by Barry Lopez
It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.
What cataclysm, I often wonder, or better, what act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?
As time grows short, the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative. As I’ve encountered other human cultures over time, especially those radically different from my own, each one has seemed to me both deep and difficult to comprehend, not “exotic” or “primitive.” Many cultures are still distinguished today by wisdoms not associated with modern technologies but grounded, instead, in an acute awareness of human foibles, of the traps people tend to set for themselves as they enter the ancient labyrinth of hubris or blindly pursue the appeasement of their appetites.
It is nearly impossible for wise people in any culture to plumb the depths of their own metaphysical assumptions, out of which they have fashioned a world view. It is also difficult to listen closely while some other people’s guiding stories unfold, or to separate successfully the literal from the figurative in those stories, the fact from the metaphor. And yet if we persist in believing that we alone, living in whatever culture we’re from, are right, and that we therefore have no need to listen to anyone else’s stories, stories that we often can’t quite understand and so are unwilling to discuss, we endanger ourselves. If we remain fearful of human diversity, our potential to evolve into the very thing we most fear—to become our own fatal nemesis—only increases.
The desire to know ourselves better, to understand especially the source and the nature of our dread, looms before us now like a specter in a half-lit world, a weird dawn breaking over a scene of carnage: unbreathable air, human diasporas, the Sixth Extinction, ungovernable political mobs.
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IN THE WISDOM OF THE DESERT, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, considering the moral obtuseness of the conquistadores, writes, “In subjugating primitive worlds they only imposed on them, with the force of cannons, their own confusion and their own alienation.” If this colonizing impulse in our heritage is still with us, a need to dominate, must we continue to support it? Must we go on deferring to tyrants, oligarchs, and sociopathic narcissists? The French poet, diplomat, and Nobel laureate Alexis Léger, in his epic poem Anabase, asks where the troubled world is to find its real protectors, warriors so dedicated to protecting the welfare of their communities that they can be depended upon “to watch the rivers for the approach of enemies, even on their wedding nights.”
Where, today, can the voices of such guardians be heard over the raucous din in support of economic growth?
In her poem “Kindness,” the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye writes that to learn the kindness required to ameliorate the cruelty and injustice the real world presents us with,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans…
In which national parliaments and legislatures today can we find deliberations characterized by such a measure of humility? In which congresses might questions of ethical irresponsibility be successfully raised for discussion? In which Western nations does a determination to address the mental, spiritual, and physical health of children override indifference toward their fate? Or are these questions now thought to be anachronistic, questions no longer relevant to our situation?
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IT IS NOT POSSIBLE, of course, to live up to one’s own standard of good behavior every day. Distraction and indifference always offer us a way out of dilemmas otherwise too exhausting or harrowing to face. Still many, in every corner of the world in my experience, press on through such discouragement and defeat, bind up their wounds, and tend to the needs of others, like the Aparajitas of Bangladesh, the “women who never accept defeat.” Most anyone today can imagine the biblical horsemen of the Apocalypse deployed on the horizon, pick out each one and characterize him. Anyone, too, facing this frightening horizon, might opt to turn away, decide instead to become lost in beauty, or choose to remain walled off from the world in electronic distraction, or select catatonic isolation within the fortress of the self. But one can choose, as well, to step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world, accepting its requirement for death but working still to lessen the degree of cruelty and to increase the reach of justice in every quarter.
For many years the need for this kind of heroic effort—essentially to learn to cooperate with strangers—has been calling to modern people. I’ve wondered, watching economically powerful nations scrambling in the world’s remote corners for the last large deposits of copper, iron, bauxite, and other ores, or reading about the failure of once-dependable ocean fisheries, or about cynical corporate maneuvering to secure the last large reservoirs of potable water, whether an unprecedented openness to other ways of understanding this disaster is not, today, humanity’s only life raft. Whether cooperation with strangers is not now our Grail.
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I LOOK BACK at an unsuspecting boy, a child beside himself with his desire to know the world, to swim out farther than he can see. The boy, I know, will live his life like this, always searching, even though he doesn’t really know what to look for. It will be many years before he understands that this continuous search for meaning is most everyone’s calling. Facing chaos, we’re sometimes prone to insist that we’re only ardently searching for coherence, for a way to fit all the pieces of our life experience together into a meaningful whole, to find a direction in which to continue. Gaining that, we say, we can expect to find relief from some of our pursuing anxieties.
