A Beginner's Guide to Gary Snyder

During the spring of my senior year in high school, I stopped doing the assigned English homework: I’ll read what I want to read, dammit! A musty copy of Walden. Essays by Freud and Jung. Vonnegut novels. Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. My buddies would soon depart for college, whereas I planned to stick around Vermont, rake leaves and bang nails and stack dollars to fund a dirtbaggy trip to Scotland—hiking and scrambling, drinking and smoking, talking to strangers and listening to the wind, sleeping on trains and in the rain. The time had finally arrived to claim responsibility for my education, to design my own syllabus, to fuse learning and adventuring into one inseparable and awesome endeavor. I was psyched.

And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, courtesy of my local small-town library, I was extra-psyched. Reason: Browsing on a dim gray afternoon, I chanced upon a book that seemed to contain every subject that already fascinated