 Without any further ado, please help me welcome Tom Killian. The coast is the meeting place of the two great realms of the world, of the physical world that we humans inhabit. It's the meeting of the land and the sea. And we're really land creatures. And the poets that write about the coast almost always are looking from the perspective of the land out at the sea. And Gary said, well, what about poetry of the sea? What about looking at the seaside of this divide and trying to find something that talks about that? And he has one poem that I think he'll read a little bit later that he wrote out to sea. Because Gary spent a lot of time going back and forth across the Pacific on merchant vessels. That made me start to look at the poetry of the coast and think, are these people really, these poets really investigating what it really means to be on the coast in terms of the sea? And when we look at the poetry of the coast, one poet stands out, it seems like, above all the rest. And every time I asked people or my publisher, Hayday Press and Berkeley, sent out queries to all their poet and poet scholar friends, well, what do you think is important? Who are the poets of the coast? Inevitably, everybody came back saying, well, you've got to start with Robinson Jeffers. So I started thinking about Robinson Jeffers, which turned out to be a good place to start with my own interest in the poetry of the coast. And also, it turned out to be a good place to start with Gary's experience of the California coast. Because I was surprised at first to learn how important Robinson Jeffers had been to Gary. Jeffers, I don't know if many of you know his poetry. I'm going to read a little bit of it tonight. He's a somewhat an archaic figure in California literature. I mean, he wrote in the 1920s and 30s. He kind of fell into disfavor in the 1940s. Was resurrected by the environmental movement after he died in 1962 as a great poet of the natural world of the California coast, especially down around Carmell and Big Sur. But he did some things that nobody else did. And one of them was to really give you a feeling of the importance and the great expanse of this other side of the sea land divide. What it's like out there in the sea, thinking about what the sea brings to the land. And so he's really truly is the foremost poet still, the California coast. I think everybody that writes about the coast, that's trying to explore it as a place, as a natural world, not just about human ideas about their lives on the coast, but trying to get into the place and inhabit this landscape world of the coast. They go back and look at Jeffers poetry. So we're going to read a little bit of that tonight and some other things. And I'm going to pull out some of my notes so I can get started with giving you a bit of an impression of what's in this book that's coming in a few weeks or on a slow boat from China. So in the beginning of the book, I want to talk about the sea as the wildest place in our natural world. It's a place that's the hardest for us to experience. The poetry of the coast springs from the spectacular collision of land and water, the great elemental realms of our planet. The water realm is one of movement. Currents, winds, and clouds streaming in a great arc across the northern Pacific to spin and flow into California's coast. The land, built by much slower movements, is to our fleeting perception, the stable element, the rock on which the sea breaks, the hard edge whose contours define the vast moving plane of the watery hemisphere. Poets of the coast like to remind us that our life essence comes from the sea, but we are not of the sea. Our human nature, our powers, are indibutably of the land. We need look no further than our own bodies and contrast them with the physical forms of our distant cousins, the sea mammals, to understand the utterly different evolutionary exigencies of the realms of water and of land. For us, the sea is the ultimate wild, and there has been no greater challenge to our human imagination and ingenuity than learning to live and travel on the watery surface of our planet. As is so often true in the physical and mental worlds we inhabit, it is the transition from one realm to another that is most fraught. The edge where sea meets land, the coast, is where we face true wilderness. In the California coast, this, you might sort of round it off to 1,000 mile coast when you include all the ins and outs and saltwater estuaries. That runs from the Mexican to the Oregon border is a very wild coast indeed, especially when seen from the sea. And the first European explorers that came by ship were very put off by this coast. It's one reason that California wasn't settled for 200 years after Europeans had settled the west coast of Mexico. It's very difficult to get here by sea. The currents from the north, the winds from the north, the cliffs that face much of the coast, the huge surf, the fogs that obscure the few places where you could get into a nice sheltered bay, like particularly the Golden Gate in San Francisco Bay, which was discovered from the land, as I'm sure you all remember from your California history classes. All those things really made the California coast a particularly wild shore that was very forbidding. And it still is that way if you try to row along it or sail a sailboat that isn't equipped with a motor to back it up. I've rowed along some parts of the coast and it's a scary place. Of course, now it's a place where people like to have a lot of fun. The impact zone is where the great water sports of surfing and diving for abalone and fishing, inshore fishing