AdventuresNW
Time for Serenity, Anyone?
I like to live in the sound of water
in the feel of mountain air. A sharp
reminder hits me: this world is still alive;
it stretches out there shivering toward its own
creation, and I’m part of it. Even my breathing
enters into this elaborate give and take,
this bowing to sun and moon, day or night,
winter, summer, storm, still – this tranquil
chaos that seems to be going somewhere.
This wilderness with a great peacefulness in it.
This motionless turmoil; the everything dance.
This question and recollection comes from William Stafford, the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. He lived and worked in Portland, Oregon, and spent significant time in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
For him, a shallow river and the sound of water winding through one of the many deep valleys of the American West was the salient thread connecting everything of value. Many of these rivers have flowed forever through “the basement of time” as the author Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It.
From trickling headwaters in tall mountains to vast wandering deltas, cascading rivers run hard and fast to the mighty North Pacific Ocean. During an after-poetry-reading party at Maclean’s home—a reading sponsored by The Chicago Review (I was poetry editor at the time)—he told me that if rivers were for me as they were for him, the thread that pulled everything together, I should check out the poems of William Stafford. I’d never heard of him.
“We need someone who can relate feeling as well as facts; poetry is what we need.”
Because I would never ignore advice from Maclean, who previously convinced me to quit the hobby of bait fishing and learn the art of fly fishing, I read every Stafford poem and found a deeper value for rivers “running through it.”
In 1970, I was one of a small group of Fairhaven College students at Western Washington University who blocked the not-yet paved road through the North Cascade Wilderness, protesting its construction. A highway rivering through the wilderness? Moronic, I thought; even oxymoronic. Decades later, I’ve learned the virtue of this black ribbon highway leading into the wilderness.
In part, the landscape of North Cascades watersheds became more meaningful to me because of the seven poems William Stafford wrote at the end of his life after visiting, one last time, this place of mountains and rivers without end. The poems in his chapbook, The Methow River Poems, Confluence Press, 1995) are site-specific poems that respond to the high peaks around Washington Pass, the mountain meadows around Mazama, the high desert sage of the Methow Valley, and other inspiring locations.
In recent decades, I have taken the 80-mile pilgrimage east from Sedro-Woolley on WA-20 (The North Cascades Highway) across the mountains to Washington Pass, Mazama, and Winthrop, and then south on WA-153 following the Methow River from Twisp to Pateros, where the river joins the Columbia. On this scenic route, it’s hard to keep your eyes on the road; I find myself stopping often and pulling off the road to gaze at a snowcapped mountain peak or a deep-cut green forest valley or to stop at a bend in the river to cast a long translucent line across the burbling stream—casting deceptive flies to trick the cutthroat trout. Here, Douglas fir trees comb the wind, Ponderosa pines sweeten the air, and aspen and cottonwood leaves wink in the breeze: all the views are breathtaking and, for me, full of meaning.
But the real point of my pilgrimage is to admire the site-specific ceramic plaques displaying Stafford’s poems from The Methow River Poems: “Silver Star,” “A Valley Like This,” “Where We Are,” “From the Wild People,” “Ask Me,” “Is This Feeling Real,” and “Time for Serenity, Anyone?”
The project traces its origins to 1992 when two National Park rangers, Sheela Mclean and Curtis Edwards, wrote to Stafford complaining that after years of creating interpretive road signs in the Cascade and Okanogan National Forests, they had grown tired of their own writing. They proposed a project for poetry in the wild. As Susan Hauser reports in the Wall Street Journal, they told him, “We’re tired of our own mediocre natural history writing. We need someone who can relate feeling as well as facts; poetry is what we need.” Hauser further notes that “the Forest Service offered $100 per poem. Stafford took the pay and wrote the poems in July of 1993 after an inspiring visit to the Methow River Valley. A month later, he died, at age 79, from a heart attack.”
The porcelain enameled signs displaying the seven poems have stood in place since 1994 in honor of the mountains, valleys, rivers, and deserts that inspired them. They are beautiful poems. I stop and linger over one of them, From the Wild People, and try to write one back to him.
Kim Stafford, the poet’s son (a Poet Laureate of Oregon) comments in an afterword to the poems in the chapbook that the Methow River Valley Poems “display my father’s habit of mind,” a humble and generous spirit offering insights into the more than human world and how our wild nature relies on that. Something best learned from adventuring into wild nature and listening carefully.
