They never saw it coming. Barry Lopez and three scientists were making bottom trawls in a twenty-foot boat several miles out from Pingok Island on the North Slope of Alaska, one of the most desolate and remote regions of the planet. Skirting the edges of the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, they concentrated on their work and ignored a storm moving in from the southwest. Before they realized what was happening, the wind pushed a large ice floe toward them, sealing them off from open water and pinning the craft on four sides.
Lopez and the others had prepared for such an emergency. In addition to scientific equipment, they carried flares, extra food, extra clothing, a tent, sleeping bags, and other survival equipment, including a radio. But they realized that, even if someone heard their distress signal, they had no way of describing their present location, and, with the storm moving in, they had no idea of how far the pack ice might drift to the east. Lest they become yet another footnote in the long record of Arctic disasters, they had to find a way to get free.
Taking advantage of a momentary shift in the ice, they managed to force the boat through a narrow passage. They widened the passage with ice chisels and gunned the boat’s twin ninety-horsepower engines, trying desperately to reach open water. When thirty feet of ice stood in their way, they used ice anchors, lines, and a block and tackle to pull the 3,000-pound craft out of the water, across the ice and into the next channel.
But this channel, too, was closing. Lopez went to look for another escape route. Several hundred yards ahead, he raised his ice chisel to signal that he had found one. By the time the boat reached him, however, this channel had narrowed. One of the men positioned the prow of the boat against the seaward ice, revved the engines, and widened the gap to six feet. Then he reversed course and sped up the channel. The others chopped madly at the ice, trying to keep it away from the props. Finally, they heaved and lifted and shoved the boat into the open water. They were home free-or so they thought. They fell into the boat, exhausted from the effort. The seas were now running at six feet. Waves burst over the top of the boat. The men erected a canvas shelter to shield themselves from the water and hunkered down to endure the ride back to Pingok. Like the others, Lopez was dressed in heavy clothes and foul weather gear, but unbeknownst to him, he had torn the seams in the shoulder of his parka while freeing the boat. The right side of his body was soaked.
He shivered and drifted in and out of consciousness, unaware of what was happening and why he was so cold. Fortunately, the others recognized his predicament. They peeled off his wet garments, dressed him in dry wool clothing, and pushed him underneath the tarp to protect him from the elements. He sat in a stupor and simply tried to brace himself against the boat. When the others shouted that they had reached Pingok, he realized he was safe. He dragged himself out of the boat and into the camp, where he ate dinner and fell asleep.
After the storm passed, Lopez walked the beach and reflected on the incident. A fit, strong, barrel-chested man used to living and working outdoors, he felt embarrassed at being reduced to a dead weight, but the close call made him marvel at the early Arctic explorers who had endured much greater hardships, traversing the forbidding landscape in flimsy crafts without adequate clothing or survival equipment. In the sixth century Saint Brendan set off from the west coast of Ireland in a small currach made of wicker and oxhide to search for the Isles of the Blessed. What drove him to cross the Arctic landscape in such an exposed boat? After pondering the example of Brendan and other Arctic explorers, Lopez later concluded in Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), a National Book Award-winner: "Arctic history became for me, then, a legacy of desire-the desire of individual men to achieve their goals. But it was also the legacy of a kind of desire that transcends heroics and which was privately known to many-the desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world."
This desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world animates not only Arctic history, but also Lopez himself. Each of his twelve books of fiction and nonfiction represents a search for such a passage. Though he’s known primarily as a nature writer, his work always poses large ethical questions: What does it mean to lead a dignified and virtuous life? How are we to treat others, especially the weak and powerless among us? What are our responsibilities toward the nonhuman world? Such questions pervade his fiction and nonfiction, from early works such as Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976) to About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (1998).
