During the spring of my senior year in high school, I stopped doing the assigned English homework: I’ll read what I want to read, dammit! A musty copy of Walden. Essays by Freud and Jung. Vonnegut novels. Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. My buddies would soon depart for college, whereas I planned to stick around Vermont, rake leaves and bang nails and stack dollars to fund a dirtbaggy trip to Scotland—hiking and scrambling, drinking and smoking, talking to strangers and listening to the wind, sleeping on trains and in the rain. The time had finally arrived to claim responsibility for my education, to design my own syllabus, to fuse learning and adventuring into one inseparable and awesome endeavor. I was psyched.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, courtesy of my local small-town library, I was extra-psyched. Reason: Browsing on a dim gray afternoon, I chanced upon a book that seemed to contain every subject that already fascinated me, plus a bunch more that a teenager passionate about wilderness, literature, countercultural experimentation, and the flexible boundaries of consciousness couldn’t help but find intriguing, provocative, energizing. The author’s name—Gary Snyder—rang a not-especially-loud bell. Friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg, a Beat, right?
It was the cover of The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations, 1952 – 1998—the photograph of a squirrely dude perched atop a mountain, dark crags and frozen basins spilling away in the distance—that initially piqued my curiosity. Wool cap, oversized sunglasses. Frizzy beard, goofy smile. I looked closer. Maybe Snyder was paused mid-hoot, mid-holler, mid-yodel, mid-song? Maybe that explained the gaping mouth? Without a doubt, he was ebullient. A tiny human embraced by a humongous space. Opposite of an Ivory Tower weenie.
I grabbed a chair and dove in: Bear crap, cave painting, Buddha statue, whitewater, chainsaw, peyote button, Pentagon, toddler, shooting star, granite ridge, Artemis, elephant, pup tent, roadkill, Rim of Fire, calcium, kiva, a telepathic magpie, a steaming cup of green tea…
Two decades later, I’ve yet to resurface.
At 640 pages, TGSR is deep indeed. And at 1.94 pounds, it’s heavy, hardly the text your average backpacker includes in the kit, which is ironic given that it makes a person eager to trek big miles, each step in dialogue with the rugged mysterious land. Describing Snyder as an earthy writer significantly understates the case: He is the earthy writer of twentieth-century American letters, an iconic artist-scholar who knows—nay, celebrates—that all of us are animals, natural creatures born of this planet, and that even our technologies and toxins, even our languages and dreams, are of a piece with the elemental whole. TGSR samples sixteen of his books (also miscellaneous journals, missives, interviews, and loose manuscripts) and explores, creatively and thoughtfully, again and again and again, the question of what this earth is and how various societies succeed or fail to harmonize with that foundational, nonnegotiable reality. Ecology is of the utmost importance to Snyder’s project, understood via the term’s Greek root oikos—study of the house, the dwelling place—and ethics, the pursuit of the good, is never far behind. (He’s yodeling, singing, I’m sure of it.)
A couple years after discovering TGSR, having twice sessioned it front to back and subsequently tracked down many of the original works it excerpts—Turtle Island (winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize), Mountains and Rivers Without End (composed over nearly half a century), The Practice of the Wild (wow)—I met a woman with a blonde ponytail, a quick laugh, an acoustic guitar, a pair of scuffed leather boots, and a certain dog-eared, soil-smudged book. That certain book? Sexy. The choice of reading material didn’t officially seal the deal, but it told me a lot about her character and values: Nope, not the average backpacker. Perhaps she would consider lugging me into the hills, too?
I recently asked that woman, Sophia, with whom I am lucky enough to share a home and a life, if there was an aspect of TGSR that she particularly appreciated as a teenager. She pulled her battered old edition (the paperback published in 2000 by Counterpoint) from a shelf above the couch, fanned through it, and responded, “It was such a hopeful book for me, less because of the details than the general tone and mood. The overarching message was that you can wander and you can be deliberate in your wandering. You don’t need to conform and you probably shouldn’t conform, at least in a culture like ours that harms much of what it touches. You can follow your nose, wherever it leads. You can resist lameness.”
Earlier, I wrote that TGSR’s subjects psyched me up, the cool stuff illuminated by Snyder’s diligent research and freewheeling imagination. This is true: His topics and themes are stimulating, world-expanding, of perennial consequence, and so I’ve flagged a few below, in the form of a beginner’s guide to Snyderdom. But emphasizing the pleasure of the specifics potentially distracts from their cumulative impact on the reader, the impact Sophia nicely articulated. Recall that at the end of high school I sought to “claim responsibility for my education.” Well, okay, how in the hell might one do that? From TGSR I received an intricate map of some very exciting terrain (bear crap, cave painting, Buddha statue, whitewater, etc.) and simultaneously a pat on the shoulder and a kick in the butt, a playful and dead-serious voice encouraging me to head outside and start walking, on the trail, off the trail, into the rich fertile tangle of existence.
In the Author’s Note on page XXI of TGSR, either Sophia or I—there’s no saying who—underlined the phrase “spirit of quest.”
Spirit of quest.
Welcome to Snyderdom.
