9 minute read
A Mountain Poetry Pilgrimage
Story by Roger Gilman
Time for Serenity, Anyone?
I like to live in the sound of water in the feel of mountain air. A sharp reminder hits me: this world is still alive; it stretches out there shivering toward its owncreation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing enters into this elaborate give and take, this bowing to sun and moon, day or night, winter, summer, storm, still – this tranquil chaos that seems to be going somewhere. This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it. This motionless turmoil; the everything dance.
This question and recollection comes from William Stafford, the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. He lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, and spent significant time in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
For him, a shallow river and the sound of water winding through one of the many deep valleys of the American West is the salient thread connecting everything of value. Many of these rivers have flowed forever through “the basement of time” as the author Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It.
From trickling headwaters in tall mountains to vast wandering deltas, cascading rivers run hard and fast to the mighty North Pacific Ocean. During an after-poetry-reading party at Maclean’s home—a reading sponsored by The Chicago Review (I was poetry editor at the time)—he told me that if rivers were for me as they were for him, the thread that pulled everything together, I should check out the poems of William Stafford. I’d never heard of him.
Because I would never ignore advice from Maclean, who previously convinced me to quit the hobby of bait fishing and learn the art of fly fishing, I read every Stafford poem and found a deeper value for rivers “running through it.”
In 1970, I was one of a small group of Fairhaven College students at Western Washington University who blocked the not-yet paved road through the North Cascade Wilderness, protesting its construction. A highway rivering through the wilderness? Moronic, I thought; even oxymoronic. Decades later, I’ve learned the virtue of this black ribbon highway leading into the wilderness.
In part, the landscape of North Cascades watersheds became more meaningful to me because of the seven poems William Stafford wrote at the end of his life after visiting, one last time, this place of mountains and rivers without end. The poems in his chapbook, The Methow River Poems, (Confluence Press, 1995) are site-specific poems that respond to the high peaks around Washington Pass, the mountain meadows around Mazama, the high desert sage of the Methow Valley, and other inspiring locations.
In recent decades, I have taken the 80-mile pilgrimage east from Sedro-Woolley on WA-20 (The North Cascades Highway) across the mountains to Washington Pass, Mazama, and Winthrop, and then south on WA-153 following the Methow River from Twisp to Pateros, where the river joins the Columbia. On this scenic route, it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road; I find myself stopping often and pulling off the road to gaze at a snowcapped mountain peak or a deep-cut green forest valley or to stop at a bend in the river to cast a long translucent line across the burbling stream—casting deceptive flies to trick the cutthroat trout. Here, Douglas fir trees comb the wind, Ponderosa pines sweeten the air, and aspen and cottonwood leaves wink in the breeze: all the views are breathtaking and, for me, full of meaning.
But the real point of my pilgrimage is to admire the site-specific ceramic plaques displaying Stafford’s poems from The Methow River Poems: “Silver Star,” “A Valley Like This,” “Where We Are,” “From the Wild People,” “Ask Me,” “Is This Feeling Real,” and “Time for Serenity, Anyone?”
The project traces its origins to 1992 when two National Park rangers, Sheela Mclean and Curtis Edwards, wrote to Stafford complaining that after years of creating interpretive road signs in the Cascade and Okanogan National Forests, they had grown tired of their own writing. They proposed a project for poetry in the wild. As Susan Hauser reports in the Wall Street Journal, they told him, “We’re tired of our own mediocre natural history writing. We need someone who can relate feeling as well as facts; poetry is what we need.” Hauser further notes that “the Forest Service offered $100 per poem. Stafford took the pay and wrote the poems in July of 1993 after an inspiring visit to the Methow River Valley. A month later, he died, at age 79, from a heart attack.”
The porcelain enameled signs displaying the seven poems have stood in place since 1994 in honor of the mountains, valleys, rivers, and deserts that inspired them. They are beautiful poems. I stop and linger over one of them, From the Wild People, and try to write one back to him.
Kim Stafford, the poet’s son (a Poet Laureate of Oregon) comments in an afterword to the poems in the chapbook that the Methow River Valley Poems “display my father’s habit of mind,” a humble and generous spirit offering insights into the more than human world and how our wild nature relies on that. Something best learned from adventuring into wild nature and listening carefully.
Many political conflicts needed to be resolved to establish the North Cascades public lands where Stafford’s poems now reside. One resolution of the paradox of a road through the wilderness was an agreement to construct the highway through a national recreational corridor as a fast, wide, flat, and straight roadway to facilitate the extractors—the mining, hunting, logging, and tourist businesses—on either end, outside of the park, and to preserve the otherwise roadless scenic interior for hiking and camping, climbing and canoeing.
Now, as we pass beneath the shining spires and through lush river valleys, Stafford’s poems aid our contemplation of the intrinsic, nonutilitarian value of the untrammeled community of the wild and its natural beauty, fractal changes, and the basement of time, rivers, and mountains without end. What we might love and hope for is a natural grace where the rest of nature tolerates our dangerous existence. And for serenity in a violent and mutilated world.
Stafford might tell you that if you want to explore a wild mountain or valley, an untamed river or unknown trail, you need to go there alone—even if with others—and stop often along the way to simply gaze at (or better yet) to contemplate the high-view of the deeply woven thread that runs through everything meaningful and valuable and beautiful. To seek out further stories that could be true—about the mornings and evenings, as they open and close along this thread that becomes one’s life.
Only then should we make the turn toward home.
Three Poems
A Valley Like This
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this, and suddenly the air is filled with snow. That is the way the whole world happened –There was nothing, and then. . .
But maybe some time you will look out and even the mountains are gone, the world become nothing again. What can a person do to help bring back the world?
We have to watch it and then look at each other. Together we hold it close and carefully save it, like a bubble that can disappear If we don’t watch out.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
Where We Are
Fog in the morning here will make some of the world far away and the near only a hint. But rain will feel its blind progress along the valley, tapping to convert one boulder at a time into a glistening fact. Daylight will love what came.Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever steps back in the fog will disappear and hardly exist. You hear the river saying a prayer for all that’s gone.
Far over the valley there is an island for everything left; and our own island will drift there too, unless we hold on, unless we tap like this: “Friend, are you there? Will you touch when you pass, like the rain?”
Stafford Methow River Poem Plaque Locations
A Valley Like This: Washington Pass Overlook
Silver Star: Washington Pass
Where We Are: Tawlkes-Foster suspension bridge near Mazama
Ask Me: Behind the Farmer’s Exchange building, Winthrop Is This Feeling About the West Real?: Twisp Park, Twisp
From the Wild People: McFarland Creek parking area
Time for Serenity, Anyone?: Mouth of the Methow River, across from the fruit stand
William Stafford, “Ask Me” from Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Copyright © 1977, 2014 by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org. Published by permission of Kim Stafford. Special thanks to Tim Barnes, the editor of The Friends of William Stafford Foundation newsletter, for information and ideas for this story. Learn more: www.williamstafford.org
