On a rainy San Francisco evening in late November 1959, thirty-three-year-old Japanese American poet, Albert Saijo, climbed into the back of an eastbound Willys Jeep station wagon. The wagon belonged to the red-haired poet Lew Welch, also thirty-three years old; In the passenger seat sat thirty-seven-year-old writer Jack Kerouac, looking fresh steve allen showAnd looking forward to coming home to Long Island, New York for Thanksgiving. Welch kept the Willys steady at 75 mph, heading southeast through the Mojave and on Route 66 toward Kerouac’s home in Northport. He and Kerouac continued talking, a bottle of Scotch passed between them. The three men openly wrote poems and haiku, which they transcribed in their notebooks and later published in a book, travel trap.
The road trip would become a minor footnote in Beat folklore. But it deserves to be remembered as much for backpacking as it is for literature. Saizo – a Nisei poet, jikijitsu of poet Gary Snyder’s Mill Valley zendo, and recently out of an Oakland tuberculosis ward – sat cross-legged on a mattress, looking at the America he had never seen. He knew firsthand the deprivation of liberty, of health, of property – and understood not only its humiliation but also its strange freedom. Applied to the mountains, that logic became what he later called “ultralight”: not a gear system, but a way of thinking.
He knew firsthand the deprivation of liberty, of health, of property – and understood not only its humiliation but also its strange freedom.
He saw a white horse in front of an empty shop; Grain elevators lay prone on the ground like abandoned toys. He thought about “that whore and that tub of oysters in Chicago”, a line that later appeared in a street poem called “Fucking with the Muse in Texas”. Four years later, in the novel big SurKerouac would remember Saijo as George Buso, “the little Japanese Zen master Hepcat”. (Hepcat or not, “I have had a deep attraction to all things low and prostitution,” Saijo later admitted in a letter to Snyder.)
At one point, Welch and Kerouac asked Saijo for a poem, and he said nothing. He later said, “In America, it’s hard to be born into religion. We’re the real pioneers.” No one disagreed. Postwar American prosperity, with its excess ideology, seemed to run counter to the restraint required of Zen Buddhist practice. Kerouac had already stated the problem Dharma BumsWhere a character based on Gary Snyder calls for a rucksack revolution to combat America’s addiction to excess.
Heart Mountain Rehabilitation Center, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Albert Saijo, second semester editor EchoesHeart Mountain High School Publications talks things up with first semester co-editors, Hisako Takehara and Alice Tanouye.
Thirteen years later, in a 1973 feature backpacker magazine, Saijo put it bluntly. “As soon as we ultralight our heads, ultralight gear will follow,” he wrote, emphasizing that when it comes to lightening one’s load, the mind comes before the body.
Saijo had already devoted himself to religion. He had formally studied Zen while completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California and lived a life of voluntary simplicity increasingly oriented toward outdoor activities. He came to the Beat scene by a dramatically different path than the white, middle-class and mostly male poets writing poetry openly in San Francisco in the late 1950s.
Born in 1926 to first-generation Japanese Americans in the San Gabriel Valley, Albert Fairfield Saijo’s 16-year-old life was turned upside down in the spring of 1942 when the family of five was ordered to a county park with nothing but two suitcases. Army buses sent the Saijos and other Japanese American families to a temporary detention center. That summer he was taken by train to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, where he lived in a room with a family in a tarpaper cell block. (“It was strangely liberating,” Saizo later wrote.) He graduated from Heart Mountain’s high school in 1943, served as editor-in-chief of the newspaper, and enlisted in the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a Nisei Army unit known for its bravery and extremely high mortality rate.
This photo was taken at travel trap Road trip. This is Albert in Fred McDarrah’s NYC apartment. The photo appeared in McDarrah’s book, The Beat Scene.
He contracted tuberculosis in Italy and returned to California to recuperate after spending years in TB wards, eventually obtaining his bachelor’s degree, studying Zen, and completing several years of graduate work before leaving Los Angeles for San Francisco. Eventually, he moved north to Mill Valley among the “Gary Snyder crowd,” as he called it. He bought a house, married, raised four stepchildren, studied, and wrote. He spent much of the ’60s under the influence of hallucinogens, writing to Snyder in 1968 about his compulsion to share the wealth, “doing everything possible to get more people on acid and weed.” Once, he canceled a backpacking trip to the Wind River Range with Snyder because he was on a 45-day fast.
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By 1972, Saijo was the last in the road trip trio. Kerouac had died of complications from alcohol abuse, Welch, another alcoholic, was also gone, disappearing into the Sierra foothills, a suicide. As Snyder’s rucksack revolution was cooling off into Zen and backpacking industrial complexes, Saijo wrote a slimmer approach that was markedly different from many that were published on the subject of wilderness walking. they called it backpacker. The book contains drawings, text and illustrations by his brother Gompers that indicate how one can develop an entire religious ethos from the method and mentality adopted in the mountains.
backpacker The very first sentence declared: “No one has worked out light and elegant backcountry style like a Himalayan yogi,” Saijo wrote. The front page featured Gompers’ block print/drawing of the Tibetan saint and poet Milarepa seated in the lotus position, with a sierra cup at his feet, and a Campingaz Bluet stove placed on a boulder. Saijo reported that the yogi needed little clothing (he warmed his body by meditating), no bed, and only a bowl for nettle soup. “We can work towards returning to Milarepa,” Saijo wrote. “Sometimes simple, sometimes light.”
