At Home with a Poet
May 27th, 2009 by Steven GardnerOff topic alert. As in this post has little to nothing to do with politics, but if you go to the Seattle Times story you can read some political conversation into it.
My first experience with the Pacific Northwest came when I was 11, but it didn’t really take for me until I came up here eight years later in 1981. Turns out I first fell in love with this place in the former home of a poet.
My mother discovered she had a sister up here. Actually it was my aunt who did the discovering. They wrote to each other for a couple years, then Mom went up to visit.
The next year Pauline and David came down to our neighborhood with their two girls, my cousins, to take in Disneyland and some other So-Cal sights. A couple months later we returned the visit. We were going to Utah, by way of Seattle.
We stayed in their home. For us it was considered Seattle. For Seattleites I guess it’s Lake City. It’s an older home set on a fairly busy street, but it has a nice yard, is well maintained and has a classic or traditional feel to it, without feeling stuffy.
The home has a character so lacking in today’s too-perfect houses. The stairways are narrow. The cozy bedrooms upstairs are served by a bathroom with a pitched ceiling so if you stand up too quickly off of the toilet you’ll smack the back of your head. But that house is so, so comfortable.
One night on that first visit I stayed up late and had my first HBO experience. We went to the Ballard Locks and toured the underground city. I dug that express lane that changes directions everyday, thinking Los Angeles should try something like that. The skies were blue most of the time and temps were bearable. I didn’t leave thinking I’d live here, but I sure wanted to come back for lots and lots of visits.
And so, beginning in the mid 1990s, I did. My aunt and uncle still live in the house. I’ve stayed there several times. I stayed there when I was looking for work here. My dad and I were there that weekend for my first Safeco game, the one where Mike Cameron made that catch robbing Derek Jeter of a home run. I can’t count how many times I’ve been back to the locks. Sitting in that house my own family watched my cousin open her wedding presents a day after her wedding and two days before 9/11.
Now that my aunt and uncle are empty nesters, I have asked them if they plan to leave the house, to downsize. She is not so willing. It would make sense to me if they decided to leave, but secretly I’m glad they don’t. It might only be once a year or so I get over there, but apart from my own place here in the woods of University Point it’s where I feel most at home. It’s family, but it’s the house, too.
It turns out that house has a history far predating my relatives. Environmental poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner no less, Gary Snyder grew up in that home. He stopped by the old place Tuesday and the Seattle Times was there with him. Writes Lynda Mapes:
“Back before all the asphalt, the cars and the strip malls, this was a forested glade, where Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, would beat a path into the woods to his secret camp, to snug down with the quiet night, dreaming a fifth-grader’s skinned-knee dreams.”
Snyder will be reading poetry at Benaroya Hall tonight. Pauline and David will be there.
I know next to nothing about Snyder’s work. In fact, all I know is what I’ve learned in the last couple of days. But I know some things about that house, about the people who live there now. If, somehow, Snyder’s presence as a boy left a lingering spirit that had an impact on David, Pauline, Michelle and Danielle, then what I’ve seen leads me to believe I better read his stuff. Perhaps what I feel in that home, then, will make even more sense.
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