You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,
But I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
A small part of it will die if I’m not around
feeding it anymore.
—Lew Welch, final lines of “Chicago Poem”
Lew Welch on December 10, 1959, after completing a road trip from San Francisco to New York with Albert Saijo and Jack Kerouac.
CHAPTER 1
Goodbye
It would be a strange season, seemingly of two minds, weeks of relentless sun followed by a freak snowfall that would cause general havoc among mountain-loving flatlanders who found themselves inconvenienced or dead. And now, in late spring of 1971, the valleys, foothills, and mountains of California seemed unusually alive with death: Bodies were showing up in shallow graves in Sutter County, victims of a serial killer by the name of Juan Corona; Berkeley student Mary Hoefer would go missing in Yosemite Valley, never to be seen again; four climbers from the Sierra Club’s Loma Prieta chapter would die in an attempt on 13,149-foot Mount Ritter; and on May 23, the 44-year-old poet Lew Welch, a longtime friend of Gary Snyder’s who was camped among the oaks and ponderosa pines adjacent to Snyder’s hand-hewn home on the San Juan Ridge, retrieved his .22-caliber revolver from Snyder’s footlocker, composed a 90-word note, and walked off the face of the earth.
By the time the search for Welch was called off, a cold rain was falling on the foothills and snow from the north would be measured in feet on the Sierra Nevada crest. For five days, the rescue party had thrashed and crawled up and over and down the promontory south of Welch’s camp called Bald Mountain, but had found no sign of Welch. He’d last been seen wandering off with the pistol he’d used earlier that week in a feat of marksmanship, shooting the head off a fence lizard during a wildflower walk led by Snyder. Young children were about. This was Snyder’s new home; he was building a community here and had certain norms in mind, gunplay not being one of them. Not one to suffer fools, the five-foot-seven-inch Snyder confronted the rangy, red-haired poet in front of the others with the blunt force of his words.
“Lew, you’ll never change.”
It must have stung, that judgment, coming from someone Welch loved and respected a great deal, someone with whom he’d shared important history for over two decades, because the reasons Welch had come to the foothills had everything to do with change.
He’d come to build a cabin next to Snyder’s on land Allen Ginsberg was deeding to him, on the northwest side of Bald Mountain. He’d been talking about it for six months. To make a new life. Establish himself in a new community.
He’d already had many lives, many identities, and many homes. And now he needed a new one.
Four months earlier, he’d split with his partner of seven years, a woman named Magda Cregg. They weren’t married, but he called her his wife and her two boys his sons, both standout musicians. The elder, Hugh, was in prep school back East (he would later become known as Huey Lewis), and her younger boy, Jeff, was a drummer. Seven years of living and writing in the houses Cregg owned, along with a steady gig on the San Francisco docks as an IWW- and ILWU-card-carrying ship’s clerk—“a two-card man”—had given Welch the stability to grow into the roles played by writers in full: in-demand reader, teacher, advocate, agitator, spokesperson, mentor, entertainer, and essayist. Cregg’s house in Marin City had become a gathering place for writers, artists, and musicians. Welch still worked in the shadows of friends who were better known, even famous—Snyder, Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, and to a lesser extent Philip Whalen—but he was fulfilling the promise seen early on by one of his champions, the Grove Press editor and publisher Donald Allen.
Both before his disappearance and certainly after it, Welch was viewed as not only a gifted poet with something to say but also an important one, prescient concerning the terrors to come: environmental ruination, the rapacity of world leaders, the befouling of America. A dedicated teacher of poetry with a clear view on how to master the craft—“Write like you talk!”—he was beloved by his students, some of whom became notably accomplished: Charles Upton, Tony Dingman, and Mary Norbert Körte, to name three.
“He was a luminous being,” says the writer, actor, and Zen priest Peter Coyote, a friend of Welch’s. “He gave off a bright light. And he knew some profound things about the universe. And maybe he couldn’t always live up to them. But in emptiness, there are no contradictions.”
On the day he disappeared, Welch was lean as a marathoner, in dungarees, a denim jacket, and boots. He was six feet tall, maybe 150 pounds, all oblique angles, freckled, seamed face prismed by long jaw, high cheekbones, prominent chin. His copper-colored hair, once his pride and vanity, was receding and shot through with silver, brushed back to reveal a furrowed forehead; his mother’s curiosity and intelligence, his father’s glad-handing athleticism; and those big surprised-sad brown eyes, with skyward brows gone to gray.
Forged by torment and shaped by his intense study of Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, Welch’s poems, compiled in the book of his collected works, Ring of Bone, did what he wanted them to: They spoke plain truths in plain terms. “Language is speech,” as he put it. “You have to know what the tribe is speaking.” After being fired from retailer Montgomery Ward’s middle-management ranks, he worked as a San Francisco cabbie, which led to his “Taxi Suite” poems. When he read them to his mates at the Yellow Cab Company, they told him (according to Welch), “Yeah, that’s just the way it is. By gosh, you write like that, hunh? That’s good.”
Welch called his poems songs and occasionally referred to the words as lyrics. Many pieces were intended to be sung, not spoken. He wrote rotten ones—some reading more like ad copy and bumper sticker slogans—but the best have aged well, offering a timely and utterly penetrating glimpse into that which ails us today. With abundant apologies to Taylor Swift, it’s Lew Welch who is first among equals in the tortured-poets department—a poet, sadly, who’s never received his due.
He was one of the unsung members of the Beats, or the writers of the San Francisco Renaissance, both terms sloppy grab bags for poets differing vastly in style and subject matter, but handy for the media (and booksellers) to define a particular postwar demolition of the old-school rules mediating the art of poetry. Welch was late to the party in San Francisco, showing up two years after the landmark Six Gallery reading in October 1955 (during which Ginsberg famously read Howl), but his talent, big personality, and friendships with Snyder and Whalen, roommates of his at Portland’s Reed College in the 1940s, fast-tracked him into the scene. Welch became known as much for his performances as for his verse, which ranged from songs about graffiti on shithouse walls to lambent odes to nonduality. “Welch subtitles his readings ‘One-Man Plays,’ ” wrote the Bay Area theater and music critic Grover Sales in 1967, “an accurate way of describing a total theatrical experience.… It is no exaggeration to say that Lew Welch is funnier by far than many of the comics who played the hungry i [a San Francisco nightclub].”
A 1965 gathering of poets and other literary figures at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. Top row: Stella Levy and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Middle row: Donald Schenker, Michael Grieg, unknown person, Mike Gibbons, David Meltzer, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Dan Langton, Steve Bornstein, Garry Goodrow and son Jason, Richard Brautigan (behind Goodrow), unknown person, Andrew Hoyem (on stretcher), and three unknown people. Front row: Unknown person, Shig Murao, Lew Welch, and Peter Orlovsky.
Welch was 33 in 1960, only two years removed from Chicago and just getting started as a poet, when Allen included two of his works in the landmark anthology The New American Poetry. The poet Marianne Moore reviewed the volume in the New York Herald Tribune. Alongside critiques of a handful of contributors—Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others (no Snyder, no Whalen)—she singled out Welch and his “Chicago Poem,” lauding his powers of observation, the oppressive industrial landscape counterposing the golden belly of a bluegill. It could have been a breakthrough moment for Welch, but he was fated to remain an obscure figure.
Welch was an alcoholic; not just a binge drinker, he was often under the influence. Worn by the tiresome cycle of his hospitalizations, tenuous recoveries, and inevitable falls, Cregg informed him in early 1971 that he was no longer welcome in her home. “You don’t need a lover, you need a nurse,” she said, and soon she left to travel alone in South America. Cast out, bereft, short of money, and with no place to call his own, Welch wandered the Northwest for several months and guest lectured at his alma mater. He worked the docks in Vancouver, Washington, to pay for the new cabin on the San Juan Ridge, dried out at his pal Bill Yardas’s stump farm in Woodland, Washington, and then, in the spring, headed south to Snyder. First, he detoured into San Francisco and met with his doctor, Asher Gordon, known on the docks as Doctor ILWU. Gordon wrote a prescription for disulfiram, a potent drug that would cause myriad agonies if Welch consumed alcohol: nausea, headaches, weakness, impaired vision, a muddled mind. (The 54-year-old Gordon would be found dead at home within a month of Welch’s disappearance, a victim of an overdose, according to the journalist Sidney Roger.)
