We travel together the best we can, Erin and I, but she begins to wobble a little under sleep deprivation of the sort we had on the trips to see Peacock and Sedaris. I’ve driven twelve hours west from the Yaak to pick her up at her home in Ashland, Oregon, and we’re traveling on south, to the Sierra Nevada, to see the Zen poet Gary Snyder. We’ve ridden a long way in silence now. I wish she’d say what’s eating her, but she keeps quiet, and I do not pry.
How did it work, I wonder, in On the Road? What I love about that book is the birdsong joy of the journey, the jazz-burst thrall of youth. But there can be no mistaking that it’s a boys’ book, and, more dated yet, a boys’ book in the 1950s. The women in it aren’t really given the same depth of characterization as Sal Paradise and the rest of the guys.
Home and the road are antithetical pleasures for me. What I love most, back in Montana, is to go out to the solitude of my cabin by the edge of the marsh and to tuck in at my writing desk and work, looking out at the sheets of rain or snow; or, if the weather allows, to take up residence at the picnic table outside, nestled in the bower of alder and red-stemmed ceanothus, through which bright warblers dive.
But apart from the tension today, I’ve been enjoying traveling with Erin and Cristina. I’m not ready to return to utter solitude yet. Thinking of Kerouac, a young man in his twenties during the adventures he wrote about, makes me want to start again.
The summer-yellow fields slide past. I’ve been traveling hard this past month since the trip to England and France, grading papers and giving readings, and have not made time to plot the journey. Now Erin opens the old-school road atlas that’s been floating around in the back. She gives me a few recommendations for the route to Nevada City, the nearest map coordinate, and then we ride in further silence. I want to say it was half a century ago that Kerouac longed for California, but look, now it’s sixty years. Blink and it will be seventy. Kerouac yearned for crazy all-night talks on literature, art, photography, music, but what I love about my time with Erin is the intensity of her focus on writing. We talk about the woods, but she’s also a sponge for my ferocious views on commas, on the perfectly shaped short story, on the toxicity of adverbs—and again, this teaching feels almost as creative as the writing. Some days, more so.
She asks if we can stop for a minute for her to smoke a cigarette and see what kind of birds are back in the oaks we’re passing. I park in the shade beneath the big trees—a blaze of yellow foothills beyond—and stay in the car while she watches the birds. The light dazzles. I roll the window down. In her dark glasses, Erin glares at the sky as if daring it. She lights a cigarette and puffs it not with leisure but in short bursts, as if she’s trying to extinguish it and smoke it at the same time. I know she has doubts about her writing, and no amount of coaching can keep hope or faith or confidence aloft forever.
My hope is that these visits to some of her heroes will help when she reflects on them. Along with Matthiessen and Peacock, Gary Snyder is a writer who fits right in Erin’s wheelhouse: he, too, was a fire lookout in the Cascades, a chain-saw guy and a fire lover, but also a teacher, poet, logger, essayist, activist. However you turn the prism, there’s always something else to see about him. In his late eighties now, he has become more complex with age rather than less. Gary is a science writer who believes in magic. He loves the forest, but also loves the ax, the chain saw, and, most of all, fire.
We’re certainly not the first seekers to pass this way. Built in 1970 by volunteers Snyder had recruited the year before, Kitkitdizze is intensely local, constructed of Ponderosa pines gathered within a few hundred yards of the house site, river rocks from the Middle Fork of the Yuba River, and siding from local cedars. (Dana Goodyear’s 2008 New Yorker article describing the construction of Kitkitdizze reports “they felled the trees with a two-man handsaw. Days were hot and nakedness prevailed.”)
Since its beginning, Snyder’s home has served as a waypoint for spiritual seekers. Legendary Beat poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg were regular visitors, as were Kenneth Rexroth and the artist R. Crumb. Snyder’s first wife, Masa Uehara, said they “probably hosted a dinner five of seven nights”—and whether for literary luminaries or anonymous drifting-through hippies, no matter. Into the 1980s, California governor Jerry Brown came to Kitkitdizze to meditate.
Back in the car, Erin twists in her seat to look up at the forest through which we’re driving. Shuttered light slants through the summer-green needles. The road becomes more of a trail, and the way is padded with the soft matting of pine needles. Eventually, after a missed turn and some backtracking, we ascend a gravel drive, rolling slowly, windows down. Glinting birds back in the forest deflect the sun off the shield of their wings. I can smell the crush of dried pine needles, can feel the crunching of the pine straw as our tires roll across it. We park, get out and stretch, look around. Erin’s eyes are wide, the way they often are when she’s stressed out, muscling through something. We wander toward the house, approaching the porch with caution, and the light continues to fall heavily on us.
Kitkitdizze. The word is on a wooden sign. This is Synder’s place, named after a plant in the area.
