Three Years on the Nowhere Road: The Awakening of a Poetic Sensibility

Three Years on the Nowhere Road: The Awakening of a Poetic SensibilityIn 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

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.