bring a lot of people. But the coast also is a place that when people were trying to make their livelihood that way and get their sustenance from the sea, the coast was a very dangerous and wild place. A lot of people have tried to encompass the California coast. It's a huge place. It's unknowable to any person in their lifetime in an intimate way. We can only know some little parts of it. But there have been some really good books lately. This project, doing this project on the California's Wild Edge, the coast, got me to look at a lot of these other projects. And particularly, The Golden Shore by David Helvarg and Philip Fradkin's The Left Coast are real recent books that try to encompass the whole coast. In this project, what I wanted to do, I decided, was really focus on what I call the poetic history of the coast. And juxtaposed with my woodcut images, a lot of different poetry from different eras and some prose writing as well, particularly from early experiences of people that walked along the coast back in the 1700s and 1800s, rode horses along the coast in the early 1900s, who were really getting an intimate view of the coast, one that's harder and harder to get along the whole coast today because there's roads and cities and so much urbanization, although there's still a lot of places that you can walk along the coast. And if you ride a bicycle, of course, you can kind of travel at that same slow pace. But the essence of this project is pairing what I call the silent poetry of my visual art and the verbal poetry of human experience to create a poetic history of the coast. Where I got started on my idea of thinking about the coast of California was when I went to UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, a great coastal town, sort of the quintessential California coastal town where northern and southern California come together in one little place. It's got the sunny south-facing shore like southern California and the beach culture like southern California. And then back up the canyons and in the mountains, it's got the redwood forests and the intense rainfall of northern California. So it all comes together, the logging culture of the Anglos, the old ranching culture of the original Spanish settlers. And Santa Cruz, when I got there, also happened to have some people that were really deeply involved in the poetry of the coast, particularly William Everson, who was my teacher at the Lyme kiln press that he helped to establish in the basement of the library at UC Santa Cruz. And he printed these amazing fine-pressed books. And one of my introductions defined printing and turning poetry and art into sort of a serial set of images linked with word pictures came from working there at the Lyme kiln press with Everson. And he was involved when I first met him in this incredible project of Robinson Jeffers' work called Granite and Cyprus, a big handmade folio book that's still considered one of the most beautiful fine-pressed books of the United States in the last century. And it introduced me to Jeffers' poetry. So what a wonderful introduction to his poetry. And it made me want to do something like that, being young and sort of naive and thinking that, well, if I see something that I like, I should try it too. So I came up with this book, The Coast of California, a big folio book that had my sort of sophomore poetry juxtaposed with some pretty nice prints. By then I was already doing some good artwork. In 1979, that's sort of the first iteration of this book in a lot of ways. And it was all done down there in Santa Cruz. Here's a classic view of that city with the old church on the ruins of the Spanish mission and in the background, the church of fun at the boardwalk. So I tried my hand at combining poetry and art. But I began to realize that what I really wanted to do was use other people's poetry with my art. Most of all, I wanted to use my poet ideal, get some of his poetry in there. And eventually I was able to. And that's Gary Snyder, whose poetry I've always considered to be the touchstone of my way of looking at this California land and culture that we live in. But I liked a lot of poetry. I even liked romantic 19th century poetry. I liked Lord Byron. And I liked the California poets who thought Byron was so great. Like Ina Colbrith, the first poet laureate of the United States, I mean of California, who got her crown of laurel at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition right here in San Francisco. And not only was she the first poet laureate, she also was the first woman to ever be asked to read the commencement poem at a university graduation way back in the 1870s at the University of California when it was just getting started. So I thought I would start by juxtaposing a poem of Ina Colbrith with some of my prints about the beach. And it's called The Seashell. And she wrote it in the early 1880s. And love will stay a summer's day. A long wave rippled up the strand. She flashed a white hand through the spray and plucked a seashell from the sand and laughed, oh, doubting heart, have peace when faith of mine shall fail to thee. This fond remembering shell will cease to sing its love, the sea. Ah, well, sweet summer's past and gone. And love, perchance, shuns wintry weather. And so the pretty deers are flown on lightsome, careless wings together. I smile, this little pearly lined pink veined shell she gave to me with foolish, faithful lips to find still sings its love, the sea. So 19th century. But you know, English loves that lilting line. We may look back on it and go, well. So San Francisco, where Gary and I both were