Ten Thousand Years: Yosemite Poetry

I’m still anticipating my Yosemite trip in a couple weeks.  Today, a little about poet Gary Snyder, who worked on a Yosemite trail crew one summer as a young man, inspiring his first book of poems, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 1959.  We’ll use a poem from that collection to think about the more remote parts of the park, its native people, and how the place inspires not just visual artists, like last week’s Ansel Adams and Chiura Obata, but writers as well.

Above Pate Valley

by Gary Synder

Gary SnyderWe finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen-sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass-obsidian-
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousands years.

They came to camp, he writes.  On their own trails.   (But he was there to blast trails in the trembling shadows of the granite shoulders.)

And to hunt with their arrowheads, in the one or two summer months that the high country of Yosemite is accessible, without snow.

The native folks, the Ahwahnechee, lived in the valley and climbed up to the fertile high meadows for ten thousand years, before white trappers and then soldiers and then tourists forced them out, often violently.

Gary SnyderGary Snyder is a beloved American poet, lifelong practitioner of Zen Buddhism and man of nature.  He bridged the worlds of academia (graduate work in anthropology and religion) and the outdoors (work as a young man as a fire watch in Northwest forests and one summer in the high country of Yosemite.)  He was a foundational Beat poet, hung out with Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac and was the model for the lead character in Kerouac's Dharma Burns. He lived in Zen monasteries in Japan for decades, then taught English at UC Davis and lives simply in the Sierra foothills.  He studied Japanese brush drawing with Chiura Obata from last week’s columns. 

And like Obata, and Adams, and Muir and millions of other people, he was moved and challenged and changed by Yosemite.

Some think “Pate Valley” was meant to be called “Paiute Valley” but the white map makers got it wrong.  The Paiutes were the neighboring Indian tribe to the Ahwahnechee, who lived on the huge Western Basin now Utah and Colorado.  Some of the Ahwahnechee forced out of the valley joined the Paiutes to the east. One can still see Paiute pictographs in this high country.  There might have been more to see if this “Grand Canyon of the Tuolome River” hadn’t been flooded by the Hetch Hetchy Dam.

Yosemite is grand but also sad.  All the death and dislocation and damming.

Poetry can be a window into that grand sadness, that sad grandeur.

There’s lots of Gray Snyder poetry on line.  I recommend it.  Like this one.

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.

Copyright © Deborah Streeter