Nearby there’s a little pond. An empty firefighter’s water-tank backpack, the twin cylinders resembling a scuba apparatus, leans against newly split firewood. When we peer into the house, sunlight falls down through the high ceilings, illuminating the rich blond-red wooden floors and furniture.
Everything comes at me at once. A carved wooden mask on one of the nearest end posts. The writing table right by the door, the books stacked nearby on the small ramparts. The bookshelves throughout the house; so many sunlit books. A small gas oven, and a wood-burning stove. So much light in the house. Some framed photographs of people on the bookshelf on the far back side. A stereo system. A large dining table in the center of the room. The quiet is overwhelming, and I wonder if Gary is taking a nap, or meditating. I cannot raise my hand to tap on the door and break the stillness.
We wander off the porch, past the firefighter’s gear and the neat pile of kindling. Each of us, I think, leans toward one of the four elements more than the others. He’s a hero of mine for so many reasons. His instinct seems always to have been that of an outsider, even when amid outsiders. He hung out with the Beat poets but was never, he says, “a Beat in a literary sense. I’m a historical part of that circle of friends, and I was part of the early sociological and cultural effect of it. My work did not fit with the critics’ and the media’s idea of Beat writing, ever. We were all so different from each other, all these unique cases. That makes it really kind of untidy.”
This fluctuation, I think, is the essence of fire: the great unmaking force, yet the great creative force. Gary, despite his easy, mellow demeanor, has a fondness for fire, for the swirling ability to remake, to consume one’s own self as the fire eats the very forest that feeds it. Besides a firefighter, he’s been a Navy officer, Beat poet, Buddhist, scholar, and environmental ethicist.
Erin and I pass an outdoor patio—a barbecue grill that will be perfect for our tried-and-true elk burgers—and through dappled shade make our way down a narrow path flanked by tall drying grass to the small muddy pond, which glints in the sun. The heat is buzzing, and before long we return to Kitkitdizze, where we find Gary standing inside that column of sunlight, smiling. It’s the same smile of his twenties, though in a face lined by time. He’s fit, and moves without the imbalance of the old.
A dog is at his heel, a tall well-groomed poodle, champagne-colored, as poised as Gary. “Emi,” he says by way of introduction. The dog is eerily human, like some canine of the underworld, but benign, seeming wise and magical.
It’s strange, standing there next to Kerouac’s buddy, immortalized in The Dharma Bums as the poet Japhy Ryder and credited not only with introducing Kerouac to Buddhism and mountaineering but also with inspiring him to become a fire lookout. I don’t think of him that way, though. Gary moved on—became a man who, like Erin, made a living from watching fire, and produced some of his most evocative work from those long summer days in the high country. His writer’s brain was wired from such dreamy days of watching and writing. Now he is as steadfastly local as Kerouac and his other pals were peripatetic. Home defines him.
After showing us around the house—the tatami mats, the sleeping porch, the workings of the hot water and the electricity in this solar-powered place—he inquires about our project: he wants to know the why of it. We sit down at his table and take up a Socratic discussion about art and the artist. I want to nurture my best students, I tell him, and make a bridge to the masters who have mentored me, as well as to feel again that sense of community and support myself.
Gary’s expression is stern. “But it’s never really been that way, has it?” he says, and shakes his head. “The spirit that makes great art has always gone its own way.”
His reaction surprises me. I know he insists on going it alone—it’s one of the things I admire about him—but I get a little defensive. My mind whirs with the contradictions, in my life and in his. “I know what you mean,” I say. “The best work is done alone at the table. But I think the knowledge that you have friends and a community out there—even if just one or two—is helpful.” I know it’s that way for me, with Doug and Terry. “The project is also about saying thank you,” I add.
Gary smiles, nods, as in, point taken. But although he’s happy to have us, he also intimates that we should be spending our time right now at our desks, rather than driving around the country. Nevertheless he’s prepared a portfolio of papers he thinks we’ll find interesting: a commencement speech he’s just delivered and, just out this week, a book composed of letters written between him and Wendell Berry. Yet we’ve not been in his home fifteen minutes before he also pretty much tells us not to expect him to be the hermit of myth. He received a letter from a fan, he says, who expressed her disappointment that he owned a car. Gary says he wrote her back and informed her that he owns not only a car but also a truck, and that he drives it back and forth to the dump, and sometimes it is filled with firewood he has cut.
We fix him ginger tea and rummage through his small kitchen to find the skillets and pots we’ll need, and the kitchen fills with the steamy hiss and fragrance of the tea, so that just the act of breathing feels healthful. A homey calm descends.
