Nothing Sacred? Gary Snyder at Forestville

I'm a little suspicious of the word "sacred." It's a peremptory and perhaps, when you think about it, even belligerent adjective. If you apply it to a place, a ceremony, an object, what you're saying is, "This is so important, so powerful, so sacrosanct, that you'd better not mess with it."

Then again, that which we consider sacred is so far "above" us that we stand in awe, not quite prepared to engage or enter into it. The frisson of being near is almost enough.

And yet I'm naturally drawn to anything described as sacred, because I want to get in touch with the gods, preferably as soon as possible.

The Italian savant Roberto Calasso, in his book Ardor, discusses at great length how ceremonial brick fireplaces were constructed in India during those essentially prehistoric times when the Vedas were being written. Every little detail could affect how well those ceremonial spaces functioned, how well suited (or not) they were to addressing and honoring and propitiating the gods. How sacred they were.

I was sitting in front of a campfire in Forestville State Park near the end of our recent week-long birding trip, reading an essay by Gary Snyder called "Good, Wild, Sacred." In the first paragraph he mentions that he lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, and goes on to state that because the aboriginal people in that region died out soon after the Gold Rush, no one is left "to teach us" which parts of the landscape were considered sacred. He adds, "With time and attention, I think we will be able to feel and find them again."

Being the type of reader who is always asking himself, "Is that really true?", I could not help wondering why we should care which mountains and streams were considered sacred to the Southern Maidu Indians. Are they the only people with the perspicacity to identify sacred places? Can't white people like Snyder come up with a few?

I will admit that people who lived off the land here for many generations will have a fairly deep appreciation of its sacred elements. But merely to ape the sensibilities of the Maidu would be an act of sheer laziness, if not outright cultural appropriation. Better to seek out a new understanding, less profound, perhaps, but more authentic and meaningful to ourselves.

A little later in the essay Snyder describes being led by Australian aborigines up a steep hillside on hands and knees, whispering cryptic instructions all the while. When they got to the top, his guides whispered "sacred" and proceeded to crawl nonchalantly back down the hill. It sounds like a scene out of Smoke Signals or Pow-Wow Highway. I got the impression that Snyder's native guides were pulling his leg.  

I guess that's why I soon set aside Gary Snyder, for whom I have great respect, and picked up my yellowing paperback copy of Early Greek Philosophy. These are my people. They don't offer answers so much as poems, questions, speculations about the cosmos.

Yes, I've been to Delphi, and Athens, and Crete. Powerful places one and all. But sitting in my camp chair in front of the fire at Forestville State Park, site #36, it occurred to me that this is my sacred landscape. I know the contours of the land in every direction. Through the trees to the east the land drops rapidly to the South Branch of the Root River, though you can't see the river from here. There are lots of bluebells down there. Also lots of warblers passing through at this time of year, including the bay-breasted and the mourning warblers. A hiking trail runs through the woods on the far side of the river. It eventually cuts across a stretch of open farmland, reminding us of what a special enclave of undisturbed vegetation this park is.

Better to stay on this side of the river, heading south on the gravel road, uphill past the fishermen's parking lot and the camper cabins to the wooded path that leads down to the sturdy bridge across the river. Redstarts and yellow warblers are always darting around in the open meadow down there, and once we saw a scarlet tanager in the woods nearby.

On the far side of the bridge the path continues through dank woods with an under-story of nettles for several miles to a big spring. (We've never gone up that far. Talk about lazy!)

When we first camped here twenty years ago, some of the upland fields sloping down to the river were grassy and open. You could see the steep, forested hills on the other side, and the scene reminded me of rural France. Now the "weed" trees are forty feet high and things are closed in. Elm and ash? Box Elder? What?

We've camped here many times, heard the owls and the coyotes in the darkness and tracked down the blue-winged warbler year after year at the same crossroads. Tomorrow morning we'll do the same. I've already heard his discouraged, wheezy, two-note sigh several times. 

Now an oriole is singing in the trees above our heads, a musical cascade of liquid orange. I've harvested a branch or two from the woods nearby to keep the fire going. Yes, I know: The Gathering of Firewood is Forbidden. But the rangers were at a meeting this afternoon and the firewood shed was locked.

The air is getting cool—just the way I like it. It's probably 8 p.m. The kids down the way have quit throwing the Frisbee around. They were having a pretty good time.

*   *   *

In the middle of the night I was awakened by a squeal. Maybe a rabbit that had just been caught. A second later I heard a loud, ascending feline snarl in the woods nearby. Very loud. I've never heard anything like it before, though I've heard some weird nocturnal sounds in Yellowstone and elsewhere. Bobcat or cougar? Who knows.

In any case, I won't soon forget it.