Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Night Highway 99" is a sprawling, cinematic journey through the American West, weaving together the landscapes, histories, and transient lives that populate the road. It is a poem of movement, a meditation on hitchhiking culture, the working-class experience, and the changing geography of the Pacific Northwest and California. The highway itself becomes a character, an artery connecting drifters, laborers, and outcasts, a road that "passes straight through every town" but leaves each place fundamentally unchanged.

The poem opens with a departure, a classic hitchhiking moment: "We're on our way man out of town go hitching down that highway 99." The informal syntax and conversational tone establish the poem as a record of lived experience, an account of nights spent on the road. Snyder’s language evokes the world of transients and seasonal workers, those who "went out on trail crews" in the rugged wilderness but always return to civilization, where "the punks go back to school and the rest hit the road."

The imagery shifts rapidly, capturing vignettes of those encountered along the way. There is "Baxter in black, been to a funeral," a figure of quiet grief, and "Raymond in Bellingham- Helena Hotel- / Can't go to Mexico with that weak heart." These are men on the margins, their fates uncertain, like the friend who "disappeared later maybe found in the river." The sense of loss and impermanence permeates the poem; people appear briefly and vanish into the highway’s endless stretch.

Snyder also invokes history, tying his own travels to past struggles of laborers and Indigenous people. "Fifty weary Indians / Mount Vernon / Sleep in bus station / Strawberry pickers speaking Kwakiutl turn at Burlington for Skagit," linking present-day workers with the long history of displacement and exploitation. The Everett Massacre is recalled: "The sheriff's posse stood in double rows / Everett flogged the naked Wobblies down with stalks of Devil's Club." The reference to the Wobblies, the radical Industrial Workers of the World, underscores a recurring theme in Snyder’s work: solidarity with those who labor in obscurity, the forgotten and abused.

The landscape, too, bears witness to history, transformed by industry and human intervention. "Lake City, waste of trees; topsoil, beast, herb, edible roots, Indian field- / farms; white men dances washed, leached, burnt out minds." The destruction of nature and Indigenous culture by development and capitalism is a familiar theme in Snyder’s poetry. The road is lined with "mess of tincan camps and littered roads," reflecting the waste and disregard left in the wake of economic progress.

Yet despite the bleakness, there is an undeniable beauty in the road’s raw existence. Snyder captures the rhythms of travel: "Night rain wet concrete headlights blind / Tacoma salt air / bulk cargo / steam cycle / AIR REDUCTION / eating peanuts." The sensory overload of the night drive, the neon signs and industrial hum, contrasts with the vast, desolate stretches of wilderness. There are moments of camaraderie, as when a fellow traveler declares, "I picked up an Italian tree-surgeon in Port Angeles once, he had all his saws and tools all screwed & bolted on a beat up bike."

Throughout the poem, there is a refrain of departure and return. "We're on our way man out of town / Go hitching down that highway 99." The road is both escape and trap, a place of freedom and of exile. The final section brings the traveler into San Francisco, where "NO body gives a shit man who you are or what's your car / there IS no 99." The city absorbs the wanderer, rendering individual identity insignificant. The highway dissolves, as does the sense of movement; the journey, once fluid and filled with possibility, arrives at its terminus, where anonymity and indifference reign.

"Night Highway 99" is a hymn to the restless, those who seek something beyond the static world of jobs and homes. Snyder’s road is not just a physical space but a state of being, a continuous present where past and future blur, where history and personal experience intertwine. It is a poem of exile and return, of loss and discovery, a meditation on the road as both freedom and fate.

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