The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings

THE SONG MT. TAMALPAIS SINGS

 This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. 

Human movements,

 but for a few,

 are Westerly. 

Man follows the Sun.

 This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

 Or follows what he thinks to be the

 movement of the Sun. 

It is hard to feel it, as a rider,

 on a spinning ball. 

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

 Centuries and hordes of us,

 from every quarter of the earth,

 now piling up,

 and each wave going back

 to get some more. 

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

 "My face is the map of the Steppes,"

 she said, on this mountain, looking West. 

My blood set singing by it,

 to the old tunes,

 Irish,

 among these Oaks.

 This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. 

 Once again we celebrate the great Spring Tides. 

Beaches are strewn again with Jasper, 

Agate, and Jade. 

The Mussel-rocks stand clear.

 This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

 Once again we celebrate the 

Headland's huge, carin-studded fall

 into the Sea. 

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

 For we have walked the jeweled beaches

 at the feet of the final cliffs

 of all Man's wanderings. 

This is the last place 

There is nowhere else to go.

-- Lew Welch 

 This is the full poem I heard Lew Welch read on the UC Berkeley campus in 1969, an event described in the next installment of the History of My Reading series (coming soon.) Mt. Tamalpais is the mountain north of San Francisco, held sacred by its original people and since then by various groups in the Bay Area. Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder popularized the tradition of “circumambulating” it, or walking around it as a ritual. I did it myself in the 60s.

 Mt. Tam affords various views of the city, the landscape and San Francisco Bay, but this poem focuses on its view of the Pacific Ocean, the end of the American frontier. Apart from a paean to the Bay Area spring, the poem expresses the westward march of former Europeans, who after filling up and despoiling the entire continent, came to the end of it in California. There is a certain melancholy or elegy in the poem about this finality (and a sense that the promised land is found), but also the suggestion of responsibility.  The idea that California has the responsibility of finally getting it right, has been a motivating idea since this poem was written.

 I heard it read at a benefit for Ecology Action, and in that context, it is also a song about the Earth as a finite place. With frenzied finality since the 60s, we’ve filled it up and changed it—changed the very air and water and the land—in profoundly destructive ways. Now we have to make it right; right here, right now. Because as Kim Stanley Robinson and others often say, there is no Planet B. This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.