Today, May 23, 2001, marks the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of the great American poet Lew Welch.
Welch was a college friend of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, and was also good friends with Jack Kerouac.
Relatively few have heard of him but all are familiar with his most famous work, the advertising slogan that former Poet Laureate Robert Hass calls “a modern
classic”: “Raid kills bugs dead.”
Lew disappeared into the woods off of Gary Snyder’s property, with only a gun for company. I have been thinking about this since I first read him (Spring of ’96, I believe), and in honor of his memory I decided to hike my local mountain and reflect on the matter.
JOURNAL ENTRY MAY 10, 2001
11:15 a.m. About to ascend Monadnock from Old Toll Road off 124 in Jaffrey. Bringing notebook, flannel, orange, 48 oz. water, Italian sub (no hots), 2 pkg.
jerky, 1 power bar, lots of thoughts.
Lew: On a disappearing road
among crenelated mtns.,
Thinking of whores. (Trip Trap)
11:36 a.m. Beginning of White Arrow trail, the start of the rocks. All my deep ideas seem to have been left in the car, and any inspiration has turned to idle wondering. Also beginning to suspect I will need more water, sunblock, bug spray than I have – but then, I always think this.
It is a perfect day to do this. Probably about 70 degrees, with a nice wind blowing up (whichever direction that may be). Very dry, so no mosquitoes.
The blackflies are not severe but their awareness of me grows. I have just been passed by two descending men talking about their faith. Quoth one: “… and I’ve always thought of the Catholics as a cult. But they’ve got healing practices, they’ve got things going on…”
Strange.
Lew: “Why is it,” he said, “that not matter what you say,
a woman always takes it personally?”
“I never do,” she said. (Circle Poems)
11:56 a.m. Sidefoot Trail, the best way to avoid the excessively rocky portions of White Arrow. Voices guided me up an uncertain portion. Encountered a taciturn, distant man, perhaps mid-30s, with longish grey hair and beard. In response to my stock “Nice up there?” he replies with a strong, scary NH accent:
“Don’t know, not been up there yet. In no hurry to get there.” I half expected him to laugh in a high wheezy voice and start chanting in a long-dead tongue. His apparent companion, a red-sweatered gent of about 70, added something about it being “mostly clear” atop the mountain. I wished them good climbing and hauled on.
About 15 yards later I came across a pile of bone-white broken branches. I heard the distant man growing less distant. Something susceptible in me moves me, fast.
12:35 p.m. Head throbbing, heart pounding, wind blowing— at the top. Only two other hikers. No sign of Distant Man. 1 bottle done, and half Powerbar. I have managed to find cool rocky shade, and will let my nose stop running before I eat.
12:53. I seem to have sweated off all the Coppertone.
Ate sandwich, rest of Powerbar, some jerky (oddly distasteful—too salty perhaps). There were a few minutes of tranquility before two small crowds arrived. From my crouch I see no one, but the nearest to me seem to be oldsters predicting boom-boxes from the younger hikers.
I am bothered but not startled to find my lover more prominent in my thoughts than Lew. Figures, really.
Think I’ll walk some.
Lew (speaking as the Red Monk): Anyone who confuses his mistress with his muse is asking for real trouble from both of them.
1:05. Could it be that my deep hiking thought about Lew Welch is that I have no thoughts?
I have managed to get away from the noise of my fellow hikers, and am sitting down facing the north.
The sun is nice and the wind a little less. Except for a slight headache, due possibly to allergies, my body seems to have returned to normal.
When hiking, I never feel as I wish I did. I feel:
tired, vaguely edgy (though not in a bad way; more a grim yet lightheaded acknowledgement of the labor ahead), and occasionally uncertain as to my direction.
There is no apparent consciousness of tree or stone, except in terms of how they help or hinder me.
Occasional thoughts of potential interest, but I don’t want to risk precious momentum and so let them go. And today I experience no particular awe of nature or cosmos; instead I think how silly we are, to knock ourselves out so we can lie around on a rocky, scraggly, mostly unshady peak; drink warm bottled water; and stumble down again. These thoughts do of course vanish in the windy solitude and the glimpse of two hawks gliding through the trees below.
As I walked up the Old Toll Road –the worst part of the climb, except maybe for the pre-summit deception—I thought of Lew walking into whichever woods he walked into, and I thought of the clear air and the birds whose names I don’t know, and I thought of the pleasures of natural solitude, and I realized that no matter how low and wild I have been, I have never hit the point where these things would not keep me from ending it. Though I suppose it is a short step from there to wanting to end it in such surroundings. I can see that step but can’t figure out how to take it.
Hopefully I never will.
But this image of Lew walking deep into the woods in just the company of his gun and the trees, it gets me.
Was it clarity that took him there? Or was it clarity he sought? I think of “A Very Important Letter”:
“I just can’t figure it out. But I think the problem is in my mind, now, and only there. I’ve looked everywhere else and it certainly isn’t to be found anywhere.
“I’m going to sit beneath that tree and use my mind to find my mind, even if it means I crush my mind.
I know of no other way. Goodbye.”
Gautama
and think that surely such words can come only from the mind that’s known satori. There is so much evidence of satori throughout his poems, in fact, that after several years’ lack of practice I read them and am left with the feeling that once I understood them better. Did he who wrote “O Youth!//Who feared Yourself//so much alone!” ever stop?
Now there are five or six hawks circling below. One or two of them have passed over the summit, about twenty feet above.
I wish I had written what Albert Saijo wrote in his introduction to TRIP TRAP: “I sometimes believe… that there in a pine-oak woodland or coniferous forest you reran your life and came out ahead of it.” I didn’t know Lew Welch, and to contemplate him is to contemplate a myth. All I can say is that maybe he has joined Han Shan, laughing and scuttling in the shadows. I hope his demons are down and that his ghost runs free.
-Correspondent Aaron T.
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