American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light (23 page)

The girl who moves to Forks for an inappropriate relationship with a centenarian blood guzzler is played by Kristen Stewart. Who reappears as Marylou, a version of LuAnne Henderson, the first Mrs Cassady, in the Walter Salles film of
On the Road.
She folds into the timeless Beat scroll of American bad journeys. Critics are excited
by the episode when Kerouac, Cassady and LuAnne, driving naked through Texas in the Hudson, smear each other with cold cream. Kristen Stewart’s
Twilight
character is called Bella Swan. When we reach Bodiam Castle on our swan pedalo voyage towards London, a girl from Moose Jaw slips into the water. She pedals, naked. Her name is Kristen. (Anonymous Bosch, the photographer on the
Swandown
project, sends me a postcard from the Canadian wastes with a J. G. Ballard quote: ‘Moose Jaw is quite a place to be.’) Researching this river, the Rother, I find in a memoir of Lowry’s old Rye acquaintance Ed Burra an incident from the late 1920s: the celebrity addict, Lady Brenda Dean Paul, caused a local scandal by stripping and plunging, at the point where Kristen would follow, on impulse, many years later. One time is all time. The scroll unravels. Burra, this memoir reveals, reads Céline, Ken Kesey, Flann O’Brien,
The Dharma Bums.
He adores H. P. Lovecraft. And is sick in Mexico.

In cafeterias and gas stations, we picked up rumours of trouble ahead. A mudslide had blocked 101, north of Eureka, forcing us to divert for more than a hundred miles over the Klamath Mountains on 299. No cars, steep banks of snow. The marker seemed to be a solitary tree with branches as thin and grey-green as an old man’s arms. I stopped for a closer look. The tree was heavily cropped with single shoes; ripe trainers in red, white, blue, with very clean soles.

When Anna tried to draw the curtains in our Red Bluff motel, they came away in her hand, along with a substantial portion of the wall. I was too tired to care. The token swimming pool was more of a septic tank, its petroleum jelly surface thick with polystyrene coffee cups, cigarette butts and scum like week-old bean soup. The town, on my morning Speer circuit, was a desert of fellow pensioners escaping from rest homes, abandoned car lots with lines of fluttering pennants. Unknown knotweed plants were breaking out of the riverside embankment and invading the tarmac.

We left early for Sacramento, gold country, and Grass Valley. A quiet Great Western hotel was like something out of Stevenage:
new, ambitious, hedged in by trees. The highway audible and the bed large. A good place to prepare for Snyder.

A week on the road had been enough to confirm my instinct that the western strip, all the way from Canada to Mexico, with barely registered climatic and ecological shifts, is a different consciousness. Our west is their east. The frontier myth of pushing across prairies and deserts, over mountains, dissolves into Pacific haze. There are new orthodoxies. The poets, with varying degrees of rigour and scholarship, are Buddhists. ‘We are on the edge of the East,’ Snyder wrote in his essay, ‘The Etiquette of Freedom’, from
The Practice of the Wild.
‘So where do we go next? Naturally, we look west, to the East. That’s where we go.’

Our route to Kitkitdizze read, in the email Snyder sent, like one of his poems: ‘Crossing the Yuba river in the gorge, climb up out of the gorge, and about 12 miles from Nevada City you turn right (east) up the first highway of consequence.’ After that there are signs nailed on trees, dirt roads and Jackass Flats. We were also advised where to get breakfast and which was the best Chinese restaurant. Nevada City trades on its history, gold. In bookshops, hovering between antiquarian and crafty, they have signed copies of Snyder’s books in glass cabinets at New York prices. Weekend tourists take brunch in revamped saloons with sepia photographs of the mining days.

The man in the clearing stays just where he is, his back to the house, as we clamber out of the car and walk towards him; Emi butting against our thighs, nudging us on. Snyder is a fit octogenarian. He has presence before language, in the outdoor way of taking the temperature of a situation before acting. He’s had his brushes with the shadows that come with age, but he’s sharp, narrow-eyed; skin creased and printed like a proper manuscript of mortality. Jack Kerouac, in
The Dharma Bums
, took Snyder, in the person of Japhy Ryder, as the second American hero of the Duluoz Legend; a scholar-poet of the mountains and Pacific west, after Neal Cassady’s transcontinental road rat, hard-cock energy vortex. Ryder is first
encountered in a Berkeley cottage among prayer mats and orange-crate bookcases.