born, is a city that's had a lot of poets, from Ina Colbrith to the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1940s. And one of the great poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, as they say, almost unknown today and in his day, even less well known, was Jack Spicer, who Gary introduced me to, as he has introduced me to many poets. And Jack Spicer wrote a piece that has a different sort of resonance to it than the seashell. This ocean, humiliating in its disguises, tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean does not mean to be listened to, a drop, or crash of water. It means nothing. It is bread and butter, pepper and salt, the death that young men hope for aimlessly. It pounds the shore, white and aimless signals. No, one listens to poetry. He's pretty good, isn't he? So then we have another really wonderful poet in San Francisco. I'll call him the poet laureate of San Francisco, although I'm sure he's declined the honor, if I can't quite remember. And that's Gary's good friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This is about the changing light. The changing light at San Francisco is none of your east coast light, none of your pearly light of Paris. The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light, and the light of fog blanketing the hills, drifting at night through the Golden Gate to lie on the city at dawn. And then the housey and late mornings after the fog burns off and the sun paints white houses with the sea light of grease and sharp clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted. But the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills, and then the veil of light of early evening. And then another scrim when the new night fog floats in, and in the veil of light the city drifts anchorless upon the ocean. So over the last decade or two, Gary and I have woven poetry and art together in a few different books. We've explored the high country of the Sierra Nevada and the single ridge of Mount Tammel Pius. And these projects were based mostly on foot wandering over these landscapes and notes and sketches that we made during these foot wandering, hiking, backpacking expeditions. But the coast of California, of course, is quite a different landscape world to explore, close to 1,000 miles, depending on you measure it. And though I've bicycled along a lot of it and hiked a bit of it, it would take more than a lifetime to explore the whole coast. But Gary and I have both collected our creative artifacts. From quite a bit of the coast, it turns out. Gary has his many poems, which you'll find in the book. And he's going to read some tonight. And he also has a lot of journal entries. He has kept incredible journals throughout his life, really the raw material for so much of his poems, just like I've kept sketchbooks. And I have a collection of about 60 finished wood and lino cut prints, some of which you can see in the gallery there. Yet to create a book that begins to explore the whole coast, we had to go beyond our own artistic productions and gather poems and writings of many other people, reflecting the centuries of recorded human experience and artistic exploration of this coastal world. I looked for accounts of foot-paced coastal journeys and poems that explored what it is like to inhabit the land seascape of the coast. And I spent time with a lot of historical writing. Juan Crespi kept an incredible diary with the Portola expedition. A man named Joseph Smeaton Chase rode his horse from Mexico to Canada during the 1910-11 and kept a fantastic journal. Even Jaime de Angelo, who lived down in Big Sur for many years and also in Berkeley, was a horseback poet of the coast. And in one of his journals, I found this little excerpt that talks about what it's like to travel at horse pace or foot pace compared to what we do today. Nowadays, de Angelo said, when you average 60 miles an hour on smooth highways, people do not realize what traveling horseback meant. A horse does not walk much faster than a man. I must have owned some 150 horses in my time. And I can only remember three who averaged a steady six-mile-an-hour gate under the saddle. So we find it hard to imagine walking the whole coast of California. And that's why I've turned to so many different poets who've explored their own parts of it. Now, the great poet that I talked about earlier, Robinson Jeffers, really was a walking poet, too. He built this stone house on Carmel Point back around the time of the First World War. And then he walked from that area, which was all very lightly inhabited. And there was just a wagon road down the coast and a trail into Big Sur in much of the teens and 20s. He walked it year after year from Carmel all down to Big Sur. And his poems have, in their long, resonant lines, both that foot-paste cadence and the deep landscape knowledge that only a lifetime of walking a place can bring. Jeffers also, more than anyone else, searched for a sea-centered point of view on the coast. I tried finding it in some of the early Spanish explorers' diaries, particularly in Richard Henry Dana's two years before the mast. You can find a great sea-centered point of view. But Jeffers was trying to just imagine it from that edge of the sea that he could see crashing into the rocks below his house day after day, what Gary calls California's wet edge at its wildest. And Jeffers shows his way of looking at the sea. For example, in this excerpt from the poem Cador, he wrote in 1928 talking about the sea. It dreams in the deepest sleep. It remembers the storm last month or feels the far storm off Unalaska and the lash