Three Years on the Nowhere Road

In his memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road, BJ Omanson recounts the strange and haphazard road that led him to a life of poetry-- a life of inadequate means, manual labor, wilderness solitude and-- as he was a high-school dropout-- nothing whatever to do with writing programs or academia.

In November of 1972, married scarcely a year and having lost his job as a tree trimmer with the Rockford Park District in Illinois due to being on the losing side of a labor strike, with winter coming on and no prospect of comparable work before spring, Omanson made a drastic decision. He packed his uncle's WWII seabag with a change of clothes, a blanket and some books, took five dollars from the household nest egg and announced his intention to hitchhike out to the coast of Washington State, where there was said to be a logging boom in progress and work to be had by anyone who could handle a chainsaw.

He would spend the winter camping in a primitive shelter in an alder glade above the Calawah river, working in a shake mill until his wife divorced him, after which he quit his job and spent the rest of the winter reading history, literature and ethnology, hiking for miles along rivers and the coastline with a companionable cat, and writing poetry after the manner of Hanshan, a half-mad 8th-century Chinese hermit living in a cave above the Yellow River.