Crossing Open Ground (1978)
Barry Lopez (1945-2020)
208 pages
How disheartening it is for those with a deep love of nature to observe its ongoing destruction, whether despoiled by uncaring individuals or plundered by an economic system too often exploiting it as a free resource. The resulting frustration can lead to an extremely jaundiced view of almost all human activity and an idealization of protected wilderness areas that permit no people at all.
Not that he condones the intentional damage humans can do: in The Stone Horse, he describes a visit to the undisclosed site of an ancient stone figure of a horse laid into the ground in an isolated corner of the US southwest; later, considering the fragility of such sites, he laments
this other horror … the vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. (16)
But toward the end of that same trip, stopped along a desert road outside a small village, he suddenly pauses from his notetaking, becoming “aware of the birds … the only movement in the desert; and of a series of sounds from a village a half mile away” waking up on a Sunday morning:
the impatient calls of adults, summoning children …. Wood smoke hung like a lens in the trees. The first car starts – a cold, eight-cylinder engine, of Chrysler extraction perhaps, goosed to life, then throttled back to murmur through dual mufflers, the obbligato music of a shade-tree mechanic. The rote bark of mongrel dogs at dawn, the jagged outcries of men and women, an engine coming to life. Like a thousand villages from West Virginia to Guadalajara. (15)
Here then, he finds the simple wonder in humans as part of nature, having their place in it even given the inevitable impacts.
Similarly, in A Reflection on White Geese, Lopez describes a visit to Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Northern California, which hosts a massive migratory influx of white geese each year. After describing in thrilling detail the beauty and wonder of the geese, he notes the challenges of the refuge’s coexistence with development and argues for a deeper consideration of the importance for the human condition of its preservation.
We must search in our way of life, I think, for substantially more here than economic expansion and continued good hunting. We need to look for a set of relationships [in the ecology of the lake]. … We grasp what is beautiful in a flight of snow geese rising against an overcast sky as easily as we grasp the beauty in a cello suite; and intuit, I believe, that if we allow these things to be destroyed or degraded for economic or frivolous reasons we will become deeply and strangely impoverished. (38)
And yet, when describing the biologist and ecologist who manages the refuge, Lopez acknowledges both “the depth with which he cares for the birds, and … the intelligence that allows him to disparage not hunting itself but the lethal acts of irresponsible and thoughtless people.” (36) Here, again, the nuance to distinguish between the inevitable human presence in the natural world, and those people who carelessly or thoughtlessly pursue its destruction.
What makes this collection truly shine, however, is Lopez’s evident, deep love for and connection to the natural world. This comes through in each of the stories but perhaps most powerfully in Gone Back Into the Earth, in which he describes a rafting trip taken with a group into the Grand Canyon. The enormity and beauty of the canyon around them, and the bonding of the group in their isolation as they pass through it, opens him to discover
The perplexing question posed by the canyon itself – What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet) – that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie. (47)
Reflecting back on the trip, he notes the ability of this kind of sinking into nature to fundamentally transform us: “What any of us had come [to the canyon] to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.” (51)
Ultimately, in these essays as in his other work, Lopez seeks to impress upon readers the beauty of the natural world, and that, as Wordsworth wrote, even “the meanest flower that blows can give / thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears.” But also, and perhaps more importantly, by opening a window into this beauty, as well as the importance of the relationships between it and each of us, he seeks to encourage us to open our awareness and to help rebuild and strengthen the human connection to it:
One of the great dreams of man must be to find someplace between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret. (178)
Other notes and information:
Lopez explores similar themes in Horizon (my review linked to at right), though several of the essays in that collection also take a more autobiographical turn.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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