Danger on Peaks

by Gary Snyder

  Books by Gary Snyder

  POETRY

  Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems

  Myths and Texts

  The Back Country

  Regarding Wave

  Turtle Island

  Axe Handles

  Left Out in the Rain

  No Nature

  Mountains and Rivers Without End

  PROSE

  Earth House Hold

  He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village

  Passage Through India

  The Real Work

  The Practice of the Wild

  A Place in Space

  The Gary Snyder Reader

  Back on the Fire

  The High Sierra of California (with Tom Killion)

  Tamalpais Walking (with Tom Killion)

  The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder

  Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder

  Copyright © 2004, 2014 by Gary Snyder

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  CDs recorded and produced by Jack Loeffler

  ISBN 978-1-61902-451-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Snyder, Gary, 1930–

  Danger on Peaks : poems / Gary Snyder.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61902-405-2

  I. Title.

  PS3569.N88D36 2004

  811’.54 — dc22 2004011649

  Jacket and text design by David Bullen

  Jacket art by Tom Killion

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed by RR Donnelley in China

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR CAROLE

  “. . . danger on peaks.”

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  I Mount St. Helens The Mountain

  The Climb

  Atomic Dawn

  Some Fate

  1980: Letting Go

  Blast Zone

  To Ghost Lake

  Pearly Everlasting

  Enjoy the Day

  II Yet Older Matters Brief Years

  Glacier Ghosts

  III Daily Life What to Tell, Still

  Strong Spirit

  Sharing an Oyster With the Captain

  Summer of ’97

  Really the Real

  Ankle-deep in Ashes

  Winter Almond

  Mariano Vallejo’s Library

  Waiting for a Ride

  IV Steady, They Say Doctor Coyote When He Had a Problem

  Claws / Cause

  How Many?

  Loads on the Road

  Carwash Time

  To All the Girls Whose Ears I Pierced Back Then

  She Knew All About Art

  Coffee, Market, Blossoms

  In the Santa Clarita Valley

  Almost Okay Now

  Sus

  Day’s Driving Done

  Snow Flies, Burn Brush, Shut Down

  Icy Mountains Constantly Walking

  For Philip Zenshin Whalen

  For Carole

  Steady, They Say

  V Dust in the Wind Gray Squirrels

  One Day in Late Summer

  Spilling the Wind

  California Laurel

  Baking Bread

  One Empty Bus

  No Shadow

  Shandel

  Night Herons

  The Acropolis Back When

  The Emu

  The Hie Shrine and the “One-Tree” District

  Cormorants

  To Go

  One Thousand Cranes

  For Anthea Corinne Snyder Lowry

  The Great Bell of the Gion

  VI After Bamiyan After Bamiyan

  Loose on Earth

  Falling from a Height, Holding Hands

  Sensō-ji

  Envoy

  Notes

  Thanks

  Acknowledgments

  Audio CD Track Listing

  Danger

  on Peaks

  I

  Mount St. Helens

  LOOWIT

  from Sahaptin / lawilayt-Lá / “Smoker, Smoky”

  THE MOUNTAIN

  From the doab of the Willamette and the Columbia, slightly higher ground, three snowpeaks can be seen when it’s clear — Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens. A fourth, Mt. Rainier, farther away, is only visible from certain spots. In a gentle landscape like the western slope, snowpeaks hold much power, with their late afternoon or early morning glow, light play all day, and always snow. The Columbia is a massive river with a steady flow. Those peaks and the great river, and the many little rivers, set the basic form of this green wooded Northwest landscape. Whether suburban, rural, or urban the rivers go through it and the mountains rise above.

  Mt. St. Helens, “Loowit” (said to be the “Indian name”) — a perfect snowcapped volcanic cone, rising from almost sea level to (back then) 9,677 feet. I always wanted to go there. Hidden on the north side in a perched basin is a large deep lake.

  Spirit Lake

  When I first saw Spirit Lake I was thirteen. It was clear and still, faint wisps of fog on the smooth silvery surface, encircled by steep hills of old fir. The paved road ended at the outlet, right by the Spirit Lake Lodge. A ways down the dirt road was a little shingle Forest Service Ranger Station. Farther down was a camp.

  Looking out on the lake and across, only forested hills. Cool silence. South of the ranger station a dirt road climbed steadily up to a lighter drier zone. It was three miles to timberline. The mountain above the lake: they reflected each other. Maybe the mountain in the lake survives.