Under interrogation now, Snyder is both open and guarded; the difficulty being that he doesn’t understand what I want, what I’m after, making this long trip. What he is very clear about is that Kerouac was a fabulist; actual events such as the ascent of the Matterhorn Peak in the Northern Sierra were accurately reported, other aspects were romanced. Back in Hackney, I received an email from Snyder: ‘I am as you know a reluctant beat icon – and have never considered myself a beat writer.’ In London bookshops, Gary is more widely represented as a wilderness essayist than a poet. ‘I’m particularly interested in talking around
The Practice of the Wild
,’ he said.

Talking around was the essence of our encounter. While we stood where we were, Snyder discoursed on logging. ‘They used to have bigger trees when I was a kid,’ he said, recalling the dairy farm, and the stumps, ten feet high and twelve feet in diameter, on the hill ‘back of where the pasture was’. That forest was logged in 1890. As a boy Snyder made expeditions, walking and camping, into the surrounding territory.

The focus of our conversation, as we remained between car and house, shifted from Oregon to the recent nuclear meltdown in Japan, and the practicalities of sustaining Kitkitdizze. Snyder was no Amish-style purist. His practice, through meditation and spiritual discipline, was rigorous, but it was programmed to sustain rather than deny the realities of life in this scattered community of the woods. Snyder’s son Kai, who ‘knows about computers’, pointed out that the best coverage of Japanese nuclear horrors came from al-Jazeera. ‘How do I find out how to get al-Jazeera?’ Snyder asked. ‘Just google it.’

The electronic world, which Snyder recognizes as a thief of time, is tolerated. ‘I resisted, but I found how useful it could be.’ The house, built from the forest that surrounds it, by students and friends, is a graceful blend of two cultural paradigms: the pioneer homestead out of
The Searchers
and a traditional Japanese structure based
around a central fire pit, a hanging pot and an open roof. The roof sweeps low, skirted with pinkish-red tiles and clumps of moss. Gary is in no hurry to move inside. There are other buildings, barns, meditation halls, going back further into the woods. Until the right model for conversation is identified, we will stay where we are, listening to a leathery croak of native life forms somewhere in the trees.

‘What are those birds?’ Anna said. ‘Frogs,’ Snyder replied, ‘bullfrogs.’ It was hard to talk over their throaty, repetitive chorus. ‘How do you put up with it?’ ‘I shoot them.’ They are a non-native species, these bullies of the green pond, and they eliminate the local yellow-legged variety. It’s like a shockingly obvious solution to a Zen koan.
Bang!
I recall Jack Nicholson’s cameo in
Easy Rider.
The manic white-gleam orthodontics at the campfire, before the redneck attack that will kill him. Jack mouths Terry Southern’s dialogue against a racket of cicadas and lone dogs. ‘You ever talk to a bullfrog in the middle of the night?’ That Cheshire-cat grin in the dark. Then the thump of clubs and boots. And the career-defining moment of shifting from Roger Corman B-features to off beat, independent adventure, to global celebrity and perpetual self-impersonation.
Croak! Croak!

The pond, dug by Snyder’s early construction crew, is chlorophyll sludge, picking up the colours of the surrounding evergreens. The bullfrogs sound more like turkey buzzards. Lew Welch, down the coast, in his cabin near Mount Tamalpais, talked of Zoroastrianism and ‘buzzards that eat the dead’. He registered the forest as a regiment of vertical coffins, giant redwoods waiting to wrap their bark around humans who stand still too long. ‘The trees are just passing through,’ he said in a letter to Snyder.

Poets on their far-flung travels, their neurotic migrations, kept in touch with letters, discussions of craft and influence. When Welch corresponded with Charles Olson, on the East Coast, he said that he had ‘finally taken to the woods, I hope for ever’. Like Snyder, Lew kept a gun. There was a bad moment when his companion in solitude, a cat called Stanley, dragged himself back to camp with deep scratches and two legs missing; forcing Welch to shoot and bury the
beast. There had been some talk about Lew building a home at Kitkitdizze, but Snyder felt that in the remote cabin beyond Forks of Salmon, where his friend worked on his
Hermit Poems
, he ‘really achieved the meeting of an ancient Asia sage-tradition, the “shack simple” post-frontier back country out-of-work workingman’s style, and the modernism of modern art’. Like Snyder, Lew had to deal with the shadowy duplication of being a character in Kerouac’s fiction.

