Since the election of Donald Trump, however, I’ve turned away from Whitman and have begun to take Jeffers’s grave warnings more seriously. But in the end, Jeffers’s darkness, his contempt for his own century and his own kind, always scared me off, sent me back to that more sanguine American poet, Walt Whitman. I’ve loved what he has to say about hawks and rivers and mountains. On hiking trips, I have often kept a copy of Jeffers’s slim Selected Poems in my back pocket. I’ve made passing glances at that glass for the past thirty years. To consider the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, one must go to a dark place, which is to say, one must look in the mirror. In other poems, the human race is a “civil war on two legs,” a “walking farce,” a “denatured ape, this-citizen.” In his poem “De Rerum Virtute,” the poet Robinson Jeffers described standing where I stood and watching these same rocks, “with foam flying at their flanks, and the long sea-lions / Couching on them.” He called the scene an “intrinsic glory” that “means the world is sound, / Whatever the sick microbe does.” What exactly is the “sick microbe”? It is us. Pelicans, cormorants, and gulls swirled around this harsh coast while the kelp-filled surf crashed against the shore, turning from gray to white to green as the water drifted into shallow tide pools. Huge masses of conglomerate rock jutted out down below.
A kingfisher darted through the understory as I emerged from the trees onto the jagged precipice of the point. I passed under a grove of ancient cedars, their twisted, wind-haunted limbs rising into an emerald canopy that seemed to float in the sky. Now I was bipedal again, and making my way along a narrow trail to a granite promontory called Point Lobos.
I had arrived in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, encased in metal, first in a plane that brought me across the country, then in a rental car that transported me through Silicon Valley and its canyons of mirrored glass. On a clear October day, I walked to the continent’s edge.
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