Lopez prefers to set his stories in remote, sometimes desolate locales-the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Galapagos Islands, the Sonoran Desert-but, important as the physical environment is to his narratives, they finally turn on issues of metaphysics. What are the trustworthy patterns in this life? How can we discern them? How can we overcome our propensity to doubt? In a postmodern culture where the possibility of knowledge is often denied and a glib nihilism frequently prevails, Lopez offers a refreshing sense of hope and possibility. His work attempts to reconcile an intimate and scientific knowledge of the physical world with Christian virtues of hope, dignity, and charity. This effort to yoke together such seemingly disparate traditions grows out of his Roman Catholic upbringing and his Jesuit and University of Notre Dame education. As he puts it: "I grew up in a Roman Catholic tradition, and was deeply affected by it. The part that affected me was the tradition of the Desert Fathers, the Jesuits, and the monastic tradition-not the things one normally hears about Catholicism. An image I have from childhood is of a group of men and women praying somewhere in the desert, and the reason chronically myopic and selfish people have not destroyed us with nuclear weapons is that, in a rarefied and metaphorical way, there have been these enclaves of monastics praying. What keeps these things from exploding, perhaps, is that each of us in his own way is saying his prayers."
Lopez’s attempt to address issues of ethics and spirituality through stories about the natural world makes his work of particular interest to Catholics. "Barry Lopez’s works have a profound relationship with Catholic thought," says Thomas Berry, Passionist priest, author of The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999), and the leading Catholic figure in the field of ecology and spirituality. "His is one of the best achievements of what you might call Western Christian thinking. He has such an intimate presence with the world of nature, with the animal world, with the landscape, with the entire range of natural phenomenon. He’s deeply sensitive to how the human mind and emotions meet with the reality of the nonhuman. He understands profoundly the manner in which humans and the natural world are present in a single community of existence."
Lopez’s vision of community as encompassing the nonhuman as well as the human world is central to that of an emerging movement in Catholic theology and social teaching. "Questions of ecology and environment loom very large in Catholic theology today," says Walter E. Grazer, director of the Environmental Justice Program at the U.S. Catholic Conference. "What is the place of the human in nature? What does it mean to care for creation? Religious communities are bringing out the dimension that we are stewards of the earth. We have an obligation of respect and reverence because it’s God’s creation."
Global warming. Acid rain. Species extinction. Ground- water contamination. Heavy metals pollution. Soil erosion. The signs are clear, according to Lopez, that we have failed in our stewardship of the earth. A growing number of religious leaders, theologians, and lay people look to his work and that of other nature writers for a sense of how to achieve a respectful, responsible relationship with the planet. As one of the leading figures in a field including Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Peter Matthiessen, and Terry Tempest Williams, Lopez has helped spark a crucial debate about the systematic destruction of the global environment and what churches and other religious communities should do about it.
It was winter in western Oregon. Gray clouds moved inland from the coast, leaving a dusting of snow on the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and a fine sheen of rain on the lower forests of alder, Douglas fir, Western hemlock, and Western red cedar. Fluorescent green moss hung from the trees, clung to their bark, and filled the cracks in the pavement along Highway 126, which hugs the banks of the McKenzie River. Wood smoke curled from the chimneys of houses. Logging trucks roared by on their way to a mill outside of Eugene. Strings of Christmas lights, plastic Santas, and illuminated crèches brightened the somber landscape.
Despite the chilly weather, Lopez drove his 1989 gray Toyota 4Runner with the sunroof open, letting the winter air wash over him. Dressed warmly in a green Patagonia jacket, brown scarf, purple shirt, blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots, he didn’t seem bothered by the cold. Instead, like a wolf enmeshed in its world, he reveled in the sights, sounds, smells, and sensations around him.
Lopez had spent the morning running errands, taking a break from typing up his latest manuscript, Light Action in the Caribbean, a collection of short stories. He still pecks away at an IBM Selectric. He doesn’t own a computer. "It’s not an opposition to them," he explained. "They don’t offer me anything as a writer." He works out of a two-bedroom cedar-shake house overlooking the river; he and his wife Sandra bought it thirty years ago. After the couple divorced recently, Lopez discouraged anyone from visiting the place, including me, someone who has known him and followed his work for fifteen years. An intensely private man, almost monkish in his devotion to solitude, he apologetically explained, "There’s a stillness there I want to preserve."
