*Three Years on the Nowhere Road:* discovering Hanshan in the Olympic Peninsula wilderness

 BJ Omanson's road to becoming a poet began about as far from the classroom as can be imagined. He had dropped out of high school five years earlier and had no intention of returning. He was 22, living alone in a primitive shelter above the Calawah River in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula and working in a little shake mill outside of Forks, Washington. 

His journey began one winter morning in a stand of old-growth Sitka spruce when a fellow mill-worker and ex-Sgt of Marines named Mitch handed him a sheaf of folded pages, worn at the corners and tearing at the creases.  They were poems that Mitch had copied out by hand and carried in his jacket pocket for months until finally deciding to pass them along. They were Gary Snyder's translations of the Cold Mountain Poems, written by a half-mad old hermit named Hanshan who lived in a cave overlooking the Yellow River in 8th-century China. 

For the rest of the winter, ensconced in his shelter with a small fire for warmth, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, Omanson read and re-read the ancient poems, along with other books of literature, ethnology and mysticism, and wrote his first cycle of poems. ---- 

Volume I of Three Years on the Nowhere Road chronicles that first winter on the Calawah, his hazardous work in the mills and on the steep, logged-over slopes, his encounters with a Sasquatch and other backwoods eccentrics, and his first steps on the arduous, solitary road to becoming a poet.