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, Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, and the Philippine Islands and restocking U.S. radar stations along the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line with foodstuffs and supplies for the coming winter. Ginsberg was desperate for money and also hoped that the stark Arctic scenery might help him shake off the blues; it had worked for Rockwell Kent. Ginsberg earned $450 a month, the equivalent of $3,500 a month in 2010 dollars. But, far from finding enlightenment in the Chukchi Sea, as Muir had, he grew even more depressed at the sight of the bruised skies, coal storage tanks, Eskimo skid rows, wharf shacks, rocks, and general bleakness of Wainwright. “Settled down in trip more, now up at a place in Arctic Circle called Wainwright, Alaska—so far no ice, snow, icebergs, aurora, whales, dolphins, seals, fish,” he complained in a letter to the painter Robert LaVigne. “Nothing but grey sea and occasional bright day, and day which truly does last all night. The light if you’re interested in these northern lights has a kind of teablush-grey immanence, as if not out of sun (usually hidden behind solid cover of clouds also dead grey color past midnight) but lunar reflected out of the water.”1
What made Wainwright even worse for Ginsberg was the fact that the Pendleton had been quarantined half a mile offshore by the merchant marine, because of a measles epidemic in the Native villages. (The memory was still raw, in the Bering Sea region, of the “great sickness” of June 1900, when a vicious strain of influenza wiped out half the population of Alaskan villages with “lightning force.”2 Also, all around Arctic Alaska tuberculosis—which accounted for one-third of all Native deaths in the territory—was always a threat.) Using field glasses, he could see the village crouched on the cliff: a cluster of about seventy dreary, ramshackle edifices. Jack Kerouac had made a steamer voyage to Greenland in 1942 aboard the SS Dorchester and described it romantically in his first (unpublished) novel, “The Sea Is My Brother.” To Ginsberg, however, the landscape was profoundly desolate. Adding to the grim bleakness, the Pendleton’s captain had a persistent fear that a flood tide or a northerly wind would sink the ship, and all the cargo would be lost. “Northern latitudes look flat and the land of Alaska a pencil line on the edge of horizon from where we are,” Ginsberg wrote to his friend, “and the further Northward stretches up another thousand miles to the pole in the daylight streaked with clouds.”3
As the Pendleton steamed farther north up the Chukchi Sea, Ginsberg’s mood grew darker. Nothing noteworthy happened, there was just the ache of boredom. According to the merchant marine’s plans, the Pendleton would moor off Point Barrow, not far from where the humorist Will Rogers’s plane—the Aurora Borealis—had gone down in 1935 during a violent gale. Meanwhile, Ginsberg would peer out over the wet railing into the cold summer dusk, too often asking himself why. There is no record that he saw any other ships on the horizon. A sharp pang of regret penetrated him as the Pendleton headed toward the north pole. The Chukchi Sea shoreline changed almost minute by minute but became no less desolate. Large scattered masses of blue, green, and white ice drifted forlornly. “I am on the sea north of Alaska 1000 miles from the Pole,” Ginsberg wrote to his grandmother Buba. “The sun is up all night, and ice flows by on the edge of the ocean day after day. I spend my evenings reading through the books of the Old Testament.”4
Point Barrow, frozen and windswept, was the most northerly outpost in Alaska. A thick fog suddenly swallowed the Pendleton. Sea ice encircled it as it steamed ahead to port, with the crew hoping for a safe anchorage. Ginsberg, carrying a clipboard that held numerous cargo release papers, was to oversee the unloading of supplies at the U.S. Navy station. In the Inupiat tongue, the geographical location of Point Barrow was Ukpeagvik, “the place where we hunt snowy owl”; in the requisition office two stuffed owls were on display. The midnight sun caused the sleep-deprived Ginsberg to wander about Point Barrow like a zombie. Darkness is the natural signal for human glands to produce melatonin—the hormone that most affects sleep. Body clocks get scrambled in the Arctic. Ginsberg was among the victims.
Before Ginsberg left San Francisco, he had heard sailors describe Point Barrow as the Arctic transportation hub. Now he could see, with his own eyes, that besides a few weather station buildings and conical Native huts, Point Barrow was nothing much. Working to counter his despair, however, was a gladdening thought: before setting sail he had optimistically mailed prepublication copies of Howl and Other Poems to T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Faulkner, though he didn’t know any of them. City Lights Books was bringing out Howl on November 1, 1956, as the fourth volume in its Pocket Poets series. The San Francisco poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Books, had begun the series with his own collection The Gone World. Ginsberg, like any author, was bursting with anticipation and longing to actually touch his own finished book. “So have been up and down north coast of Alaska for a month, now at northernmost Point Barrow,” Ginsberg wrote to Jack Kerouac in mid-August (Kerouac was at Desolation Peak in the North Cascades, working as a fire lookout, deep in solitude for sixty-three days). “Sun is out all night or was in midsummer last week, dread ghastly pallor all night through clouds, and this week fantastic burning iron sun going down at edge of horizon for a few hours, clear weather. The water always moving clouds, always moving, birds same clouds and me same like a transparent shifting haze everywhere changing.”5
Ginsberg was unlike John Muir in that Alaska didn’t inspire his creative muse very much; although on August 10 he wrote the poem “Many Loves” from the Arctic. The primary intellectual lesson he
squeezed out of his job with the merchant marine was how viciously the Chukchi Sea current attacked ships. Whalers considered the waters between Icy Cape and Point Barrow the most treacherous north of New Zealand. The Arctic sea-lanes were in the field of a strong northward magnetic pull that made timepieces run backward. Frequent fog could turn dangerously heavy within seconds in an unexpected rain shower. Nobody was really ever prepared for the strange turbulence that could suddenly appear with no meteorological rhyme or reason.
