by Barry Lopez
A date of 4.27 billion years for the crystals places them in the early Archeozoic period of the Precambrian era, more than four billion years before the emergence of the first dinosaurs.
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ALONGSIDE THE PIECE of greenschist are two eucalypt buttons. I picked them up from the ground at the top of what some refer to as “the suicide cliff” at Point Puer, in southeastern Tasmania. Early in the nineteenth century a few buildings were erected here to provide housing for adolescent male prisoners incarcerated at a British transport prison called Port Arthur. Building the dormitories was part of a plan the resident commandant developed to protect the boys from sexual predation by adult males living around them in the prison compound.
Like other transport prisons in Australia during the nineteenth century, Port Arthur boarded the psychopathic and the deranged indiscriminately with the innocent and the unlucky, and jailers made little effort to keep the former from preying on the latter. Some of the Port Arthur boys, it is said, desperate to escape the daily rounds of sexual abuse and physical punishment, came to these cliffs at night, held hands, and jumped, falling more than a hundred feet into the frigid waters of Carnarvon Bay.
Standing there that day at the crest of the cliffs, rotating two eucalypt buttons in my hand like a pair of dice, I imagined that the boys were driven to this fatal act by the certain knowledge that they were trapped in circumstances beyond their control, and that they would be snared like this, caught in some pedophile’s net, for years to come. The emotions on which they chose to act were emotions I once knew and which I can readily recall. But I was not entangled as a boy as hopelessly, as fatally, as they were.
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NEXT TO the eucalypt buttons sits a small water-polished stone, a dark piece of basalt. I found it on a pocket beach among thousands of nearly identical rocks at Cape Horn, on a chilly, fog-drenched, austral summer morning in January 2002. I took three of these stones, each about the size and shape of a Brazil nut. One I sent to my younger brother, living on the coast of Maine, who had an affinity for the sea; the other went to my half brother in Northern California, a retired naval officer who had become a traditional healer.
The full nature of the stone that I kept for myself is not immediately apparent. Beneath the black patina on its surface is a dark gray, fine-grained volcanic rock called andesite, named for a chain of mountains, the Andes, which, as the Darwin Cordillera, plunges into the Southern Ocean at the tip of South America. The black coating, an encrustation of iron-manganese oxides, was created by a community of diatoms and other microorganisms, which millions of years before had lived on the surface of the stone.
Perhaps, over time, my brothers lost track of their companion stones, but the one I keep recalls these two men for me, and the thousands of sailors I’d read about who lost their lives trying to double that cape in sailing ships.
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ON THE OTHER SIDE of the cinnamon-colored greenschist is a spent 7.62mm NATO cartridge casing I retrieved on the grounds of a cemetery at a decommissioned Norwegian whaling station called Grytviken, on the island of South Georgia. South Georgia is one of several large, sub-Antarctic islands in the Southern Ocean that James Cook claimed for England during his second around-the-world voyage, in 1772–75. South Georgia, along with the South Sandwich Islands, both former Falkland Islands Dependencies, are today British Overseas Territories. Great Britain’s claim to the Falklands is founded on an opinion most historians share, that the English navigator John Davis was the first European to see these islands, in 1592. At various times Spain, France, Chile, and Argentina have also claimed them. When Argentina, off whose coast the Falklands lie, decided to press its own claim by occupying them in 1982, Britain responded with military force, swiftly ending the so-called Malvinas, or Falkland Islands, War. And the occupying British troops stationed on South Georgia went home.
I picked the empty brass casing up a few paces from the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton, on the shore of a harbor that once served this now-long-abandoned whale processing site and Southern Ocean entrepôt. Dozens of 7.62mm casings gleamed around me that day in the pale sunlight. They were scattered like grain across a graveyard of explorers and whaling men, and they shone like spilled bits of mica along footpaths that wound through the partially collapsed, bullet-riddled structures of the whaling station. The casings told a provocative story, for me, about pro patria mori emotions, about persistent colonial claims to such remote bits of bleak, virtually unoccupied land in the modern era, and about humanity’s enthusiasm for the violent enforcement of strongly held political beliefs.
The once enormous populations of large whales in the nearby waters—blues, southern rights, seis—have yet to recover from a spree of killing that lasted well into the twentieth century, the expression of another related persistent human desire—to take possession. To put whatever was discovered in a new place to “better use.”
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THESE MEMENTOS OF travel sit apart from one another on the tansu. The generous space I’ve left around each is meant to leave each room for its aura. As I pass them by, year after year, going back and forth to a room where I work, each object remains piquant for me, eloquent in its silence. The staggering diversity of life, the stony flesh of the ancient planet, the lethal violence of human behavior, the growing inutility of war in the modern era.
I glance at them because I know I am prone to forget.
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I’VE CLEARED SMALL SPACES around our house for other talismans. I engage with these, too, as if they were votive candles I’d lit. Here are bits of volcanic scoria and water-tumbled seashell from Point Venus in French Polynesia, the spot on Tahiti’s northern shore where Cook tried, successfully, to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, in 1769. Beside these, a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite, its sheer surfaces intersecting as neatly as the sides of a pyramid. A ventifact, a thing made by the wind, brought home from the Wright Valley in Antarctica’s southern Victoria Land.