Welch’s letters from the San Juan Ridge in early May alternated between bravado and the sorrows, the disulfiram having helped him kick booze for good this time. “Some terrible depressions, then straight days, then absolute bewilderment,” he wrote to Cregg in South America. Of those on the ridge, including Snyder, he wrote, “It’s funny, but everybody seems somehow a stranger.”
Meanwhile, he was being swallowed whole by the cabin construction’s minutiae. “Everything is harder than it looks except water-skiing,” Welch wrote on May 2 to the current and former Reed College students who’d volunteered to help him with the build. He was finding himself awash in details and financially in arrears, shy at least $1,000 and maybe three times more than that. He made wheedling cash appeals to his mother, to Cregg, and to Ginsberg. All three agreed to loan him money, but too late to ease his worries.
The note found in Welch’s Chevy van on the morning of May 24 made that clear enough, but despite his commitment to a manifesto of pellucid poetics, he’d left one key sentence in his last bit of prose uncharacteristically murky.
I never could make anything work out right and now I’m bretraying [sic] my friends. I can’t make anything out of it—never could. I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone. Don Allen is to be my literary executor—use MSS at Gary’s and at Grove Press. I have $2000 in Nevada City Bank of America—use it to cover my affairs and debts. I don’t owe Allen G. anything yet nor my mother. I went Southwest. Goodbye. Lew Welch.
“I went Southwest,” he wrote.
Welch had walked away under his own power, presumably of his own volition, not having fallen prey to a serial killer, not having been abducted in a national park, not having slipped on glacial polish hiking in a remote defile; neither had Welch been caught short by a late winter snowstorm in the backcountry, nor had he blundered up a 13er on precisely the wrong day that spring. Welch’s was not a disappearance of the 20-year-old solo explorer Everett Ruess variety. It was also not a Christopher McCandless type of tragedy—Welch the unwitting victim of his own romantic or quixotic impulses, like the young man memorialized in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
It would appear that Welch perceived something dreadfully awry, something he could neither fix nor cast off. So he walked away from it, to spare others the pain of dealing with him and himself the mortification of knowing that he’d likely cause others pain, living as he would be in a tight-knit community, no place to hide, because, in fact, Lewis Barrett Welch Jr. would never change.
It wasn’t the first time Welch had walked away. Walking and 100-yard-dashing away from it ran in the family. His mother did it by hopscotching into homes as though trying to elude her shadow, new schools with each move and new names with each marriage: from Phoenix to La Jolla to Los Angeles, Coronado, El Cajon, La Mesa, Palo Alto, and later, after the kids were through with high school, Berkeley, Ithaca, Burlington, Santa Barbara, Reno, and finally Sonoma. There were also marital false starts: three marriages to the father, Lewis Barrett Welch Sr., plus one to an El Cajon citrus grower, John Hathaway. Lew Sr. would die at 48, when Welch was 19, and Gig, Welch’s sister, at 47, four years after Welch disappeared, both of cirrhosis, alcohol as their means of walking away. And then there was Welch himself: His mother, Dorothy, had enrolled him at Palo Alto High as a Brownfield (her maiden name). So it was Lew Brownfield the teenage track star and standout halfback, the speed demon with the snaky footwork, the snooker champion, the actor, the dashing kid with the bow tie, a patriot readying his peers for the military; and then the adult, Lew Welch, who abandoned cities and women for the mountains and then the mountains for the cities and women again.
But this, the last and most famous of Welch’s withdrawals, would freight his narrative with the kind of branding that would have caused him to think twice about disappearing. “The Poet Who Wanted to Be Eaten by Vultures,” reads a JSTOR Daily brief, written for the digital library in 2018, to tee up an introduction to Welch’s corpus of work, referring specifically to a poem called “Song of the Turkey Buzzard,” in which Welch posits that one of his friends will have “proper instructions / for my continuance.” This is to say that Welch had selected someone to rend his corpse and on “marked rock, following his orders, / place my meat.” We’re talking about a groaning board for buzzards here, with Welch as the main course—although given his underfed frame, a rather stingy one. Notwithstanding acclaimed writer Maxine Hong Kingston’s thumbs-up in the first line of the JSTOR piece (as if to assure the curious that Welch was legit, the best dead Beat poet they’d never heard of), this “Last Will & Testament” section of “Song of the Turkey Buzzard” has been called Welch’s true suicide note, serving as apologia and rallying cry for those who would fetishize the man’s death.
“This is the last place / There is nowhere else to go,” Welch writes in “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings.” The peak and its views inspired several of his best-known poems.
Shoot a southwesterly bearing from the top of Bald Mountain out to the Pacific and sweep for a landform or place that might have had significance to Welch. At 222 degrees, the transect grazes the summit of Mount Tamalpais’s East Peak, a landscape that meant everything to Welch. “I have taken Mount Tamalpais as my goddess in a very real way, like a priest takes a vow,” he says in a much-cited 1969 interview he gave David Meltzer for his anthology The San Francisco Poets.
I ask her, Mount Tamalpais, about this, about that, and I listen to what she tells me. A lot of people think I am being goofy about it…but I mean it. I really mean it, and the only way to say it is in the poetry. The praises. Prayers.
“This is the last place / There is nowhere else to go,” Welch writes in “The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings,” a poem that has led some to refer to him as the poet laureate of the peak.
Striking out to the southwest from the top of Bald Mountain would mean a plunge of 1,000 feet into the South Yuba River canyon through vegetation so feral that a searcher could walk within three feet of a corpse and be none the wiser. And if Welch were able to descend from Bald Mountain into the river canyon, he’d be faced with the meltwater-swollen South Yuba. While Welch was a capable woodsman who had burned impressive miles in the Sierra backcountry with 50-pound loads, he was malnourished. The disulfiram in his system was already causing side effects, and if he had consumed any alcohol, the reaction would have unleashed a biochemical tempest. But maybe he had something else in mind. Maybe he’d just walk as far as he could in the direction of his beloved goddess and stop wherever he fell.
Crashing and burning often followed Welch’s new beginnings—part of it was beyond him to control; Whalen characterized him as “sort of bipolar,” and his published correspondence might seem to validate that theory. But it’s one thing to make a grand statement, a final statement, and another thing to stick the muzzle of a small-caliber firearm in one’s mouth, some would say a gun grievously underpowered to do the job, and pull the trigger. Welch had made many grand pronouncements in his 44 years, several of which he’d fulfilled, many of which he hadn’t.
“I went Southwest,” he wrote. A poetic nonending, then, for the brilliant man plagued by a boom-and-bust ecology of mind, destined to live out the better part of his career as a phantasm. His output includes 181 published poems across five chapbooks, one book of essays, a published undergraduate thesis (How I Read Gertrude Stein), a two-volume letter collection (I Remain), and a slim book of haiku cowritten with Kerouac and Albert Saijo on their 1959 San Francisco–to–New York road trip in Welch’s Willys Jeepster.
Welch was on the cusp of a kind of fame when he walked into the void, his intellect, poetry, and opinions respected by people who mattered. A natural storyteller who could hold forth in a bar or onstage, he wasn’t so prepossessed by his own budding celebrity that he didn’t acknowledge what others had to say or encourage them to say it. He was a feel-good guy, a hail-fellow-well-met, and for most of his life his behavior belied the demons that haunted him.
Welch went missing 54 years ago, 10 more years than he walked the earth. For some, he’s become the stuff of folklore, urban legend, and a great deal of myth, especially considering the company he kept, and the poems he wrote.
Welch’s body of work is as distilled and high-proof as Everclear. The epigraph of his collected poems reads, in part,
i want the whole thing, the moment
when what we thought was rock, or
sea
became clear Mind, and
what we thought was clearest Mind really
was that glancing girl, that
swirl of birds…
(all of that)
No wonder, then, that the musicologist, historian, and poet Samuel Charters writes, “Lew Welch…left a group of poems that are among the purest and the most precise of all the Beat creations.”