Kitkitdizze was no simple retreat for Snyder. The land was relatively cheap because nobody had much use for it; the scars of industrial mining came close. The community to be supported included: ‘two grown sons, two stepdaughters, three cars, two trucks, four buildings, one pond, two well pumps, close to a hundred chickens, seventeen fruit trees, two cats, about ninety cords of firewood, and three chainsaws’. The bees were destroyed by black bear. The kitchen garden went dry in winter and was raided by deer. The chickens were taken by northern goshawks, red-tailed hawks, racoons, feral dogs, bobcats. The forest was full of noises. When visitors arrived in the early days, it was to a set that might have attracted the
Easy Rider
crew or Antonioni’s picturesque hippies from
Zabriskie Point.

Helpers shared a work roster, freeing Snyder to write and research. The manner of the man now, when he is alone in this place, is dignified, unhurried, pedagogic. He instructs, he remembers, he references: books on fire by Stephen Pyne of Phoenix, Arizona; a text called
Forest Primeval
by ‘a biology guy’ called Chris Maser; articles from the
Nation
on food-stamp policy. Snyder trades in specifics, hard evidence. When he gives public performances, events like the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1965, the reading is carefully constructed between translations from the Japanese and Chinese, short sharp squibs, and longer, serial compositions that have been cooking for decades. Listening to recordings, you can hear the big audience being drawn in, the warmth of the laughter. Snyder spoke about the sequence
Mountains and Rivers, Without End.
Journey after journey, down 99, from the Northwest to San Francisco. He
borrows an epigraph from Lew Welch about being ‘forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace’. Returned from Japan, he discovers that the old road is no longer there; Highway 99 is now Interstate 5. ‘Pine trees coming up through asphalt … see what happens when you try to be country.’

When I try to bring the practicalities of composition, the gossip of craft, into the conversation, Snyder misreads my questions or veers sharply away. In letters he wrote, to Kerouac and to his friend Will Peterson, during his six-month voyage as a ‘wiper’ in the engine room of an oil tanker, the act of poetry is rarely mentioned. Inspiration is fugitive, like a ‘rabbit with horns’; it comes, when it comes, as a chimera, a freak. Aware of the depredations of the corporate energy pirates, the strip miners, the dynamiters of forests, the leaking wells and supertankers, Snyder delivered polemic from the unusual position of having experienced strange hallucinatory voyages across the world’s oceans. His letters are about boredom, drudgery, clouds, money earned, bars, prostitutes, thefts, marine tourism. He makes temporary landfall in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Samoa: ‘volcanic green flowery hills … lotus-eater land, a buddha-realm of flowers and delight which is really like old captain cook and herman melville’. Money is stolen from Snyder’s pocket while he swims; he doesn’t care. ‘Other guys lost money too, but it’s all so good-natured.’ Wild pigs. Gauguin horses eating flowers. The tanker spews out its oil, before the return to the West Coast of America. San Francisco. Rice wine and Buddha texts.

When we move inside, for green tea, at the table that has replaced the authentic but inconvenient fire pit, there are dried fruits on small saucers. ‘Shall we talk?’ Snyder says. ‘How much time have you got?’ Meaning, quite reasonably,
when will you depart?
We settle for another hour. There is much to be done on a Sunday. Jim Harrison, in the film shot on the Hearst estate, asks if Gary felt the need to retreat from the world after the loss of his wife, Carole. The answer is immediate and considered, in that style the poet has: it was no melancholy fugue, but a necessary three-month period in which he simply didn’t want to see, or deal with, other people.
Contemplation of the fact of the thing: death. Carole’s presence remains here in the house, and more especially in the barn, which has been converted into a library. Her books and papers, the projects with which she was involved, are spread in her adjoining workroom. The house itself is uncanny in its relationship between interior and exterior; how, quite unexpectedly, it feels as if you are back outside; or how the beams fold into the forest like smoothed branches, and narrow alcoves expand to fulfil their purpose, for storage or prayer. The daily routines can be set by the weather, the winter snows and the months when cooking, and eating at a communal table, moves to an open-sided kitchen-shelter. We come at a quiet time. But the spirit of the naked bathers, the woodchoppers, the chanters, the poets who gathered or passed through, is strongly felt. Snyder was sitting here in March 1997 when he got the call from Allen Ginsberg in New York; the gloomy prognosis, the liver cancer. He had climbed with Ginsberg in the High Cascades, travelled with him in India, and together they had bought this land.