The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [226]
Snyder’s home in the North Cascades was a cedar-log miner’s cabin dating from about 1920 but since remodeled. It belonged to the prospector Frank Beebe, who had looked for gold nuggets along Ruby Creek and then, desperate for a paycheck, had lit out to work with the fishing fleets of Alaska. After a few years bouncing around among salmon canneries on the Kenai Peninsula, Beebe gave up on Alaska and drifted back to the Cascades. He remodeled his little cabin on Granite Creek and tried breeding ermines and marten, with no luck. The U.S. Forest Service soon hired him as a lookout. Upon retiring in the 1950s, Beebe moved to Bellingham, Washington, a lumber town that was also a gateway to magnificent beauty.14 His cabin at Granite Creek was now fitted out to become the “guard station.” Snyder was enthralled with the primitive conditions and was proud to call this shack home. Every night, after an arduous day’s work, Snyder would stay up late reading Po Chü-i—a poet of the Tang dynasty—by oil lamp. Nearby Canyon Creek was his companion, offering cool water as a salve. And Bob Marshall’s teachings about the wilderness stayed with Snyder that summer. The bulk of his job was to make sure the backcountry hiking trails were free of debris. The young poet was fast developing his own outdoors philosophy. A journal entry from 1953 expresses his antagonism toward the “chop-chop-chop” concept of managing timberlands: “Forests equals crop / Scenery equals recreation / Public equals money. . . . The shopkeeper’s view of nature.”15
Although Snyder didn’t write much poetry in the North Cascades, he kept a subtle, intelligent literary journal, parts of which were later published as Earth House Hold.16 To his great surprise, one of his first poems, “A Berry Feast” (1952), had become a favorite among his core friends in San Francisco. In it, he had written about coyotes’ mischief and a “neat pile” of bear scat found on “the fragrant trail.”17 This long comical poem, first published in 1957 by the Evergreen Review, was celebrated for its ethnopoetic merging of traditions—Native American; Asian; The Living Wilderness—and helped develop the ecological dimension of the beat generation during the 1950s.18 Poetry, Snyder would tell the Anchorage Daily News in the 1970s, was another way—like science—of seeing the natural world as it truly is. “Buddhism is one of the few religious and philosophical systems on a world scale that asserts the ethical value of the nonhuman,” he said in that interview. “What Buddhism contributes to environmental politics is a profound spirit of compassion. In the Buddhist’s view, everything in the world has value, has authenticity. Ultimately, this goes beyond humans and animals and is an attitude of regard toward rocks, plants, clouds. Do you objectify and commodify the world when you look at it? Or do you see it as worthy, as beautiful, as full of its own intrinsic value?”19
There was nothing flaky about Gary Snyder. Even while tramping around America he found time to take graduate courses at Indiana University. He always considered nature a cure for the depression induced by society. To Snyder solitude was to be relished, not merely endured. And people should always be treated with generosity, kindness, and namaste, a bow of respect. Ever since childhood, Snyder had valued secret hiding places in the deep woods, as if he were a hobbit.20 Inspired by Japanese mentors, he taught himself Zen meditation and, as noted above, read Chinese poetry of the Tang dynasty. Perhaps remembering the Portland