Or, as City Lights Booksellers’ executive director and publisher, Elaine Katzenberger, says of Welch’s poetry, “It’s a gateway drug.” By that, she means that his work is simple without being simplistic; it’s easily grokkable, fun or humorous or wise on the surface, and meaningful at the most superficial level, but like a tide pool, it also contains layers of profundity. “And once your curiosity is piqued and once you’ve had a positive experience reading [his poetry],” Katzenberger tells me, “then maybe you’re able to be curious about what other things lie within that genre for you, right?”
Right. As Welch puts it in one of his poems,
Step out onto the planet.
Draw a circle 100 feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody’s ever really seen.
How many can you find?
Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Welch (from left) before the Freeway Reading at Longshoremen’s Hall in San Francisco on June 12, 1964.
CHAPTER 2
The Search
Seeking Perfect Total Enlightenment
is looking for a flashlight
when all you need the flashlight for
is to find your flashlight
—Lew Welch, “Difficulty Along the Way”
Where the hell was Lew?
Back home, the lithe, compact, ponytailed, and two-earringed poet, the mountaineer, the ur–dharma bum himself, Gary Snyder, 41 years old, found himself at the center of a maelstrom, the person in charge of finding his dear friend. He hadn’t asked for this, but by making certain decisions, he wound up taking the lead rather than abdicating it to the authorities.
Before Welch had arrived, all had seemed well in Snyder’s world. Having already become a figurehead of sorts in the back-to-the-land movement, deep ecology, and American Zen Buddhism, Snyder had returned to the United States from Japan for keeps in 1968 with a young wife, Masa Uehara, and a young son, Kai. One year later, another son, Gen, would be born. They settled permanently on the San Juan Ridge in the summer of 1970, living in a custom-built hybrid of a Mandan earth lodge and a Japanese farmhouse. Snyder named his home and surrounds Kitkitdizze, the Wintu word for the spicy-smelling Chamaebatia foliolosa, known colloquially as bear clover or mountain misery.
Mountain misery, indeed. On the morning of Sunday, May 23, at Snyder’s version of matins, during breakfast, he had read aloud Samuel Johnson’s “The Vulture,” an allegory about humans’ tendency to slaughter one another on battlefields, which redounds to the benefit of the birds’ bellies. The story brought to mind several Welchian themes—sky burials, human nature, and that time in the ’60s when Snyder had invited Welch to drop acid with him on Mount Tamalpais, hoping the psychedelic trip would break Welch of his alcoholism. Turkey vultures appeared. Welch tried to call them to him, then, in despair, said, “I’m not edible.”
At Snyder’s place that Sunday morning, three large birds wheeled overhead, and Welch grew agitated. Snyder assured him they weren’t vultures, though his journal later acknowledged they likely were. Within hours, Welch would retrieve his gun.
The story Snyder told the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher the following night contained these facts: Welch, 44 years old, a very skinny six feet tall, a balding redhead with a heavily freckled face and blue-gray eyes (that last detail incorrect), was missing and was feared to have killed himself. Last seen wearing Frisco jeans, a denim jacket, and boots, Welch was camped on land adjoining Snyder’s compound. He intended to spend the summer building a small cabin; he’d arrived in mid-May.
Snyder had last seen Welch at 3 p.m. on May 23, when he dropped by Snyder’s house to retrieve his .22-caliber revolver, which Snyder was storing in a footlocker. Snyder assumed he would see Welch at a group dinner later that day—Snyder’s brother-in-law was visiting from Marin County that weekend, as were other friends—and Welch then headed toward his camp, a short walk from Snyder’s compound. Nothing in Welch’s manner suggested mental distress.
Snyder blew the conch to signal mealtime that evening, but Welch didn’t show, which didn’t raise any alarms. Could be that on this evening, the ordinarily gregarious Welch preferred to hunker down and keep his own company.
But when Welch didn’t respond to the summons to breakfast on the 24th, Snyder dispatched Zac Reisner, a 24-year-old carpenter and former Reed College student who had hired on to be Welch’s foreman that summer, to check Welch’s van, which sat on a skid trail on a bench above Snyder’s compound; the trail to Bald Mountain extended south from the site. Reisner found the panel doors open. A note had been placed on the floor. Reisner scanned it and rushed downslope to share it with Snyder. It was Welch’s valedictory, his “I went Southwest” note.
Snyder explained to the dispatcher that he had mustered a search team composed of friends camped on-site and others who lived on the ridge. Reisner, who was camping on Snyder’s land, was one of the first draftees. Snyder also tapped Steve Sanfield, a poet who lived nearby. Sanfield and his wife had seen Welch just a few nights earlier, when Welch visited their house for dinner. “He was spiffed up,” Sanfield told a packed room at the San Francisco Public Library in 2012 at an event to honor the City Lights updated edition of Ring of Bone. “He had shined his boots. He had a clean shirt on. He was freshly shaven. His hair was slicked back. On his waist, he had a 50-foot Stanley tape measure, and hanging from his neck was an engorged tick.” Snyder also summoned a local schoolteacher and poet, Don “Doc” Dachtler. Others would join them in the days to come.
But where to search? They decided to take Welch at his word: Heading southwest by foot would mean taking a bead into the canyon of the South Yuba River. Snyder, Sanfield, and Reisner began scouring the southwest aspect of Bald Mountain, a slope so hideously choked with chaparral that they were forced to their knees to follow game trails, occasionally skirting granite outcrops and great disk-shaped boulders teetering over voids that could swallow a person whole, the entire landscape trending down to the South Yuba, raging with runoff. They crabbed and crawled along, shouting, “Lew! Lew!” Meanwhile, Snyder had sent Dachtler to search nearby Jackass Flats Road by horse. No trace of Welch.
That night, Snyder called the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office from a pay phone in North San Juan, 10 miles from his home. A dispatcher logged the call at 8:50 p.m.
The following morning, Tuesday, May 25, at 9 a.m., 42 hours after Welch had gone missing, Snyder rendezvoused with Deputy Sheriff Stan Creamer at the intersection of Tyler Foote Road and Jackass Flats Road, about 2.5 miles from Kitkitdizze. They drove the hummocked and pitted Jackass Flats southwest through the “diggins,” the area on the San Juan Ridge flayed and denuded of vegetation by water cannons aimed at the earth 100 years before in the hunt for gold.
Within a few miles, the road entered a forest of incense cedar and ponderosa pine, and beyond it lay Bald Mountain, where robust stands of Garry oak and Macnab cypress grew within serpentine soils. A path was already worn between Kitkitdizze and the “top” of Bald Mountain, more the terminus of a ridge than a summit, but from the slightest lift of the “bald,” before the slopes tilted into the canyon formed by the South Yuba River, you might glimpse, on a clear day, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Sierra crest to the east. The small pioneer town of Nevada City lay about five miles due south, about 30 minutes by car via Tyler Foote Road and Highway 49.
Snyder and Creamer parleyed with the other searchers at Kitkitdizze. In the incident report, Creamer notes meeting six of them. Then Snyder and Creamer headed up to Welch’s van.
Creamer examined the note, which was curiously dated “3/22,” always assumed to be Welch’s error. The deputy sheriff took the note as evidence after Snyder transcribed it into his own journal. Creamer then joined Snyder’s search team for the remainder of the day. They found nothing.
On May 26 and 27, Snyder’s crew took the lead, assuming the roles of sheriff’s deputies and search and rescue professionals: They climbed and crawled through the countryside from dawn to dusk, but found no sign of Welch—no scrap of clothing, nothing. At some point, folks began to arrive from the city: Welch’s old friend from the Trinity Alps, the painter Jack Boyce; Nancy Peters, then a recent hire at City Lights (she would become its co-owner and executive director); her husband, the poet Philip Lamantia; and Donald Allen. They continued to scour the back roads threading the San Juan Ridge clear to Nevada City and beyond. They divvied up the territory into sections and split into teams to sweep them; some carried rifles, which they’d occasionally fire to signal that they’d covered an area and maybe also to get Welch’s attention. Meanwhile, the springlike weather was giving way to cold and fog, which crept up the river canyon come evenings, transforming the landscape into a Chinese brush-and-ink painting.
At this point, Snyder’s string of private journal entries reveals both the search’s mounting desperation and his own sadness and remorse:
The lizard he shot, me saying “you’re not going to change.” Thursday, after the wildflower walk…“I drink because I cannot eat this awful meat”…“my frail brother”…A strange discovery of a different landscape when searching for a dear, dead, lost friend; disorients into the brush, into places no one goes…
Later, in Japan, having heard about Welch’s disappearance from Snyder, Philip Whalen wrestled with the news, noting that Welch “kept falling in love & enjoying that feeling, but I don’t believe he often felt the love which other people expressed for him.”