Wilderness
Snyder is born May 8, 1930. As a kid, he lives with his parents and sister on a scrappy dairy farm north of Seattle, Washington—two acres of pasture set amidst woods half-ruined by the timber industry. At age ten he passes nights alone at a secret campsite, cooking on an open fire, and at age thirteen he journeys into the proper wilderness of the Cascades. “I had an immediate, intuitive, deep sympathy with the natural world, which was not taught me by anyone,” he says. “I found very little in the civilized human realm that interested me.” Throughout adolescence, Snyder’s major obsession is climbing glaciated volcanoes like Rainier and Saint Helens, and the power and romance he encounters on those “glowing floating snowy summits” prompts him to try his hand at poetry. His first book, Riprap, will draw on seasonal gigs as a Forest Service fire lookout and a Park Service trailbuilder. For instance: “Sky over endless mountains. / All the junk that goes with being human / Drops away.”
Anthropology
As an undergrad at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Snyder studies anthropology and drafts a senior thesis (“The Dimensions of a Haida Myth”) that three decades hence will get revised and published as a book (He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village). His preoccupation with “the old ways” stems from exposure to the Coast Salish of Puget Sound, his childhood neighbors, and a conviction that there are “self-destructive tendencies in our cultural tradition”—not only in profit-addled corporate capitalism, but in the fundamental DNA of Western civilization. Where to go for inspiration, for alternative models of social and economic organization, for an environmental ethic? One answer: Tight-to-the-ground subsistence peoples who learned, generation by generation, to survive within the limits imposed by their habitats. “It’s actually quite impossible to make any generalizations about history, the past or the future, human nature, or anything else, on the basis of our present experience,” Snyder writes. “It stands outside of the mainstream. It’s an anomaly.” Arguing the overconsumption of resources and overproduction of wastes that defines modern America is deviant, and the real mainstream is hunting and gathering, family and tribe, ritual and magic, tons of walking—this is a classic Snyder switcheroo.
Bohemianism
Though the word “bohemian” isn’t central to Snyder’s vocabulary, it captures the ethos of the Beat and Hippie movements, both of which he participates in and influences. In 1955, a fierce Allen Ginsberg shocks the audience at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, California, with his soon-to-be infamous poem “Howl,” and Snyder’s disdain for the status quo is likewise on display that evening when he recites “A Berry Feast,” a piece that includes this portrait of a suburban trap, er, house: “Joined boards hung on frames, / a box to catch the biped in.” (This chestnut too: “‘Fuck you!’ sang Coyote / and ran.”) The protagonist of The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel about a coming “rucksack revolution,” is a charismatic fellow—part dissenting intellectual, part visionary artist, part quiet naturalist, part disciplined Buddhist, part alpine vagabond, part fun-hog weirdo—named Japhy Ryder. Hmm, rhymes with Gary Snyder, coincidence? What you get with Ryder/Snyder is freedom, love, inquisitiveness, and a principled rejection of stifling norms. “Investigating new lifestyles is our work,” writes Snyder (not Ryder), “as is the exploration of ways to explore our inner realms.”
Buddhism
Snyder enrolls in the East Asian Languages Department at University of California, Berkeley, in 1953. The goal is to improve his reading comprehension, conversational chops, and grasp of the Buddhist canon in preparation for rigorous Zen training at Shokoku-ji and Daitoku-ji, renowned temple complexes in Kyoto, Japan. (Two incidents that steer Snyder to the Dharma early on: The ancient Chinese landscape scrolls in the Seattle Art Museum resemble the Cascades, and he’s informed by a marm at Sunday school that his favorite heifer will under no circumstances be admitted into Heaven.) Of zazen, or seated meditation, he says, “It wasn’t alien to my respect for primitive people and animals, all of whom/which are capable of simply just being for long hours of time. I saw it in that light as a completely natural act. To the contrary, it’s odd that we don’t do it more, that we don’t, simply like a cat, be there for a while, experiencing ourselves as whatever we are, without any extra thing added to that.” Snyder will spend a dozen years in Japan—chanting sutras, wrestling with koans—and then play a decisive role in the introduction of Zen to the spiritually ravenous public of the United States.
Labor
Sweaty boring healthy exhausting honest grunting labor is a mainstay of Snyder’s poetry and prose. This flows from the radical politics of his youth (Snyder’s grandfather soapboxed for the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World) and an associated belief in the dignity, not to mention basic necessity, of using our bodies to earn our living, our bread. Furthermore, it aligns with his Zen philosophy and his habit of contextualizing subjects ecologically. “We are six-foot-long vertebrates, standing on our hind legs, who have to breathe so many breaths per minute, eat so many BTUs of plant-transformed solar energy per hour,” he says. Zazen practice is merely “one intensification of what is natural and around us all of the time.” Or to put it bluntly: “We damn well better learn that our meditation is primarily going to be our work with our hands.” Reading Snyder, you can feel the blisters spread on your toes and the callouses thicken on your fingers, and you can enjoy the sweet fatigue and satisfaction of a job accomplished, such as in “The Spring,” when the grueling day of tamping asphalt into highway potholes culminates with a “numbing” drink from “a rocked in pool / feeding a fern ravine.”
