Elders! The backwoodsman, poet and activist...

This is a PS to my last post: I called Barry Lopez my all-time favourite writer on Wild. How could I possibly have forgotten the wonderful backwoodsman, poet and activist Gary Snyder, who's shaped my thinking since I first met him as Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, given to me by a traveller when I was an A level student and hitchhiked up (unbeknown, as they say, to my parents) to what was then Stonehenge Free Festival, on the summer solstice, where my life first veered strongly towards the road less travelled (except that there were a lot of us flowerchildren then taking it, and I guess my bohemian polymath father had always led us that way anyway). That's a long sentence!