when we crossed the border into California).

‘Great joy in camp, Ocian in view.’ Wrote William Clark on Dismal Nitch at the mouth of the Columbia River, having, in company with Meriwether Lewis (and a fifteen-year-old Shoshone woman, Sacagawea), reached the Pacific at the completion of a two-year transcontinental expedition launched in 1804. The hunger, beyond journals filled with reports on topography, plant and animal life, Indians encountered, was for new territory to exploit. The swan voyage with Kötting was an absurdist homage, in reverse, ocean to city – as a means of making contact with England’s riverbank, woodland tribalists and runaways. Clark was trapped on Dismal Nitch for five days, waiting for the weather to relent. Unlike Kötting, he didn’t know about red wine libations.

After Port Orford and a night’s roost overlooking a small harbour where fishing boats were winched from the water, we saw the sun for the first time since leaving Vancouver. I was ready, like Lew Welch, to worship the pale eye of fire; pink striations, feathery cloud discriminations above banks of mist shrouding the beach and the coastal hills. ‘Orford,’ said Charles Olson, ‘is a peninsula none try but Cyclops.’ The hours spent inside the car, working our way slowly south, creeping through coastal settlements and over a procession of bridges, cantilevered, double leafed, steel trussed by Conde B. McCullough, Oregon’s master engineer, were the only reality. The evening halt, meal, sleep, and the morning walk, were soon forgotten, swallowed up in the miles driven.

For Roberto Bolaño, the car, by the time his literary executors are breaking open computer files for fragments to publish as
The Secret of Evil
, is revealed as the ultimate instrument of fate. ‘They tell Bolaño about his death, how he was run down by a mysterious car, a black Impala, and they talk about his life, a succession of legendary drinking bouts, as if the bars and rooms where Ulises Lima got sick and threw up were the successive volumes of his complete works.’

The windscreen of the Impala detaches us from the road. A steady beading of rain, the swish of the wipers, confirms the Pacific Rim adventure as a memory-movie, a sequence of prompts and quotations unpicking what we think we know; making us wonder if, in truth, we ever made it out of the thunderhead depression of that first drowned Oregon city with its skeletal World’s Fair.

Gary Snyder was justifiably proud of his childhood on a stump farm just north of Seattle. He delivered milk for his father. He learnt to chop wood, how to use a two-handled saw. Tools were important to him, the right kit for the right job. In Kitkitdizze, there are tools everywhere, racks and stacks of them, useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. Peter Coyote remembers Joanne Kyger laughing ‘about how much stuff Gary had to store so that he could go off to Japan and live simply’. The novice monk insisted that his future wife clear her credit card debt, which had climbed to $1,000, before she travelled out to join him. On arrival, she discovered a list Snyder had compiled, numbering her faults and the ways she could improve her presentation. The big difference in Japan, Snyder explained, was the necessity of having the right manners. His fourth wife, Carole Lynn Koda, was Japanese-American. But in Japan, she got everything wrong. ‘I walked too fast,’ she said. ‘I swung my arms too much. My stride was too long. I looked at people in the eyes. That marked me out as American right away.’

Snyder talks about the ‘long view’. The vision of Pacific America privileged from high peaks. He was, from the start, a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, as a schoolboy and
young student, over academic studies. At the age of fifteen, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when he came down from the hike, on 13 August, was a day-old copy of the
Portland Oregonian.
It carried a photo spread of the aftermath of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Learning from Chinese scroll paintings at the museum in Seattle, Snyder adopted a linear continuity of narrative, everything happening at once: the pilgrim with his staff on the mountain, the bridge over the stream, the forest and the ocean. Diary fragments, named persons, conversations in roadside cafés, bars, truckstops, prayers, chants, native shamanic lore, myths of place: they enjoyed an equal status and emphasis. The delivery was crafted to move like natural speech with a leavening of slowburn humour. This was a country-smart poetry, beautifully balanced between frontier transcendentalism and the long gaze of Asia.

After the first hour, I took over at the wheel. We talked about Gary Snyder, whom I had never met, and Michael McClure, whom I visited with Pavel Coen, in the house above Berkeley. Both poets read at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, when Ginsberg exposed ‘Howl’ to an appreciative audience for the first time. We tried to define the attractive otherness of Forks. The
Twilight
aspect of the town was no more intrusive than the traces of Elgar in Malvern or Hardy in Dorchester. Being on the road, spatially limited, loosed from time, imposed a Pynchonesque or Philip K. Dick reading of the world and its conspiracies: pick any wavering thread, follow it, and all the characters interact, exchange roles, climb out from the grave. Films and books are coded. In different languages. Watch out for Number 7. For Seattle. Vulcano. Guadalajara.