Free Danger on Peaks by Gary Snyder Page A

we made our way to the summit just like Issa’s

    â€œInch by inch
    Â Â little snail
    Â Â creep up Mt. Fuji”
    ISSA

    West Coast snowpeaks are too much! They are too far above the surrounding lands. There is a break between. They are in a different world. If you want to get a view of the world you live in, climb a little rocky mountain with a neat small peak. But the big snowpeaks piercethe realm of clouds and cranes, rest in the zone of five-colored banners and writhing crackling dragons in veils of ragged mist and frost-crystals, into a pure transparency of blue.

    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
.

    And then we grouped up to descend. The afternoon snow was perfect for glissade and leaning on our stocks we slid and skidded between cracks and thumps into soft snow, dodged lava slabs, got into the open snowfield slopes and almost flew to the soft pumice ridges below. Coming down is so fast! Still high we walked the three-mile dirt road back to the lake.

A TOMIC D AWN

    The day I first climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13, 1945.

    Spirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn’t appear in the
Portland Oregonian
until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying “nothing will grow there again for seventy years.” The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin moccasins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”

S OME F ATE

    Climbed Loowit — Sahaptin name — three more times.
    July of ’46 with sister Thea
    (went to Venezuela & Cartagena as a seaman summer of 1948)
    June of ’49 with dear friend Robin who danced shimmering in the snow,
    and again with her late that summer

    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 names in the summit book,
    prepare to descend

    on down to some fate in the world

1980: L ETTING G O

    Centuries, years and months of —

    let off a little steam
    cloud up and sizzle
    growl        stamp-dance
    quiver       swell, glow
    glare         bulge

    swarms of earthquakes, tremors, rumbles

    she goes
    8.32 AM        18 May 1980

    superheated steams and gasses
    white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a
    burning sky-river wind of
    searing lava droplet hail,
    huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,
    shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing
    cloud of rock bits,
    crystals, pumice, shards of glass
    dead ahead blasting away —
    a heavenly host