The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
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Certainly political conversation was in the air that summer of 1956, but none of the seven on the Sheenjek expedition gave many details. The journey had an unexpectedly spiritual feel. In Athabascan-Inuit cosmology, animal species like the bear and the caribou were once humans. To cut down a white spruce or to shoot a trumpeter swan for no essential reason was considered a crime against the creator.25 Perhaps Olaus Murie—who considered exploration the most profound intellectual activity known to man—summed up the Sheenjek River experience best when he simply wrote, “Here we found nature’s freedom.”26 The short summer intensified the awareness that warmth in the Arctic was only a brief respite from the cold, that light was always followed by a deep, long darkness. This mood, Murie knew, dominated the land and everything living in it.
All the members of the expedition did publish articles in various periodicals, including Alaska Sportsman and National Parks. Mardy Murie would use her Sheenjek diaries quite extensively in her memoir, Two in the Far North, published in 1962. Olaus had taken fine photographs of the Sheenjek Valley over the summer and was prepared to give public slide presentations throughout the Lower Forty-Eight. Olaus had collected cutting-edge biological information about Arctic Alaska to share with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.27 The Muries, in fact, had so much fun that they considered the expedition their second Arctic honeymoon.
Living Wilderness published a detailed account of the Sheenjek expedition of 1956 under the heading “Alaska with O. J. Murie.” Murie began by praising Dr. Brina Kessel of the University of Alaska for documenting eighty-five birds, but it was the spirit of William O. Douglas that pervaded this account. Clearly, having a man of Douglas’s eminence on the Sheenjek River was extremely encouraging. “I was impressed with the sincere motivation of this author of books such as Of Men and Mountains and Almanac of Liberty,” Murie wrote. “And I feel fortunate in having on our Supreme Court a man of his honest outlook, and one who so loves the mountains and virile outdoor living.”28
Clearly, Douglas had been enraptured by the snowcapped Brooks Range and the virgin Sheenjek River. His upbeat report on the Arctic Range as a wilderness area had a dramatic effect on the entire conservationist community. “This is—and must forever remain—a roadless, primitive area,” Douglas said, back in Washington, D.C., about what became the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, “where all food chains are unbroken, where the ancient ecological balance provided by nature is maintained.”29 George L. Collins expressed the prevailing opinion in conservation circles when he observed that Douglas’s participation in the Sheenjek expedition was crucial, because that “goofy bird” from the Supreme Court had a name that was “sterling” and “magic” in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.30
Douglas had left the Sheenjek Valley convinced that it should be preserved as a primitive park. It was an Arctic Eden where whales blew, grizzlies stalked, and caribou roamed freely. If President Harding could make a National Petroleum Reserve for the navy in 1923, Douglas didn’t see why President Eisenhower couldn’t declare an Arctic Range by 1960. Back in Georgetown, Douglas, who always wanted to keep the public estate out of corporate hands, started writing My Wilderness: The Pacific West. Its opening chapter was about the Sheenjek expedition with those amazing Muries. With Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall gone, Douglas, a man of keen political instinct, knew he had to step up his own advocacy. Presidents dating back to Benjamin Harrison and Grover Cleveland had favored creating new forest and wildlife reserves on their way out of office; it gave them a few final good deeds for the historians to tally. Collins, Douglas, Sumner, and the Muries were all calling for an Arctic Wildlife Range, as were Alaskans such as Virginia Wood and Celia Hunter.
