On a rainy San Francisco evening successful precocious November 1959, Albert Saijo, a thirty-three-year-old Japanese American poet, climbed into the backmost of an eastbound Willys Jeep presumption wagon. The wagon belonged to the red-haired writer Lew Welch, besides thirty-three; successful the rider spot was the writer Jack Kerouac, thirty-seven, caller from an quality connected the Steve Allen Show, and anxious to beryllium location connected Long Island, New York, for Thanksgiving. Welch held the Willys dependable astatine 75 mph, winding southeast done the Mojave and onto Route 66 toward Kerouac’s location successful Northport. He and Kerouac talked non-stop, shuttling a vessel of Scotch betwixt them. All 3 men spitballed open-form poems and haiku, which they scribbled into their notebooks and aboriginal published successful a book, Trip Trap.
The roadworthy travel would go a insignificant footnote successful Beat folklore. But it should beryllium remembered arsenic overmuch for backpacking arsenic for literature. Saijo—a Nisei poet, jikijitsu of writer Gary Snyder’s Mill Valley zendo, and precocious retired of an Oakland tuberculosis ward—sat crosslegged connected a mattress, watching an America he’d ne'er seen. He knew deprivation firsthand of liberty, health, possessions—and understood not lone its humiliations but its unusual freedom. Applied to the mountains, that logic became what helium aboriginal called “ultralight”: not a cogwheel system, but a mode of thinking.
He knew deprivation firsthand of liberty, health, possessions—and understood not lone its humiliations but its unusual freedom.
He saw a achromatic equine successful an bare storefront; atom elevators tilted crossed the onshore similar abandoned toys. He thought of “that whore successful Chicago and the tub of oysters,” a enactment that would aboriginal aboveground successful a roadworthy poem called “Fucking with the Muse successful Texas.” Four years later, successful the caller Big Sur, Kerouac would memorialize Saijo arsenic George Baso, “the small Japanese Zen maestro hepcat.” (Hepcat oregon not, “I’ve had beardown attraction to each debased things & whoring,” Saijo would aboriginal admit successful a missive to Snyder.)
At 1 point, Welch and Kerouac asked Saijo for a poem, and helium said nothing. Later helium said, “It is hard being calved successful the Dharma, successful America. We’re existent pioneers.” Nobody disagreed. Postwar American prosperity, with its ideology of more, seemed stacked against the restraint required of Zen Buddhist practice. Kerouac had already framed the occupation successful The Dharma Bums, wherever a quality modeled connected Gary Snyder called for a rucksack gyration to antagonistic America’s addiction to muchness.
Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Albert Saijo, 2nd semester exertion of Echoes, Heart Mountain precocious schoolhouse publication, talks things implicit with Hisako Takehara and Alice Tanouye, archetypal semester co-editors.
Thirteen years later, successful a 1973 diagnostic for Backpacker magazine, Saijo enactment it plainly. “The ultralight cogwheel volition travel arsenic soon arsenic we get our heads ultralight,” helium wrote, insisting that caput came earlier assemblage erstwhile it came to lightening one’s load.
Saijo had already committed himself to the Dharma. He’d studied Zen formally portion finishing an undergraduate grade astatine the University of Southern California and was fashioning a beingness of voluntary simplicity progressively oriented toward the outdoors. He’d travel to the Beat country done a dramatically antithetic way than the white, middle-class, and mostly antheral poets penning open-form verse successful San Francisco successful the precocious 1950s.
Born successful the San Gabriel Valley successful 1926 to first-generation Japanese Americans, Albert Fairfield Saijo’s 16-year-old beingness was upended successful the outpouring of 1942 erstwhile the household of 5 was ordered to look astatine the region parkland carrying thing but 2 suitcases. Army buses shuttled the Saijos and different Japanese American families to a impermanent detention center. That summertime they were ferried by bid to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center successful Wyoming, wherever they lived successful a tarpaper compartment block, 1 household to a room. (“It was oddly liberating,” Saijo would aboriginal write.) He graduated from Heart Mountain’s precocious schoolhouse successful 1943, having served arsenic the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, and enlisted successful the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Nisei Army portion known for its bravery and atrociously precocious decease rates.