Two other objects hold a particular place in this olla podrida. I keep one by my bedside, wherever that happens to be, and the other on my writing desk. Next to my bed is a sand-cast silver harpoon tip, a stylized replica of a toggling implement that Eskimo hunters have used for centuries to secure and retrieve seals. A gift from my wife. To provide food for one’s family, whether it is seal meat or a sack of grain or the flesh of an avocado, is to encounter again an unsettling question about the way in which death provides life. To act here is to face one’s own complicity, to choose to take life in order that one’s own kin might continue to live. When I lie down to sleep far from home, I place this small work of art close by on a folded scarf. It was crafted by a man named Jimmy Naguogugalik, an Inuit artist and hunter from Baker Lake, in Nunavut, Canada. It reminds me of the centrality of the symbolic in human life, and of both the consequence of providing and of the obligation to provide.
The object on my writing desk is a stark reminder of a connection I feel, though a tenuous one, with a murderous period in Western history. A real de a ocho, an eight-real silver coin, crudely minted in Mexico City sometime between 1630 and 1641, during the reign of Philip IV of Spain. It comes from a large cargo of bullion and coinage carried by the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de la Pura y Limpia Concepción when it set sail from Veracruz, Mexico, on July 23, 1641. Later that summer, probably after making a port call at Havana, the galleon encountered a hurricane and was dismasted, somewhere south of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the western Atlantic. The crew, it is thought, were trying to reach the harbor at San Juan, Puerto Rico, when their ship, heavily laden with gold and silver ingots and with bags of silver coins, ran aground on Abrojos Reef, about eighty miles northeast of Cabo Isabela, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic today). The shipwreck was located during a search in 16
87 and a portion of its cargo salvaged. The position of the Nuestra Señora, however, was not accurately fixed at the time and its whereabouts remained unknown for another three hundred years, until November 28, 1978. The coin on my desk comes from this second salvage.
For me, and for some members of my stepfamily, the story behind this coin has a discomfiting personal dimension.
In 1521, Hernán Cortés ordered four brigantines built on Lake Xochimilco for the invasion of Tenochtitlán (Mexico City). In 1524, his shipbuilder, Marín (or Martín) López, received a land grant in Pinar del Río, a region of western Cuba, from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as a reward for his having built the brigantines. Members of the López family took possession of the land in Cuba at the time but continued, for the most part, to occupy and maintain their former lands in northern Spain, in a region of the Iberian peninsula called Asturias. (Asturias is still referred to today by politically conservative Spaniards as “the principality of the kings,” partly because it was the homeland of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the man more widely known as El Cid. Asturias is also the only region of Spain not subjugated historically by “foreigners”—that is to say, by Rome or by the Moors. It’s regarded today as a citadel of Spanish pur sang.)
Pinar del Río eventually became the region of Cuba most preferred by tobacco growers. In the 1850s, after Spain relaxed its onerous export tariffs on tobacco, the López family emerged as one of the three or four most important cigar-manufacturing families in the country. Later my stepfather’s branch of the family, with money from their tobacco interests, purchased a walled estate overlooking the Asturian coastal village of Cudillero. The compound was a “casa del Indio,” an estate built on wealth from the New World.
According to my stepfather, male members of his branch of the López family are best viewed historically as hidalgos, as “near royalty.” In 1900 my stepfather’s father, Don Eugénio López Tréllez y Albierne de Asturias y Vivar, was appointed the Spanish first secretary to the Court of St. James’s by Alfonso XIII. In 1908, two years after my stepfather was born in Southampton, Hampshire, Don Eugénio resigned his appointment and returned to America. He had departed the States for Asturias at the start of the Spanish-Cuban War (Spanish-American, to most Americans), in 1898. Once back in New York City, he again took up representing the family’s tobacco interests in the United States.
I sought out the silver ocho-real from the Nuestra Señora in 1997 on a visit to Christiansted, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, not so much because of its link to the early activities of my stepfamily in the New World but because I wanted this manifest symbol of unrelenting pathological exploitation around me while I wrote, a thing smaller than, say, a bale of rubber from Prince Leopold’s Congo. It recalls for me the extent of international indifference to catastrophic human suffering, then and now, a worldwide indifference to the fate of human beings that has persisted through numerous slaughters, including in my own lifetime those in Siberia, in Cambodia, in Iran under the Shah, in Liberia under Charles Taylor, and in Chile under Pinochet.6
The temptation for someone like me with this silver coin, someone with an active objection to the mistreatment of indigenous people, is to consider myself apart from the mistreatment, not implicated in these subjugations and exploitations, beginning, say, with the Black Legend of the Spanish conquistadores, and with the English financial investment in, and development of, the Atlantic slave trade. I’d be on secure moral ground absolving myself of direct responsibility in all this, but for me—and for many others, I must think—taking this position would leave unaddressed the ethical responsibility to object. It would be to hear resonating within oneself the shouting of the Mothers of the Disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, and to turn instead to other things.