Lopez was perfectly willing, however, to provide a tour of what he calls his "neighborhood," the forested slopes along the McKenzie River. "I’m in trouble if I’m in my room too much," he admitted. "I try to immerse myself in this place. I walk the road. I just drift."
Shells, feathers, cedar boughs, and rocks cover the dashboard of his truck. These gifts from native peoples serve as a way of bringing the outside world into the truck. Parkas, clothing, and outdoor equipment fill the back seats. Lopez stopped on a bluff above the river to point out a blue highway sign directing how cutting, spraying, and maintenance work should be done to minimize disturbance to spawning salmon. "Two hundred fifty thousand salmon once came up the Willamette," he said somberly. "Now that number is down to a thousand, about nine hundred of which spawn on the McKenzie near my property."
After letting that sink in, he drove across a wooden bridge and turned onto Pond Road, a gravel track winding through old-growth forest. The truck crept along in first gear, allowing him to spot a bird flitting through the undergrowth, a newly fallen tree, a collection of alder branches stripped of their bark by the beavers that live on Quartz Creek-all the recent doings of the neighborhood.
"You can get an idea of the succession by looking down there," he pointed to the trees along the river. "Cottonwood, alder, Douglas fir," he pronounced the names as if they were old friends. As the truck passed through the drippy, filtered light of the forest canopy, Lopez enumerated the local plants-"sword fern, bracken fern, deer fern, licorice fern."
As the truck passed out of the Willamette National Forest the old growth gave way to gravel washes, alder thickets, and new second-growth trees.
"They just butchered up to the national forest," he said, shaking his head. Lopez continued up a logging road to a high point above the valley. He parked, got out of the truck, and surveyed the clearcut-scarred Cascade foothills.
"It’s difficult to see this because it fills me with grief," he said, indicating the cutover valley that provides habitat for beaver, elk, deer, mountain lion, lynx, skunk, bobcat, salmon, as well as human beings. "I have a constant sense of grief about the relationships destroyed by all this. Ecology is not just about endangered species. It’s about community. It’s about relationships. You can’t have a consumption-based culture unless you have an immoral relationship with nonhuman species."
The winter light was fading. Lopez lingered for a few moments before getting back in the truck. He fingered the truck key strung with steel wire and a climber’s metal chock. "As soon as I turn the key," he said sadly, "I’ve bought into this whole lifestyle." Then he turned the key, started the truck, and drove back down into the gathering darkness.
Lopez’s sensitivity to the plight of the McKenzie River Valley and the rest of the nonhuman world grew out of his early upbringing in Southern California. He was born in 1945 in Port Chester, New York, but three years later his family moved to the northern San Fernando Valley. The rural landscape there made a lasting impression on him.
"Adventure unfolded in fruit orchards and wisteria hedges, in horse pastures and haylofts, and around farming operations, truck gardens, and chicken ranches," he wrote in About This Life. "We rode our bikes out as far as Porter Ranch, the rural fringes of valley settlement where braceros worked the fields and where encounters with coyotes, jackrabbits, and even rattlesnakes were not unusual."
At five, after his parents divorced, Lopez turned to the natural world for solace. By foot and bike, he explored the local farms, rivers, and mountains. His mother encouraged this appreciation of landscape, taking him and his younger brother Dennis to the Mojave Desert, the Santa Monica Mountains, Zuma Beach, Big Bear Lake, Hoover Dam, and the Grand Canyon. These trips encouraged a sensitivity to what he calls "classical" landscapes-deserts, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. It was wrenching for him at age eleven when his family took up residence in Manhattan, after his mother remarried. Gone were the orchards, truck farms, and grasslands of his childhood.