According to the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office incident report, Creamer returned to Kitkitdizze at 9:30 a.m. on Friday, May 28, and noted that additional volunteers had joined Snyder’s search crew, so now they were 16. Also, Snyder and Reisner had recently driven to Nevada City and made inquiries at bars and taverns for miles around, 14 of them. Snyder had pulled Welch’s tools, clothing, and other belongings into his compound to protect them from the coming rains. He informed Creamer that because of the considerable rigors of the search thus far and the coming weather, the hunt for Lewis Barrett Welch Jr. would come to an end that evening.
So Snyder and his team of volunteers—poets, storytellers, essayists, back-to-the-landers, painters, students, Zen Buddhists, Ananda acolytes, many young and strong but none of them search and rescue experts—beat the countryside one last time.
Meanwhile, California’s big dailies had broken the story that morning, five days after Welch’s disappearance. The San Francisco Chronicle: “Bay Poet Missing—Big Search.” Yet by evening, even though the UPI wire service had spread the story nationwide, Snyder was cutting bait. They’d done what they could do. Welch was capable of staying lost if he cared to remain unfound. Nevada County undersheriff Frank Gallino spoke for Snyder and many others when he said, “Frankly, we don’t know whether he’s a suicide or just a missing person.”
And then, on Tuesday, June 1, someone reported seeing Welch in Nevada City, at the Bank of America branch. A UPI story ran six days later: “Missing Poet Is Seen—Search Off.” “He was in town Tuesday, conducted some business and left again,” Gallino told the news service stringer. “We are no longer looking for him.”
Snyder, it appears, got the news late, noting in his journal on June 4 that Creamer had informed him of the sighting. He wrote to Ginsberg in San Francisco a few days later: “Dear Allen, Lew is supposedly alive—tho not known where—word came thru Sheriff’s office. Keep an eye out in the city. Maybe he’s monstrously drinking. G.” On June 10, Snyder wrote to Dan Mathews and Louise Steinman, two of the volunteers who’d pledged to help Welch build the cabin: “Lew is alive…apparently went off to start a new self. May he flourish. I doubt we’ll see him for a while tho.” Ginsberg wrote to Snyder and Uehara several weeks later: “Should I not send Lew Welch his grand? but where?” Snyder replied on July 6: “We don’t know where Lew is.” He advised Ginsberg to hold on to his money. “The only evidence we have that he’s alive even is the bank’s word that he was in there.” Friends would believe Welch was out there, somewhere, for years. And Welch was out there: likely closer than they thought.
But if the sheriff’s deputies were no longer looking for Welch—weren’t even capable of looking for Welch, were relieved to not have to look for Welch—the search had just begun for others. A wire service article reported,
“We’re going to be looking for him in San Francisco now,” said [Welch’s] mother, Dr. Dorothy Brownfield Welch, who was reached at her home in Glen Ellen. She theorized that he must have walked from Snyder’s home to a road and hitched a ride. “I don’t think he knows what he’s doing mentally,” she said. “If Lew was able to think clearly, he wouldn’t have done this. He’s not the kind to be mean to people—he wouldn’t upset his friends like this if he knew what he was doing.”
Dorothy Brownfield Welch possessed a BA from Stanford University, an MSW from UC Berkeley, and a PhD from Cornell University’s Department of Child Development and Family Relationships—degrees germane to answering the central question posed—but she couldn’t then or ever know whether her son understood what he was doing mentally, to the extent that any of us can.
As to whether Welch knew what he was subjecting his “human shape” to when he walked away from Snyder’s compound (Welch once wrote, “If you get into this human shape, here, on this little planet, and can’t make it, then fuck it”), as a seasoned woodsman, he probably did. Whether he cared about how others felt: Who knows? He might have thought they’d be happy to be rid of him, just as he would be. Or maybe he intended to subject them to a kind of living hell, especially the woman with whom he’d been in a lifelong death dance: his mother, Dorothy.
As tends to follow such disappearances, a Rashomon-like welter of contradictions and red herrings has arisen: It wasn’t a .22-caliber handgun Welch carried into the buckbrush; it was a bolt-action .22-caliber rifle; he was also lugging a double-bit axe. Welch didn’t shoot a lizard; he shot a squirrel. Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky were on the wildflower walk and witnessed Snyder giving Welch the tongue-lashing. Welch’s farewell note was found inside the van on the evening of the 23rd by Reisner, not on the morning or afternoon of the 24th. Welch camped in his van, not in a tent on his plot of land. Two accounts had Snyder searching the van and finding a mess of spent beer cans. What was up with that? Welch never drank beer. Up to 30 searchers were combing the countryside, not 16.
Welch lives on, everywhere and nowhere.
“Live people have bodies, dead people leave bodies,” Magda Cregg told an interviewer four years after Welch vanished. “But Lew has no body so Lew is neither alive nor dead—he has disappeared.”
Welch and Ginsberg outside City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, 1963.
CHAPTER 3
Discoveries
crazy as Han Shan as
Wittgenstein in his German hut, as
all the others ever were and are
Ancient Order of the Fire Gigglers
who walked away from it, finally,
kicked the habit, finally, of Self, of
man-hooked Man
(which is not, at last, estrangement )
—Lew Welch, from “He Thanks His Woodpile”
The entire conceit was ridiculous. It didn’t make sense. I’d been beguiled by Welch’s story after coming across that JSTOR article, the one about the poet hitchhiking into immortality in the gut of a turkey “buzzard”—he hadn’t even gotten the genus right—and admittedly, I was pulled by the intrigue, not by his poetry, which I’d never read. (Beats, Shmeats. I’d read Kerouac, had sampled Howl, knew Snyder as Japhy Ryder from Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums—what climber didn’t—but that was the extent of it.) The more I looked into Welch’s regurgitated narrative—he walked into the woods with a gun—the less satisfied I became.
Myths had accumulated around Welch like lichen on granite. Even Welch’s own accounts proved unreliable—his letters and interviews filled with exaggerations, omissions, and outright lies.
For handrails, there were Welch’s poetry; his roman à clef, I, Leo; and his two books of letters, I Remain, the latter tracking 22 years of Welch’s life, from 1949, his first year at Reed College, to nine days before his disappearance. The letters provide a stunning portrait of the artist as a young—and middle-aged, increasingly erratic—man. The poet and critic Robert Peters considered them the equivalent of an epistolary novel, on par in quality with the letters of D.H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. But Welch is a narrator fond of fact stretching. Especially egregious are his fabrications in a fountainhead of Welchiana for biographers: the long-form interview he gave David Meltzer for The San Francisco Poets. Welch needs diligent fact-checking, and perhaps only one nonacademic historian has bothered to do that. But there simply aren’t many writers who have gone to school on Welch: no historiographers and no investigative journalists. I’d find clues in the shreds of primary data, including unpublished recordings, and the trove of his papers at UC San Diego. I’d speak to a majority of the few people still alive who’d known Welch, the most important of whom was Snyder. Mainly, I wanted to see the places significant to Welch; maybe I’d learn something simply by visiting Mount Tamalpais, the San Juan Ridge, and his refuges in Siskiyou County—old mining cabins—close to the outpost of Forks of Salmon, where he’d composed some of his best work.
But the easiest way into Welch, at first, was to read. The writer Aram Saroyan was the first to tell Welch’s tale. In Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation, published by William Morrow and Company in 1979, Saroyan uses Welch’s works and interviews to reconstruct his life, while counterpointing it with mini-biographies of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. Saroyan takes Welch from his birth in Phoenix to his disappearance in the Sierra. The 128-page book was panned, but the reviewers seem to have missed the point: Genesis Angels is less a biography, more a gestalt. If Saroyan elides too much and takes liberties with Welch’s state of mind, the book is faithful to Welch’s letters but even more so his spirit, some of it seemingly channeled. Saroyan, who came to admire Welch and still considers him a mentor, wrote Genesis Angels at 35. “Somebody said to me, ‘I really liked the book. Now who is Lew Welch?’ ” Saroyan says, chuckling—not for the first time—at the implication that he’d written Genesis Angels about himself. “In certain ways, I had.”