Gary leaves for a moment to go fuss with the generator, which is on the fritz. As I look through the sunny window at him walking across the carpet of pine needles down to the little outbuilding, I have a flashback to rinsing some dishes in Peter Matthiessen’s kitchen and imagining all the times Peter would have looked through that same window, and here too I find myself experiencing a view Gary must have witnessed thousands of times.
Not long after he returns he excuses himself to his office—a neat, tiny book-lined room toward the back of the house—and continues to allow us the run of the kitchen. We chop some more ginger to mince and mix into the elk patties. This task is the old standby, the thing you can do almost with your eyes closed. After the sound and fury of the preparation for Sedaris’s dinner, it feels good to enjoy this simplicity, with the summer light coming in through the windows and falling upon all the colors of Erin’s salad—the deep red of the beets, the greens, the marbled blue cheese, some golden raisins, and, a flourish I’m proud of, some violets gathered from behind my house the day I left and kept in a Ziploc on ice. And for dessert, rhubarb again, not a pie this time, but a cobbler, with whipped cream.
An hour melts, then two. I take in my surroundings. A bucketful of kindling for the woodstove. Old Encyclopedia Britannicas. A rifle hanging on the wall; snowshoes.
When at last we eat at the picnic table in the pavilion, it seems our leisurely time of preparation has imparted itself into the splendidness of the food. Gary eats with purpose and satisfaction until his plate is empty.
And then, as if it’s a natural extension of the meal, he tells us he has a tattoo of a raven and asks if we want to see it. We do. “It’s big,” he says, pulling his T-shirt up over his head and shoulders like a boy at a lake in the summer. It covers all of his chest. I admire the boldness. There’s no part of him that’s not raven, so much tattoo that Gary disappears within it. Above it there’s just his face, smiling—do we like it?—and I’m so surprised I don’t even think to ask when, where, how, who, how much, why. All I can do is state the obvious: “Wow, that’s really big.” Gary puts his shirt back on and we proceed to sip our wine.
I ask a few questions about Kerouac—what was he like, what were those times like?—but I sense a wariness from Gary: am I here to celebrate and converse with him, or to mine the much-mined rubble of sixty years ago?
“We were different” is all Gary allows. “He was very, very social.” And Gary stares out at the pond, perhaps thinking, I had work to do.
And though I wanted to know what it was like being Kerouac’s roommate, I let it go.
With darkness comes a drawing in, a deepening feeling of clan. I ask Gary if, before the evening closes, we can hear him read aloud, and if Erin can read one of her essays to him. Erin is usually imperturbable, and when she blanches at the suggestion it’s the first time I can recall seeing that reaction in her.
Gary does nothing to indicate the request is unusual. “Of course,” he says. “I’ve got something I’ve been working on recently, I’d love to try it out.”
There is an absence of ego in him. I suspect that all of the greats are able to banish ego during the white-heat, childish purity of the creative process. Make something up. I’m reminded of Jim Harrison commenting that his mother, late in her life, said to him, “Well, Jimmy, you’ve made a pretty good living with your little windies.”
I want this to be memorable for Erin. It’s good training. Reading out loud brings an awareness to every word, forcing the writer to assume full responsibility for every pulse, cadence, rhythm, and sound; for all the clumsy, stilted passages. And while Gary goes to find his poem-in-progress, Erin says she doesn’t know what to read. Her signature essay in the collection she’s working on, about her time as a fire lookout, while compelling, is a tad long for the lateness of the hour; I suggest instead the essay about her mother.
The lights are off in the rest of the house. Gary comes back with a couple of lit candles. With little preface he settles in with a poem about wildfire, set in the West. A poem about the unstoppability of things and the what-will-be, with some geology thrown in. These elements are well-traveled territory for him, and this circling back to old material interests me keenly. Is it something many great writers feel compelled to do on the farther side of their journey?
During her turn, Erin’s voice is tight and high owing to her nerves, but the essay’s so good it doesn’t matter. I feel a mix of pride and fascination as she adjusts her voice to the text, following the landscape of the sentences, remembering her mother and forgetting, sometimes for long stretches, that she’s reading a bedtime story to Gary Snyder.
Gary listens intently, eyes closed, head tipped down as if in church. How much attention can he be giving, really, at this hour? And yet when the essay is finished he nods with somber satisfaction, and there’s a new light in his eyes. “That was fierce,” he says.
And with that, it’s time for bed. I will sleep on one of the tatami mats. Erin, as is her wont, goes outside to sleep, beyond the porch and out into the tall summer grass rustling in the wind. She reminds me of Doug in this manner. Hers is a quiet wildness, but the flash of fire is there regardless. What to do with that fire? It is a question everyone must answer each morning—how to end the day with no sticks left unburned, so that you’re like a cooling mound of phosphorescent blue ash, ready to rise again, fully formed, the next morning.