This photograph was taken connected the Trip Trap roadworthy trip. It’s Albert successful Fred McDarrah’s NYC apartment. The photograph ran successful McDarrah’s book, The Beat Scene.
He contracted tuberculosis successful Italy and returned to California to convalesce for years successful TB wards, yet receiving his bachelor’s degree, studying Zen, and completing respective years of postgraduate enactment earlier quitting Los Angeles for San Francisco. Eventually, helium relocated northbound to Mill Valley among the “Gary Snyder crowd,” arsenic helium enactment it. He bought a home, married, raised 4 stepchildren, studied, and wrote. He spent overmuch of the 60s successful thrall to hallucinogens, penning Snyder successful 1968 of a compulsion to stock the riches, to “do everything imaginable to get… much radical connected to acerb and grass.” Once, helium canceled a backpacking travel with Snyder to the Wind River Range due to the fact that helium was successful the midst of a 45-day fast.
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By 1972, Saijo was the past lasting of the roadworthy travel trio. Kerouac was dormant from complications of intoxicant use, Welch, different alcoholic, was gone too, vanished into the Sierra foothills, a suicide. As Snyder’s rucksack gyration was calcifying into Zen and backpacking concern complexes, Saijo wrote a slim how-to, markedly antithetic from the galore that were being published connected the taxable of walking into the woods. He called it The Backpacker. The publication featured his member Gompers’s enactment drawings, the substance and illustrations hinting astatine however 1 mightiness cultivate an full dharmic ethos by the method and mindset 1 took into the mountains.
The Backpacker declared itself successful the archetypal sentence: “No 1 has worked retired a backcountry benignant arsenic airy and elegant arsenic that of the Himalayan yogi,” Saijo wrote. On the facing leafage was Gompers’s artifact print/line drafting of the Tibetan saint and writer Milarepa sitting successful a lotus position, a Sierra cupful astatine his feet, and a Campingaz Bleuet stove resting connected a boulder. Saijo explained that the yogi needed small covering (he heated his assemblage by meditating), nary bedding, and lone a vessel for nettle soup. “We whitethorn good enactment our mode backmost to Milarepa,” Saijo wrote. “Ever simpler, ever lighter.”
If Milarepa was excessively obscure a model, Saijo’s beloved John Muir surely wasn’t. As for the why? “You mightiness accidental the wilderness acquisition gives america a modular by which to measurement our sanity… The savage wants out. He wants to beryllium expressed.” Ultimately, though, Saijo divined the phenomenology of the pursuit. “[Y]ou get the feeling that you are each progressive successful immoderate enigma oregon vaster allegory, successful which you are each devotees of a space. A abstraction not adjacent outside, perhaps. What you mightiness beryllium doing is simply a pilgrimage to a much authentic outback wrong yourself. But is determination an wrong and an outside? And you thought you were conscionable backpacking?”
The Backpacker was arsenic bantamweight arsenic its 5 foot, 5 inch, 125-pound author. It measured 4 by 8 inches and weighed 4 ounces, the parsimony and aesthetic precisely the point: a acquisition successful signifier and function, mean and message. Its 96 pages, uncoated paper, oatmeal successful color, declared “small autarkic press.” It sold for $1.95 successful 1972, a 4th of the terms of its competitors. Gompers’s enactment drawings fused Heinz Edelmann with the woodblock frontispiece of the Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra. In the acknowledgements, Saijo thanked Locke McCorkle (“Sean Monahan” successful The Dharma Bums), who’d introduced him to the Sierra Nevada, and Snyder, who’d said of backpacking, “It tin beryllium similar beverage ceremony.”
It is hard being calved successful the dharma, successful America. Saijo understood that.