But Lopez gained much in the process. He attended Loyola, a Jesuit prep school on the Upper East Side, where he studied Latin, history, English literature, French, art, and science. He came to revel in the heady intellectual atmosphere of New York City.
After graduation, he went on to the University of Notre Dame. Ron Weber, a professor in American studies there, remembers him as "a strong student-intense, independent, ambitious-within a group of other strong students who took writing seriously and had genuine intellectual interests." Lopez got a solid grounding in the liberal arts, but enjoyed studying philosophy and theology most.
He was not only a good student and a varsity soccer player, but also a devout young man who considered entering a monastery. He went as far as visiting Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, where the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton lived, in 1966. "That’s the point at which I made the decision that I wasn’t going to go into a monastery," he said. "The work I wanted to do with my life-I didn’t have anything specific in mind-I was going to do outside. The monastic life is very attractive to me, probably more as an abstraction than as a reality."
Though he decided against monastic life, he found the austere lifestyle an important model. He came to understand his writing as a kind of prayer, his way of living a virtuous life outside the monastery. "Prayer is a way to formalize in a conventional sense with language the relationship between yourself and a spiritual entity or entities," he says. "But I think of prayer as larger than that; in the monastic traditions your work is your prayer. There must be moments in your life when you are saying your prayers better, and that’s what writing is for me."
Lopez subsequently married and moved West. He entered the University of Oregon’s graduate program in English, hoping to use it to jump-start his writing career. But he found the program pretentious and dropped out after the first semester. He did, however, meet an important mentor in Professor Barre Toelken, a specialist in folklore, who introduced him to North American Indian myths.
"Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred," he said. "They did not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the divine in both."
Lopez became fascinated with Coyote, the trickster figure of Native American stories. He pored over the Coyote tales, analyzed their structure, and learned how to make the land come alive through story. His first published book, Desert Notes, shows the influence of these tales. It synthesizes many aspects of his background: his early memories of Southern California deserts, his inclination toward desert monasticism, and his interest in Coyote tales.
This spare, sensual, paradoxical work serves as the blueprint for the rest of his oeuvre. Like most of his stories, it is organized around a quest, with the central character journeying into a desert to gain wisdom and learning from people and animals native to it. The book opens with the unnamed narrator stating his desire to discover the secrets of the desert, much as the desert father Saint Anthony sought to know God through prayer, fasting, and self-mortification: "The land does not give easily. The desert is like a boulder. You expect to wait. You expect night to come. Morning. Winter to set in. But you expect sometime it will loosen into pieces to be examined. When it doesn’t, you weary."
The narrator senses that the place contains mysterious dimensions. He wants to unlock these secrets quickly, but the landscape frustrates these attempts. Only when he approaches it in a humble, oblique, and respectful manner does it reveal itself to him. Then he can enter into communion with it. At the end of the introduction, the narrator observes: "One morning as I stood watching the sun rise, washing out the blue black, watching the white crystalline stars fade, my bare legs quivering in the cool air, I noticed my hands had begun to crack and turn to dust."
The narrator’s patience is rewarded as his hands are transformed into the stuff of the desert landscape, symbolizing his communion with it. Just as the Jewish people in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus and John the Baptist in the New Testament strengthened and purified themselves in the desert, so too the narrator of Desert Notes comes to life through the discipline of the harsh environment. This is a common theme in Lopez’s books, articles, and stories: Journeys into the wilderness provide us with a chance to return to an original, uncompromised spiritual self, a self often buried beneath the conventions and distractions of modern urban life.
Desert Notes is an excellent introduction to Lopez’s work. Many of his narrative strategies find their first expression here: the identification of the narrator as a seeker after the spiritual secrets of the landscape; the narrator’s application of perspectives from biology and anthropology to get closer to the heart of this mystery; and, finally, the narrator’s change in attitude as he comes into contact with the mystery. Treating the environment as a metaphor as well as a subject, these strategies pushed the limits of nature writing. Lopez’s willingness to address issues of dignity, tolerance, morality, and spirituality in terms of the nonhuman world soon caught the attention of the larger literary world.
