Walking Mount Tam
http://www.counterpunch.org/heilig07142009.html
By STEVE HEILIG
July 14, 2009
Mount Tamalpais is Marin's Mount Everest. Although only 2,574 feet
high at the summit, it dominates the county; to get to or from West
Marin from almost anywhere else, you have to go over or around it.
Much has been written about "Tam" and countless photographs taken and
published featuring its image. However, what may prove to be the
ultimate book about Tam does not feature a single photograph.
Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History, and Prints, published by
visionary Berkeley publisher Heyday Books, is a labor of love by West
Marin artist Tom Killion and the poet Gary Snyder.
Gary Snyder is one of the great literary figures of our time.
Prominent in the San Francisco poetry scene of the 1950s and early
60s; he first gained wider renown as the thinly-fictionalized
primary figure "Japhy Ryder" in one of Jack Kerouac's The Dharma
Bums, published in 1958. But he has long transcended any "beat poet"
label with his prescient ecological and Buddhist thought, and voice
of true "green" values who walks his talk by homesteading in the
Sierra foothills for four decades. Before settling in there, though,
Snyder lived in Mill Valley in the 1950s and 1960s and has been
walking all over Tam for over 60 years.
Tom Killion grew up in Mill Valley and recalls a feeling of awe about
Tam since early childhood. After much education and world travel, he
settled in Inverness, where his woodblock printmaking studio is a
productive source of the many colorful prints that have graced
numerous books and countless walls and exhibits. He first
collaborated with Snyder on their book The High Sierra of California
in 2002.
Killion has been "carving Tamalpais" in both color and
black-and-white prints since the early 1970s, and his first book
featured those early works. Tamalpais Walking is primarily Killion's
project, featuring 60 of his prints, done over decades and done from
vantage points all over the mountain and from all over Marin and the
Bay Area. Killion also contributed essays on his own experiences with
Tam and the mountain's history as well as descriptions of how he
produces his prints.
But at Killion's request, Snyder wrote of his own almost lifelong
experiences all over its slopes, nooks, and crannies. Poetry
pertaining to Tam by Snyder and others is featured throughout. Snyder
is now at work on a book "which will be pretty much a personal memoir
of 20th century trans-Pacific Buddhism." But he still loves to talk
about "Tam."
What is your earliest memory of Mount Tamalpais?
Gary Snyder: I grew up the Pacific Northwest, but actually was born
in San Francisco. My aunt lived in Richmond, and in 1939, the
Treasure Island World's Fair was on. My aunt invited my parents to
send me down to stay down with them in the Bay Area for a month and
get a chance to experience the World's Fair. I was nine years old and
they put me on the train, and for that month I really experienced a
lot of good things, San Francisco, the zoo, the beach and ocean --
and Muir Woods and Mt. Tam. We went over the Golden Gate Bridge,
which was still quite new then, and up to the top of Mt. Tam, and
then spent a day in Muir Woods. And I was suitably impressed.
Impressed enough to come back before you were too much older, right?
Yes, but actually my first experience with Tam after my childhood was
in 1948 when I was passing through the Bay Area on my way back from
working as a seaman in South America. My college sweetheart lived in
San Francisco and I connected with her and we went on a hike all over
the mountain, as described in the book. Anyway, after I finished my
undergraduate work in Portland, I went to Indiana University for a
semester of linguistic anthropology, decided that wasn't what I
exactly wanted to do, and came out to the West coast in the Spring of
1952. I lived for a while in Berkeley, and then enrolled at UC
Berkeley and stayed there until I first went to Japan in May of 1956.
But before I left, I lived for 4 or 5 months in Mill Valley and did a
lot of walking on the mountain then.
It was still legal to camp anywhere up there, right?
Well, I think so, but I'd never asked! I still really don't know if
it was; I read somewhere that it was sometime in the early 70s where
they decided to ban most camping there. But it was not very intensely
managed, other than the state park at Pan Toll. Actually I didn't
sleep up there too many times. It was best for long day hikes anyway.