More rigorous and recent is Ewan Clark’s thoughtful biography, He, Leo: The Life and Poetry of Lew Welch, published in 2023 by Oregon State University Press. Clark sourced genealogical records and newspaper archives and traveled to at least four special collections libraries. He describes Welch’s Reed College years; his six years in Chicago, several as a grad student; and, when Welch tired of the University of Chicago, his pivot into the retail advertising department at Montgomery Ward (along with forays into Dianetics, Freudian analysis, and an ill-fated marriage). Clark describes Welch’s first breakout work as the apotheosis of his stint in the Midwest: the stunning “Chicago Poem” representing Welch’s Howl moment. (It is still one of his greatest poems, on par with and the counternarrative to Carl Sandburg’s ode to Chicago, but doomed, perhaps, to be shunned by the academy owing to a single noxious word.) He, Leo also details the writer’s brief and sporadic but seminal stay in Forks of Salmon, from August 1962 to November 1963 (Welch would later claim, falsely, that the hermitage spanned three years), where he composed Hermit Poems and The Way Back, two of his finest collections. The biography examines all the rest: the lifetime of victories, friendships, Welch’s only marriage, his many love affairs, breakdowns, hospitalizations. Clark mined previously unexamined letters and poems and also wrestled with their use of racial and sexual epithets. (Clark’s author’s note serves as a kind of trigger warning.)
Neither Saroyan nor Clark fully considered Welch’s considerable afterlife—now past the half-century mark—which I deemed critical to understanding the underappreciated poet. “Immortality of narrative is dependent on the mortality of beings,” the environmental writer Michael Branch once observed about Fred Beckey, a legendary climber I wrote about some years ago.
This seemed especially true of Welch.
Straightaway, I sought a document no biographer had ever seen: the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office incident report. My request was denied: The file was sealed because case no. 17101215 remained open. But I remembered something: Welch wasn’t missing. Undersheriff Gallino had made that clear in 1971 when he told UPI that Welch had been seen in Nevada City. The search was called off for that very reason. I put that fact to Nevada County. Something budged. An email slipped into my inbox one day: the files, made public for the first time.
But the report, written more than 50 years ago, was as barren of details as the diggins were of vegetation up on the San Juan Ridge: It contained skeletal and flawed narratives consisting of one witness statement—Snyder’s—and one bogus lead about a hanging victim in Marin County. Nothing about the Bank of America sighting, no inventory of Welch’s van, no follow-up investigation, no evidence log—not even the suicide note. It all but confirmed my suspicions that the authorities had added little value to the search, although I would eventually interview a Nevada County Sheriff’s Office detective named Richard Osborne, who had visited Kitkitdizze in summer 2024, spoken with Snyder, and walked out to Bald Mountain. Before he declined to speak further with me (citing the age of the case and the lack of new evidence), Osborne had hinted at mustering the Nevada County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team to sweep Bald Mountain.
Clark and Saroyan had illuminated much about Welch’s life. But I suspected that the truth lay on the San Juan Ridge, where Snyder’s and Welch’s lives seemed inextricably bound.
Late in the spring of last year, my Subaru sent up a specter of dust as I sped down Jackass Flats Road, turned left, and eased under a canopy of incense cedar and ponderosa pine. Eventually, I nosed the car up a short road to Kitkitdizze. A bearded man wearing horn-rimmed glasses whose face I somewhat recognized from photos I’d seen of him as a boy, Kai Snyder, greeted me in the driveway, and we walked up past the famous hip-roofed home, which was looking a bit tired after 54 years in the sun.
In the shade of the outdoor dining area sat Gary Snyder, Japhy Fucking Ryder, looking like he’d walked out of an L.L. Bean summer catalog: lime-green windowpane short-sleeve shirt, khaki-green shorts with a tan leather belt, no socks, and black driving moccasins.
I imagine that all who know Snyder and his work, which includes every member of my extended peer group, would have a similar reaction to meeting the man who articulated an entire way of coming into the world, a man whose example launched thousands of lives liberated from Levittowns. In other circumstances, I would have figuratively bent the knee and kissed the ring of the then-94-year-old archdruid. “I pledge allegiance to the soil of Turtle Island,” etc., etc. But that wasn’t going to happen today. I’d mainly ask questions. Snyder is the only living person who knew Welch well. I’d picked up cold craft beers and chips for the occasion.
But Snyder was peevish, interrupted by someone inquiring about ghosts. After the preliminaries—he was busy, I wouldn’t be allowed to take photos (“You’re just going to have to use your memory”)—I asked him to tell me about Welch.
“We don’t really know a lot about Lew,” Snyder said.
So this was how it was going to be. I sneaked a glance at Kai, who was on hand, I assumed, to intervene only when necessary: to keep his father on track and, at times, prompt his memory, which the elder had admitted wasn’t what it used to be. Snyder was examining me. We locked eyes. We sat in silence for a few moments doing the stare-down thing.
“His face was a mask of woeful bone,” Kerouac had written of Snyder in The Dharma Bums, “but his eyes twinkled like the eyes of old giggling sages of China, over that little goatee, to offset the rough look of his handsome face.… Sometimes he’d quiet down and just stare sadly at the floor, like a man whittling. He was merry at times.” Gone were the two earrings he’d worn in his left ear for most of his life; his teeth were as jagged as the Sierra’s Sawtooth Ridge, some of them with summits of gold.
I croaked out something about how Snyder had known Welch longer than anyone else alive.
“Yes, but how long does it take you to really get to know somebody?”
The Rinzai Zen sensei and koan riddler, throwing out the first of many puzzlers, so conversationally different from Welch of the passionate assertion. I replied along the lines of there was probably no way to ever know someone, much less ourselves, an answer acceptable to Snyder.
I tried again. “What’s your favorite Lew story?”
“I don’t keep Lew stories,” Snyder said. In fact, “I never wanted to. I wanted to always have it fresh. And hear it anew, and he was always different.”
Welch’s lability was kind of at the heart of the matter.
“What’s your theory about what he did and where he went?”
“I don’t have a theory,” said Snyder. “It’s just one of those things I don’t understand.”
“How would you contextualize his body of work?”
“I don’t think Lew completed a body of work worthy of a magazine article like you’re writing,” said Snyder.
“Why?” I asked. And then, idiot that I am, I stepped on my own question. “What do you think it was that he was saying in his poetry?”
“I don’t know. If I’d venture to say that, and you put it in print, I’ll be stuck with that forever. And I don’t even know myself.”
In fact, the forewords Snyder had written for Welch’s selected and collected poems made very clear how he felt about Welch’s work, especially the collection called Hermit Poems: “In those works Lew achieved the meeting of an ancient sage tradition and the ‘shack simple’ post frontier back country of out-of-work workingman’s style, and then the (elite) rebel modernism of art.” He praised Welch’s work for cutting through the “psychedelic baroque” popular in the poetry between the Beat and hippie eras.
At some point, I pulled the tall-boy beers from the cooler for the Snyders and ripped open the bag of tortilla chips, which the elder was content to munch on. We swapped a few stories about mountaineering in the Cascades. Then I asked Snyder what came to mind when he heard the name Lew Welch. I mean, he’d written two poems about Welch, one after Welch appeared in a dream.
Lew Welch just turned up one day,
live as you and me. “Damn, Lew” I said,
“you didn’t shoot yourself after all.”
“Yes I did” he said,
and even then I felt the tingling down my back.
“Yes you did, too” I said—“I can feel it now.”
“Yeah” he said,
“There’s a basic fear between your world and
mine. I don’t know why.
What I came to say was,
teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. All the other cycles.
That’s what it’s all about, and it’s all forgot.”
“That’s a good question,” Snyder said. “Lew’s wonderful spirit.” And Snyder began to talk, lauding Welch’s smarts; recalled how Snyder, Philip Whalen, and the others had considered the red-haired preppy with Johnston and Murphy shoes and tweed sport coats to be of a higher social status than themselves and had wondered why he didn’t seek out classier friends; talked about how he, Snyder, had stuck up for Welch when professors derided him as shallow; said that what ruined Welch was having a rich mother, a money tap. He should have kept his job as an adman.