"He’s a nature writer, but he has philosophic and metaphysical overtones," said Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, one of the first national magazines to publish Lopez’s work. "He’s trying for a synthesis of the spirit and the material. There’s a connection in his work between the physical and metaphysical. He likes to ask the question ’Why?’ as well as ’What?’"
Lopez’s use of natural history as a springboard for discussing larger issues is part of what makes him so highly regarded as an author. Most nature writers address only ecological issues, but Lopez uses natural history to broach questions about everything from living a virtuous life to responsibilities toward a community.
"It’s hard for me to imagine a contemporary writer more sacramental and incarnational than Barry Lopez," says Douglas Burton-Christie, associate professor of Christian spirituality at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and author of The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (1993). "The way he studies something carefully, intensively, and then articulates it so that a reader can feel its power reflects the mystery of the Incarnation, that God has taken human flesh in the form of Christ. His writing is filled with sacramentality: the idea that ordinary physical things mediate the holy. I’d be hard-pressed to think of a theologian giving us a more powerful vision of those issues."
By addressing such issues in terms of landscape, Lopez follows a long tradition in American literature. Melville’s Moby Dick, Stephen Crane’s "The Open Boat," and Thoreau’s Walden pose similar questions in the same way. But where Thoreau and other Trancendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson considered nature divine, Lopez considers it simply one manifestation of God’s presence, though he admits to recognizing that presence more easily in nature than in human society. His sense of the sacramental quality of nature, its ability to mediate between the human and the divine, accounts for his work’s resemblance to that of Catholic writers like Gerard Manley Hopkins.
"To me a ’Catholic writer’ is someone who uses the concerns and/or traditions of the Catholic faith in his or her work," says Brian Doyle, a friend of Lopez and the editor of Portland Magazine, "either as setting and costumed character, like J.F. Powers’s priests, or discernible in the relentless pursuit of the Christ in the most troubled and odd of us (Flannery O’Connor), or in the heartfelt urge to portray the very Catholic notion of an ocean of grace available to us in our brokenness and struggle (Andre Dubus)."
Barry is clearly a man of Catholic nature, says Doyle, "always trying to draw his fellow travelers and sufferers and supplicants together in a community alert to its responsibility to the least of God’s creatures. The idea that the world is suffused with divine grace, that God is in everything (not that God is everything, which is pantheism) and thus all things are precious and priceless and holy, is at the root of the man’s work. His themes are finally responsibility, community, grace, and love, and of these the greatest is love-as Saint Paul says."
Despite its Catholic qualities, Lopez’s work has gained renown primarily as natural history, not religious literature. His 1978 book, Of Wolves and Men, won the prestigious John Burroughs Medal for nature writing and earned Lopez a reputation as one of the most promising young figures in the field. The work goes much further than previous treatments of the subject, using wolf biology, Native American beliefs, and a story from the life of Saint Francis to examine the attitude of humans toward nature. The treatment of wolves serves as an especially notorious example: "Throughout history man has externalized his bestial nature, finding a scapegoat upon which he could heap his sins and whose sacrificial death would be his atonement. He has put his sins of greed, lust, and deception on the wolf and put the wolf to death-in literature, in folklore, and in real life."
Lopez sees this treatment of the wolf as a microcosm of mankind’s treatment of the wilderness as a whole. The wolf was trapped and killed because it epitomized the wilderness that settlers sought to tame and replace with farms and ranches. This violence toward the wolf and the wilderness it represents will end only when human beings come to terms with the wilderness in themselves, as Saint Francis suggested, and not simply project it onto something else. This admission of what is essentially Original Sin is a necessary step in ending the cycle of violence against the wilderness and beginning to fit the wilderness into a moral framework.