of sea rain. It is never mournful but wise and takes the magical misrule of the steep world with strong tolerance. Its depth is not moved. Inevitably, this project is mostly concerned with the landward side of the great sea land boundary. The wet western edge is where California's coastal poetry gets its power. And this project draws its energy and particularly from four great meetings of land and sea where points of rock thrust into the deepest and wildest parts of the sea. The bookends of the coast that this book is mostly concerned of and most of my art and Gary's poetry is about are point conception on the south where the coast turns eastward and Southern California begins. So from there, northward to Cape Mendocino, which is the farthest point that most of the early sailing expeditions from Mexico were able to gain and where the coast really begins to change again into an even wilder and stormier coast than it is south of Cape Mendocino. So these are the bookends of the coast and then there's the two great poetic touchstones of the coast, not as big in terms of their boundary defining different zones of the coastal landscape but very important in the poetic works that we've found on the coast. And the first one is point Lobos, which is really the world of Robinson Jeffers. And I'm going to read a few things from the point Lobos world of Jeffers at the end of this presentation. And the other one is point Reyes, where Gary has spent a lot of time and which Gary really has gotten to know on foot the way he likes to know a landscape and he's going to read quite a few poems about point Reyes. So just before we turned over to Gary, let me talk a little bit about the other two bookends of the coast. Point Conception. It's the boundary between Southern and Northern California. And to sailors, it was always a very difficult place to get around. It once took Richard Henry Dana five weeks to sail from Santa Barbara up to San Francisco Bay and he sailed back down the coast from Monterey to Santa Barbara in 24 hours. He said about Point Conception, Point Conception, the Cape Horn of California, where it begins to blow the first of January and blows all the year round. Now Cape Mendocino is the other great sea mark and there it is, that's Cape Mendocino. It's one that a lot of people don't see because it takes a long time to get out to Cape Mendocino on very rough little roads. The farthest point of much early exploration, still in a relatively wild area, although it's been settled by ranchers for a long time, there is a poet up there of Cape Mendocino, a friend of Gary's. Gary introduced him to me, his work, and then I went up and met him where he lives in Eureka, Jerry Martin. And he spent a decade crafting a series of poems, a little jewel of a coastal chapbook called The Rocks Along the Coast, and I'm going to read the poem of that name from this little book by Jerry Martin and show you some slides of the Northern Coast, the Mendocino Coast. The Rocks Along the Coast, they were once like us, like we were, a part of the continent. The ones close in get to keep their green, sometimes a tree, a few birds. Farther out, they wear away, and at certain tides go under. But in some opposite, equal justice. At a point not too close in and not too far out, to even the balance, they are added on. Barnacles, limpets, blown sand, maybe a seed in criminal droppings. It could be the wearing down winds out, leaving them stranded in their own by the main body's day to day breakdown and retreat, or they are thrust up and will remain by the sheer memory of the edge of the continent going over the edge of another continent. It has to do with love and how love has everything and nothing to do with islands, how it takes so much to be ocean. And so little to be rock. There are no islands left along this coast. All the rocks have names. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Gary to read about that other great point on the coast. Point rays. I'm gonna do two things. I'm gonna first read a brief prose piece about point rays and a kind of a memoir of my own experiences of the Pacific coast and off from up in Oregon, clear down to here, which is actually the territory I've been covering for many years of my life, as is recorded in the poem in Mountains and Rivers Without End called Night Highway 99, in which you can learn all about out of hitchhike on Highway 99, which is no longer there. Now it's I-5, and you can't do much on that. But this is a little piece I did called, and I did it for Tom. He gets a lot of stuff out of us. Discovering point rays. Tamal, hey, yeah. That's the coast miwak word for it. Tamal means bay, right? Hey, yeah, point. As a new graduate student at Berkeley, down from Oregon, I found the warm and sunny climate confusing. All through October, that first year, it stayed rain-free, and I was tempted to go out walking or bicycling or exploring around every day because in the Pacific Northwest, you would not normally waste a good fall day by staying inside. I wasn't keeping up with my classical Chinese courses, and I realized I'd have to change my standards. Also, I had, for several seasons, spent summers working in the forests and mountains of the West, and winters skiing and doing mountaineering whenever possible. In coastal California, the snow fields seemed too far away, so I turned to the local hills and forests, Mount Tamal Pius and vicinity, and finally the ocean coast. In Portland, Oregon, a half-days drive to the coast was a real project, and though the whole beach seemed open and public, getting through to the waves then required wading estuaries or