Danger on Peaks

by Gary Snyder

  On the night mountain canyon wall road

  construction lights flash

  we wait til the other lane comes through

  one empty bus

  (early October 2000 in the headwaters of the Mibu River, Southern Japanese Alps)

  NO SHADOW

  My friend Deane took me into the Yuba Goldfields. That’s at the lower Yuba River outflow where it enters the Sacramento valley flatlands, a mile-wide stretch between grass and blue oak meadows. It goes on for ten miles. Here’s where the mining tailings got dropped off by the wandering riverbed of the 1870s — forty miles downstream from where the giant hoses washed them off Sierra slopes.

  We were walking on blue lupine-covered rounded hundred-foot gravel hills til we stood over the springtime rush of water. Watched a female osprey hunting along the main river channel. Her flight shot up, down, all sides, suddenly fell feet first into the river and emerged with a fish. Maybe fooling the fish by zigzagging, so — no hawk shadow. Carole said later, that’s like trying to do zazen without your self entering into it.

  Standing on a gravel hill by the lower Yuba

  can see down west a giant airforce cargo plane from Beale

  hang-gliding down to land

  strangely slow over the tumbled dredged-out goldfields

  — practice run

  shadow of a cargo jet — soon gone

  no-shadow of an osprey

  still here

  SHANDEL

  I gave a talk one outdoor evening to some students at a park. After, sitting on the bench and drinking juice, crowd chatting, a slender woman with dark hair came by and flashed a smile.

  She had her daughter with her, maybe nine. Also dark short hair. Introduced her, “This is Shandel.” I said “Please — tell me about the name Shandel.” The mother sat on the bench beside me. “Shandel,” she said, “is Yiddish — it means beautiful.”

  And then she pulled her daughter toward her, cupped her head in her hands and said “like a shandel head.” And then she put her hands on the girl’s cheeks and said “or a shandel face” — the young girl stood there smiling sweetly at her mother.

  “Why did you want to know?” the woman asked me. I told her “I once had a dear friend named Shandel who grew up in Greenwich Village. She was talented and lovely. I never heard the name again.” — “It’s not common — and Yiddish isn’t either. I liked your talk — my daughter too.” — they strolled away.

  People leaving in the dusk

  lights coming on, someone drumming in a cabin

  I remember Shandel saying

  “We were radicals and artists,

  I was the little princess of the Village — ”

  at her home in San Francisco

  half a century ago.

  NIGHT HERONS

  At Putah Creek a dense grove of live oaks. Step out of the sun and into the leafy low opening — from within the tree comes a steady banter, elusive little birds — they shift back, move up, stay out of sight. It’s a great dark hall arched over with shimmering leaves — a high network of live oak limbs and twigs — four or five big trees woven together. Then see: a huge bird on a limb, head tucked under, motionless, sleeping. Peering deeper, seeing others — it’s night herons! Roost by roost, settled in. One shifts a little, they know someone’s here. Night herons passing the daylight hours in this hall of shadowy leaves.

  Driving the 80 East, on the Bryte Bend bridge

  high over the Sacramento River

  wind-whipped by passing bigrigs,

  thinking of night herons

  in a leafy palace, deep shade, by a pool.

  (Family Ardeidae, the black-crowned night heron, Nycticorax nycticorax)

  THE ACROPOLIS BACK WHEN

  Toula Siete meets me on the street, she translates into Greek from German and Italian. She and I are off to the Acropolis. We walk through winding back streets and around the east end to the south side walls and cliffs, go west past the semi-standing theater of Dionysus. Reach up and pick some rotten shriveled olives — so bitter!

  Up the steps to an outlook ledge, a glint of sunshine, and we are above Athens. The modern city starts to fade. Toula’s friend arrives and leads us on steeper steps past the small shrine to Bear-girl Artemis and into the territory of big clean slabs, pentelian marble, old stone newly stacked — lintels perched on blocks, old talus tumble.

  Walk the porch edge of the soaring Parthenon, sacred to gray-eyed Athena. Slip into the restoration office by the cliff for tea. He is the director of the restoration project for the whole show, especially the Parthenon, Taso Tanoulas. He explicates the structures ruin by ruin, and explains the calibrated aesthetics of just “leaving be.” The city racketing around below. Chilly breeze — now see the housecat tribe gone wild in the scattered heaps of big stone blocks. This whole hilltop a “palimpsest,” Taso says, of buildings: Neolithic, Mycenean, Periclean, and after. Then I’m thinking, here’s a good place for a bivouac — there’s a spring, they say, a few yards down — people must have camped here when —

  Lifetimes ago

  drawn to this rock

  I climbed it

  watched the clouds and the moon,

  slept the night.

