Volume 19 293Pursuing a dual major in literature and anthropol-
ogy, he wrote a thesis in his senior year that ana-
lyzed a myth of the Haida, a coastal British
Columbia native people. One of his former profes-
sors later remarked that it was the most photocopied
Reed thesis of all time. It was published in 1979 as
He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The
Dimensions of a Haida Myth. The book is a schol-
arly work of some intrinsic interest, but it is most
valuable for the light it sheds on the patterns of
Snyder’s development: by age twenty-one he had
reached a level of intellectual sophistication rival-
ing that of most Ph.Ds. Clearly evident in this the-
sis is the poet’s preoccupation with themes that
recur in his work to the present day: Native Amer-
ican culture, the natural landscape, and the rela-
tionship between myth and literature. Yet, as
Snyder himself cautions in the preface he wrote
some twenty-seven years later, the essay “is about
twentieth century occidental thinking as much as
Dream Time, the Old Ways, or the Haida.” Nev-
ertheless, it conveys his respect for, and facility
with, scholarly method.
After graduating from Reed in 1951 Snyder
spent the summer working on a logging operation,
setting choker cables and scaling timber on the
Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east side
of the Oregon Cascades. Then he hitchhiked to In-
diana University to begin graduate study in an-
thropology but remained there only a semester. In
early 1952 he made his way to San Francisco and
moved in with Whalen. That same year he and his
wife were divorced.
In 1953 Snyder met Rexroth, who became a
valued, albeit irascible, friend and mentor. Rexroth
served as a sort of poetic elder for the young writ-
ers of Snyder’s generation, presiding over the lit-
erary movement later known as the “San Francisco
Renaissance,” a loose affiliation of like-minded
writers, artists, and intellectuals that also included
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. In a
1977 interview Snyder commented on those years:
“San Francisco taught me what a city could be, and
saved me from having to go to Europe.” Also in
1953 Snyder took up residence in Berkeley and en-
rolled in the graduate school of the Department of
East African Languages at the University of Cali-
fornia; he remained there for the next three years
but did not receive a degree.
Snyder was able to get away from the city each
summer and find employment in the forests of the
Pacific Slope. In the summer of 1952 he worked as
a fire lookout on Crater Mountain in the Cascadesof Washington, an experience that proved central to
his aesthetic and spiritual development. Snyder
chronicled the events of these summers in his diary
and later published it as “Lookout’s Journal,” the
opening section of his 1969 prose collection Earth
House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries for Fellow
Dharma Revolutionaries. He might have continued
as a lookout for the Forest Service for several more
summers, but he was denied subsequent employ-
ment because of his alleged communist sympathies.
In the summer of 1955 Snyder worked on a
trail crew in Yosemite National Park. Although he
had been writing poetry since high school, the po-
ems that came to him in the Yosemite high coun-
try that summer were in a voice he recognized at
once as uniquely his own. His first published vol-
ume,Riprap(1959), he explains in his “Statement
on Poetics” in Donald M. Allen’s 1960 anthology,
The New American Poetry, “is really a class of po-
ems I wrote under the influence of the geology of
the Sierra Nevada and the daily trail-crew work of
picking up and placing granite stones in tight cob-
ble patterns on hard slab.” The title poem, one of
Snyder’s best-known pieces, not only serves as a
statement of his poetics but also provides a glimpse
into the Western American backcountry cultural
practice of trail-making:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things
In the opening of the volume the poet provides
a sort of trail map to the poems that follow by defin-
ingriprapas “a cobble of stone laid on steep slick
rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains.”
“Riprap” and the other Yosemite poems in the vol-
ume—“Piute Creek,” “Milton by Firelight,”
“Above Pate Valley,” “Water,” and “Hay for the
Horses”—remain favorites with his audience,
which includes Park Service employees as well as
academic literary critics. The book is dedicated to
the men he worked with on the trail crew that sum-
mer and on the oil tanker Sappa Creekin 1957–- The backcountry poems in Riprapand sub-
sequent volumes preserve something of the lore of
the American West that otherwise might have been
lost. In addition to their literary value, Snyder’s
writings are a trove of anthropological information
on the American West in the latter half of the twen-
tieth century.
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