We’re up early. After a quick breakfast of toast and coffee, Gary shuffles a great stack of his books he has assembled to give us. One by one he ticks through them, asking if we’ve read them, and if not, he inscribes each one, loading us up with the bounty of his mind.
He’s got little books that few people have heard of, books of all sizes and shapes, books written about whatever he pleased. He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, and The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia. He arranges the stacks like a card dealer. Two more for Erin, three more for me, another for Erin, and another. Feeling gluttonous, giddy, mortified, I ask him to sign one for Lowry, and he does that too; how I wish she was here.
Erin and I are feeling the pull of the road. Ahead of us awaits an overnight drop-in at the home of famed landscape painter Russell Chatham, in the remote, winding hills of Marin County, overlooking Tomales Bay. And following that a visit to the Oregon home of Barry Lopez and his wife, Debra Gwartney. But beyond the schedule, there’s also the code of manners, which is nearly lithified in both Erin and me: Don’t overstay your welcome.
Gary, however, has other designs. He’s warming to this idea of apprenticeship. He keeps signing books, sliding them across the table to us as if loading us up with food for our journey. I want to believe that greatness can have an element of sloth, but Gary is so neat, so precise, that he ledgers into a special notebook the date and other specifics of this gifting.
“I wish we had done this more,” he says, speaking of the old days. “I wish we’d had more of these conversations.”
This surprises me. My image of the ’50s and ’60s is of nothing but deep talk. In my mind, On the Road is a nonstop celebration of art and artists—but in the rereading, it does come across as more of a rolling drift, with an emphasis, then as now, on how to come up with money for gas and food; how to make ends meet and when the next meal will be.
Kerouac departed the world early, before he was fifty. What would he be doing today if he had avoided drinking himself to death? Could he have weathered as well as Gary? Can I imagine the two of them sitting in the shade on a hot California day, two old men playing cards and talking as the grasshoppers clack and spur past in the yellow sun? It’s hard to picture. Gary feels like the last of the last, strong and powerful into old age, ablaze now as he was in the beginning.
We’re at the car, making preliminary gestures toward leaving, when Gary asks us if we’d like to see his Zendo; as if he, too, wants to leave no stone unturned. If you are to know me, you should know this. Who could say no? We follow him down through the big pines. The needles, sun-scented with the rich smell of turpentine, are soft beneath our feet. When we reach the Zendo, the word compound comes to mind. Connected by boardwalks are three buildings there in the dappling of sun and shade, one low and long, another high-ceilinged like a church, and a third resembling a cabin. The wood on all of them is stained dark by time. An enormous bell is stationed between the long bunkhouse and the churchlike one.
The Zendo, which he calls Ring of Bone, was built by volunteers, Gary tells us, like Kitkitdizze itself, and you can still feel that vibe of yearning and community. It’s modeled after a famous one in Japan, where Gary studied as a young man and met his third wife, Masa Uehara, who lived with him at Kitkitdizze for twenty years and is the mother of his two sons. The three of us pass from room to room as if through the chambers of a heart.
There’s a kitchen, which surprises me. It’s tucked away neatly in one wing. But of course: Buddhists need to eat, too. Surprising to me also is the lone photograph hanging on the wall, of a young man. Somehow, without ever having met or even seen him before, I know who it is. I know the young man’s father, Tom Lyon, a friend of Gary’s, who taught a short-story appreciation class I took my freshman year at Utah State University, one of only two literature classes I would ever take, back when I was studying geology.
Tom’s son, Max, was one of those legendary young men who backcountry skied, white-water kayaked, ran marathons. Tom talked about him in class all the time: “Max and I are going to the Brooks Range, Max and I are going to the Wind Rivers.” When Max died in a freak avalanche in the night, it broke both of his parents’ gentle souls. Nearly forty years have gone by since college days, but I say to Gary, “That’s Tom’s son, isn’t it?” And Gary looks at me with surprise—he didn’t know I knew Tom, much less Max—and says, “Yes, it is,” and then mentions what an amazing young man Max was. On we go, walking, looking, and the great bell outside that has not yet been rung seems nonetheless to have been sounded, and is echoing within me as though I am a hollow vessel.
For me the Zendo is a lonely place. Elegant, yes, a church for the ages, hand-hewn and classic—but it matches the human condition of emptiness, and I cannot get out of here fast enough. The open road beckons.
A thank-you, an embrace, a rearrangement of the crates and cartons of books, olive oil and avocados, guidebooks and dirty laundry and wine. Erin keeps the trunk of the rental car as neat as the shelves in a hardware store, while my belongings—loose notebook pages, an unstuffed sleeping bag, open laptop and various charging implements, socks and sandals—writhe in the back seat. But neatness will not address any inner emptiness, I tell myself. Soon enough we’re gone, knowing only that although we came to give, once again we received.