In 1973, the publication reviewers of a caller mag called Backpacker were charmed by Saijo’s fugitive sensibility portion lauding his prose, writing, “No longer the backpacker, you’ll beryllium a sojourner—a twentieth-century anomaly allowing escaped formation to your ‘savage’ instincts.” They placed it alongside the era’s bestsellers arsenic “those that champion bespeak the…view of the editors and publisher.” As backpacking books went, the publication was sui generis, successful absorption to alleged begetter of backpacking Colin Fletcher; Saijo wrote it for seekers, not consumers.
The publication arrived erstwhile Americans had begun to fetishize Zen, applying the “inner game” to tennis, motorcycles, and being present now. But portion those different manuals for the caput became bestsellers, The Backpacker ne'er saw a 2nd printing. In May 1972, Saijo sent a transcript of the publication to Snyder, bemoaning the editors’ dense hand. It’s “painful for maine to spot what they’ve done…perhaps it’s seventy percent of the publication I wrote…humbling Deva pridefulness suffers.”
And yet, erstwhile 101 Productions published a revision successful 1977, its astir 200 pages did incorporate a fewer further piquant ideas, though it was Gompers’s Southwest-inspired artifact prints (entirely devoid of quality figures) that marked the astir melodramatic change. It was that 1977 variation I showed to Gary Snyder astatine his location successful the Sierra foothills successful 2024. He took The Backpacker successful his 94-year-old hands, turning to his lad Kai to inquire if they owned it. They didn’t—not that edition, anyway. Snyder wanted it; I referred him to online utilized booksellers.
While penning The Backpacker, Saijo was recently divorced, reconciling myriad selves: Nisei, internee, soldier, and tuberculosis patient. Soon helium would remarry, determination to Humboldt County to homestead, write, and cultivate cannabis. When the authorities rained helicopters connected his garden, helium and his woman moved to Hawai’i, wherever helium hand-built a tiny location astatine the basal of Kilauea. In 1997, his archetypal publication of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsody, was published, its mordant jeremiads fulfilling a beingness of survey and praxis. Another volume, Woodrat Flat, was published successful 2015, posthumously. The 2 books of poesy and some editions of The Backpacker: each agelong retired of print.
In 1989, he’d been jotting his “rhapsodies” successful a bid of notebooks and deemed them acceptable for print. To Snyder helium wrote, “As I work what I constitute I americium amazed to spot what I think. I americium an incendiary revolutionary and I privation to bring down civilization, I privation an absorbing aged age!”
In Outspeaks, helium fto the carnal out:
I WANT TO RHAPSODIZE—BUT I WOULD NOT BE PUT INTO ANY LITERARY CATEGORY—I CAN HONESTLY SAY I HAVE NO LITERARY CONCERN—I AM AN ANIMAL IN A CAGE & I AM BARKING TO BE LET OUT—AS IT HAPPENS MY BARK IS RHAPSODIC.
It is hard being calved successful the dharma, successful America. Saijo understood that. In 1972, helium made a publication that weighed 4 ounces. On a rainy nighttime successful aboriginal June 2011, Albert Saijo laic connected a mattress, a occurrence blazing successful the hearth, his woman by his side. Mount Kilauea loomed successful the acheronian overhead. Fifty-two years earlier, he’d ridden a mattress crossed America, watching the state unspool done the windows of a Willys Jeep wagon. Now the presumption was of the void. He died that night. He was eighty-five. Few cognize his sanction today.
In the 1977 variation of The Backpacker, Saijo wrote, “So it’s a provident and redeeming backcountry benignant we want. Lean. Ultralight. Appreciative of the chaotic arsenic a refuge and sanctuary wherever we spell to shingle disconnected the particulate of the world. And due to the fact that we cognize chaotic world to beryllium a benignant of flesh, we spell successful a mode not to coiled it. We spell light. As though, being stalked, we don’t permission a trace.”
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“Zen Bivy: Our Favorite Book connected Backpacking was Written by a Buddhist Japanese Beat Poet” by Brad Rassler appears successful Adventure Journal #40.
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