Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  ALSO BY BARRY LOPEZ

  Nonfiction

  About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (1998)

  Apologia (1998)

  The Rediscovery of North America (1990)

  Crossing Open Ground (1988)

  Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986)

  Of Wolves and Men (1978)

  Fiction

  Outside (2014)

  with engravings by Barry Moser

  Resistance (2004)

  with monoprints by Alan Magee

  Light Action in the Caribbean (2000)

  Lessons from the Wolverine (1997)

  with illustrations by Tom Pohrt

  Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994)

  Crow and Weasel (1990)

  with illustrations by Tom Pohrt

  Winter Count (1981)

  River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979)

  Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (1978)

  Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976)

  Anthology

  Vintage Lopez (2004)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Barry Lopez

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Far Corner Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Kindness” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye, copyright © 1995. Reprinted by permission of Far Corner Books.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945– author.

  Title: Horizon / by Barry Lopez.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033323 | ISBN 9780394585826 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lopez, Barry Holstun, 1945—Travel. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Travel—Social aspects.

  Classification: LCC PS3562.O67 H67 2019 | DDC 813/.54 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018033323

  Ebook ISBN 9780525656210

  Maps and globe illustrations copyright © 2019 by David Lindroth Inc.

  Cover photograph by artpartner-images.com/​Alamy

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  This page: Remember, by Nicholas Roerich

  v5.4

  ep

  For Debra

  and for

  Peter Matson and Robin Desser,

  with profound gratitude for the years of support

  To travel, above all, is to change one’s skin.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,

  in Southern Mail

  Site Maps

  1Johan Peninsula Area

  2Alexandra Fjord Lowland

  3Skraeling Island

  4Great Rift Valley

  5Ross Ice Shelf Region

  6Ross Island

  7The Dry Valleys

  8Brunswick Peninsula and the Strait of Magellan

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Barry Lopez

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Site Maps

  Remember, by Nicholas Roerich

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Introduction: Looking for a Ship

  1. Mamaroneck

  2. To Go/To See

  3. Remember

  4. Talismans

  Cape Foulweather

  Coast of Oregon

  Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean

  Western North America

  Skraeling Island

  Mouth of Alexandra Fjord

  East Coast of Ellesmere Island

  Nunavut

  Canada

  Puerto Ayora

  Isla Santa Cruz

  Archipiélago de Colón

  Eastern Equatorial Pacific

  Jackal Camp

  Turkwel River Basin

  Western Lake Turkana Uplands

  Eastern Equatorial Africa

  Port Arthur to Botany Bay

  State of Tasmania

  Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean

  Southeastern Australia

  State of New South Wales

  Western Shore of the South Pacific

  Graves Nunataks to Port Famine Road

  Queen Maud Mountains

  Central Transantarctic Mountains

  Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau

  Antarctica

  Brunswick Peninsula

  Shore of the Strait of Magellan

  Southern Chile

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Scientific Binomials

  Overview Maps

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Horizon is an autobiographical reflection on many years of travel and research, in Antarctica and in more than seventy countries. Some of these travels I financed myself, others I sought grants for or received fellowships to fund. I made several trips on assignment for magazines, and with others I was simply invited to come along. The details, and my expressions of gratitude for those who assisted me over the years, are included in the Acknowledgments.

  Most of the journeys described here I made in my forties and fifties. I traveled to the Galápagos Islands, however, and to Australia and Antarctica, on several occasions and at different points in my life. The least complicated way to chronicle these experiences, it seemed, was simply to tell the story, not to try to explain any juxtapositions in time. It might help to know, however, that when I traveled to Cape Foulweather in order to encounter the winter storm I was forty-nine; that I was in my early forties and had just published a book about the North American far north, Arctic Dreams, when I flew into the archeological camp on Skraeling Island; and that I was fifty-four when I made the trip to Graves Nunataks in the Transantarctic Mountains.

  As Horizon is meant to be an autobiographical work, I should emphasize that there was a long learning curve inherent in all this sojourning. I’ve not tried to be explicit about what was learned (or unlearned) or when, in part because it hasn’t always been clear to me what changes might have occurred. The young man visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.

  Prologue

  The boy and I are leaning over a steel railing, staring into the sea. The sun is bright, but shade from a roof above us makes it possible to see clearly into the depths, to observe, quivering there, what’s left of the superstructure of a battleship sunk seventy-two years before.

  My grandson is nine. I am in my sixty-eighth year.

