Days before Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, introduces his Next Big Thing (the consensus holds it will be a sleek tablet computer), I called up Gary Snyder, the Beat-era poet who writes about the American wilderness.

Now, Mr. Snyder might not seem the best person to ask to reflect on the milestones of the digital age. He is 79 and lives in the Sierra foothills in Northern California. But his world and that of the early personal computer makers, like Mr. Jobs, overlapped, in both time and space.

He has a nuanced understanding of computers. He is a devoted Macintosh user, though he said he wrote with whatever was at hand. And while everyone in Silicon Valley is on the edge of their seat waiting for Apple’s introduction on Wednesday of its newest “creation,” Mr. Snyder is taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Word of an Apple book replacement had not yet reached him in the California backcountry where he lives without electricity. He almost never uses a cellphone and has no use for BlackBerrys. He considers texting “abhorrent.”