  Dreamed of a gray-eyed girl

  on this rocky hill

  no buildings

  then

  (1998)

  THE EMU

  Driving out of the foothills heading west — there’s a high layer of cloud that’s thin enough to let a lot of light through, not exactly sunshine but it showed up as 5 amps on the solar charge-controller at home. At about Truxell Road I slip seriously under the fog/cloud cover. Coming from up high like this, one knows that there are two layers of clouds, a high one and this low one. Closer to Davis, the belly of the cloud is almost on the ground and now it’s fog.

  In this drippy gloom I manage to pick up my laser printer, which has been repaired, buy a copy of The Economist at Newsbeat, get Korean-style ramen at the Asian store, and then cruise down to Red Rum Burger to try eating Ostrich.

  Thinking back to the Emu: there it was last summer, an Emu in the yard with a green garter (probably an identification band, maybe with a serial number and a record of its shots). Our place surrounded by a dozen miles of forest. It soon ran off. I told Shawna about that — and she changed it into an Ostrich in her mind. As an Ostrich its picture got into a zine/comic poem, garter and all.

  I’m recollecting all this as I eat my Ostrich burger at the place that now calls itself “Red Rum,” which is “murder” backwards. Because for years it was called Murder Burger, until, I guess, there were just too many murders happening out there. The Ostrich burger is delicious. It’s big, with lots of lettuce, onions, hot mustard, Swiss cheese, and sesame bun. In the midst of all those, you really don’t taste Ostrich as anything special — it’s just nice and chewy. I don’t think they cook it rare. It is supposed to be good for you, low fat. And they don’t use feedlots, so Ostriches probably eat lower on the food chain than steers that are being fattened on milo or corn for the slaughterhouse.

  It certainly tastes just like Emu! Or vice versa. The Emu, a case of parallel evolution developing in far-off New Zealand. No garters there. But hold! Maoris might have tattooed some green designs right around those handsome thighs.

  Lost Emu wandering the Sierra pine woods

  I have dressed you, tattooed you,

  eaten you, spread wide your fame,

  in the time it takes to eat lunch

  THE HIE SHRINE AND THE “ONE-TREE” DISTRICT

  The Hie Jinja in Akasaka is on a rocky tree-covered kopje — skull-shaped little rocky hill and surrounded by an ocean of metropolis that stretches kilometers in all directions: urban buildings all sizes, broad traffic roads, narrow-lane neighborhoods, elevated speedways, criss-crossed underground subways. The great Diet buildings are to the north and beyond that the moated island of the Imperial Palace. The upscale Capital Tokyu Hotel just abutting the jinja is built on some land
the shrine sold off. A giant ginkgo tree at the foot of the broad shrine stairs leads up into a forest of evergreen broad-leaved hardwoods and dense underbrush. At the top of the steps is a flat white gravel yard in front of the main shrine structure, wood all painted red.

  Quarreling crows and crisp hopping sparrows, a dash of lizard. Green hill in the urban desert, “Island biogeography” — the shrews and geckos holed-up in the shrine-protected little forest, waiting for their time to come again. Down another set of steep steps and across the street below you go into the crowded “One-Tree” district with its many tiny multi-story buildings. Countless young Leisure Workers put out food and drink in thousands of bars til almost dawn.

  From the One-Tree bar district

  to the politics of parliament

  there’s a shortcut over the hill

  up broad steep steps like

  crossing a pass

  and down the other side

  “Even though you may be busy

  stop

  and make a little bow to the

  San O, the Mountain God

  of the Shrine”

  says a sign

  CORMORANTS

  Dropping down rock ledges toward the breakers see a long flat point spiked with upright black cormorants and a few gulls gray and white. Rocks dabbed with threads and dribbles of bird-white. “White writing” like Mark Tobey did — drawn in loops and splatters — lime-rich droppings pointing back to the fishy waves.

  Some rocks more decorated than others. A dark stink as the breeze rises, whiffs of ammonia — stabs you in the back brain — the only place worse once was on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska — came alongside sea lion rocks and the whole thing blew in our face and whipped us with awful offal gassy blast.

  Each bird-scholar has its own stone chair and the long full streaks below. Some rocks are unoccupied, unwritten.

  Pelicans flap slow by. Cormorants fly clumsy — taking off from the water, drag their toes in the waves flap flap flap leaving scratch lines in the froth until they get just barely up and never fly much higher. Cormorants on a cliff launch out and fly downward til they drag their toes and then gain height again. Underwater they are fast as jets and full of grace.