  The camp had tent platforms under the big trees in a web of soft fir-floor trails. They were all near the water. It was so dark on the forest floor that there was almost no undergrowth, just a few skinny huckleberries. The camp had a big solid wood and stone kitchen building, and a simple half-open dining hall. There was one two-story lodge in the rustic stone and log construction that flourished (making work for skilled carpenters) during the Depression.

  From the camp by the lake we went out on several-day hikes. Loading Trapper Nelson packboards, rolling our kapok sleeping bags tight, and dividing the loads of groceries and blackened #10 can cook pots with wire bail handles. The trails took us around the lake and up to the ridges: Coldwater Mt. Lookout and on to Mt. Margaret and beyond, into a basin of lakes and snowfields nestled below. From the ridges we could look back to Spirit Lake and the mountain with its symmetry and snowfields. We walked through alpine flowers, kicked steps traversing snowfields, glissaded down and settled in by rocky lakes to boisterous campsites and smoky crusty tincan meals all cooked by boys.

  THE CLIMB

  Walking the nearby ridges and perching on the cliffs of Coldwater Mountain, I memorized the upper volcano. The big and little Lizards (lava ridges with their heads uphill), the Dogshead, with a broad bulge of brown rock and white snowpatches making it look faintly like a St. Bernard. The higher-up icefields with the schrund and wide crevasses, and the approach slopes from timberline. Who wouldn’t take the chance to climb a snowpeak and get the long view?

  Two years later the chance came. Our guide was an old-time Mazama from Tigard in Oregon. His climbing life went back to World War One. Then he got a big orchard. He wore a tall black felt hunting hat, high corked loggers-boots
, stagged-off pants, and carried the old style alpenstock. We put white zinc oxide paste on our noses and foreheads, each got our own alpenstock, and we wore metal-rimmed dark goggles like Sherpas in the thirties. We set out climbing the slidey pumice lower slopes well before dawn.

  Step by step, breath by breath — no rush, no pain. Onto the snow on Forsyth Glacier, over the rocks of the Dogshead, getting a lesson in alpenstock self-arrest, a talk on safety and patience, and then on to the next phase: ice. Threading around crevasses, climbing slow, we made our way to the summit just like Issa’s

  “Inch by inch

  little snail

  creep up Mt. Fuji”

  ISSA

  West Coast snowpeaks are too much! They are too far above the surrounding lands. There is a break between. They are in a different world. If you want to get a view of the world you live in, climb a little rocky mountain with a neat small peak. But the big snowpeaks pierce the realm of clouds and cranes, rest in the zone of five-colored banners and writhing crackling dragons in veils of ragged mist and frost-crystals, into a pure transparency of blue.

  St. Helens’ summit is smooth and broad, a place to nod, to sit and write, to watch what’s higher in the sky and do a little dance. Whatever the numbers say, snowpeaks are always far higher than the highest airplanes ever get. I made my petition to the shapely mountain, “Please help this life.” When I tried to look over and down to the world below — there was nothing there.

  And then we grouped up to descend. The afternoon snow was perfect for glissade and leaning on our stocks we slid and skidded between cracks and thumps into soft snow, dodged lava slabs, got into the open snowfield slopes and almost flew to the soft pumice ridges below. Coming down is so fast! Still high we walked the three-mile dirt road back to the lake.

  ATOMIC DAWN

  The day I first climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13, 1945.

  Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn’t appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy years.” The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”

  SOME FATE

  Climbed Loowit — Sahaptin name — three more times.

  July of ’46 with sister Thea

  (went to Venezuela & Cartagena as a seaman summer of 1948)

  June of ’49 with dear friend Robin who danced shimmering in the snow,

  and again with her late that summer

  This wide Pacific land blue haze edges

  mists and far gleams broad Columbia River

  eastern Pacific somewhere west

  us at a still place in the wheel of the day

  right at home at the gateway to nothing

  can only keep going.

