Gary Snyder’s Vision of Petaluma

I first became acquainted with Gary Snyder like millions of others—through a novel written by Jack Kerouac called Dharma Bums, which features a thinly fictionalized snapshot of Gary in the 1950s, five years out of Reed College, whole-heartedly engaged in many of the pursuits that he had cultivated while a student here—poetry, mountaineering, countercultural politics, Native American animism, and Zen Buddhism.

We also see a young man on the quest for self-authenticity, involved in what Gary has described as a process of “de-educating” himself after descending from the pinnacle of elite education at Reed College:

Hanging out in the bohemias and underworlds of San Francisco, returning to his working-class roots as a lumberjack, trail maker, and fire lookout in the Cascades, preparing for a sojourn to Japan, where he would spend 12 years studying Zen and writing poetry, returning home to the States to establish a farmstead with a community of family and friends on the San Juan Ridge of the Sierras foothills.

We also get a glimpse in the novel of Gary’s knack for combining the intellectual and the experiential; a knack that, through exploration of a wide range of social, ecological, and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose, he would weave into a new social mythology, one grounded in the most archaic values on earth, and shaped by his literary talent for synthesizing precise observations of nature with a deep insight of reality.

Of course, as a 17-year old reading Dharma Bums, I knew little of this. Sitting out on the porch of the house my great-grandmother built in my hometown of Petaluma, California, renowned as the one-time chicken Egg Basket of the World, I only knew that wherever Gary Snyder was, had to be better than the hell hole I was stuck in.

Gary’s message was simple: On the trail laid out before us, others have already picked all the berries. If you want your own berries, you have to carve out your own trail.

And so, a few months after finishing high school, I pulled together my meager savings and bought a one-way ticket to Europe—my first time on an airplane—and like millions before me joined the so-called “rucksack revolution” that had been inspired by Gary’s character in Dharma Bums.

I spent the next four years hitchhiking the world, working odd jobs, and, in what I took to be the Snyder model, studying everything that crossed my path.

Then I came to Reed. It was the only college I applied to. I wanted training in the skills Gary said that he had received there—the independent thinking, the rigorous discipline, the fearlessness required for holding your ground in any territory you choose to enter.

In the classical hero’s journey, after venturing out in search of adventure and self-exploration, the hero returns back home with what Joseph Campbell called the “boons” of his or her travels.

I wasn’t sure what boons I had acquired, but twenty-five years after leaving my hometown of Petaluma, I returned, seeking to recapture something of my roots in a place my family had resided for 150 years. About six months into my return, I was having a difficult time of it, wondering if it was in fact possible to go home again.

Then one evening I went to a book signing by a local author who had written a book entitled Empty Shells: The Story of Petaluma, America’s Chicken City. There were a number of old chicken ranchers I recognized there, sitting around with their prized hens on their laps. As the author signed my book, I noticed that she used a calligraphic style of writing.

“That’s Chancery Cursive,” I said.

“Yes, it is.” she said, “Where I went to school we all had to learn it.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Reed College?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, if you went to Reed, you must know my brother,” she said. “We called him ‘Mr. Reed College,’ and he’s standing right behind you.”

I turned around, and lo and behold, there was Gary Snyder, standing amidst the ranchers and their chickens . . . in my hometown.

The book author turned out to be Thea Snyder Lowry, Reed class of ‘53. Gary explained to me that their father had retired to Petaluma for a spell, and that, at about the time I was in high school, sitting out on the family porch reading Dharma Bums and thinking I was stuck in a hell hole, Gary was riding up to town on his motorcycle on the weekends to visit with his father.

He told me that sitting out on his old man’s front porch—a mere few blocks away from my family’s house—he would think to himself that he had found a bit of heaven.

Which goes to show that sometimes, a turning word from a poet is all it takes to bring us home.

A version of this story was first delivered as an introduction for Gary Snyder at a ceremony held on the Reed College campus in which Snyder was presented with a lifetime achievement award by the college.