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| holding up a photo of Mt St. Helens before the eruption, looking at it as it is now |
Last week’s poem by Gary Snyder was occasioned by his return to Mt. St. Helens, some 20 years after the volcanic eruption in 1980 that blew off the snowy top of the mountain and devastated miles of forest around it. As noted, he first climbed to the now vaporized summit in 1945. He wrote about these and other visits in his 2004 book Danger on Peaks.
Together with the coincidence of his first climb occurring just after atomic bombs devastated the landscapes of two Japanese cities, and the power of the eruption being many times that of either of these blasts, this section is a meditation also on unpredictable renewal.
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| Mt. St. Helens from Spirit Lake 1923, similar to photo taken by Gary Snyder in 1945 |
This week I add a paragraph from a prose section, and another poem about Mt. St. Helens. The paragraph describes the peak as it was in 1945:
“St. Helens’ summit is smooth and broad, a place to nod, to sit and write, to watch what’s higher in the sky and do a little dance. Whatever the numbers say, snowpeaks are always far higher than the highest airplanes ever get. I made my petition to the shapely mountain, “Please help this life.” When I tried to look over and down to the world below—there was nothing there.”
The poem follows three more climbs in the 1940s:
This wide Pacific land blue haze edges
mists and far gleams broad Columbia River
eastern Pacific somewhere west
us at a still place in the wheel of the day
right at home at the gateway to nothing
can only keep going.
Sit on a rock and gaze out into space
leave name in the summit book,
prepare to descend
on down to some fate in the world
--Gary Snyder
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