“The Arctic has strange stillness that no other wilderness knows,” Douglas wrote of his experience on the Sheenjek expedition. “It has loneliness too—a feeling of isolation and remoteness born of vast spaces, the rolling tundra, and the barren domes of limestone mountains. This is a loneliness that is joyous and exhilarating. All the noises of civilization have been left behind; now the music of the wilderness can be heard. The Arctic shows beauty in this bareness and in the shadows cast by clouds over empty land. The beauty is in part the glory of seeing moose, caribou, and wolves living in a natural habitat, untouched by civilization. It is the thrill of seeing birds come thousands of miles to nest and raise their young. The beauty is also in slopes painted cerise by a low-bush rhododendron, in strange mosses and lichens that grow everywhere, and (to one who gets on his hands and knees) in the glories of delicate saxifrage, arctic poppies, and fairy forget-me-nots. The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few. It is a call to adventure. This is not a place to possess like the plateaus of Wyoming or the valleys of Arizona; it is one to behold with wonderment. It is a domain for any restless soul who yearns to discover the startling beauties of creation in a place of quiet and solitude where life exists without molestation by man.”31
Chapter Nineteen - Dharma Wilderness
I
The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom,” Jack Kerouac wrote in The Dharma Bums. “The mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth.” Kerouac had never made it to Alaska on any of his cross-country treks in North America. But his 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, based on his hikes in northern California and the Pacific Northwest with the laid-back poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder in the novel) brought the wilderness movement to a whole new audience. Insisting that poets needed to learn the biological names of trees, plants, and animals, Snyder became a major voice for making ecology interdisciplinary.1 Not since Muir had America produced a visionary so innovative in defense of wild nature as Snyder. “Is it all lost?” Snyder asked about nature in the atomic age. “Was it ever real? A world where men and women, trees, grasses, animals, the wind—were at ease with each other’s songs?”2
Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930, but his family moved to Lake City, a suburb of Seattle, when he was two years old. To survive during the Great Depression his parents had turned to subsistence farming: milking cows, mowing hay, collecting eggs, picking apples, and chopping cedar. Eventually Snyder’s family moved to Portland. Shortly thereafter his parents divorced. As a teenager Gary was hired by a newspaper, the Oregonian, as a jack-of-all-trades. Like so many Depression-era children on rural farmsteads, he learned to survive economically on very little. He never shrank from a hard day’s work. When Snyder was fifteen, in the summer of 1945, he climbed the volcano Mount Saint Helens. The next year he climbed Mount Hood. By the time Snyder turned twenty-two he had climbed Mount Hood many times. Extreme mountaineering was Snyder’s favorite sport. He loved to climb. To Snyder, reaching a summit was an expression of ultimate freedom. His two summers as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain (1952) and Sourdough Mountain (1953)—which together, in 1968, became North Cascades National Park—helped him contribute a new wilderness ethos and an ecological aesthetic to the cultural phenomenon known as the Beat Generation.
Snyder had a scholarly bent and an intense interest in Native American history, and he managed to win a scholarship to prestigious Reed College in Portland. Earning A’s in English literature, an all-around excellent student, he spent his free time at the nonprofit Mazamas clubhouse on the top floor of Portland’s Power and Light Building. The Mazamas sponsored alpine hikes and climbs all over the Pacific Northwest from Mount Baker in Washington to Mount Shasta in California. Snyder, using the club’s library, studied the history of mountaineers in the Cascades, learning useful information from their firsthand accounts.3 Since 1894 the club had been a leader in conservation in the Pacific Northwest, fighting to save Crater Lake and the North Casca
des from over-timbering. Snyder also joined the satirical Regressive Party (whose slogan was “Back to the Neolithic”).4 The only real politics that Snyder and his friends engaged in was trying to get William O. Douglas to run for president in the Democratic primary in Oregon.5 “Marshall, Yard, Douglas, and those guys were my animating force,” Snyder recalled. “I joined The Wilderness Society at seventeen. And I received The Living Wilderness, which automatically came with membership. I was already mountain climbing with the Mazamas Club of Portland. Bob Marshall was a socialist, with very liberal ideas, and everything he had written about roadless areas made absolute sense to me. It still does.”6
What Snyder admired about The Wilderness Society was that it worked closely with Native Alaskans and other allies to ensure that local voices were heard in the public debate over public lands. Snyder, even in his teens, wanted to prevent “big timber” from taking over the entire Alaskan territory and Pacific Northwest. Reading about the early explorations of the Rocky Mountains during the 1850s, Snyder came to admire rough-hewn mountain men such as Jim Bridger; they were intrepid, and they knew how to “read” nature as the Cayuse or Paiute did. But Snyder saw the “second wave”—the stockmen, timbermen, mine operators, and sheep ranchers—as pillagers and despoilers. They bought and sold nature’s wonderful patrimony.