Snyder pointed up to where Welch had parked his van, then beyond that to where Snyder and his team had searched. Snyder, bemused, bore no enmity for a fellow who’d created drama in his extended backyard just six months after he’d moved his family up here in 1970.
When asked about the Nevada City sighting, Snyder was dismissive. “None of us believed it,” he said. “It wasn’t reasonable.… Why walk around in the brush for three or four days and then go to town? Makes no sense.” When asked whether his friend would have been capable of “disappearing himself,” Snyder praised Welch as someone who could do anything. As for whether he had done that, he was skeptical. “You show up sooner or later.”
While the era had seen numerous examples of successful identity changes—by fugitive radicals and counterculture dropouts alike—those who knew Welch best dismissed the possibility. The man who wrote “I never could make anything work out right” was too weak, too impulsive to maintain a new identity. And there was the issue of motivation: What did he have to gain from such a remake? Nothing.
I needed to pose the question that arose the moment I learned about Welch’s disappearing act. Did Snyder know something more than he’d let on?
But soon Snyder was excusing himself; it was hot out, and he wanted to take a nap. He stood up and walked into the house.
Fuck. Ask now?
Instead, Kai was motioning toward the road up to the Kitkitdizze side trail to Bald Mountain, so I grabbed a pack and we started up it. Kai Snyder, who was 56 when I visited, is a compact and soft-spoken father of two, a forest ecologist by training with expertise in stormwater systems who moved from these parts to Portland and then back again some years ago to care for his father alongside his brother, Gen.
A mix of beetle-ravaged pine, oak, and towering madrone bordered a side trail to a prominent bench, the terminus of an old skid track leading toward the Ananda Meditation Retreat center. “This is where Lew camped,” Kai said, and he pointed slightly downslope toward the approximate location of Welch’s proposed building site. He’d never broken ground. There wasn’t much to see. A flat spot, a bit of a gulch, and that was it. But here was where Welch would have retreated to think things out, sitting and writing in the driver’s seat of the ’65 Chevy van. Here was where Welch would have been weighing his options. If he left that note and wandered away, there was no coming back. Not really. But you could almost see him up here in the preceding weeks, all alone above so much life just below, close enough to make out the Snyder family talking in the yard, little Kai tearing around down there, the house guests gathered for meals.
Kai and I continued walking to Bald Mountain, the place I really wanted to see. I’d been imagining this landscape for months, flying it on Google Earth, scouring the southwest face as well as I could, assessing the topography of the area, examining the plunge from the top to the Yuba below.
Eventually, the use trail bypassed a large clearing with a circle of small banked-up stones: a ring. Was this a shrine to Welch? The “ring” of Bald Mountain? No, said Kai. “This predates and postdates Lew.” He explained that it was a gathering place used by the Ring of Bone Zendo, Ananda, and other residents of the ridge: a community sacred spot, one of several in the area.
The trail threaded mats of flowering kitkitdizze, each one with amber anthers framed by five white petals, the shrub more robust where the forest was open. The trail soon ended in a kind of cul-de-sac anchored by a rust-colored granite outcropping offering a view to the southwest. A curtain of chaparral and poison oak surrounded the opening.
And then we were ducking through manzanita because Kai wanted to show me another place. I was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and shorts and now was oozing blood, scratched by the red-swathed shrub’s broken branches. This second spot was a bit farther downslope, and if you were willing to climb up onto a boulder, you could just make out the river, which we’d heard but not seen.
Kai was carrying binoculars, and he began glassing Grouse Ridge to the east, then the plunge of land to the west. He said something that got my attention.
“You should talk to Sara Greensfelder. Her son Louis and Louis’s friend Theo ran all over this mountain looking for Lew Welch.”
“How old are they now?”
“A few years younger than I am,” Kai said.
We started back to his father’s home, reversing course and actually walking uphill off of Bald Mountain.
“You know,” Kai said after we passed through the stone circle, “I was the last person to see Lew Welch.”
“What? Really?”
“I was outside,” Kai said. “He was just walking off.”
“How old were you?” I asked, but I knew the answer: He was three. He told me that he was standing on the deck of his family’s new home. Welch was walking toward Bald Mountain.
“I yelled at him, ‘Where are you going?’ ” said Kai. “He turned and sort of stared at me, then turned again and kept walking.” In place of a sigh, Kai let forth a haunted chuckle. “It’s just one of those memories that’s always been with me.”
Saijo (left, with scarf), Gloria Schoffel, Kerouac (with rose in mouth), Welch, and Fred W. McDarrah celebrate the completion of “This Is a Poem by Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, and Jack Kerouac” (later published as “Trip Trap”) at a New York restaurant in 1959.
Subsequent research took me to UC San Diego’s Archive for New Poetry, where I pored through Welch’s papers, discovering connections between Donald Allen, Magda Cregg, and Welch’s mother, in his unpublished as well as published correspondence, which, true to form, spouted epiphanies, pronouncements, and “huge” plans that would be grandly abandoned in subsequent letters. I found Welch’s torturously worked-over manuscripts (including his unpublished poems, his unfinished I, Leo, and a few short stories) and a separate file called “Kitkitdizze,” containing harried correspondence between Welch and his student architects as they mapped out increasingly complex cabin-building details during the poet’s final two weeks. Here were also a ballistics chart for a .30-30 rifle and an astrological chart (Welch was a Leo) drawn by the sexologist Gavin Arthur.
On my last day in San Diego, I spotted two letters from Allen to Cregg dated to the fall of 1973 that cast the Bank of America sighting in a new light, and for that matter, everything else: Snyder had kept many of Welch’s personal possessions at Kitkitdizze, and he was returning them to Welch’s mother, Dorothy—clothing, boots, tools. According to Allen’s letters to Cregg, included among the articles were Welch’s wallet and address book, which Snyder had discovered in a drawer in his house. When they had been placed there, nobody knew. Allen didn’t reveal the contents of the wallet, but if it contained Welch’s driver’s license, the man allegedly conducting bank business a week after disappearing apparently would have had no way to identify himself.
Last June, a week after the summer solstice, I circumambulated Mount Tamalpais and gazed 42 degrees northeast, toward Bald Mountain, from the summit of East Peak. Above Muir Woods and Pantoll Road, I looked for a perch where artist Tom Killion had directed me based on his knowledge of the poet’s perambulations. And there it was—the exact view from Cregg’s linocut cover in the second printing of the chapbook The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings. As though on cue, a turkey vulture wheeled above me, soaring over the Douglas firs to the fog-shrouded Pacific. This was where Welch and Cregg had once sat together, before alcohol destroyed what stability she’d given him. The goddess mountain had witnessed it all: the hospitalizations, the phoenix-like renewals, the inevitable crashes. The pattern that would play out one final time on the San Juan Ridge was well rehearsed.
At the remote outpost of Forks of Salmon, I found the sites of Welch’s so-called hermitages with the help of two locals, Scott Harding and Jessica Hanscom. The cabins had been reduced to scrap; the one he occupied for nearly a year wasn’t 300 yards from an asphalt road, situated halfway between the Forks of Salmon post office and the Cecilville Pub, where he drank with his buddy Jack Boyce: not exactly the stuff of Han Shan.
Two audio recordings reveal Welch’s psychological decline. In the 1969 Meltzer taping for The San Francisco Poets, a drunken Welch viciously insults his mother, who insisted that he was “not the kind to be mean to people.” He screams gendered slurs, makes claims of incest, and demands that Meltzer print the diatribe verbatim. Meltzer didn’t. But neither did Meltzer fact-check Welch’s many questionable boasts and claims. The second recording, from his 1971 Reed College lecture, captures Welch’s further deterioration. He utters homophobic slurs and expresses violent thoughts, denigrating a Reed professor who criticized Snyder: “When I hear things like that, I just get so mad I want to kill.”
I returned to the San Juan Ridge in late June, on a day that promised some semblance of a revelation, or so I’d hoped. I was about 100 yards north of Kitkitdizze. A member of the Ring of Bone Zendo, a slim, almost boyish-looking man by the name of Davis, with thin waist-length hair, a wispy mustache, and no shoes, was pointing below the zendo, into the space between the ponderosa pine piers and the ground. “I keep trying to tell people that Lew Welch is under there,” he said. Other members of the sangha, here this Sunday morning for zazen, laughed, maybe a bit uncomfortably.