It has long seemed to me that what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love. That means, too, embracing the opportunity to be loved, to ferret out and nurture the reciprocated relationships that unite people, that bring people and their chosen places, both the raw and the built Earth, together into one agreement, without coercion or sentimentality. If someone was to suggest that the evidence for how things can and do go wrong is only evidence of the repeated failure to love, even the boy, I believe, would agree. He would lean into the belief, as he grew older, that the failure to love or to be loved explains most of the mental pain people endure. The failure to love explains the burden of human loneliness, which each person prays or hopes or works hard to be rid of.
The boy who wanted to go and see, and then to return home with a story, came to see that he’d never be able to carry a story forward very far by himself. He believed, though, that others might, those who were able to see, with a different clarity of mind than his own, the things that are now at stake for everyone.
Cape Foulweather
Coast of Oregon
Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean
Western North America
44°47'00" N 124°02'38" W
A light winter rain descends in weak pulses over the ocean, is buffeted across a flattened tide-built beach by a fresh wind, and rolls up into the mountains. A female rain. A swirling mist. Farther north a heavier rain, what the Navajo call a male rain, is falling hard and trundling this way, southward out of the Gulf of Alaska.
I start off searching a
long the high tide line.
I’d learned about the storm last night, as it was starting to build below the arc of the Aleutian Islands, bringing wind-slanted sleet and fifty-foot seas to the gulf. A few hours ahead of it, trawlers were hauling their nets and battening hatches. The next morning, as it was bearing off farther to the south, I’d put a few things in my truck and driven to the coast, 150 miles through the mountains west of my home. I wanted to be in it, to feel it thrashing Cape Foulweather, to know the punch of it against my back, to inhale the ionized air, infused with the smells of fish and trees.
I’m straddling a serpentine wrack line of kelp fronds just now, which binds together broken bits of razor clamshell, scraps of salt-encrusted, sunburnt plastic, gull feathers, empty water bottles, kelp bladders, and the vacant carapaces of shore crabs. I hope one day to discover a glass float from a Japanese fishing net in these wrack lines, but it won’t be today.
Another hundred yards farther along, ducking down from the humid air accumulating like dew on my face, I retrieve a ball cap. In script across the plastron are the words Calico Enterprises. My mother taught me to recognize calico cloth when I was young, a plain, serviceable cotton the British once exported from India. Before that, I’d assumed the word referred only to the patterned color of a horse or a cat.
I recall her instructing me about the many fabrics she used: worsted wool, chambray, complicated Jacquard weaves like damask and brocade. She spoke of what she called the “hands” of these cloths, the fine, silky feeling of batiste, the stiffness of organdy, the coolness of linen. I saw these textures everywhere in nature later—a late-recalled gift from my mother’s concern about my education.
I carry the hat absent-mindedly another few hundred yards, then place it back on the wrack line for someone else to find before a spring tide takes it away. I pick up a half dozen other things to scrutinize—a doll’s eyeless head, a cormorant’s long primary feather—but hold on to nothing. The informing history behind flotsam and jetsam notwithstanding, an hour more of this flânerie and I turn around, putting my back to a damp north breeze. I cover the same ground once more, then walk up the shallow slope of the beach, fists in my pockets, to a paved parking area where my dark gray truck sits by itself.
I head south on the Oregon Coast Highway. A few miles on, I turn left and drive east into the mountains on a gravel road that parallels a creek. A mile in, I cross the creek on a stout timber bridge and enter a maze of narrow logging roads. The roads I follow climb hillsides through deep-shadowed copses of spruce and cross over tracts of upended land shorn of its trees.
The last spur I turn onto climbs up a steep grade to a landing, part of an old logging operation below the heights of the cape, about half a mile inland and six hundred feet or so above the Pacific. The slope below me is planted to young Douglas-fir trees, five or six feet tall now. I guy my tent in the lee of the truck and begin making dinner on the tailgate. The wind is fitful, sodden, but real rain hasn’t started to form yet. Harsher weather is still hours off, its leading edge probably somewhere near the Olympic Peninsula in Washington now.
On the way in here something strange caught my eye, a white thing in the logging debris of the scabland. I shut the truck’s engine off and walked toward it, leaving the door ajar, the vehicle blocking the road. I threaded my way through the clearcut slash and past debarked stumps glaring skyward from the cratered earth.
I stood before a white brassiere, as incongruous an object as I could imagine here. Its straps were stretched around the wide face of a stump and secured there with pushpins. Each cup had been painted with concentric orange rings. Each was punctuated with a half dozen bullet holes. I pulled the bra free, shoved the wad of it deep into the weedy undergrowth, and started back toward the truck. No. I returned, retrieved it, and stuffed it under the driver’s seat, thinking to put it in a trash receptacle in the town of Newport.