At that time I was living in Homestead Valley, off Throckmorton, and
I could walk out the door of my little cabin and get onto trail walks
that didn't involve very much walking on pavement at all.
On those hikes did you encounter very many other people hiking?
Only on weekends.
Then it hasn't changed that much in that regard. So you soon got this
concept of walking all the way around in a day ...
Yes, I had all these old maps and had studied them closely. When I
went to Japan there were two big hills nearby called Atago and Hiei.
And the first thing I did was discover how to catch a bus to the base
of the base of Mt. Atago and climb it. There was a Shinto Buddhist
shrine up there; and Mt. Hiei had been for many centuries the
headquarters of the Tendai sect. There were still a lot of temples up
there, and I learned from some of the priests there of one of their
many practices, although one not much done much anymore, which was
circumambulation. This involved going around the mountain by a
certain route for a thousand days. People have been doing that for
centuries; it's an old practice not only in East Asia but also in
North India, Nepal and Tibet. It's a Buddhist practice that is
probably older than Buddhism.
So when I was in India in 1962 with Joanne Kyger (a Marin poet and
Snyder's wife at that time) and Allen Ginsberg, we heard more about
circumambulation. I made a little note to myself to see if we
couldn't find a way to do that elsewhere.
So, back on the West coast in the mid-60s, I connected a route on Mt.
Tam and walked it once or twice by myself, and then took Philip
Whalen [a poet and Zen priest who once lived in Marin] and Allen
Ginsberg together to do it with me. We initiated stops at certain
locations, to chant and blow the conch and such. It was a lot of fun.
This is all described in a book titled Opening the Mountain [by
Matthew Davis and Michael Farrell Scott, with a foreword by Snyder.]
It's become a practice for a fair number of other people since.
So how did you hook up with Tom Killion to start collaborating on
these books of images and words?
I had first met him in the 1960s I think, and he had given me a gift
of his early book Views of Mt Tamalpais. He'd become a passionate
print artist fairly early on. After some years he got hold of me to
do a book on the high Sierra, which was a wonderful project. And
after several more years he said he'd like to do another on Mount
Tam, and I was interested from the start, although we agreed it would
in some ways be a very different book.
What's the main difference?
Tam is used by very many people, and is not a wilderness area like
the Sierra. Tom was already well read about the history of the
mountain, so I started reading up about the history of hiking,
especially in the late 19th century when many people got excited
about it. It was not just done for wilderness travel. William
Wordsworth and his sister walked 30 miles through a rainstorm all
night! People could be really hardy; John Muir was not so special in
that regard. Many people got out to be gold rush miners by walking
the whole way. That's the way most of the world was.
I've trekked around the Himalayas, and there and in other areas
walking still is the primary transport. Yes, it's not weird to walk
long distances -- to not do it is what's weird.
So how many times do you reckon you have circumambulated the mountain?
Oh gosh, I don't know. Others have done it much more. But easily a
dozen, I'd say. There were a lot of other great walks on it though --
when the narrow gauge railroad was working, you could take it over to
Fairfax, get off there, walk across the mountain on the north side on
a trail that would take you over to Stinson, back up over Bolinas
Ridge to Mill Valley, and catch the train back home. Part of that
trail is now obscured by the reservoirs up there, but it was
originally a major Indian trail between Richardson Bay and Bolinas Lagoon.
There was a lot of struggle through the years to preserve Tam from
development and logging; did you study that?