His next book, Arctic Dreams, addresses these issues even more directly. In it Lopez argues that unless our civilization finds some way of coming to terms with the land, we will continue to destroy it and impoverish ourselves as a result. Lopez sees the exploitation of the Arctic as an extension of the exploitation of the entire North American continent. This ambitious approach gives the book a far-reaching significance that helps explain why it has become the most influential of all his works.
But the book’s visibility and grandiosity also provoked criticism. The same year it was published (1986), the novelist Joyce Carol Oates blasted contemporary nature writing as inspiring "a painfully limited set of responses in ’nature writers’-reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness." Though she didn’t mention Lopez by name, others have leveled similar charges against his work. Last year in the London Review of Books, William Fiennes complained of Lopez’s weakness for "the vatic note, the ponderous, oracular voice." Such criticisms grow out of Lopez’s occasional tendency to see nature as divine, rather than a sign of the divine. "You can get so caught up in the natural that it becomes sufficient for you," said John F. Haught, a professor of theology at Georgetown University and the author of The Promise of Nature (1993). "This tendency is present in some nature writing. The reason I object is partly religious and partly scientific. We know from science that the universe is finite, not infinite. And if Saint Augustine is right that we long for the infinite, then that longing cannot be satisfied by the natural world itself. I think Christianity requires that we acknowledge the finitude of nature, but see it as sacramental. It’s full of the divine, but not the divine itself."
Lopez’s tendency to equate nature with the divine can be seen as an overcompensation for what the writer perceives to be missing in the larger culture. In his book-length essay The Rediscovery of North America (1990), Lopez asserts that we must go beyond an obsession with the material wealth of the continent that began with Columbus and begin to appreciate North America for its spiritual wealth if we are ever to feel at home here. Lopez argues that the continent’s most valuable resources are not its timber, fur, fish, and mineral wealth, but a sense of belonging on the North American continent.
"What does it mean to be rich?" he asks. "Is it to possess the material, tangible wealth of North America-the gold and the silver, the timber, the fish, and the furs? Or is real wealth, lasting wealth, something else? Most of us, I think, believe that it is something else. We have taken the most obvious kind of wealth from this continent and overlooked the more lasting, the more valuable and sustaining experience of intimacy with it, the spiritual dimension of a responsible involvement with this place."
Though sometimes overly explicit-some might say preachy-about such themes, Lopez’s stories resonate with the mystery of wild landscapes and people’s remarkable experiences of them. His recent fiction and nonfiction increasingly concern the responsibilities of community, both in regard to human society and the nonhuman world that encompasses it. "The physical setting for human life has to be seen as a component of community," he said. "Once you tear human life out of a physical context, people become the playthings of tyrants. But we must have a moral relationship with the land, rather than an exploitive one."
Though Lopez often describes himself as "a writer who travels," making trips to the Arctic, Antarctica, Africa, and Australia, he continues to cultivate an appreciation for the McKenzie River Valley where he makes his home. He believes that we can get in touch with the larger spiritual dimensions in our lives by coming to know a local landscape and including it in our sense of community. Specific knowledge of a place makes a crucial difference in our own lives, he argues, as well as those of future generations.
Several years ago, Lopez got a chance to do something for his own landscape. A thirty-two-acre parcel of old-growth forest adjacent to his home went up for sale. Local timber companies were on the verge of buying it when he began bidding for the land. After some negotiation, he purchased the entire parcel, putting the land in trust so that it could never be logged or developed. In doing so, he ensured that this small piece of North America, at least, would be preserved not for its material values but for what it offered the spirit, a sense of belonging within the larger fabric of life. Having done his part to protect his corner of the American landscape, Lopez is now free to cultivate an intimate knowledge of it. He does this in part by taking daily walks through the forest surrounding his house. On these walks he often stops and bows deeply, aware of the privileges and responsibilities of his stewardship.
"It’s a kind of love-agape-between me and the place," he said of the practice. "I recognize God in the place and I love the place because of it."
