Jack, Summer '56

He slept on a wooden bunk with a rope mattress in the sleeping bag Snyder helped him pick out in Oakland. To amuse himself he baked rye muffins, played a baseball game with a pack of cards that he'd invented when he was a boy in Lowell, and picked a few sprigs of alpine fire and a wild flower every day to put in a coffee cup on his desk. Jack wrote at the desk facing away from looming Mount Hozomeen on his north, the dark, naked rock of Hozomeen coming to symbolize for him 'the Void,' with its clouds and thunderstorms, the two sharp peaks of Hozomeen looming in his window as he lay in bed, 'the Northern Lights behind it reflecting all the ice of the North Pole from the other side of the world.' During the long afternoons he sat in his canvas chair facing 'Void Hozomeen,' listening to the silence of his cabin and making up haikus.