  The memorial terrace on which we are standing, alongside my wife, has been erected above the remains of the USS Arizona, a 608-foot Pennsylvania-class battleship overwh
elmed at its moorings on the morning of December 7, 1941, by Japanese dive bombers. It sank in minutes. The flooded hulk, a necropolis ever since, holds the remains of many of the 1,177 sailors and marines killed or drowned on the ship that morning. I’m explaining to the boy that sometimes we do this to each other, harm each other on this scale. He knows about September 11, 2001, but he has not yet heard, I think, of Dresden or the Western Front, perhaps not even of Antietam or Hiroshima. I won’t tell him today about those other hellfire days. He’s too young. It would be inconsiderate—cruel, actually—pointedly to fill him in.

  Later that morning the three of us snorkel together on a coral reef. We watch schools of tropical fish bolt, furl, and unfurl before us, colored banners in a breeze. Then we have lunch by a pool at the hotel where we are guests. The boy swims tirelessly in the pool’s glittering aqua-tinted water until his grandmother takes him down to the beach. He runs to jump into the Pacific.

  He can’t get enough of swimming.

  I watch him for a few minutes, flinging himself into the face of wave after wave. His grandmother, knee-deep in the surf, scrutinizes him without letup. Eventually I sit down in a poolside chair with a glass of iced lemonade and begin to read a book I’ve started, a biography of the American writer John Steinbeck. I glance up once in a while to gaze at sunlight shuddering on the surface of the ocean, or to follow flocks of sparrows as they flee the tables of the hotel’s open-air restaurant, where they’ve been gleaning crumbs. For prolonged uninterrupted minutes I also watch, with a mixture of curiosity and affection, the hotel’s other guests, sunning on lounges around the pool or ambling past, completely at ease. The clement air and the benign nature of the light dispose me toward an accommodation with everything here different from myself. When I breathe, I’m aware of a dense, perfume-like scent—tropical flowers blooming in a nearby hedge. Is it bougainvillea?

  The exuberance of my grandson has also enhanced this sense of tranquility I feel.

  Most of the guests here are Asian. I recognize in particular the distinctive cast of Japanese and Chinese faces. Strolling through the poolside restaurant in expensive clothes, discreetly signaling a pool attendant for a towel, snapping copies of The Honolulu Star-Advertiser to straighten the pages, they all seem to have the bearing of people familiar with luxury, as I imagine that state.

  I return to the biography. In the paragraph I’m reading, the writer is describing a meeting Steinbeck once had at his home in Pacific Grove, California, with the historian of mythology Joseph Campbell. The night before this, Steinbeck, the composer John Cage, Campbell, Steinbeck’s first wife, Carol, and a few others had all enjoyed dinner together in the Steinbeck home. Campbell has now come out onto the patio to inform his host that he has fallen in love with Carol. He accuses Steinbeck of treating her shabbily, and says that if he won’t change his ways then he, Campbell, is prepared to ask Carol to marry him and to return with him to New York.

  I look up abruptly from the book, recalling that I’d been in summer camp in 1956 with both of Steinbeck’s sons, Thom and John. It had been a memorable encounter for me. I was eleven and I met their father at the same time. I marveled at the burly reification of this person who’d written The Red Pony. (I was introduced to his third wife, Elaine, then, too. She was cool. Dismissive.)

  I pick up again where I’ve left off, keen to follow this unanticipated triumvirate—Steinbeck, John Cage, Joseph Campbell.

  Pages later, I am feeling the westering sun burning hot on my right cheek. Another tight flock of sparrows hurtles by my head and suddenly I wonder whether I’d done absolutely the wrong thing that morning at Pearl Harbor, before we’d all gone to see the Arizona. I’d walked my grandson through the interior of a World War II American submarine, explaining the architecture, the periscope in the conning tower, the forward torpedo tubes. He had touched the sleek torpedoes gingerly, a lingering caress, his small hands cupping the warheads.

  Just then a handsome Japanese woman striding along the pool’s edge makes a graceful, arcing dive into the water. An impulsive act. A scrim of water rises around her like the flair of a flamenco dancer’s skirt. The pool water shatters into translucent gems.

  In the beauty of this moment, I suddenly feel the question: What will happen to us?

  I stand up, a finger marking my place in the book, and search the breaking surf beyond a hedge of sea grape for my grandson. He waves hysterically at me, smiling from the slope of a wave. Here, Grandpa!

  What is going to happen to all of us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence?

  I want to thank the woman for her exquisite dive. The abandon and grace of her movement.

