Gary Snyder has long been a favourite poet of mine, so this article was a pleasure for me to read. I've seen a similar change in places of my youth, as no doubt most of us have who have lived some decades.
Here's just one quote from Poet Gary Snyder returns to Seattle at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/entertainment/2009265979_snyder27m.html
"Long before he grew into one of America's most famous Beat poets and was immortalized as Japhy Ryder, the fictional hero in Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums," before he put down roots in California and crisscrossed the Pacific, over and over, to study Buddhism in Japan, Snyder grew up here, living with his parents on a subsistence farm.
"He helped tend the chickens in a two-story barn and milk the family's cows. His father planted the apple tree that can still be seen out back, and some of the fir trees stand even taller than before. But mostly, the woods he remembers are long gone, and the animals with them replaced today by concrete garden statuary rabbits snugged into the closely clipped landscaping that surrounds the house today."