Many political conflicts needed to be resolved to establish the North Cascades public lands where Stafford’s poems now reside. One resolution of the paradox of a road through the wilderness was an agreement to construct the highway through a national recreational corridor as a fast, wide, flat, and straight roadway to facilitate the extractors—the mining, hunting, logging, and tourist businesses—on either end, outside of the park, and to preserve the otherwise roadless scenic interior for hiking and camping, climbing and canoeing.
Now, as we pass beneath the shining spires and through lush river valleys, Stafford’s poems aid our contemplation of the intrinsic, non-utilitarian value of the untrammeled community of the wild and its natural beauty, fractal changes, and the basement of time, rivers, and mountains without end. What we might love and hope for is a natural grace where the rest of nature tolerates our dangerous existence. And for serenity in a violent and mutilated world.
Stafford might tell you that if you want to explore a wild mountain or valley, an untamed river or unknown trail, you need to go there alone—even if with others—and stop often along the way to simply gaze at (or better yet) to contemplate the high-view of the deeply woven thread that runs through everything meaningful and valuable and beautiful. To seek out further stories that could be true—about the mornings and evenings, as they open and close along this thread that becomes one’s life.
Only then should we make the turn toward home.
Three Poems
A Valley Like This
Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this,
and suddenly the air is filled with snow.
That is the way the whole world happened –
There was nothing, and then. . .
But maybe some time you will look out and even
the mountains are gone, the world become nothing
again. What can a person do to help
bring back the world?
We have to watch it and then look at each other.
Together we hold it close and carefully
save it, like a bubble that can disappear
If we don’t watch out.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world.
Hold out your hands to it. When mornings and evenings
roll along, watch how they open and close, how they
invite you to the long party that your life is.
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
Where We Are
Fog in the morning here
will make some of the world far away
and the near only a hint. But rain
will feel its blind progress along the valley,
tapping to convert one boulder at a time
into a glistening fact. Daylight will love what came.
Whatever fits will be welcome, whatever
steps back in the fog will disappear
and hardly exist. You hear the river
saying a prayer for all that’s gone.
Far over the valley there is an island
for everything left; and our own island
will drift there too, unless we hold on,
unless we tap like this: “Friend,
are you there? Will you touch when
you pass, like the rain?”
Stafford Methow River Poem Plaque Locations
A Valley Like This: Washington Pass Overlook
Silver Star: Washington Pass
Where We Are: Tawlkes-Foster suspension bridge near Mazama
Ask Me: Behind the Farmer’s Exchange building, Winthrop
Is This Feeling About the West Real?: Twisp Park, Twisp
From the Wild People: McFarland Creek parking area
Time for Serenity, Anyone?: Mouth of the Methow River, across from the fruit stand
Methow Valley Authors Library Opens Near Twisp
Honoring the rich literary expressions that have emanated from the Methow Valley over the years, the Methow Valley Authors Library celebrated its grand opening in April at Casia Lodge, near Twisp, WA. This “collection of books and journals from every author who has ever lived in, worked in, or wrote about the valley” is the brainchild of author Greg Wright, publisher of Methow Press. The Library will be open to the public during limited hours. More info: methowpress.com
Skagit River Poetry Festival
The 12th Biennial Skagit River Poetry Festival comes to La Conner, WA. October 3-5, bringing together dozens of acclaimed poets in this beautiful location near the mouth of the Skagit River. More info: skagitriverpoetry.org/festival
Credit: William Stafford, “Ask Me” from Ask Me: 100 Essential Poems. Copyright © 1977, 2014
by William Stafford and the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The
Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
graywolfpress.org. Published by permission of Kim Stafford. Special thanks to Tim Barnes, the editor of The Friends of William Stafford Foundation newsletter, for information and ideas for this story. Learn more: www.williamstafford.org
The poet Roger Gilman lives in Bellingham and can be found around the Northwest along Cascade Mountain streams and in Puget Sound salt marshes fly fishing and birding for poems. Formerly the poetry editor of The Chicago Review, he served as Dean of Fairhaven College at Western Washington University. Roger currently serves as Poetry Editor of Adventures Northwest.
