348 PART THREE
readings to his lookout along with a sack of brown rice, a gallon of soy sauce,
Japanese green tea, and Chinese calligraphy brushes. At Sourdough Mountain
lookout, above the Skagit River, his journal sounds like an ancient scroll paint-
ing: “wind blowing mist over the edge of the ridge, or out onto the snowfield
... Clumps of trees fading into a darker and darker gray.” He stuffs the stove
“with twisted pitchy Alpine fir limbs” and in mid-August comes on William
Blake ’s proverb, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would
appear to man as it is, infinite.”
An eighteenth-century Chinese scroll, much like the view from his Cascades
lookout, has been in Seattle ’s Asian Art Museum since he was a boy. This verti-
cal landscape, unlike the horizontal one joined to Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers
Without End, recedes upward through peaks, pines, and waterfalls into clouds
and mist. He thinks this may well be the source for his youthful shock of recogni-
tion, and thanks Chinese landscape painters for their “vision of earth surface as
organism, in which water, cloud, rock, and plant growth all stream through each
other.” Near the base of this three-foot scroll, the eye barely spots two figures
sitting outside an open pavilion, doubtless sipping tea and talking philosophy
like the Chinamen in Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” Scarcely visible, they mark human
presence in wild nature. We ’re present alright, though a far cry from the Roman-
tics’ first-person singular—“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” (Plates 20 and 21)
Not mindlessness but Zen emptiness, alert, attentive, clear of clutter and
Gary Snyder at Crater Mountain Lookout, Summer 1952.
Photo © Harold Vail. All rights reserved. From John Suiter, Poets on the Peaks:
Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the Cascades (Washington, D.C.:
Counterpoint Press, 2002).