Yes. It's fascinating, really; the mountain has never been that
intensively managed and there is no one single landholding
jurisdiction over it -- it was cobbled together by the good will and
strong spirits of all kinds of people. It's also mostly not the
federal government, other than when William Kent decided to give them
Muir Woods -- and not let them name it after himself, by the way --
and then some parts of it are now in the Golden Gate National
Recreational Area. The efforts of private citizens from different
parts of areas around the mountain combined in various ways to save
it, even though they were often not quite sure exactly what they were
trying to do a lot of the time. The people who had the railroad to
the top also wanted to extend it over to Stinson and Bolinas, but
that got stopped. A developer was going to log and build housing in
Muir Woods until Kent bought it. Then the Marin Water district came
into existence and that saved a good chunk of the north side of the
mountain. Audubon Canyon extends all the way to the top of the
Bolinas Ridge. And so all of this combined to give us a place
where you go walking on trails that were mostly built by volunteers,
and you rarely go through a boundary that says "You have now left
this and entered that." So that's part of the fascination I have with
the social and political history of the mountain.
In the book, there is an ironic observation that a century ago, there
was a 'class' distinction about hiking; if you were rich, you rode
your horses in Golden Gate Park, but if you were of more limited
means, you hiked Mt. Tam.
Right. Once stages and cars came into being, walking started to
become something you only did if you had no other option. But later
it again became something anyone did. But a lot of the early hikers
on the hikers weren't poor; some were influenced by English and
French romanticism. Rousseau was a great walker, and Dickens went for
a ten or 15-mile walk, every night sometimes, throughout London.
Which could have made him crazy.
As for other writers, you first took Jack Kerouac hiking on Tam, right?
Yes I did, several times in the 1950s when I was living in my little
cabin in Homestead Valley. I had already introduced him to hiking in
the Sierra when we went up on the Matterhorn in October of 1955,
which is described in The Dharma Bums -- one of the few things in the
book which is actually close to truth (laughing). And I took Allen on
the mountain, and Philip, anyone I could get my hands on. Jack was a
hardy hiker and old football player, who had no problem laying on the
ground and going to sleep, and after Tam I talked him into applying
for his famous fire lookout job. Allen was thought of as one of these
wimpy Easterners, but he and I did a ropes, ice axes, and crampons
climb of Glacier Peak in the North Cascades in Washington state one time.
Do you have any favorite spots on the mountain?
Well, it's very diverse there, because it has the ocean on one side,
the interior on the East, and microclimates all over. You can go into
a damp drippy redwood grove in one part of the day, and be in cypress
and serpentinian vegetation later. One special place is up in that
basin where Rock Springs used to be, and the serpentine outcropping
just a short walk away. Potrero Meadows is always surprising in its
openness and scope, especially this time of year when it is fresh and
green and wet. The slopes coming up from Muir Woods are very nice,
and to go down the Steep Ravine trail is remarkable. I used to always
come down the absolutely barren rocky trail that would take you down
to Mountain Home, but wisely enough they've closed that as a route
and point you to a more sensible and safer one. And I really love the
old Mountain Theater, which is nearly always empty of people. What
energy they had in those days they had to think they could have a
theatre there and hold full-scale plays. I've sat there and
meditated, just pick any spot on the stone seating, looking out over
the city and bay and sometimes all the way to Mount Diablo.
Do you have any most striking memories of incidents or sightings up there?
You know, my memories are not like I have a single great story; it
might be just a particular hawk or vulture going over, an old tree...
I suppose I could tell a few things I did with girls but that
wouldn't go into a newspaper. It's just a great place to take people,
who may have looked at it from the city or the Bay Bridge, but it's
full of details and endlessly interesting.
As a poet, do you have any favorite poems about Mount Tam, by
yourself or others?
Lew Welch's poems about the mountain, especially some of his final
ones, are really touching [Welch was also associated with the Beats
and lived in Marin in the 1960s before disappearing in 1971; some of
his poems are included in the new book.] He was another person who
really got to know the mountain.
In the new book Killion writes that you avoid using words like
'sacred' about the mountain. Why is that?