If Milarepa was a very obscure model, Saijo’s beloved John Muir certainly was not. Why for? “You could say that the wilderness experience gives us a standard by which we can measure our sanity… The wild man wants to go out. He wants to express.” Ultimately, however, Saijo anticipated the phenomenology of discovery. “You feel like you’re all involved in some mystery or giant metaphor in which you’re all devotees of a space. A place that maybe isn’t even out there. What you might be doing is a pilgrimage to a more authentic outback inside yourself. But is there an inside and an outside? And you thought you were just backpacking?”
backpacker Like his five-foot, five-inch, 125-pound author, he was a bantamweight. It measured four by eight inches and weighed four ounces, parsimony and aesthetics to the point: a lesson in form and function, medium and message. Its 96 pages, uncoated paper, in oatmeal color, were declared a “small independent press.” In 1972 it sold for $1.95, a quarter of the price of its competitors. Gompers’ sketches juxtapose Heinz Edelmann with the woodblock frontispiece of the Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra. In the acknowledgements, Saijo thanks Locke McCorkle (“Sean Monahan”). Dharma Bums), who introduced him to the Sierra Nevada, and Snyder, who said of backpacking, “It can be like a tea ceremony.”
In America, it is difficult to be born into a religion. Saijo understood this.
In 1973 there was a call for book reviewers of a new magazine backpacker Charmed by Saijo’s fugitive sensibility, he praised his prose, writing, “No longer a backpacker, you will be a migrant – an anomaly of the twentieth century that allows your ‘wild’ instincts free flight.” He placed it alongside the bestsellers of the era, “those that best reflect the vision of the editors and publisher.” As backpacking books go, the book was sui generis, in opposition to Colin Fletcher, the so-called father of backpacking; Saijo has written it not for consumers but for seekers.
This book came as Americans began to apply Zen to tennis, motorcycling, and now the “inner sports” of living here. But while those other manuals for the mind became bestsellers, backpacker Never saw a second printing. In May 1972, Saizo sent a copy of the book to Snyder, expressing his dismay at the strictness of the editors. “It’s sad for me to see what they’ve done… It’s probably seventy percent of the book I wrote… Deva’s pride is hurt.”
And yet, when 101 Productions published a revision in 1977, its nearly 200 pages included some additional heady ideas, though it was Gompers’ Southwest-inspired block prints (completely devoid of human figures) that marked the most dramatic change. It was that 1977 version that I showed Gary Snyder in 2024 at his home in the Sierra foothills. backpacker In his hands the 94-year-old turned to his son Kai and asked if he had it. They didn’t—not that version, anyway. Snyder wanted it; I sent it to used book sellers online.
while writing backpackerSaijo was recently divorced, and was juggling myriad selves: Nisei, apprentice, soldier, and tuberculosis patient. Soon he would remarry, settle down in Humboldt County, write, and cultivate cannabis. When the government rained down helicopters on his garden, he and his wife moved to Hawaii, where he built a small house with his own hands at the base of Kilauea. In 1997, his first book of poetry, Outspeaks: A Rhapsodywas published, its pithy jeremiads entailed a lifetime of study and practice. another quantity, woodrat flatPublished posthumously in 2015. Two books of poetry and both editions backpacker: All are long out of print.
In 1989, he was writing his “Rhapsodies” in a series of notebooks and deemed them suitable for print. To Snyder he wrote, “I’m amazed at what I think when I read what he writes. I’m a raging revolutionary and I want to destroy civilization, I want to have an interesting old age!”
In speaks out loudHe let the animal out:
I would like to rhapsodize – but I would not put me in any literary category – I can honestly say that I have no literary concerns – I am a beast in a cage and barking to get out – it happens that my bark is rhapsodic.
In America, it is difficult to be born into a religion. Saijo understood this. In 1972 he created a book that weighed four ounces. On a rainy night in early June 2011, Albert Saijo was lying on a mattress, a fire blazing in the stove, and his wife beside him. Mount Kilauea loomed above in the darkness. Fifty-two years ago, he rode a mattress across America, watching the country unfold from the windows of a Willys Jeep wagon. Now the scene was void. He died that night. He was seventy-five years old. Today very few people know his name.
In the 1977 edition of backpackerSaijo wrote, “So this is a provident and saving backcountry style we seek. Lean. Ultralight. Appreciate the wild as a refuge and sanctuary where we go to shake off the dust of the world. And because we know the wild earth is a kind of flesh, we go in a way so as not to injure it. We go in the light. Such that, when pursued, we leave no trace.”
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“Zen Bivy: Our Favorite Book on Backpacking Was Written by a Buddhist Japanese Beat Poet” by Brad Ressler Adventure Journal #40.