Once, in poor visibility, the Pendleton’s navigator accidentally rammed the ship into a huge ice floe, causing serious damage to the hull and cracking the fantail. The captain was then forced to make a two-day detour around the floe. Saltwater seeped aboard the ship. Vacuums were brought out. Divers in what Ginsberg described as “Mars suits underwater” tried to fix the damage while the ship was at dockside in Point Barrow. At least no one had to worry about working the graveyard shift: Barrow had eighty-five days of continuous daylight from May 10 to August 2.
Ginsberg, wandering around in the thick weather, did a little paperwork in the village center, thankful for the chance to stretch his legs, and thought about the fame Howl might soon bring him. While supplying a storage shed onshore, he contemplated the U.S. Air Force radar station stuck here on top of the continent. This was the cold war era, and some Democrats—saying that the Soviet Union had the “missile edge”—wanted Alaska to become a launch area. Ginsberg wondered if there weren’t already enough atomic missiles that could be fired, from underground bunkers, over the North Pole to destroy the Soviet Union. Rumors of polar bears on the ice, always bandied about in Point Barrow, were also troubling to him. Feeling unsafe, he went back aboard the Pendleton and continued reading the Bible.
While Ginsberg was at Point Barrow, Kerouac was working on his Scripture of the Golden Eternity: sixty-six easy-to-contemplate nuggets of personal wisdom from the Buddha. Corinth Books would publish it as a pamphlet in 1960. Scripture 63, written while Kerouac was at Desolation Peak as a forest lookout, dealt 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 the mad rush of consumerism and conformity. Seeking solace in the sea, sky, and mountains of the Kenai Peninsula, particularly the temperate zones, they hoped that subsistence farming and fishing were the way off the treadmill of making money. As Gary Snyder had said, these seekers all wanted to “create wilderness out of empire.”9 Homer’s slogans became “The Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea” and “Living on the Edge,” and were a way of giving the finger to Main Street. To the professional fishermen in Homer, who thought of their village as the “Halibut capital of the world,” all these cosmic-minded kids with no money were a disturbing trend. “Humans don’t own the earth,” Lady Greensleeves and Spoonguy have said about the ethos in Homer. “Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, la madre tierra, she bears us on our destiny, and herstory is a vast saga.”10
Curved around Kachemak Bay, Homer—the magnet for the beats in Alaska—was a clannish fishing village centered on a low, treeless spit (a long, thin gravel bar jutting out into the water). Muir had found the Homer Spit—where fishermen caught thousands of Pacific halibut and Pacific lampreys—enchanting when he sketched Kachemak Bay in 1899. The spit was surrounded on both sides by the exchanging tidal flows of Cook Inlet and the Gulf of Alaska. Low, wooded mountains rose on one side of the spit; on the other side was a rolling ridge of glistening glaciers. At twilight, Homer glowed in what some people described as a blanketing halo. “Light,” Muir had written. “I know not a single word fine enough for Light . . . holy, beamless, bodiless, inaudible floods of light.”11
Homer, a magnet for vegetarians, may be where seaweed became a popular health food in the 1950s. Bands of seaweed—such as porphyra (black seaweed), palmaria (ribbon seaweed), and macrocystis (giant kelp)—became a subsistence food for hitchhikers along Kachemak Bay. Such seaweeds were rich in minerals, vitamins, and carbohydrates.12 Likewise, the clams and mussels of Kachemak Bay, whose beds were in the mudflats, were also an attraction; small but succulent, they were among the best-tasting in the world. Nestled along Kachemak Bay was a huge raft of sea otters. Daily they swam about in these highly productive waters, gorging on shellfish.
When the Harriman Expedition visited Kachemak Bay in 1899, Charles Palache of Harvard University, the m
ineralogist aboard the Elder, noted the “interesting geology” around Homer; the area gave him a newfound interest in crystallography.13 John Burroughs, however, found “nothing Homeric about the look of the place.”14 But he loved seeing the volcanic peaks, Iliamna and Redoubt, sixty miles across Cook Inlet to the west.
The Kenai Peninsula was ripe for the beat generation ethos after Ginsberg’s Howl was published in 1956, followed by Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957. As Muir had told an earlier generation, “Go to Nature’s School—the one true University.”15 Homer was a natural place for the beat philosophy to take root because the village spit—not San Francisco—was truly the end of the road in America.16 While Snyder and Whalen were injecting Zen Buddhism into the poetry of California, the Barefooters, a group based in the Los Angeles area, were melding Hare Krishna, reincarnation, and Henry David Thoreau’s “Simplify, simplify” into a heady cocktail. The back-to-nature cult had started in 1948 as the Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, and Love Community (WKFL). A subgroup with theatrical ambitions in the Los Angeles area performed a Christmas play in which none of the performers wore shoes: hence the name Barefooters.
The WKFL was led by Krishna Venta, who sought martyrdom. The members permanently shunned shoes; the men refused to get a haircut until world peace was achieved; the women dressed in long, flowing white gowns and liked to serve apple butter on homemade wheat bread. The Barefooters intended to wear their holy robes until universal love rained down. Love and service were the goals of WKFL. These cultists, forerunners of the San Francisco hippies, devoted their varied talents to humanitarian endeavors such as helping the poor and homeless and extinguishing forest fires. “Bare feet keep one connected to the earth,” Brother Asaiah, a WKFL leader, explained. “One doesn’t need blinders on one’s feet any more than one’s eyes. We learn about the earth through our feet. We learn to tread lightly on earth and not dally too long in one place.”17
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 51