While Snyder was growing up, between 1947 and 1951, The Wilderness Society and the Mazamas Club were leading a campaign to designate the Cascade Mountains (from Mount Saint Helens in southern Oregon to the Skagit Mountains in north Washington and up to British Columbia) as Ice Peaks National Park. But many Washingtonians saw Ice Peaks as a land grab by Harold Ickes. Bob Marshall, along with Ferdinand Silcox, director of the U.S. Forest Service, insisted that this park would protect the Cascades from desecration. Marshall, working for the U.S. Forest Service, was able to save parts of the northern Cascades in the early 1930s: Glacier Peak Recreation Area (230,000 acres) and North Cascades Primitive Area (800,000 acres). But politicians in Oregon and Washington couldn’t or wouldn’t take on the lumber giant Weyerhaeuser. By the time Snyder climbed Mount Saint Helens and Mount Hood—which can be described as sentinel towers of the Pacific Northwest—a postwar housing boom was under way, timber was in high demand on the market, and the concept of Ice Peaks National Park was shelved.7
In 1951 Snyder earned his BA in literature and anthropology from Reed College; he then continued drifting around the Pacific Northwest in blue jeans and a zip-up rain jacket, working as a camp counselor, carpenter, and logger. Sometimes he would look for red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) and owls in the Columbia Slough, using Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds.8 His nomadic yearnings were inspired by Woody Guthrie’s life and music. At heart Snyder was an itinerant poet with a deep love for mountain trails and for the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW—the Wobblies—and their lore. Much like Bob Marshall, he was equally comfortable with bookish academicians and with working-class people whose creed was self-sufficiency. Open-minded, uncorrupted by conformity or by the consumer culture, Snyder labored as a timber scaler at the Warm Spring Indian Reservation in central Oregon and—determined to be a poet like Robinson Jeffers and William Carlos Williams—started developing a new, sparse style of poetry: no word was wasted. He pledged to treat the planet with respect, as the North American Indians did, and he had an intuitive understanding, reinforced by his long treks into the North Cascades, that earth was a holy, living being, a single entity. But his poetry was also informed by biology, forestry, socialism, Buddhism, Paul Bunyan, and Native American customs. Snyder treated animals with particular kindness and gentleness, like such earlier, pioneering advocates of animal rights as John Quincy Adams, John Burroughs, and Henry Bergh. One of his close friends at Reed College was Martin Murie, whose parents were Mardy and Olaus Murie.9
In June 1952, the twenty-two-year-old Snyder started working for the U.S. Forest Service at Marblemount, Washington, in the northern Cascades, where there was evidence of ancient volcanic upheaval in all directions.10 This was the Skagit district of Mount Baker National Forest (sometimes called America’s Alps). The North Cascades had about 300 glaciers; only Alaska had more. Having experienced many YMCA summer camps at Mount Saint Helens and many trails in Columbia National Forest (renamed Gifford Pinchot National Forest in 1949), Snyder was erroneously convinced that to be a fire lookout was rather easy work, far simpler than scaling timber: that he would get to live in splendid isolation in the Cascades, would call headquarters on a Motorola PT 300 radio if he saw smoke rising from a distant burn, and meanwhile would read books for pay. But Snyder’s dream soon came up against reality. “Boy,” a forest ranger warned him when he showed up for duty, “you have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into.”11
At one time, many youngsters wanted to be Daniel Boone or Kit Carson—outdoorsmen who could track a whitetail deer (Odocoileus virginianus) and survive in a blizzard. Snyder’s boyhood idols were John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton. The Sierra Club had done a marvelous job of presenting Muir as a lovable long-bearded prophet of the wild kingdom. “Muir inspired me, as a lad, on the practical level of boldly going out and staying longer in the woods with less gear, and having the nerve to do solo trips,” Snyder recalled. “So I did (for example) some lengthy trips in the summer of 1948 in the mountains north of Mt. St. Helens in the Washington Cascades, including some third-class rock scrambles.”12
