The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [236]
Crick was also a Malthusian. But what attracted him to McClure was the almost molecular swirl of vivid words and surreal images in McClure’s poems about nature. McClure also seemed almost intuitively able to understand key concepts about human consciousness, and he and Crick shared an interest in peyote. “The worlds in which I myself live,” Crick said, “the private world of personal reactions, the biological world (animals and plants and even bacteria chase each other through the poems), the world of the atom and molecule, the stars and the galaxies, are all there; and in between, above and below, stands man, the howling mammal, contrived out of meat by chance and necessity. If I were a poet I would write like Michael McClure – if only I had his talent.”64
Loving people so much, always needing human company, Snyder shied away from Malthusian fretting and from poetry inspired by DNA. As a warmhearted Buddhist, he didn’t feel like telling people not to breed. In 1956 Snyder moved to Japan to study on a scholarship at the First Zen Institute of America. Often, he lived in an ashram. The monastic life suited Snyder fine—for short spells. But his wanderlust soon compelled him to get a job on the oil tanker Sappa Creek, traveling to Ceylon, Guam, and Istanbul. In the western Pacific in 1958 Snyder, aboard the tanker, wrote the four-verse poem “Oil.” He was full of fear and dread about the planet’s future, when “hooked nations” would need “long injections of pure oil.”65 America, he believed, was a society of petroleum junkies. Maybe—who knew?—Snyder later mused while visiting Alaska, the internal combustion engine would become obsolete. As Snyder wrote in his poem “Energy Is Eternal Delight”:
We need no fossil fuel Get power within Grow strong on less.66
Chapter Twenty - Of Hoboes, Barefooters, and the Open Road
I
Wainwright, Alaska, sits on a spit of land at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, just within the boundary of the National Petroleum Reserve. An old Inupiat map from 1853 showed that the fishing camp used to be called Olgoonik. But coal was found along this part of the Chukchi Sea coastline in the early twentieth century, and it seemed only proper to anglicize the name of the town. The first naval report from the Arctic area had been written in the 1820s by Lieutenant John Wainwright. Later the navy honored Wainwright (if you want to call it an honor) by naming the frozen town after him. During the winter in Wainwright, temperatures regularly dropped to about fifty degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and there was very little precipitation. More than 90 percent of Wainwright remained Inupiat, hunting bowhead whales and caribou to survive. But the U.S. Navy kept a lookout station in Wainwright: you never knew when, instead of beluga whales, you might see a Soviet submarine or an oil seep or a UFO.
If one were to pick a place on the globe where one wouldn’t expect to find the poet Allen Ginsberg in the summer of 1956, it could have been Wainwright. But Ginsberg, depressed because his mother, Naomi, had died in June, signed up as a deckhand and boarded the USNS Sgt. Jack J. Pendleton (T-AKV-5)—a cargo ship constructed during World War II—for the summer months while City Lights Books was preparing Howl and Other Poems for publication. His employer was the U.S. Merchant Marine. The Pendleton had been refitted with radar and enlarged hatches in 1948 and usually worked the central Pacific Ocean, visiting ports in Japan,