354 PART THREE
climbed Mount St. Helens in southern Washington. The next day came news
of Hiroshima, and a scientist saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy
years.” “I swore a vow to myself, something like, ‘By the purity and beauty
and permanence of Mount St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive
power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life ’.” The fifteen-year-
old took a photo, looking across the calm reflective expanse of Spirit Lake
toward a mountain that would later erupt with five hundred times the force of
the atomic bomb.
Gary Snyder, Mount St. Helens, 1945.
Photograph taken by Gary Snyder, August 1945. Copyright 2004 by Gary Snyder
from his work Danger on Peaks. Reprinted by permission of Shoemaker & Hoard.