Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural Community

1. Migrating: Exploring the Creaturely Byways of the Pacific Northwest

In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, anthropologist James Clifford discusses a variety of postmodern predicaments resulting from increased contact among global or “traveling” cultures. Travel, as Clifford attempts to define it throughout his book’s collage of essays and personal notes, encompasses “an increasingly complex range of experiences: practices of crossing and interaction that [have] troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture.” Although Clifford occasionally apologizes for his imperfect explanation of travel and its effects, he reminds all members of “heterogeneous modernity” how difficult it is to see the interactive processes that condition or “translate” our being. Part of the problem is our own myopia. As Clifford and other contemporary scholars of diaspora would have us recognize, we tend to focus on “roots” of culture while ignoring the “routes” that make cultural contacts possible. We focus too much of our attention on the location of culture and too little on the displacement of culture resulting from an endless series of global/local encounters.1 Clifford’s thesis finds it apotheosis in “Fort Ross Meditation,” the luminous personal essay that closes Routes. “I’m looking for history at Fort Ross,” Clifford writes, journal-style. “I want to understand my location among others in time and space.” Clifford’s location, geographically speaking, is on the 1. M I G R A T I N G Exploring the Creaturely Byways of the Pacific Northwest northern California coast, at the site of a Russian-American Company fort abandoned in 1842, yet the routes he espies extend far beyond that site. As his perspective shifts from local place to global space, Clifford comes to understand that extended movements along the rim of the Pacific—arrivals and retreats of human populations, migrations of animals, introductions of plant species—affect his sense of place and “may provide enough ‘depth’ to help make sense of a future, some possible futures.”2 By “making room for other stories, other discoveries and origins, for a United States with roots and routes in the Asian Pacific,” Clifford’s meditation draws a new cognitive map, a space of contingency where “contact relations, borders and powers, line up differently” before “definitive” histories of westward expansion and geopolitical fantasies about Pacific Rim community.3 Clifford’s work is exciting, inasmuch as it challenges Americans to rethink the spatial and historical contours of their nation by locating a space of interactive identity, or “contact zone.” Still, I cannot help but think that a certain poet had formulated a similar geographical paradigm years earlier. From an early age, Gary Snyder has regarded the Pacific Rim as a migratory space, the configuration of which can be determined simply by observing the interactive movements of its many forms of wildlife (humans included). For centuries, the Rim has conditioned basic subsistence practices, spurred migrations, and fostered exchanges, thereby accommodating an extended community of living beings and preserving an ancient cultural continuum. Glimpsed from this perspective, the ways (methods, practices, rites, literatures ) of West Coast culture are inseparable from the various byways (trajectories , routes, paths) through which they physically make landfall and through which they psychically come to consciousness. As Snyder’s personal aura was to evolve during the Beat and hippie eras, other writers in the San Francisco community would sometimes liken him to an animal, primarily because of the way he moved effortlessly through the landscapes and seascapes of the Pacific region. If Snyder did in fact move like an animal, it was probably because he had already studied the migratory pathways taken by the creatures he calls “critters” (after frontier lingo) or “animal-people” (after Native American oral legends). In a long career devoted to recovering the “old ways” of Pacific Rim culture, he has repeatedly summoned the example of migratory animals, and the mythologies they have inspired, in order to challenge official national histories, resist capitalism’s destruction of natural resources, and engage the multitude of 46 | M I G R AT I N G biological and cultural currents that have been forgotten, repressed, or otherwise obscured. This chapter tracks the emergence of Snyder’s migratory sensibility, following the poet from his boyhood on Puget Sound, to his college years in Portland, to the composition of his first volume of verse. Even at this early juncture, we shall notice, Pacific Rim consciousness was shaping his...