The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [230]
Snyder hoped that the wilderness cause, supported also by the Mazamas Club, would take hold in both high art and pop culture on the West Coast. Instead of an elite movement—in which members of the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote memos about primitive roadless areas, and people like the Muries occasionally had their work published in Scientific Monthly or the Sierra Club Bulletin—Snyder envisioned a revolution of youth consciousness would reject industrialization. Fear of nuclear annihilation and toxic pollution was the root of his thinking: some kinds of technology were not to be trusted.* Howard Zahniser wrote in The Living Wilderness that wild places like the Cascades and Arctic Alaska weren’t a “disparagement of our civilization.” Rather, they were “admiration of it to the point of perpetuating it.”36 Echoing Leopold, proponents of roadless wilderness like Zahniser spoke about a nature aesthetic instead of using the outworn terms preferred by the National Park Service: “scenic” and “wonder.”37 When Mardy Murie complained that Americans had an insatiable need for “comforts and refinement and things and gadgets,” she was saying much the same thing. “Where is the voice to say,” Murie asked, “look, where are we going?”38
When Snyder came down from Sourdough Mountain in the fall of 1953, full of pleasant thoughts, he moved to Berkeley. Hungering for further enlightenment, he enrolled in courses on Japanese and Chinese culture at the University of California–Berkeley. The Bay Area was swirling with creative energy. The dean of West Coast poets, Kenneth Rexroth, had recently published The Dragon and the Unicorn to great acclaim. Snyder thought it a great book.
After two years of intensive study Snyder needed a break. Wanting to connect with the spirit of John Muir, Snyder worked on a trail crew in Yosemite National Park in June–August 1955, writing his fine poem “Riprap” (first published in 1959 as the title poem of Riprap). Snyder later explained that riprap meant a “cobble of stone” that was “laid on steep slick rock to make a trail.” He had learned it from master trail builders in the Sierra. To construct these stone trails took the skill of a mason and the precision of a surgeon. Snyder was paid $1.73 an hour working around Pate Valley and Pleasant Valley. Always frugal with money, he planned to spend a couple of months in San Francisco and then take a steamer to Japan to study with Zen Buddhist masters. And he started thinking a lot about Alaska: “My sense of the West Coast,” Snyder said, “is that it runs from somewhere about the Big Sur River—the southernmost river that salmon run in—from there north to the Strait of Georgia and beyond, to Glacier Bay in southern Alaska. It is one territory in my mind. People all relate to each other across it; we share a lot of the same concerns and text and a lot of the same trees and birds.”39
III
In the fall of 1955, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg became fast friends in San Francisco. They were something of an odd pairing. Certainly, Ginsberg had a more urban disposition, writing poems about his Jewish roots, such as Kaddish in 1961. But Ginsberg was a fierce critic of Moloch. Rejecting the notion of America as a monoculture, Ginsberg chastised industry, whose “factories dream and croak in a fog” and whose “smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!”40 Since the early 1920s lead components had been mixed into petroleum as antiknock agents, regardless of the toxic effects on humans. Ginsberg was aghast. Until his death in 1997, Ginsberg enjoyed hiking with Snyder in California and the Pacific Northwest. One afternoon, in the fall of 1965, they were exploring around Washington’s Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, walking in rhythm with the chant “Hari Om Namo Shiva.” Snyder had a Vandyke beard and a crew cut and wore a mountaineer’s cap. Ginsberg had