slogging over sand dunes, and a lot of close-in places needed trespassing to get to the surf. As a high school student, I couldn't afford it, and as a college student, I couldn't spare the time, but in the mild California winters, warm even during heavy storms, I found myself heading north to the Point Reyes Inverness area, and finally all the way out to the windswept foggy hills over the Bishop Pine and cows. My father had told me of a few dairies out there going back to when the coastal strip was the only place that the cattle could graze year-round without irrigation. Many early ranches were started by Azorian, which, who were Portuguese settlers, and Hawaii and Hawaiian ranches was all Azorian cowboys in the beginning. Eventually I discovered an accessible and isolated beach down a steep trail toward the northern point of the point where you parked up above. This beach had bluffs and cliffs behind it and big rocks to give shelter from high wind. Good sand and surf, but not so shallow that you couldn't swim. I made a deep, almost sea mammal connection with the Pacific here. Learning to tumble in the surf, dive down deep, come up behind, roll with the weight of the wave, then slide out, never mind the cold, in and out, thrashed and whipped about, and luckily somehow surviving that power. I visited this remote place many times. Staying in the water till the cold finally drove me back to warn by a driftwood fire. Friends standing there, the fresh plucked steamed mussels and the cheap white wine, French bread, sandy nudity, strong legs and lungs, what more could one ask? And the good thing about modest polyester sleeping bags is you can shake the sand right out. It was an alternative to mountains and snow, a place to get to in a reasonable time and camp undisturbed for days and sometimes party, half the night talking politics, poetry and dance, singing in a tiny circle of free spirited friends. Later, as a Buddhist monastic beginner in Japan, this was what I missed most. So a few poems about all that. I never pulled all these poems together in one place because I just didn't. But now with Tom, I have to think about it. This is a little poem called Point Raise. Sandpipers at the margin in the moon, bright fan of the flat creek on dark sea sand, rock boom beyond. The work of centuries and wars, a car is parked a mile above where the dirt road ends. In naked, gritty sand, I stinging salty driftwood campfire smoke out far. It all begins again. Sandpipers chasing the shiny surf in the moonlight by a fire at the beach. I wish you all that experience and it's free. This is one of my favorite poems because I don't usually write formal poems and when I do, I like it. And this is blocked out as you will hear briefly and formally, even with proper rhymes and a trick or two in it. It's called the North Coast. Those picnics covered with sand, no money made them more gay. We passed over hills in the night and walked along beaches by day. Sage in the rain or the sand, spattered by new falling rain. That ocean was too cold to swim, but we did it again and again. A Chinese friend translated this poem into Mandarin and then got confused and wrote me a question about the line, Sage in the rain or the sand. And she says, does that mean a wise person sitting in the rain? I said, wise people in California don't do that. I got to ended up going to sea for over two years. I still have my retired national maritime union card and I still have my, I guess it's still legal, Coast Guard Siemens papers, but boy, did it take a lot of work to get Siemens papers. And then once I had them, after I got Siemens papers when I was 17 or 18, when I was ready to go to Japan at the age of 25, my passport was withheld. And what I found out was that my Siemens papers had been obtained in New York City at the hiring hall of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which I was friendly to. And the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union was totally dominated by the Communist Party, which I did not know at that time. All I know is that they had a great sign on the wall that said $100 fine for any racism or any other kinds of comments that are denigrating to your fellow workers. And a second time of being charged this, you will be kicked out of the union. There is no Marine Cooks and Stewards Union anymore. That one went down. So working out at sea and traveling across the Pacific, this is my one little thing about the Pacific that I'm slipping in here, not the coast at all. Now you know about, I'll tell you something about the Pacific Ocean if you didn't know it already. Its average depth is five miles. It is a huge quantity of water. Longitude 170 degrees west latitude 15 degrees north. For Ruth Sasaki. This realm, half sky, half water. Night, black with white foam. Streaks of glowing fish. The high half, the high half black, too, lit with scats of stars. The thrum of the diesel engine twirling 60 foot driveshafts of twin trees. Shape of a boat and floating over a mile of living seawater, under way, always westward, dropping land behind as we go east. No, dropping land behind us to the east. Brought only these brown booby birds that trail a taste of landfall feathers in the craw, hatch rock barons, old migrations, flicking foam off stern into thoughts, sailing jellyfish by day, phosphorescent light at night. Shift of current on the ocean floor, food chains climbing to the whale. Ship hanging on this membrane, infinitely tiny in the heights, the deep. Airbound beings in the realm of wind or water holding hand to wing or fin, swimming westward to the farther shore. This is what