  Toes writing in water

  rocks drawn with dribbles

  scat incense in the wind

  cormorants open their thin black wings

  talk about art, lecture the

  clouds of tiny fish

  TO GO

  Slopes of grassy mountains rise steep up from the narrow town of Gorman north of LA on the route of the 5. Clusters of bush and spans of spring wildflowers in bloom: California poppy, lupine, paintbrush, fiddlenecks — blue, orange, and yellow — arching across the slopes above. Afternoon angle to the sun. “Gorman” painted on a hillside water tower. At Carl’s Jr. in Gorman, getting coffee, I say to the truck driver just parked on a slant and walked in behind me, “those things are huge, how the hell do you drive them.” He says, “they’re really easy.” — “still, you have to find a place to park” — He laughs, “yeah, you do.”

  Heading north toward Tejon Pass

  humming ant-column vehicles

  six, eight lanes wide

  curving through a gap in the vertical

  cowflank-tan mountains, tops out of sight

  sprinkled with spring flowers

  bigrig parked by the water tower

  sun, cars, hills, coffee — all

  to go

  ONE THOUSAND CRANES

  When Carole had a bad cancer prognosis some years back, several of her relatives got together and started folding the little origami called “cranes.” They made one thousand paper cranes in different colors and sent them to us, it’s a loving custom, to help one get well. Carole got better, though not cured, and they now hang in swooping strings like flowers on a wall in the house.

  In East Asia cranes are noble birds of good fortune, suggesting long life, health, good luck, and troth. They are much in art. Most of the cranes of the world are now centered in Siberia and East Asia — they summer in the north, and winter in north India, eastern China, central Korea, and Japan’s big south island, Kyushu.

  There are two crane species in North America. One is the endangered whooping crane and the other the gray-beige sandhill crane. One group of sandhill cranes comes down to the Great Central Valley of California: an estimated 30,000 winter over in the area around Lodi, Cosumnes, Thornton, and west toward Walnut Grove. In late February I went with a friend to Cosumnes to look at the flocks of waterfowl one more time before they went back north. We found a place of flooded ricefields full of swimming white-fronted geese, ring-necked ducks, old squaws, teals, coots, and a few tundra swans. And then looking beyond them to a far levee there were rows of cranes pacing, eating, doing their leaping and bowing dance. “Staging up to go back north,” they say.

  A month later Carole and I were in Berkeley down on 4th Street where we saw an Asian crafts store called “One Thousand Cranes.” It had that subtle incense and hinoki-wood aroma of old Japan. I asked the handsome Japanese woman “How do you say one thousand cranes?” She laughed and said “senbazuru.” “Oh yes: one thousand wings of tsuru, cranes.” And I told her that my wife and I lived in the Sierra Nevada and watch the cranes flying directly over our place. I remembered back to early March — Carole had been outside, I was in the shop. We began to hear the echoing crane calls. We saw a V — a V made of sub-Vs, flying northeast. They were way high but I did a count of a subsection and it came to eighty birds. They kept coming, echelon after echelon — the cranes just specks, but the echoing calls are loud. More grand flying wedges all afternoon — at least a thousand cranes.

  So I told the lady of the store, “Not long ago we watched the cranes go over heading north. They came by all afternoon, at least a thousand.” The woman smiled. “Of course. Real life cranes. Good luck for all of us, good luck for you.”

  From the shady toolshed

  hear those “gr r u gr u u g rr ruu”

  calls from the sky

  step out and squint at the bright

  nothing in sight

  just odd far calls

  echoing, faint,

  grus canadensis

  heading north

  one mile high

  FOR ANTHEA CORINNE SNYDER LOWRY

  1932 – 2002

  She was on the Marin County Grand Jury, heading to a meeting, south of Petaluma on the 101. The pickup ahead of her lost a grassmower off the back. She pulled onto the shoulder, and walked right out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck by a speedy car, an instant death.

  White egrets standing there

  always standing there

  there at the crossing

  on the Petaluma River

  THE GREAT BELL OF THE GION

  “The great bell of the Gion Temple reverberates into every human heart to wake us to the fact that all is impermanent and fleeting. The withered flowers of the sâla trees by Shakyamuni’s deathbed remind us that even those flourishing with wealth and power will soon pass away. The life of fame and pride is as ephemeral as a springtime dream. The courageous and aggressive person too will vanish like a swirl of dust in the wind.”

  The Heike Monogatari, 12th century

  Heading back to our little house in Murasakino from the Gion Shrine on New Year’s eve, with a glowing wick handout from a priest — lit in the New Year sacred fire started anew by bow drill, purified. Walking and lightly swinging the long wick to keep it aglow, in a crowd of people whirling wicks and heading home, finally catch a taxi. Once home start a propane gasplate from the almost-gone wick. Now, a sacred fire in the house. The Gion’s huge bell still ringing in the new year: as soft, as loud, at the house three kilometers away as it was at the temple.

  Up along the Kamo River

  northwest to higher ground.

  After midnight New Year’s eve: