Poets on the Peaks

DURING HIS LAST WEEK, things had slowed down to the way he wanted them, and like the year before he didn’t want to come back down. But he knew it was coming. Each day he cut a little cordwood to build up the woodpile for next year’s lookout. One afternoon while splitting, he saw a figure ambling along the ridge, coming towards the L.O. As he got closer, Gary saw it was Roy Raymond, the old fellow who had helped pack him up back in July, coming up for a visit on his day off. Roy had a postcard for Gary, from Diane Scott, an old girlfriend from Reed. The card was from an exhibit of Japanese painting that had come through Portland that summer; it was a fourteenth century picture of Kanzan (“Han Shan”)—“famed for his eccentric behavior and his carefree poverty,” quoted Diane.

ROY STAYED the afternoon and night. The two played horseshoes in the afternoon, using some old muleshoes from a box under the lookout. In the morning they played five-card draw, huddling close by the woodstove. Roy was a lonely old guy, whose wife had died a few years before. Now he spent his time in the mountains, working for the Forest Service, doing a little carpentry, even panning the creeks now and then. “I sold the house and the furniture,” he told Gary. “I got it down now to where I can get everything into a footlocker. My friends ask me What you sell that for, but hell, what use did I have for it? I’ll never marry again.”

WHEN ROY WENT back down, Gary settled into his final days of solitude, extending his zazen sittings, chanting, doing calligraphy, sitting up late in the doorway looking up at the Milky Way stretching like a wisp of smoke from Jack Mountain across to Pyramid Peak. On the morning of August 30th it started to snow and Blackie radioed to close it up and pack on down. By noon he was ready to go. While the snow whirled outside Gary took a few minutes to finish a short poem he’d begun a few days before in preparation for leaving. He ended it and hung it on a nail on the side of the fire finder cabinet:

I the poet Gary Snyder
Stayed six weeks in fifty-three
On this ridge and on this rock
& saw what every Lookout sees,
Saw these mountains shift about
& end up on the ocean floor
Saw the wind and waters break
The branched deer, the Eagle’s eye,
& when pray tell, shall Lookouts die?

HE HIKED OFF DOWN THE RIDGE, through all the familiar humps of gneiss, and wreckage of basalt and incredible quartz veined boulders. He turned to look uplake to Hozomeen one last time, but it was socked in, and by the time he turned into the first switchback of the south meadows, so was Sourdough Lookout.

GARY STAYED IN THE UPPER SKAGIT for another few weeks, working trail crew from the Ross Lake Guard Station with Andy Wilcox, old Ed Wyman, and Kim Oelberg, the Desolation lookout. They went deep into the back country along Big Beaver Creek, up past Thirty-nine Mile Creek between Mount Prophet and Elephant Butte, where the sun filtered down in bars through dark stands of old growth red cedar. They spent ten days bucking gigantic blowdowns on the pack trail with two-man cross cut saws. It was up there that Gary performed his first sweat lodge.

“GOD, THERE'S SOME big trees up there—big cedars,” says Snyder. “That was when I first made a Native American-style sweat lodge. We heated rocks, threw an old packer’s tarp over a framework, and rolled hot rocks in there and made myself a little sweat lodge. The other trail crew guys thought it was great, but too hot they thought. One of the guys was an Indian. There were always some Native American guys that were working on those crews, because they were the locals.

That led into something I did for a number of years when I was out, which was to make sweat lodges, do that kind of Native American purification. Then I started doing it when I worked on trail crews down in the Sierra.”

WHILE GARY WAS UP ON BIG BEAVER, Jack Francis left Diablo Guard Station and headed back to Bremerton for another year of high school teaching. He took the train from Diablo back to Marblemount, riding on one of the last trains of the year. At Newhalem, Blackie Burns got on the car with a couple of other Forest Service men. Jack was reading a newspaper he’d found in the seats and Blackie didn’t notice him behind it, but Jack recognized Blackie by his voice. Soon Blackie and the others were talking shop and gossiping about the various men in the district. Eventually the talk got around to the lookouts, and someone asked Blackie who he thought was best on the forest. Jack perked up, eager to hear Blackie’s judgment. “I like that Snyder feller we had up on Sourdough,” said Blackie. “He’s a calm son of a bitch.”

From Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac
in the North Cascades, published by Counterpoint Press, 2002.
Text & Photos © John Suiter All Rights Reserved.
No part of the text or of any photograph may be used
without the express written permission of John Suiter.