  I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

  Introduction

  Looking for a Ship

  1

  Mamaroneck

  A history, one purporting to depict the life trajectory of the grandfather reading by the pool, could easily begin sixty-five years before that moment in Hawai‘i, in an embayment of Long Island Sound called Mamaroneck Harbor. Here is a stretch of sheltered water, a surface barely roughened that day by a wind blowing westward from the direction of Crane Island. A boy who cannot yet swim wades steadily farther out into the salt water, under the shepherding gaze of his mother. She’s hardly fifty feet away, a dark-haired woman in her middle thirties, her legs tucked beneath her, her belly round with a second child. She’s sitting on a wool blanket, embroidering a needlepoint image of field flowers erect in a vase. It’s 1948. She’s conversing with a friend underneath a large white oak tree on Orienta Point, on the Westchester County coast of New York.1

  The boy halts when he reaches water up to his chin. She watches him steadily now. He wants to go farther, to swim out past Turkey Rock, out farther even, out beyond the Scotch Caps, two islets on the distant rim of the sound. Past that lies a horizon of water. A blank page.

  He turns for shore, scuttling sideways like a crab in ripples that break over his small shoulders.

  A few months later, with the approach of a New England winter and following the birth of his only sibling, the boy moves with his family to a valley in Southern California, an irrigated expanse of farmland. Groves of oranges and walnuts, fields of alfalfa. Peach orchards. The irrigated San Fernando Valley. This Mediterranean plain is bounded to the south by the Santa Monica Mountains, to the north by the snowcapped San Gabriels. A different life for him now. A different geography. An unfamiliar climate. Different races of people.

  One day, a couple of years after the family arrives, the father leaves. He returns to his first wife, living in Florida with their son, and the boy and his mother and younger brother begin together another sort of existence. His mother teaches home economics at a junior high school in Northridge and, at night, dressmaking at Pierce Junior College, near Calabasas. Other evenings she works at home, creating couture clothing for her clients. The father writes from Florida. He promises to send money but never does. The three of them, anyway, seem to have all they need. The boy is curious but wary. A suburban crow. He makes friends with other boys in his neighborhood and with his classmates at Our Lady of Grace, a Catholic grade school in Encino. He gets to know a few of his mother’s students, the sons of braceros working in the vegetable fields north and west of their house in Reseda.

  He learns to ride a bicycle. He rides and rides, as far north in the valley as Granada Hills and west all the way to Chatsworth.

  Their mother takes the boys out into the western Mojave Desert, to the eastern Mojave and the Grand Canyon, and south to the San Diego Zoo and across the border into Mexico.

  One afternoon the boy stands on the shore of Topanga Beach, fronting the great Pacific just east of Malibu. He watches comber after comber crash the strand, stepping clear of the waves’ retreating sweeps each time, as his mother has asked. He un
derstands that this foaming storm surf has arrived on the beach from someplace else. Here, temperate air embraces him; an onshore breeze softens the burn of the sun’s rays on his white skin. Its light splinters on bits of quartz in the sand at his feet.

  This, too, is new to him, a feeling of being cradled in harmless breezes and caressed by light. Years later, walking alone in faraway places, he will remember and long for this sensation.

  A friend of his mother, a man the boy hopes will one day become his father, is accompanying the family that day at Topanga Beach. He tells the boy that far off across the water, farther away even than the storm that makes these waves, is the extremely ancient country of China. The boy has no image of China. The tall, long-fingered, long-legged, soft-spoken man in khaki trousers moves through the boy’s mind with the hesitating grace of a flamingo. The boy imagines that the man knows many things. He works at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and some days takes the boy with him to work. His name is Dara. He points out differences among the plants; he pots with the boy in the greenhouses. He explains how a large flowering plant like a jacaranda grows from a small seed.

  The boy’s most favorite trees now are eucalypts, the tall river red gums and blue gums that flank Calvert Street in Reseda where he lives. He likes the royal towering of them; the shedding boles, slick beneath his hands; the fragrance of the hard gumnuts. He carries a few of these buttons in his pockets wherever he goes. He likes the defiant reach of these trees, how they crowd and rake the blue sky, and how the wind chitters in their leaf clusters. He feels safe hiding in their shadows. Dara tells him that around Los Angeles they’re called “skyline trees.” He likes that. Originally from Australia, he says, but they grow all over the world, wherever the right conditions can be found. It’s the same for the frangipani trees and bougainvillea vines growing at the botanic garden. Those two, along with the eucalypts, says Dara, are now found everywhere “in the colonial subtropics.”