I wanted, water and the world in so much crossing, oceans of truth, seas of doctrine, salty real seas of our westering world, spray of lonely slick on deck, sleepy between two lands, always a floating world. I go below. Well now, moving just briefly into one more territory here. The view from the ocean. And this is from my latest book that's just out. I don't know if Tom even knows about this point or just barely knows about it. I've been thinking about wildfires. I think about drought too, but I don't worry about it. Wildfires have always been present. It was not human beings who started burning the landscape. It was burning on its own with the help of Mother Nature for millennia, for millions of years. The average, the estimate of the climate people or the NOOA, what is it? 20,000 lightning strikes every summer in Sierra Nevada of California. You don't have to wait for people to start the fires. So it's not true. What they say in the Forest Service, only you can stop forest fires. Absolutely not true. So that made me think about how it looked several million years ago to have a fire going. And here's a point about it called wildfire news. For millions, for hundreds of millions of years, there were fires, fire after fire, fires raging forests or jungle, giant lizards dashing away, big necks sticking out from the sea, looking at the land in surprise, fire after fire, lightning strikes by the thousands just like today. Volcanoes erupting, fire flowing over the land. Huge sequoia, two foot thick fireproof bark. Fire pines, their cones, loved the heat. How long? How long to say? That's how they covered the continent. 10 locks of millennia or more. I have to slow down my mind. Slow down my mind. Rome was built in a day. And I'll finish on this note because imagining a beginning now to imagine and live with that consciousness of the West Coast being the edge of the ocean and remembering that we live on the edge of the Eastern Pacific. And I try to tell my friends in Asia that I'm going on across to the Eastern Pacific again when I'm heading back to Turtle Island, North America and all that goes with that. So I was asked to make a little statement about reinventing North America by some humanistic bureau. And I wrote this, living on the Western edge of Turtle Island, living on the Western edge of Turtle Island in Shasta Nation where the human beings are native, Euro-African, African, Asian, Mestizo, Pacific and Nuevo Americanos, Turtle Islanders where the dominant language is still Americano edge of the Eastern Pacific in the Homo Sapiens year, 50,000. Thank you. So I'm gonna end with some Robinson Jeffers. And he's talking about fire as well. He wrote some poems about Big Sur burning. This is his realm, Point Lobos. This is the view from his tour house at Sunset. And he wrote a poem that's very long and I'm not gonna read it all. And it deals with the great themes of his 19th century Euro-American worldview of manifest destiny, the imperial United States moving westward as the Europeans had before them across the Atlantic and ending up on this shore, this continent's end as he calls it in another poem. But here he's exploring it as maybe the finishing point of one race pushing on a torch past from hand to hand from Asia to Europe to the new world and ending on California's coast. It's called the Torchbearer's Race and I've taken the liberty to excerpt some parts that go with this print of mine that has such a fiery look to it. The Torchbearer's Race here is the world's end. Dark and enormous rolls the surf down on the mystical tide lines under the cliffs at Moonset. Rolls the surf of the far storms at the heart of the ocean. The old granite breaks into white torches, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind, our ancient wanderings, west from the world's birth. What sea-bound breaking shall flame up torch like? I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore. The very turn of the world, the long migrations end. The sun goes on, but we have come to an end. The Torchbearer's Race, it is run in a dusk when the emptied racer drops unseen at the end of his course. A fresh hand snatches the hilt of the light. The torch flies onward, though the runner die. Not a runner knows where it carries fire to. Hand kisses hand in the dark, the torch passes. Oh flame, oh beauty and shower of beauty. There is yet one ocean and then no more. God whom you shine to walks there naked on the final Pacific, not in a man's form. The torch answered, have I kindled a morning? For again, this old world's end is the gate of a world fire new of your wild future, wild as a hawk's dream. And he explores this world that's questing up into the heavens and into outer space. And finally, the Torchbearer falls on what he calls the gate sill of the universe beyond the earth's confines and he closes saying, remember that the life of mankind is like the life of a man, a flutter from darkness to darkness across the bright hair of a fire. Oh, wow. What was the question? How did you meet? Well, it was at a party. That's right. As usual. You know, I met Gary, but he doesn't remember. I think I first saw Gary when I was a teenager. He was with a traveling circus of wonderful poets at Glide Memorial. Oh, that's right. Doing some benefit, maybe for the Zen Center or something. I don't know. Well, that was before the days of the Zen Center. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, and then I saw him again at UC Santa Cruz in, oh, the winter of 1972. I think he came to read there. He had a new book out called Turtle Island and he was reading a book about the power of the natural world. And suddenly there was a great clap of thunder. All the lights went out and stayed out on the whole campus. And as we all went out into the beautiful night the snow was falling through the redwood trees. So. That was a spectacular night, yeah. Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I don't think I've ever seen it snow since in Santa Cruz up there in the redwoods at UCSC. I still run on to people who remember that reading that night and the failure of the lights and the thunder and the lightning. And the timing was impeccable. And the copper, and some of them are on the East Coast. Even. Well, they remember it even more then. That's their best memory probably. So I'm glad I've got a moment here to add something. The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union sign on the wall. I didn't get it quite right. Baiting, the word was baiting, right? Yeah, he said no race baiting, no red baiting, no gay baiting. Those three things written in big letters on the wall and saying you would get kicked out of the union if you kept it up. And that was in 1947. Would I do what? Well, this is not a very popular thing for me to say, but I don't think that there's much point in like worrying about the drought because first of all, it's a social construct. It's a human problem. It's not that mother nature is producing less rain. In the 1880s, if we had the rainfall that we've had in the last couple of years, people would not have called it a drought. There were a lot of businesses, a lot of industries in some big cities. In the 1880s already, San Francisco, Los Angeles and so forth, but human beings were not requiring and using nearly as much water then as they are now. And so they said a few dry years and that is a better way to speak about the drought at this point than to call it a drought because it seems like nature is taking the hit and that it's short changing our present gigantic overpopulation and overdeveloped world and not giving it all the water it needs. But it's true that the snowpack of the Sierra is what supplies agriculture in the Great Central Valley. Where I live, we're still getting plenty of water from our wells up in the northern Sierra Nevada. And that's true all across Northern California. The wells are holding up if you get up into the mountains a bit. And so you have to go place by place around the state to actually know where there's some problem with water and where there's not. But the groundwater in the Great Central Valley is overdrawn. Just like the groundwater in Arizona around Phoenix and Tucson is way overdrawn down over 2000 feet deep now to get water out of the desert around Tucson. So California doesn't have a big problem. It just has an attitude problem. The Southwest is the one and I'm going to a big land use panel in Las Vegas in September where they're going, I know exactly what they've got a bunch of people that they're paying good money to to come and say the federal government should turn over a lot of the public land in Nevada and let us go down as deep as we want to go to get more water. And that's all BLM land, public land. People's land, not government land, people's land. So that's a real argument. We're gonna have some real arguments. And since I'm being a prophet right now, I'll go on a little bit farther and say, the real possibility and not a very good possibility but it would work for a while will be to make a big pipeline from the Columbia River to the Southwest and that will supply it with more water than it needs for a long time. By that time, maybe we'll have a new climate. Gary, did you get a chance ever to meet Robertson Jeffers? No, I never did. Okay, no. Did you, were you moving around in the kind of same, well, you were in Big Sur sometimes. I was down the coast a few times. But you know, I knew that he didn't wanna see young poets who with foolish questions. And I wasn't about to knock on his door and impose on him. William Stafford, you know the name of William Stafford. Wonderful poet, now dead. William Stafford told me how much he had admired and had thought, and he's from the Midwest originally, how much he had thought about Robertson Jeffers as a young man. So he finally, he chiked all the way from the Midwest to Carmel. And then he walked down and sat on the rocks right near Jeffers stone house when it didn't have any suburban housing around it, I hope. And he said, I sat there for three days looking at the house. And I saw people moving around inside of it. Then I decided not to try to see him. I understand that. But Jaime de Angelo, of whom you will hear more later in his book, was, they say was one of the very few people that Robertson Jeffers would open the door for day or night anytime and love to talk to him. They had a good time together. They first met, I know how they first met. Yeah, do you? Yeah, well, I know the story. I don't know, it's true. Well, that's all we've got. Yeah, and the story was that Jaime de Angelo was carrying home a stake from the butcher shop to his house when he ran into Robertson Jeffers on a trail in Carmel because Carmel just had little paths through the woods in the teens when they both lived there. And he recognized Jeffers and he invited him over to his house and their women partners got along well and they started to make dinner together and something happened to some of the vegetables they were cooking and they burned them and they threw them out the back door and then they threw the potatoes out. Then they fed the steak to the dogs and they had a really great evening. But they didn't mention that they threw out the wine. So, well for it.