The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [229]
Snyder brought with him to Sourdough Mountain in 1953 a rucksack full of his own dharma literature that included Daito Kokushi’s Admonition, William Faulkner’s Sartorius, and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Like Rockwell Kent on Fox Island, Snyder kept a detailed chart of William Blake’s cosmology in his cabin. In Snyder’s journal of 1953 is a passage from Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”32 According to the biographer John Suiter, author of Poets on the Peaks, Snyder wrote next to this passage a simple, “Ah.”33
The question Snyder and Whalen were asking that summer of 1953 in the North Cascades was whether modern societies were capable of living in harmony with nature. Did Americans have the ability to say no to the extraction industries? Would man destroy the planet Earth and move on to a different solar system? L. Ron Hubbard and the Scientologists thought so. World War II had brought new mechanized terrors—culminating in the atomic bomb. Many lovers of Earth wondered whether the apocalypse was at hand. Whalen, who became a Zen monk in 1973, believed that wilderness sanctuaries, where quiet ruled, were essential to rejuvenate an America that Henry Miller had derided as an “air-conditioned nightmare.” Whalen wrote poems with the sparse energy of Bashō’s in the early stages of zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation). During his time in the North Cascades, Whalen wrote poems that would later be collected as Canoeing Up Carbarga Creek: Buddhist Poems 1955–1986, most of them concerning nonattachment as the mind drifts through the cosmic world.34
The modernist poet Robinson Jeffers cast a constructive spell over the thinking of both Snyder and Whalen. A Pennsylvanian by birth, Jeffers had gotten married in 1913 and constructed the granite Tor House and Hawk Tower in Carmel, California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the core of Jeffers’s long verse narratives, some resembling Greek tragedies, was his philosophical belief in inhumanism (the idea that humans were egoists: self-centered and unable to grasp the “astonishing beauty” of the natural world). Jeffers wanted poets to shift the emphasis of their verse from “man to notman,” and urged the “rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.” Jeffers’s poetry—particularly lines such as “long live freedom and damn the ideologies” (from “The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean”) and “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk” (“Hurt Hawks”)—pointed toward a new distrust of political authority and from an embrace of religious instinct that included respecting wildlife.
Amid fears of radiation and of McCarthyism, reading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden on Sourdough Mountain must have been reassuring to Snyder. Thoreau held the key to the wilderness: solitude. He knew the feeling of “total removal” found at the top of the world because he had explored Mount Katahdin (in Maine) and Mount Greylock (in Massachusetts). As he wrote in Walden, the most interesting dwellings in America were the “humble log huts” and “cottages of the poor.” Snyder, who felt himself part of the Buddhist cosmos, was happy living in exactly this type of primitive structure. The new environmental consciousness that Snyder hoped would sweep America during the 1950s seemed to come from a single line of Thoreau’s: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”35 Snyder, like The Wilderness Society, wanted to see the North Cascades left completely untouched by commercial development. Ironically, San Francisco became the urban center where this Thoreauvian philosophy found a suitable home. All around this area were natural mysteries: seal rocks, redwoods, multicolored pebbles shimmering