Davis instructed one other noob and me in the ritual of entering, bowing, sitting, and chanting. Seated next to the zendo’s teacher, Nelson Foster, I succeeded in not falling asleep. Ninety minutes later, the thing was done: I had practiced zazen in the structure named for Welch’s poem “[I saw myself].”
“Whatever it is that chooses to flow through me is so powerful that it will destroy me if I resist in any way. That I must open to it and die. And the death will be a suicide,” he wrote in an unmailed letter to the poet Robert Duncan, describing the realization that had led to the poem.
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a
bell does
Ring of Bone was an apt name for the central living space of this Zen community. Poignant that Snyder chose it. And a sign that the friend he was honoring, Welch, a man who lived between extremes, really did see a there there.
The Ring of Bone zazen session was prelude to that afternoon’s meeting with Louis Blue Cloud, the 50-year-old son of Sara Greensfelder and the late Peter Blue Cloud, a Mohawk artist and poet. Louis (pronounced “lewie,” a name from his Mohawk forebears, whose names often have traces of French colonization) had grown up here, beating paths into the South Yuba canyon and back with his best friend, Theo Killigrew, searching for Lew Welch’s skull and gun. Louis had promised to show me something, and I badly wanted to see it.
It had just gone noon, and temperatures were already in the 90s. Coordinating this meeting by text and phone, Blue Cloud had warned me that the terrain would be rough, to come prepared for major-league bushwhacking.
As we walked to Bald Mountain, this time using a signed trail from the neighboring Ananda retreat center, he told me about his upbringing here: His mother, Sara, had been an Indian rights activist, which is how she met his father. Sara and her sisters, Liese and Anne, had met Welch when very young, growing up in Mill Valley not far from Marin-an, Snyder’s little zendo. Their parents, Bob, a former “Reedie,” and Jean, who modeled for Salvador Dalí, named their Muir Beach restaurant for one of Welch’s first published poems, “Wobbly Rock,” which Welch wrote while he sat on a boulder in the surf there. Bob and Jean moved up to the ridge in 1974, having grown fond of the area through Snyder, and the daughters followed them.
Blue Cloud and I were now thrutching down Bald Mountain, looking for something he hadn’t seen for 15 years. We were wading through the kind of chaos of uneven, rock-strewn, poison oak–choked terrain that I’d been warned about. At one point, we came across a massive mound of bear scat. Certainly, there were mountain lions and bobcats prowling the area above, too. Carrying a small saw and clippers on his waist, Blue Cloud discreetly pruned here and there as we picked our way downslope. To prevent sharp and poisonous foliage from tattooing and blistering my flesh, I wore leather gloves, a long-sleeve denim shirt, canvas pants, a neck gaiter, and boots—a getup more suitable for autumn than a scorching summer day in the midst of a heat wave. No matter: I was getting slapped in the face by poison oak branches—yes, branches that grew free from entire shrubs of the stuff. The gradient of the slope averaged that of a black diamond ski run, but in places it fell away in vertical drops, giving us glimpses of the tops of trees. In the background, the rumble of the river rose from below, the South Yuba still out of sight. The air had been still above, but a brisk upslope breeze brought slight respite the farther we descended. Blue Cloud, now a volunteer with Nevada County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue, later admitted that he’d been tempted to turn tail, such was the heat wilting his memory and desire to find the spot.
Eventually, Blue Cloud pulled ahead. I was facing into the slope, tiptoeing across a lip of an outcropping, when I heard a little whoop. A chunked and grainy pedestal of granite rose from the ground, splashed with lichen and rust-colored globular intrusions. Projecting from a flat section in front of it, a slab of granite overhung a 50-foot drop; Blue Cloud was perched upon the top of the overhang, looking southwest. From my spot upslope, the entire ground seemed to fall away from the gangplank about the dimensions of a rectangular dinner table, nothing but an eagle’s view beyond the toes of Blue Cloud’s boots. A Class IV stretch of the South Yuba River snaked to the west, pool and drop, turquoise in color, bony this time of year with great river-polished boulders reflecting the westering sun.
When they came across this spot 35 years earlier, Blue Cloud and Killigrew knew instantly what it was.
They named it Welch’s Point.
Blue Cloud stepped off the roof of stone and crouched down. He reached into the base of the pedestal and pulled out an ammo can. On the front of it was a soaring turkey vulture, painted by a younger version of the strong-jawed middle-aged man I was looking at. The can and its contents had been placed in this precise location on Sunday, May 24, 1998, exactly 27 years and one day after Welch was last seen and 26 years before we came upon it. Sara Greensfelder had organized an homage to Welch that weekend. San Juan Ridge locals attended, as did folks from Nevada City and groups from UC Davis and the Bay Area, including Cregg and a somewhat Romantic coterie of Welch’s fans and friends whom Cregg called the Hey Lew Crew—so named for their ritual of saluting blissfully ignorant turkey vultures with a heartfelt “Hey, Lew.”
They had gathered that Sunday to place Welch’s books on an altar erected in his memory, one of them a Festschrift commissioned by Cregg called, yes, Hey, Lew. Snyder and Michael Killigrew, Theo’s father, blew conches. One member of the Hey Lew Crew showed up dressed like a turkey vulture, wings, beak, and all.
Now, Blue Cloud was fiddling with the box. He gave me a “You’ll want to see this” look, flipping open the latch. Inside were a sheaf of maybe 30 raddled scraps of paper and a copy of Cregg’s Hey, Lew, everything dimpled and foxed by heat like old parchment but mostly intact; the pages sounded like dry leaves when Blue Cloud shuffled them. He pulled out one sheet at random and laughed. It was a note written by his late grandfather Bob Greensfelder, who’d known Welch, Snyder, and Whalen at Reed College. Another one was from Michael Killigrew. Another one from Sara Greensfelder. And one written by Snyder. The page was frayed, but he’d penned something reminiscent of Welch’s beloved Gertrude Stein: “…utterly beyond / gone beyond beyond / Awakening! / Hail / Svaha 1 / Lew.” It was signed “Gary,” next to which was a crossed vajra, or dorje, the Buddhist symbol of the emptiness of all things, the immutable mind of enlightenment.
Blue Cloud pulled out a last one, written by Welch’s Point cofounder Theo Killigrew.
Hey, Lew, it’s hard to believe, but we have finally found a sort of finish to an altar we made for you. I never met you in person but as a young boy I searched for your bones with my best friend Louis. I must admit I was after your skull, or second-best a femur bone; maybe some carpals.… That’s the feeling I get, well…the South Yuba River canyon.
“Cool,” Blue Cloud said, tucking everything away and resealing the box. “I’m surprised any of the old stuff is still in here.”
I walked to the end of the gangplank. Too hazy that day to make out the Coast Range, or even the Central Valley. The swell of Montezuma Hill to the west, South Yuba River State Park approximately in line of sight, Nevada City and Round Mountain to the south: rugged terrain, but plenty populated, too. Welch couldn’t have walked more than a few miles before bumping into someone’s settlement—or squatters’ camps in the South Yuba canyon. He might have drowned attempting to reach the well-established footpath on the opposite bank, but if he’d tumbled into the Yuba, his body would have turned up eventually.
I left Welch’s Point and scrambled below it to examine the scarp. Pungent splashes of guano lay scattered around the rocks. Ravens…or some other winged creature. Certainly, the slab above my head could have accommodated a kettle of vultures.
Despite the breeze, the heat was pressing down on us, so Blue Cloud and I began the hike back to the top of Bald Mountain through the dense scrub. Back at our cars, we bade each other goodbye and promised to reconnect in the autumn, when I would meet his mother and other longtime residents of the ridge.
Welch reading from a draft of “This Is a Poem by Albert Saijo, Lew Welch, and Jack Kerouac.” His cowriters are off camera.
