All My Heroes Have Beards

If I am anything like Gary Snyder when I'm 70 I'll be happy (and still alive!). Now if I could be more like him at 30!!



"It comes down to how one thinks about screens, fences, or dogs. These are often used for keeping the wild at bay. ('Keeping the wild at bay' sounds like fending off hawks and bears, but it is more often a matter of holding back carpenter ants and deer mice.') We came to live a permeable, porous life in our house set among the stands of oak and pine. Our buildings are entirely opened up for the long Sierra summer. Mud daubers make their trips back and forth from inside the house to the edge of the pond like tireless little cement trucks, and pour their foundations on beams, in cracks, and (if you're not alert) in rifle-bore holes and backpack fire-pump nozzles. They dribble little spots of mud as they go. For mosquitoes, which are never much of a problem, the house is just another place to enjoy the shade. At night the bats dash around the rooms, in and out of the open skylights, swoop down past your cheek and go out an open sliding door. In the dark of the night the deer can be heard stretching for the lower leaves of the apple trees, and at dawn the wild turkeys are strolling a few yards from the bed."