How We Name Our Mountains (Reading Response)

How We Choose Our Fathers: Snyder in the Teeth

Well, since you wondered how things turned out between me and my dad—

No. This first: my friend Dave’s dad lives up on San Juan Ridge, off Lazy Dog Road, outside of Nevada City. Cedar groves and mine tailings. Deer in your garden. The Yuba River. In college I helped them clear brush before fire season. Dave’s dad, Scott, edited one of Snyder’s non-fiction books (I forget which one—something from the old days of Earth House Hold). Anyway, there was a picture, a snapshot gone slightly sepia, of a toddler Dave in a diaper on neighbor Gary’s knee. Snyder, looking relaxed and happy on a hot night, wears only white briefs. I remember being jealous of the boy in that picture. Who did my dad know? Gary the part-time pastor at Rohnert Park Bible Church. Our neighbor worked for the water district.

“Late October Camping in the Sawtooths” is a poem about me and my dad. We never camped in the Sawtooths, but we backpacked all over the Trinity Alps, Marble Mountains, and northern Sierras when I was growing up. And, before my junior year at Davis, we took a trip into the Trinities and camped under Sawtooth Ridge (I imagine much naming in the west was done by whatever white man was manifesting his destiny; saws, apparently, were often on hand). My dad had been cancer-free for a few months. He was still weak, but, in another sense, he’d never been stronger. I don’t remember everything we talked about. God, probably, at some point. But the trip was not about the words we didn’t know how to utter. It was about doing the small things around the fire, washing dishes in the stream, pulling on sweaters after sundown. I remember we made freeze-dried scrambled eggs one morning and threw the package in the fire before we read the directions, added too much water and had to cook them for twenty minutes. And while we took turns stirring, a doe and fawn came down into the skunk-weed meadow and we watched her teach the fawn about evasion, charging at it until it bolted away, and then circling it to charge again. She was playing bear. I wonder if he thought about my four younger siblings then, about mom raising them alone. He cried a couple times. Once at the story of standing, sick, in his bathrobe, urine bag filling up on his thigh, watching his neighbor mow his lawn. This neighbor had grown up in the backwoods of Minnesota, and had been stricken with polio as a boy. He had a prosthetic leg, and it took him a very long time to mow even the standard postage stamp—so long, in fact, that my dad, in health, had started just mowing his lawn when he did ours, a don’t-mention-it between reticent men. And then, sick, he watched Mike finish his own lawn and keep going, pushing the mower around our twisted Gravenstein in painstaking quarter turns, leaning on the handle and taking a step with his good leg and swinging his prosthetic forward in kind of waggly dance. My father said he wept at this, and he wept while he said he wept.

There was levity, too. We fished and read and talked about the family. And every evening we lived a version of Snyder’s poem, a poem, in its essence and rhythm (and meter and lineation), about the methodical, contemplative moments that every high country backpacker has known a hundred times. The activeness of light and shadow—night falls faster in fall in the mountains: “Sunlight climbs” and “shadows merge.” The trochaic meter (at the beginning) and the grammar (it’s a run-on) of the first sentence reinforce the imagery and the feeling it produces of dark and cold cinching into the gorge. Then when the person enters the poem it is also active: “Building” and “Drinking.” And there’s a simple causal relationship between the actions: stoke a fire for hot water for tea. This sentence feels like it will be a fragment—until, after the dash, we get the imperative “Pull…and roll….” It’s worth noting that the lines before the dash contain a recurring short “i” sound, and there is no long “I” personal pronoun in this poem that might only seem personal to those who don’t recognize its general applicability to the common experience of backcountry campers.

The other thing about that trip was we watched the sunset twice on the hike out. The last half mile before the trailhead was ascending switchbacks. We stopped to watch the sun go down red, and then we hauled ass up the trail fast enough to bring the sun back up again. I was in the best shape of my life, and my legs were burning. I don’t know how he did it. Like I said, he’d never been stronger.