Snyder had been assigned to the Granite Creek guard station, high up near snowcapped Crater Mountain, for the summer of 1952. In the winter, its rocks looked like blocks of ice and there was scant vegetation. But in the summer, this part of the North Cascades was invigorated with life. To get to the little ranger shack at Granite Creek, Snyder had to hike fifteen miles from the roadhead, into the primeval forest. The job called for an outdoorsman, able to clear trails through thickets, chop wood, and haul in hay from settlements lower down the mountain. Forest rangers throughout the Cascadian interior laughed at the skinny kid from Reed College, who was still trying to grow his first beard but who had actually volunteered for the desolate fire tower in the North Cascades. Over the summer, Snyder learned that miners and loggers were marvelous characters but poor stewards of the ancient forests. All over Washington, Weyerhaeuser—one of the largest pulp and paper companies in the world—was engaged in speed-logging, which was profitable for communities that relied on timber. (However, the area where Snyder was—the upper Skagit—was too steep for Weyerhaeuser to menace.) Worse, the 655-foot Ross Dam—constructed between 1937 and 1949—was ruining the environment of the North Cascades in order to generate electric power for greater Seattle. Snyder later wrote in A Place in Space about his worries over “mineral exploitation” and his wish that miners and loggers could learn to “make deeper connections to the earth.”13
Snyder’s home in the North Cascades was a cedar-log miner’s cabin dating from about 1920 but since remodeled. It belonged to the prospector Frank Beebe, who had looked for gold nuggets along Ruby Creek and then, desperate for a paycheck, had lit out to work with the fishing fleets of Alaska. After a few years bouncing around among salmon canneries on the Kenai Peninsula, Beebe gave up on Alaska and drifted back to the Cascades. He remodeled his little cabin on Granite Creek and tried breeding ermines and marten, with no luck. The U.S. Forest Service soon hired him as a lookout. Upon retiring in the 1950s, Beebe moved to Bellingham, Washington, a lumber town that was also a gateway to magnificent beauty.14 His cabin at Granite Creek was now fitted out to become the “guard station.” Snyder was enthralled with the primitive conditions and was proud to call this shack home. Every night, after an arduous day’s work, Snyder would stay up late reading Po Chü-i—a poet of the Tang dynasty—by oil lamp. Nearby Canyon Creek was his companion, offering cool water as a salve. And Bob Marshall’s teachings about the wilderness stayed with Snyder that summer. The bulk of his job was to make sure the backcountry hiking trails were free of debris. The young poet was fast developing his ow
n outdoors philosophy. A journal entry from 1953 expresses his antagonism toward the “chop-chop-chop” concept of managing timberlands: “Forests equals crop / Scenery equals recreation / Public equals money. . . . The shopkeeper’s view of nature.”15
Although Snyder didn’t write much poetry in the North Cascades, he kept a subtle, intelligent literary journal, parts of which were later published as Earth House Hold.16 To his great surprise, one of his first poems, “A Berry Feast” (1952), had become a favorite among his core friends in San Francisco. In it, he had written about coyotes’ mischief and a “neat pile” of bear scat found on “the fragrant trail.”17 This long comical poem, first published in 1957 by the Evergreen Review, was celebrated for its ethnopoetic merging of traditions—Native American; Asian; The Living Wilderness—and helped develop the ecological dimension of the beat generation during the 1950s.18 Poetry, Snyder would tell the Anchorage Daily News in the 1970s, was another way—like science—of seeing the natural world as it truly is. “Buddhism is one of the few religious and philosophical systems on a world scale that asserts the ethical value of the nonhuman,” he said in that interview. “What Buddhism contributes to environmental politics is a profound spirit of compassion. In the Buddhist’s view, everything in the world has value, has authenticity. Ultimately, this goes beyond humans and animals and is an attitude of regard toward rocks, plants, clouds. Do you objectify and commodify the world when you look at it? Or do you see it as worthy, as beautiful, as full of its own intrinsic value?”19