Is it good, I wondered, to be drawn off by such things, mute evidence of the malign cast of some human mind? Is it useless, perhaps even wrong, to hide the evidence? Should one just give misogyny its quarter? Is it hopelessly naïve to think that by preventing others from being confronted by such things, there will be fewer imitators? I also wondered whether you might ever find such signs of degeneracy in the rural clearcuts of Kalimantan or Sarawak. I suspect not.
The incident rankled me. Unduly.
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I’VE CAMPED IN this place before. From here, my view of the white-capped ocean and, away to the northeast and southeast, the dark hills and old mountains of the Coast Range, is unobstructed.
I fix dinner, watching the sea. It’s just beginning to heave. “The farspooming Ocean,” Keats once wrote.
In the years ahead, I will listen to elders in the mountains of Tajikistan talk about 80 percent unemployment in their villages, seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. I will visit the province of Aceh in northern Sumatra, in the wake of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, which in just a few minutes killed more than 175,000 Indonesians. In an effort to understand lethal human tragedy, the murderous way we’re capable of behaving toward each other, I will one day follow a guide through abandoned cellblocks at the New Mexico State Penitentiary outside Santa Fe. On February 2 and 3, 1980, nearly forty people were executed here by rioting prisoners, many of them using blowtorches and hammers. (Some, burned beyond recognition, died in anonymity.) In the spring of 2014, I’ll walk the western waterfront of Singapore looking for a man who told me he would take me north from there, for a fee, to see the Strait of Malacca, for more than five hundred years an ambush site used repeatedly by thieves. A hero of mine, the British navigator and explorer John Davis, was killed here in 1605 by Japanese pirates. My desire was only to see those waters, to put myself in the place where he died. It’s a pursuit of the kind of sensation that feels like insight. Often, though, it is no more than seeing the way things are in the world.
With the approach of dusk, dinner now finished, I follow long dark lines of returning Brandt’s and pelagic cormorants with my binoculars, rookery bound, skimming the ocean’s surface. I lean into the hood of my truck, propping my elbows there to steady my view in order to distinguish between the look-alike species.
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AT DUSK the coming rain is still little more than mist beading up on my cheekbones, a chill on the back of my hands. In the agitated air, droplets of water tremble on my fingernails when I hold my hands still.
Somewhere, once, someone must have composed a list of the gradations of color I now see before me in the sky: the grays of pigeon feathers, of slate and pearls; in one sector the puce of a fresh bruise, in another the whites of eggshells. In the taxonomic language of meteorology, the sky is heaped with nimbostratus and cumulonimbus. Tiers of clouds are decked shoulder to shoulder in every direction.
This particular February storm doesn’t have enough violence in it to have been given an official designation; nevertheless, in its details it differs from every other late-winter storm that has ever come down this way off the North Pacific, lumbering southeast over this very old water, this modern-day child of one of Earth’s early oceans, the Panthalassic of the Permian. This Pacific, this once-upon-a-time Orientalis Oceanus, rolling and unrolling under the carry of clouds. Hessel Gerritsz’s Mar Negro. Paolo Forlani’s Golfo di Tonza.
This great disturbance of air has brought forth red signal flags in the harbors of Oregon coastal towns. Strangely, I know I’ll experience a measure of grief after it passes through, that sense of loss one sometimes feels when a brief, intense relationship with someone encountered on a plane or at a café ends. I’ll feel its absence, because the nature of the storm is to be emphatic, though it is indifferent to all life. Managing the force of it is beyond the reach of any machinery. It can be sketched in isobars, shifting through time, contoured around the points of a compass, but it cannot be contained or pinn
ed down, even by the most precise numbers.
It’s entirely free. Its own idea.
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WHAT’S LOCALLY CALLED Cape Foulweather is actually a distinct coastal ridge, a gently rising prominence about two miles long, bowing outward into the Pacific.
On his third around-the-world voyage, James Cook made his first landfall on the west coast of North America at this place. He was thirty or so miles out to sea when his lookouts, standing on the ship’s tops, spotted the twin crests of what today are called Cape Perpetua, to the south, and Cape Foulweather. Very early on the following day, a late-winter storm, bearing down out of the north, intensified. Even as it raked HMS Resolution and Cook’s consort, HMS Discovery, he tried to crab in closer to this unknown (to Europeans) lee shore. Twice on the ninth he got within a few nautical miles, dangerously near the sea stacks and reefs, before standing out to sea again. On March 13, after four straight days of being “unprofitably tossed about,” as he wrote in his journal, he departed, setting “more sail than the ships could safely bear” to get clear of the area.
On his tactical retreat to the southwest, Cook named Cape Perpetua for the saint on whose feast day he had first seen it. He named Cape Foulweather for the rough weather that had accompanied his visit.
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