Sometimes I’ve been able to rise to these ethical challenges and craft what I hope will be an eloquent objection. Other times, I am ashamed to admit, I step into the next room. I shut the door. Who can change this? I say to myself. The horrors—ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution—once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human.
We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.
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OF THE TALISMANIC REMINDERS set about in nearly every room of our house over nearly five decades, like pages from a psalter, I want to describe one final piece, an object that still unsettles me because it reminds me when I write to trust the reader to apprehend the injustice in what I try to describe. I do not need always to parse it.
Historians mostly agree that Christopher Columbus’s first landfall in the Americas was at a Bahamian isle called Samana (or Atwood) Cay, located northeast of Acklins Island, about forty miles north of the Plana, or French, Cays. For most of the twentieth century, however, it was generally believed that his first landfall was at San Salvador, eighty miles north-northwest of Samana Cay. (In 1926, the British name for this isle, Watling Island, was changed back to San Salvador, the name Columbus originally gave it on October 12, 1492. Local Lucayan people, according to Columbus, referred to the place as “guanahani.”)
In the spring of 1989—I was forty-four at the time—I traveled to San Salvador with a friend, Tony Beasley. I wanted to dive the island’s reefs and also to see a monument honoring Columbus, erected on the bottom of Fernandez Bay. One very hot afternoon on a walk along the island’s shore, Tony and I found ourselves at Fernandez Bay but unprepared. We had no snorkeling equipment with us. On an impulse I stripped off my clothes and bolted, naked, for the water. (We were alone at siesta time on an otherwise deserted beach, out of public view.) I swam furiously toward the place I anticipated the monument would be, swam until I was so winded I felt in danger of drowning. Anger had suddenly flooded my senses on the beach. Unresolved anger over the behavior of my stepfather’s ancestors, and of the other hidalgos—Pizarro, Gonzalo de Sandoval, Diego Velázquez, Andrés de Tapia—the second-son conquistadores; anger about the loss of so many unchronicled cultures, the consequence of colonial genocide and exploitation; frustration with imperial incursions of all sorts, in nearly every freshly discovered place in the world, over the centuries; fury over licentious behavior forcing its way into the hinterlands of every political empire, perpetrated by people imbued with a sense of divine right as they redesigned societies, burned out spiritual practices, and restructured economies to serve their own ends. At that particular time this was, for me, Shell Oil operating in Nigeria, Rio Tinto mining in Western Australia, the Chinese boot heel crushing Buddhist culture on the Tibetan Plateau. I was furious about the impoverishment and hopelessness of people I’d seen eking out an existence in places like São Paulo, about those separated from their homes and living in refugee camps all over the world and dying in war zones in Angola, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. The Japanese use a word, hibakusha, to describe those who physically survived the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but who subsequently lost their minds. These individuals are “explosion-affected people”—uncomprehending, disoriented, catatonic with grief. They’re everywhere now, from the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to IDP (Internally Displaced People) camps in Eritrea and South Sudan. They are people capable only of existence, not recovery. For them, the damage has gone too deep.
In that moment that afternoon on San Salvador, all such genocidal horror—in Tenochtitlán, in the American West, in Sarajevo—seemed rooted for me in the same insane and seemingly ineradicable desire: to eliminate strangers and take possession of whatever they had.
I burned up my anger in the long, exhausting swim. Treading water, I could see below me the pale monument to Columbus rising distorted through a lens of clear tropical water. Voiceless. Adamant.
I swam back to shore, standing up when my toes finally touched bottom. Tony was watching from the beach, a hesitating, quizzical look on his face. Some moments passed while I stood in the shallows, catching my breath. As I waded toward the beach I began to speak aloud in disconnected sentences, enunciating the familiar principles of justice, proclaiming sorrow and regret, asking the pardon of every animate thing before me—the trees, the clouds, the broken shells washed up on the beach. Stepping clear of the water, I knelt on the beach and bent forward to rest on my palms, stupefied by the heat, squinting into glare off the sand, startled by my own outburst. Just in front of me, inches away, was a piece of chalk-white sandstone, exactly the shape and precisely the size of a human tongue.
I picked it up.
Tony and I walked together back to Cockburn Town, to our air-conditioned hotel room. He didn’t say anything about what I had declaimed, words I was too self-conscious to try to recall. I lay on my bed wondering if the fury I’d felt had actually been ignited not by history but by the reawakening of my own feelings of impotence.
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TAKEN TOGETHER, the objects I’ve described represent a kind of strategy I’ve used to remain connected to the disorderly world, with its numerous paradoxes and inconsistencies. Further, they point me toward an overriding and fundamental issue—the importance of preserving the human capacity to love. These objects are, too, reminders of my own unconscious presumptions and impositions, according to which I occasionally organize the world I encounter in such a way as to feel safe in it. I read daily about the many threats to human life—chemical, political, biological, and economic. Much of this trouble, I believe, has been caused by the determination of some to define a human cultural world apart from the nonhuman world, or by people’s attempts to overrun, streamline, or dismiss that world as simply a warehouse for materials, or mere scenery.