Barry Lopez’s collection of essays, Crossing Open Ground, details his travels through various landscapes and wildernesses in the United States. The essays are beautifully crafted meditations on the land and its inhabitants, and how an appreciation of landscape can enrich us intellectually and spiritually. In his opening essay, “The Stone Horse”, Barry visits a little known archaeological site in the southern Californian desert. In a hard to reach arroyo, he encounters a three-times life-size outline of a horse, shaped by light-coloured stones laid out in the darker soil like paint on a canvas. It was created hundreds of years ago by the Quechan people, and through careful observation and speculation, he suggests what the “low-relief ground glyph or intaglio” (8) might have meant for the artist who created it, and what it could mean for us, today. Such monuments, ancient constructions, the tangible remains of past cultures are part of the landscape all around us. They define and shape the environment as they, in turn, are defined and shaped by their setting, the climate and seasons, the time of day, and so on. These structures and monuments informed ancient peoples about how to live in the lands they occupied, and they continue to inform us.
Barry makes note of what is lost when such
monuments are pillaged by amateur archaeologists and fortune hunters. He also
reminds us how such places are meant to be engaged—not as static artifacts seen
from a distance, but as living expressions of human consciousness as it
grapples the mysteries of time and place. For example, he notes that the vast
glyphs on the Peruvian plains, the famous “Nazca Lines”, were not meant to be seen from great heights, such as from an
airplane (something that was, of course, impossible for their pre-historic
creators). Rather, they were meant to be seen from the surrounding hillsides
and other elevations, but importantly, Lopez feels, they were to be experienced
as structures to be walked around and in. They are human alterations of the
landscape, but they also act to alter their human makers.
His prose is elegant, controlled and focused as he
describes the places and settings he encounters:
“On this
cool California evening, the land in the marshy valley beyond is submerged in
gray light, while the far hills are yet touched by a sunset glow. To the south,
out the window, Venus glistens, a white diamond at the horizon’s dark lapis
edge. A few feet to my left is lake water—skittish mallards and coots bolt from
the cover of bulrushes and pound the air furiously to put distance between us.”
(20)
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| Barry Lopez |
Another example is his description of a late night walk
through the streets of Tule Lake in northern California, whose nearby waters
and marshes are home to hundreds of thousands of migrating geese. Here, Barry
describes the town’s sleeping silence as, “the stillness of moonlit horses
standing asleep in fields.” (27) It is a beautiful image.
In this essay (“A Reflection on White Geese”), he
bemoans the loss of habitat to agriculture and urban sprawl, habitat that is
necessary for the health of so many migratory bird species. But he also
provides descriptions of the beauty and vitality of those species that
still make Tule Lake an important stop on their continent-wide migrations. He
gives the reader hope in the resilience of wildlife to thrive as they move through
landscapes impacted by human civilization. Written in 1982, we can only hope,
today, that such optimism is not misplaced.
In “Gone Back to the Earth” he writes about
white-water rafting down the Colorado River, noting that it is uniquely humans
who, “bring to bear so many activities, from so many different cultures and
levels of society, with so much energy, so suddenly in a new place.” (46) In
part, his essay is a meditation on the place humans make for themselves within
the immense geological journey of the planet. The people he travels with
encounter ancient processes found in the water-carved canyons where, over
millennia, the river’s flow has exposed the layered bedrock of the planet. As
they journey from the heights of Lee’s Ferry down to Lake Mead, they encounter
life—plants, animals, fish—that exist as part of the thin skein that dresses
the storied rock in their all too brief flowering of existence. In the end, he
says, such a journey through such a place allows you to “hear your heart beat.”
(53)
In his essay on writing, “Landscape and Narrative”,
he says
“The
purpose of storytelling is to achieve harmony between the two landscapes [the
interior landscape of the self and the environment], to use all the elements of
story—syntax, mood, figures of speech—in a harmonious way to reproduce the
harmony of the land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story is the
power to reorder a state of psychological confusion through contact with the pervasive truth [italics mine] of these
relationships we call, ‘the land.’” (68)
He says truth is, “something alive and
unpronounceable” (69), and can be found in both scientific as well as fictional
narratives, as long as there is a genuine
search for it. You can write diatribes, or have a specific intention in
writing a story, for example, but if you tell “who was there, what happened,
when, where, and why things occurred…the integrity inherent at the primary
level of meaning will be conveyed everywhere else.” (70) There is much truth to
be gleaned from writing stories about the land, he says, and these can provide
an “illumination,” an awakened consciousness, that can ultimately “heal us.”
(71)
One thing I like about Barry’s writing is his
ability to describe the natural world using language that reflects our
perceptions, our ways of experiencing it. He reminds us that the ‘world of the
mind’ we so often see as separate and objective, like a computer that
analyzes input from the environment, is anything but. For example, he describes
a grove of willow trees in central Alaska:
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| Yukon-Charley National Park, Alaska |
“The undersides of the long, narrow leaves are a
lighter shade of green than that above; their constant movement, a synaptic fury [italics mine] in the
wind, makes them seem all the more luminous. Moose are bedded down among them,
beyond the reach of our senses. Their tracks say so.” (78)
He later describes the ‘less-dramatic’ landscape
found in Alaska’s Yukon-Charley river basin as what most people typically experience
when they encounter nature or wild landscapes. It is
“…the common experience of most people who travel
in wild landscapes. A sublime encounter with perhaps the most essential
attribute of wilderness—falling into resonance with a system of unmanaged,
non-human-centered relationships—can be as fulfilling as running a huge and
difficult rapid. Sometimes they prove, indeed, to be the same thing.” (82)
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| Anasazi Mesa Verde Dwellings, Colorado |
“We are
takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. We search
for order in chaos wherever we go. We worry over what is lost. In our best
moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are
benefiting by these acts. One of the great dreams of man must be to find some
place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to
live without regret.” (178)
In his final essay, “The Passing Wisdom of Birds”,
Barry offers suggestions on how we can renew our connection with nature. He
suggests there was a fundamental shift—really a divergence—in our relationship
with the natural world following the development of agriculture after the last
ice age. He argues we must seek to rediscover the “philosophy of nature we set
aside eight thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, “(204) and use the
range of scientific and indigenous knowledge available to help us with this most
important task.
Written over thirty years ago, his words ring as
true now as when they were first published, and they come with a sense of urgency that
has only grown over the years.
His book is a thoughtful and deeply moving set of meditations,
and I recommend Crossing Open Ground
for anyone interested in these issues.
Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Macmillan Publishing
Company. New York, 1988.
Cheers, Jake.
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