Travel
1948: He’s hitching to New York City, shipping out in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, visiting Columbia and Venezuela. 1957: He’s a wiper in the engine room of the SS Sappa Creek, crisscrossing the Persian Gulf, making port in Italy, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Samoa, Hawaii. 1962: He’s rambling Nepal and India on the cheap, unrolling his sleeping bag, smoking opium, ogling the Himalayas, discussing meditation with the Dalai Lama. 1972: He’s attending the UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm and chasing wildlife in Hokkaido. 1981: He’s bullshitting with cowboys in Australia. 1984: He’s serving as cultural diplomat to the People’s Republic of China. 1994: He’s dodging crocodiles in Botswana and dancing with the spray of Victoria Falls on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border.
“I have knocked about in the world,” Snyder writes, “on tankers, freighters, third-world buses, beat-up cars, by foot and by jumbo jet—midnight bars and dawn mosques.” And elsewhere: “The idea of being a person of place never excludes the possibility of travel.”
Place
“To re-achieve indigeneity, re-achieve aboriginality, by learning about the place and what really goes on there”—to belong—becomes a thoroughly absorbing task for Snyder after he returns to North America, or as he prefers to call it Turtle Island, “the old/new name for the continent.” In 1970, with his wife and two sons, he settles above the South Yuba River, on the slope of California’s Sierra Nevada, and constructs an off-grid home (pines cut with a two-man saw and peeled with drawknives) adjoining public lands—a “porous, permeable” home through which bats flit and chipmunks scamper. Thus commences an unending process of growing into the territory, sinking into the watershed, and of nurturing a sensitive and mature “reinhabitory culture” that will, ideally, remain committed to “Shasta Nation” for seven—or seventy—generations. During the 1980s and 1990s, Snyder preaches the gospel of bioregionalism, “a kind of creative branch of the environmental movement” that aims at “citizenship” in the natural community. “There is a very simple vow… ‘I’ll stay here, love here,’” he says. “That changes the politics around totally, if you have a rooted group of people who won’t retreat.”
Time
Snyder zooms out from the insanity of the species-extinguishing, everything-polluting twentieth century by studying the skills and customs of Turtle Island’s natives—denizens of boreal Alaska, the desert Southwest, the Pacific littoral—but this only takes him as far as the close of the Ice Age, and his capacious thinking requires a larger timespan. So he engages the Upper Paleolithic, our hominid ancestors, and in 1996 tours the limestone caves of southern France, searching polychrome murals of horse, bison, auroch, ibex, and panther for “clues and guides to understanding the creature that we are and how we got here, the better to steer our way into the future.”
He asks: “What have human beings been up to? The cave tradition of painting, which runs from thirty-five thousand to ten thousand years ago, is the world’s longest single art tradition.” Zooming out further, there’s geology, the deep, deep, deep, deep time of plate tectonics and supercontinents, eras and eons. Contemplating the dynamics of a planet constantly dismantling and reassembling itself allows Snyder to breathe easy and, in turn, offer images like this: “The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back into the waters.” Also tantalizing riddles like this: “Knowing that nothing need be done is the place from which we begin to move.”
Poesy
On a ten-day “mountain meditation walk” in 1955, Snyder relinquishes any sort of clingy, controlling grip on the artform that will ultimately establish him as a literary celebrity. “From that time forward I always looked on the poems I wrote as gifts that were not essential to my life,” he says. “Ever since, every poem I’ve written has been like a surprise.” The surprises catalogued by his poetry range from the melodic (“half-moon hairy seeds in the hair of the wrist”) to the metaphysical (“The Father is the Void”) to the technical (“Turquoise: a hydrous phosphate of aluminum / a little copper / a little iron”) to the exotic (“bhaishajye bhaishajya samudgate”) to the tender (“hugging babies, kissing bellies”). What’s unsurprising—what’s consistent through the entire oeuvre—is a strong, smooth current of wonder and gratitude. It’s intentional, of course: “Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step…is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.” Picture him fording an autumn stream, “singing inside / creek music, heart music.” Picture him hitting the brakes, parking the truck, bowing “in roadside gravel.”
Reading
Let’s loop back to childhood on the farm. In the summer of 1937, Snyder severely injures his feet when he unwittingly dashes across a mound of hot ash left over from a burnpile. At the start of his four-month convalescence (mandatory bed rest), he can barely read. By the end, he’s gobbling books meant for adults, hooked forever. “The original context of teaching must have been narratives told by elders to young people gathered around the fire,” he writes. “My grandparents didn’t tell stories around the campfire before we went to sleep—their house had an oil furnace instead, and a small collection of books…In this huge old occidental culture, our teaching elders are books. For many of us, books are our grandparents! In the library there are useful, demanding, and friendly elders available to us.” I want to repeat that last sentence: In the library there are useful, demanding, and friendly elders available to us. Obviously, I fully agree. But maybe at this point I ought to directly address Mister Snyder, who is ninety-six and still resides on his rural homestead in the Sierra Nevada, along with turkey and deer and bobcat, incense cedar and manzanita and black oak, papers and pencils, books galore: Thanks pops. Spirit of quest. Onward.
