Revisiting a Journal Taken to Mount Talol / Pooskaus / Tahoma / Tacobeh / Tacoma / Rainier

–TUESDAY, 28 JUNE, 2016, SOUTH OF OTHELLO, WA

To immerse, unfold, sink in—we are in the car and on the way to Mount Rainier National Park to inhabit a campsite by the White River and take a day hike up to the glacier on its northeast side. The requisite duffle bag stuffed with books is among the gear: Dorothy Wordsworth's journals; collections of poems by Lorine Niedecker and R. F. Langley; Gary Snyder as a mountain guide, Phillip Whalen as a mountain companion; and another book or two—certain that I would not read all of these, but feeling rich with the vast promise of this company in those moments between and after walking and hiking and fire-tending and cooking and dishwashing and splashing cold water on the face and washing the hands, when the time to read arrives.

About an hour into it, Kirk, driving, has long since tuned into his chosen soundtrack and I let myself read, begin. I pick up Left Out in the Rain, a selection of poems from all decades of Snyder's writing life through 1986. In these poems, all women are wives or wombs and they are sometimes just vessels or landscapes, even in the later poems. I detect a resistance to independent female imagination. In a forgiving reading we parenthetically remark that they are of an era from which one must work very, very hard to recover. An era with many strategic oppressions that threaten to reemerge. Regardless: I brought Snyder with me to the Cascades because he knows these mountains as I never will.

I will have to prefer my way of knowing them.

—still in the car: I have annoyed myself with this start. How can I decolonize my mind? I mean of those assumptions and values, literary, social, and embodied, from a life of studies, literary, social, and embodied, in a largely white masculine world; from the responses that sometimes emerge as my response. And my reaction, how I characterize these poems: is that my response? I raise the specter of my own obstacles, Oh, why did I grab this book? I had hoped to prepare for whatever encounters the wilderness may offer as a release from lifelong, workaday restrictions, as a reimagine-release into new becomings amid the rough strokes of hiking and camping—not a crafted step toward a conscious goal, but part of a larger lifework or journey. And instead re-entrenched the terms of possibilities already etched in a wilderness culture of mountains named mostly for white men. I will have to prefer my way. I will have to try harder to know and honor the "old ways," the ways of people who lived on this land far, far longer than I. As a white woman seeking to cultivate her own inhabitory method, who has drawn largely on Snyder as a teacher of reinhabitation, of "turn[ing] back to the land, back to place," as he writes in The Old Ways, I will have to try harder to learn, to bring more into view.

I love Mount Talol / Pooskaus / Tahoma / Tacobeh / Tacoma / Rainier. I love its ice and its spring bear muds, its summer alpine prairies flecked with myriad flower-colors and its carpeting greens, its rough rocky moraines adding contrast nearby, its fat, always-feasting marmot (after which some outdoor clothing are named)—I love its shape, its prominence in Washington state, visible from Seattle though it calls from all directions. And we go. Named Rainier by George Vancouver of the British Royal Navy for an officer who had died decades earlier—long before the United States Board of Geographic Names declared it Rainier, which was almost a decade before the place was established as a National Park, in 1899, with the legislation to which U. S. President William McKinley signed his name.

What other names? In 2015, President Obama reconfirmed Denali over McKinley, though the state of Alaska has officially recognized the Athabaskan name since 1975. Federal recognition garnered national headlines and kindled in me...