On May 15, 1974, almost three years after Welch’s disappearance, Ginsberg accepted an invitation from Snyder to attend a ceremony to “declare Lew Welch empty.” The following week, Ginsberg, accompanied by Orlovsky, Ferlinghetti, and Whalen, drove to Kitkitdizze. Albert Saijo, Bob and Jean Greensfelder (who had yet to move to the San Juan Ridge), and poet Joanne Kyger (who had been married to Snyder from 1960 to 1965) also made the trek. We know what happened next thanks to a letter written by Steve Nemirow, one of Welch’s Reed College students, excerpts of which were published in the Oregon Journal: On May 23, 1974, Snyder told everyone that while the sheriff’s office report of Welch having been seen in the Bank of America had given some hope that he would turn up one day, Snyder expected that Welch was now dead, had walked away and didn’t want to be found. Snyder said that Welch’s disappearance had never caused him nightmares, either waking or sleeping, and he was not perturbed “by ghosts hungry or otherwise, by the feelings of spirit’s unrest.” He announced that the central room in his own living space would become known as the Ring of Bone Zendo.
Mysteries lingered. Several months before he walked away from it all, Welch visited his old Reed College mentor Lloyd J. Reynolds, sharing his latest poem about turkey buzzards. Welch “said he’d asked Gary to place his body high up on a mountain where such birds could clean the bones,” Reynolds later wrote. “Gary didn’t want to do it. [Welch] said he insisted.” The conversation gave Reynolds “the creeps.”
“With proper ceremony,” Welch had written in “Song of the Turkey Buzzard,” “disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot and tempt / my new form.” Earlier in the poem, he’d written words parroted in his “went Southwest” note.
Let no one grieve.
I shall have used it all up
used up every bit of it.
What an extravagance!
What a relief!
Years later, Cregg told an interviewer that Welch “was ready to cash in his chips” when she met him in 1964. She added that she knew Welch would kill himself when he “swapped his shotgun for a revolver” in January 1971, right before she split from him.
Reynolds’s memory hinted at an alternative endgame. And so the question hung in the air: whether Snyder had done Welch’s bidding.
During one of my visits to Kitkitdizze, we got to talking about dead things. “OK, well, so there might be a body out there,” Snyder said. “And I, for one, think that’s fine.”
“I know what it looks like,” he continued, referring to mammalian remains. “Sort of, from what I’ve seen of other animals. After 10 years and after 20 years, scattered a little bit.”
“So it’s nature,” Snyder said.
“It’s nature,” I said. “Did you find Lew’s body?” I asked.
The answer came very fast, one word, spoken in an up note: “No,” as if he knew what the follow-up question would be.
“If you had found his body, what would you have done with it?”
“Told everybody,” Snyder said.
“Would you have given him a sky burial?”
“I would have given him some kind of burial. But I would also, following the requirements, notify the county.”
It made sense that Snyder wouldn’t have gone rogue when it came to funeral rites. He was building a Buddhist community up on the ridge, not a Branch Davidian enclave. The reality of Welch’s exit was likely more prosaic: a troubled man walking into dense brush with an underpowered weapon, leaving his community to grapple with uncertainty rather than closure, performing a last act that would have them talking for nearly 60 years.
And so it has come to pass that Welch has been metabolized: not by a turkey vulture but by the folks on the San Juan Ridge. Walking back to our cars that day on Bald Mountain, I asked Louis Blue Cloud, whose own father, Peter, was a poet of some renown, which of Welch’s poems was his favorite. He recited the one from Hermit Poems that begins,
Not yet 40, my beard is already white.
Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red,
like a child who has cried too much.
“Why that one,” I wondered.
“It describes waking up hungover and figuring out what to do with his day, right?” Blue Cloud said. “And it’s beautiful and sad at the same time. It’s kind of heartbreaking. I guess that’s what I love about it.”
Welch in a circa 1968 photo on the balcony of the residence he shared with Magda Cregg in Marin City, California.
CHAPTER 4
Afterlife
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I was brought up wrong
tried to correct it
couldn’t
and crashed.
—unpublished poem, Lew Welch, October 1970
Through the years, Welch’s legend has been shaped and the burrs smoothed, the inconsistencies and unseemly bits taken into a particular form, in the same manner that a woodturner takes a roughing gouge to a block of wood to round it before hollowing it out. If Welch’s considerable foibles have been dropped from the legend, the timeline bungled, the alcoholism and probable mental illness minimized, the use of racial epithets and the overt misogyny ignored, his death fetishized into a form of transfiguration (helped along by Snyder, who wrote in the foreword to Ring of Bone that Welch was “one of the few who saw the beauty of that ecstatic Mutual Offering called the Food Chain”), he is cherished by those who know him for saying it plain: simply, elegantly, puckishly, and humanely.
While it would be convenient to view Welch’s disappearance as a kind of performance art—the last, best poem writ large on geography intended to be his last, best place—the reality resists such neat closure. In the ensuing years, Welch has been seen hitchhiking on the on-ramp of Highway 101 and sharing a booth in a Denny’s restaurant with a bleach-bottle blonde and bratty kids; Tony Dingman insinuated him into poems centered in Paris, Rio, Peru, and Australia, among the Aborigines; a street performer and Beat archivist named Kush has performed Welch’s poems in a two-hour show called Lew Welch Alive!; Charles Upton, once Welch’s protégé and poetic heir, perceives his mentor’s spirit in “a kind of twilight zone, a darkened Limbo where spiritual progress is excruciatingly slow,” symptom and sign of Welch’s buzzard fetish; Maxine Hong Kingston revivified Welch as a poet-guide in Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book and The Fifth Book of Peace; even before Welch died, Kerouac had immortalized him as Dave Wain in Big Sur; Welch has appeared in dreams and visions, with some people tracking him to Milwaukee and to Mexico; he’s been seen as a turkey vulture circling the knolls above Mount Tamalpais; naturally, there’s a Lew Welch Facebook page; and he’s been useful grist for a certain type of adventuresome, hermeneutics-obsessed academic attracted to the themes of nature, retreat, and nonduality, with the handy conceit of his disappearance as a unifying metaphor for fill-in-the-blank.
Welch has also been seen wandering the halls of SC Johnson’s downtown Chicago corporate offices, credited—errantly, illogically—with writing the tagline to a campaign that resulted in the flogging of millions of cans of insecticide (“Raid Kills Bugs Dead!”). He is said to have inspired the stage name of Huey Lewis (falsely, according to Lewis). And at this very moment, he is peering at passersby on San Francisco’s Columbus Avenue from a City Lights Bookstore window display, one of 20 or so Beat authors.
His relative obscurity compared with those others featured in the City Lights display wasn’t a matter of talent. Many of them extolled “Lewie’s” work, and Whalen especially considered Welch’s poetry to be enduring. When Grove Press offered Welch a contract in 1970 to publish his collected poems, with a $1,000 advance—the kind of breakthrough deal that had launched other Beats—the opportunity lingered unresolved until his disappearance. His suicide note’s reference to “MSS at Gary’s and at Grove Press” hinted at this unfinished business. His work wound up being published by Donald Allen’s smaller Grey Fox imprint, keeping it within a more limited circle. And when Welch was coming into his own as a poet, gaining teaching positions and reading invitations, he was too ill to care. Whether he might have achieved broader recognition remains one of many unanswered questions.
Instead, he gained a kind of immortality by vanishing. But one can’t help but mourn the rich communal life Welch deprived himself of by stealing away.
Many have walked away from it all: disappearing, committing suicide, or relinquishing the built world for the natural one, lives ending intentionally, whether consciously or not; accidentally; or through terrible miscalculation. Many have died younger than the actuarial tables would have played out, annihilated by their own hand.
Suicide is a writer’s occupational hazard in general and a poet’s in particular, and the list runs long—maybe too long, some having left notes and others in too great a rush to do the deed to convey their parting thoughts: Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway. “A suicide’s excuses are mostly by the way,” wrote A. Alvarez, a poet and Plath’s literary agent, who survived his own suicide attempt and died in 2019 at 90. “At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories.… The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.”
If you’d like to turn Welch into a vulture, have at it. Or, if you prefer, call him an undiscovered midden of bones on Bald Mountain, a .22 lying alongside, and sure, why not, a double-bit axe. That’s the beauty of disappearing yourself for all time: You become whatever people need you to be. It’s nature.
Thirteen years before his disappearance, Welch had sat on Wobbly Rock at Muir Beach. Thunk, thunk, it went each time the Pacific hit it, and Welch, freshly arrived from Chicago, newly freed from convention, posed a riddle.
Waves and the sea. If you
take away the sea
Tell me what it is •