I do think the word "sacred" is overused -- in fact, it's thrown
around without treating it sacredly. My ancient mother, who died
recently, always said she was an atheist. I asked her about it one
time and she said "Well, there might be a god, but if there is a god,
it's so powerful, amazing, and beautiful that it would be kind of
disrespectful to say you believed in it!" I really liked that. So,
you also shouldn't have to call wilderness, or a mountain, 'sacred'
in order to have to protect it. Mount Tam is not the High Sierra of
California. It has been a very powerful and perhaps half-unrecognized
influence on the whole Bay Area. Tam is a model for appreciating
nature close at hand and not needing a total icon of pristine
wilderness to get your attention. We can make the most out of all
kinds of areas closer to us. And I hope this book might being some
new people into consciousness about Tamalpais, and they might want to
get out on the mountain and take a real look around.
Coda: Tom Killion of Inverness Dismantles a Myth
Growing up in Mill Valley, Tom Killion's first memory of Tam is "when
I was about seven, and went way up on the fire roads with my
next-door neighbor family, and discovered I could just go right out
the back door and up some flights of steps and be on the trails -- it
was a real adventure." And thus his sense of awe about Tam's slopes.
But as an historian, he did not harbor much awe for the widely told
story of local Native Americans seeing Tam's outline as one of a
'sleeping lady." "It's an invention, one of the 19th-century
creations of the new settlers,' he says. "As the Europeans took over
new parts of America, they seemed to want to create some sort of
'back' story for themselves. And what they did was foist it upon the
people they'd displaced. Here at least it is relatively benign. The
"Sleeping Beauty" story was really popular in the mid-1800s, as the
Brothers Grimm had just published their collection of stories, and
then out came some operas, such as Wagner's Ring Cycle. Germans were
the biggest population group of immigrants in the Bay Area in the
late 19th century, and they loved to go hiking and pioneered the
hiking culture on the mountain."
Killion points out that the first mention in writing of the Sleeping
Maiden or Lady dates to the 1870s, but that the image's creation of
the "Indian" aspect of the story came later. "To make it seem more
authentic, the first generation of kids born and raised in Marin and
San Francisco in the late 1880s and early 1900s started to put it
into poetry and such. There were all sort of invented Indian legends
then; they couldn't quite decide how to view the Native Americans
here, for as long as they were still contesting them for the land
they hated them and it was massacres and genocide, but once they were
subdued and disappeared into the background, they became 'noble
savages'." Killion says it is not surprising that no mention of any
'sleeping maiden" has been found in Native American lore, as "you
just don't find that kind of anthropomorphizing of places around
here." Finally, "People I've talked to here who are descendants of
Miwoks say it was all invented."
"The fascinating thing is how young people in the early 20th century,
already a generation removed from the days when there was much
interaction between Miwok people and the early settlers, wanted this
mountain they loved to somehow have a romantic past. So they came up
with these wonderful adolescent stories -- and the adults grabbed
ahold of it and used it to create a recreational background for their
culture of hiking. One of the Marin kids was actor in the Mountain
Play and the myth found its way into the play in 1921 Still, he
admits, "once somebody says it, you can really see it. It's more
obvious from the East Bay, and in those days many more people were
out on the bay as that's how one traveled then."
Killion "never took any art classes" and is largely self-taught. His
earliest woodcut of Tam dates from 1969 or 1970, done when he was a
teenager as a holiday card for his family. Now, with many layers of
color in his more elaborate pieces, he says a single work can take
him over 300 hours of work. "I tend to expect that I will spend two
months on something, but it often runs to almost four months for
these big color ones," he says. "It's almost like painting with wood
blocks at this point; I get the basics down and keep carving away a
little more, building up the colors, and sometimes have gone up to 15
or more layers."
As for his own favorite spots on the mountain, he lists "out at the
serpentine power point above Rock Sprints, and down along the front
of Bolinas Ridge, most any old place, and an area over on the north
side trail where you have this wonderful flora, madrones with that
beautiful pink bark growing over that grey wacky rock that is all
over Mt. Tam."
Killion has many more spots he loves on Tam, including "Lone Tree
Spring, on the dispea trail -- I'm sure that's what Lew Welch was
thinking of when he wrote that hymn to a spring."
--
This interview first appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser.
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