  Sit on a rock and gaze out into space

  leave names in the summit book,

  prepare to descend

  on down to some fate in the world

  1980: LETTING GO

  Centuries, years and months of —

  let off a little steam

  cloud up and sizzle

  growl stamp-dance

  quiver swell, glow

  glare bulge

  swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles

  she goes

  8.32 AM 18 May 1980

  superheated steams and gasses

  white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a

  burning sky-river wind of

  searing lava droplet hail,

  huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,

  shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing

  cloud of rock bits,

  crystals, pumice, shards of glass

  dead ahead blasting away —

  a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down

  lightning dances through the giant smoke

  a calm voice on the two-way

  ex-navy radioman and volunteer

  describes the spectacle — then

  says, the hot black cloud is

  rolling toward him — no way

  but wait his fate

  a photographer’s burnt camera

  full of half melted pictures,

  three fallers and their trucks

  chainsaws in back, tumbled gray and still,

  two horses swept off struggling in hot mud

  a motionless child laid back in a stranded ashy pickup

  roiling earth-gut-trash cloud tephra twelve miles high

  ash falls like snow on wheatfields and orchards to the east

  five hundred Hiroshima bombs

  in Yakima, darkness at noon

  BLAST ZONE

  Late August 2000.

  An early plane from Reno to Portland, meet Fred Swanson at the baggage claim. Out of the Portland airport and onto these new streets, new highways, there’s a freeway bridge goes right across the Columbia, the 205, piers touch down on the mid-river island, but there’s no way onto it. This is the skinny cottonwood island that Dick Meigs and I used to sail to and camp on the sandbars. Blackberries growing around the transmission towers.

  In an instant we’re in Washington State, and swinging north to join the main 5. Signs for Battleground, Cougar. Crossing the Lewis River, the Columbia to the left, the Kalama River, the old Trojan nuke plant towers, then on to Castle Rock. Freeway again, no sign of the towns — they’re off to the west — and we turn into the Toutle River valley on a big new road. Old road, old bridges most all swept away.

  (Remembering two lane highway 99, and how we’d stop for groceries in Castle Rock, a hunter/logger’s bar with walls covered solid by racks of antlers. The road east toward Spirit Lake first climbed steeply out of town and then gradually up along the river. It was woodlots and pasture and little houses and barns, subsistence farms, farmer-loggers.) Air cool, clear day, bright green trees.

  The new Silver Lake Mt. St. Helens Visitors Center is close enough to the freeway that travelers on the 5 can swing by here, take a look, and continue on. It’s spacious, with a small movie theater in back and a volcano model in the center large enough to descend into, walk through, and at the center look down a skillful virtual rising column of molten magma coming up from the core of the earth.

  The Center’s crowded with people speaking various languages. Gazing around at the photographs and maps, I begin to get a sense of what transformations have been wrought. The Toutle River lahar made it all the way to the Columbia River, some sixty miles, and deposited enough ash and mud into the main channel to block shipping until it was dredged, weeks later.

  We go on up the highway. Swanson explains how all the agencies wanted to get in on the restoration money that was being raised locally (and finally by Congress). They each put forth proposals: the Soil Conservation Service wanted to drop $16.5 million worth of grass seed and fertilizer over the whole thing, the Forest Service wanted to salvage-log and replant trees, and the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build sediment retention dams. (They got to do some.) The Forest Ecology Mind (incarnated in many local people, the environmental public, and some active scientists) prevailed, and within the declared zone, zero restoration became the rule. Let natural succession go to work and take its time. Fred Swanson was trained as a geologist, then via soils went into fore
st and stream ecology research in the Andrews Forest in Oregon. He has been studying Mt. St. Helens from the beginning.

  The Corps of Engineers went to work along the Toutle with hundreds of giant trucks and earth movers. Swanson takes a turn off the main road, just a few miles on, to a view of an earthwork dam that was built to help hold back further debris floods in the new river channel. The lookout parking lot had clearly been more of a tourist destination in the past than it is now, partly closed and getting overgrown with alders. Once the dump trucks stopped, the people didn’t come so much to look. But there it is, lots of earth holding back what further mud and gravel might be coming down — for a while.

  The color of the dam, the riverbanks, the roads, is “volcano-ash-gray.” New bridges, new road, this has all been rebuilt. Swanson says that for some years after the eruption there was no access into the west side of Spirit Lake. To get closer to the lake and the mountain, people were driving a string of small roads north and around. You could drive up from the east to Windy Ridge. And then a new state highway from the 5 to the west side ridge above the lake got built. You still can’t drive to the edge of the lake — all pumice, ash, and broken rock.