• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3128 0

with Coyote; Scripture 62 echoed passages in Robert Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness. “The world has no marks, signs, or evidence of existence, nor the noises in it, like accident of wind or voices or heehawing animals, yet listen closely as the eternal hush of silence goes on and on throughout all this, and has been going on, and will go on and on,” Kerouac wrote. “This is because the world is nothing but a dream and is just thought of and the everlasting eternity pays no attention to it. At night under the moon, or in a quiet room, hush now, the secret music of the Unborn goes on and on, beyond conception, awake beyond existence. Properly speaking, awake is not really awake because the golden eternity never went to sleep: you can tell by the constant sound of Silence which cuts through this world like a magic diamond through the trick of your not realizing that your mind caused the world.”6

Just two weeks after the reading at the Six Gallery, Kerouac and Snyder took off for Yosemite National Park to climb the 12,000-foot Matterhorn Mountain. (The outing, complete with raisins, haiku sessions, and homemade chocolate pudding, became the anchor for The Dharma Bums.) When Ginsberg returned to San Francisco from Point Barrow, happy to be in a softer climate, he learned that the Nation was going to run an explanatory article about the “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance,” which had been launched at the Six Gallery reading of October 7, 1955. Since he was considered the publicist for the beat generation, he wrote to the journalist Carolyn Kizer of the Nation, saying that Kerouac, Snyder, Whalen, and McClure were poetic geniuses. Ginsberg pleaded with Kizer not to write her article in a “condescending tone,” adding, “that’s first paramount.” Kerouac was just returning to civilization from Desolation Peak in Baker National Forest in Washington; Snyder was off to study Buddhism in Japan; Whalen was wandering around the Sierras; and McClure was married and with young children, reading Haeckel, and busy trying to protect marine life as John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts were doing around Monterey Bay (on California’s central coast)—so the burden fell upon Ginsberg to articulate what all the hullabaloo in San Francisco was about. “Generally the method is as in Buddhist Zen Archery or Koan Response,” Ginsberg wrote to Kizer, trying to explain the ethos of the “dharma bums,” “long continued practice at spontaneous exactness of expression requiring years of 10–16 hours a day practicing uninterrupted transcription of the droppings of the mind upon a page—until form, deep form, begins to appear, emerge out of the sea.”7

II

With the reading at the Six Gallery in 1955 serving as an impetus, Alaska opened up to spiritual wanderers, seekers of the northern lights, tripsters, permaculturists, wildcrafters, greenhousers, seedsmen, backpackers, quartz collectors, kayakers, misfits, highway bums, seasonal workers, dropouts, malcontents, and survivalists. To longtime Alaskan boomers and sourdoughs, it was as if all of San Francisco’s mystics were arriving in their territory in search of bliss. If Kerouac was right in saying that in the Lower Forty-Eight “the woods” were “full of wardens,” then Alaska was a land where a free- spirited drifter could still “cook a little meal over some burning sticks in the tule brake or the hidden valley.”8 Land was still very cheap: you could easily purchase ten acres for $1,000. Motor homes were welcome in public domain lands. Squatting wasn’t frowned upon. Instead of seeking gold, the young people now coming to unconventional Alaskan enclaves like Haines and Sitka were seeking self. Unlike Rotary Club types, whose belief in America’s future was limitless, these self-seekers were turning toward Buddhism, Hindu reincarnation, vegetarianism, groovy drugs, social consciousness, and yoga—away from the flag and toward the prayer mat—and were fearful of an atomic or chemical holocaust.

In Homer, Alaska—at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula—a new wave of young seekers found the deeply forested region a spiritual haven, far from