Being There

I’m so glad we had people like Barry Lopez to make up for people like me. My idea of camping out is checking into a motel with the windows open.  Lopez was one with nature. He endured the tundra of both poles as well as the blistering equatorial desert.

He sets up a tent in Cape Foulweather on the rugged Oregon coast, with a violent storm on the way. From there he walks into an old-growth rainforest to experience the sense of being lost and the spatial closeness. He contrasts this with the wide-open expanse of arctic regions where he lived with wolves or the fifty-foot waves he weathered between the Falkland Islands and Antarctica.

Lopez is an intrepid nature writer who confronts his elemental self and by extension invites his readers to their own discoveries. He is an essayist, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, and also author of eight works of fiction. His books erase categories. Tragically, a fire along the McKenzie River in Oregon destroyed 200 boxes of his personal journals.  Published in 2019, his last book Horizon reads more like a memoir recalling six of his past adventures. Adventure is the wrong word. His life was devoted to encountering harsh ecosystems, their history, which is our history and the struggle for survival.

Above all else he is a humanitarian who somehow delivers a message of peril for our planet and, at the same time, offers hope and a reverence for life.  His voice is both urgent and lyrical. He doesn’t just despair over clear-cut forests or land despoiled by fossil-fuel and mining interests. He subscribes to the notion that undisturbed land not only heals but can bring a distracted mind to a state of transcendence and release us to an awareness of the wondrous and salutary nature of the Other. Wondrous indeed were his witnessing a hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

He mourns for the damage done by Europeans to the Asian sub-continent as well as to Africa and the Americas owing to their arrogance and rapacity. He reminds us that violence to the earth begets a violence among ourselves.

Lopez shows us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez does. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists is a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Centuries ago the Polynesians navigated over ten million square miles of the Pacific Ocean which astonishes modern seafarers. They not only built sea-worthy vessels but followed the patterns of migratory birds, knew the language of ocean currents and read the stars with the precision of our G.P.S. The people of Easter Island share the same tongue as those in New Zealand three thousand miles away.

Lopez’s reverence for life and his prodigious quest for historical sources are rendered with his felt language. One afternoon I pondered the sense of compassion I felt for Captain Cook and his first landing In Australia. I was prompted to do this by the bright riot of afternoon sunbeams ricocheting from the calm surface of the bay, by the distant clatter of dry eucalypt leaves roiled by the wind and the towering fair-weather cumulus clouds above, with their convoluted cauliflower heads. Together, these framed for me a Prelapsarian scene…I experienced a generosity of spirit in myself I cannot always find. An uncomplicated love of the world.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our virulent xenophobia, he pleads for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.