by Barry Lopez
The loss of any human language means that, in the most difficult straits humanity has ever found itself in, one more strategy for survival has been thrown away. In the time of my own travel, of a passing acquaintance with Kamba people speaking Kikamba in Kenya, Pitjantjatjara people in the Northern Territory in Australia speaking their tongue, Ainu people speaking theirs in Hokkaido, and Pashto- and Dari-speaking people speaking their languages in Afghanistan, I’ve come to realize how important has been the insight that linguists and anthropologists have been stressing to lay audiences for decades: there are significant differences among human societies when it comes to assessing the seriousness of any threat to a culture’s spiritual, physical, or psychological well-being. The idea here would be to forestall, by whatever approach is most effective, the onset of those feelings of despair that paralyze a people.
Everywhere I’ve been able to travel in the war-torn, ecologically compromised, misgoverned districts of the world, this thin hope has been something I thought worth plumbing, whether it’s actually possible for us to help one another with the economic, climatological, health, and environmental emergencies now camped in our front yards. Sadly, when it comes to describing what one’s own culture might offer other cultures, once the talk of increased tourism and commercial trade benefits has run its familiar course, few can say.
Cook writes in his journal, during the six days he had these densely forested mountains and the snow-covered foreshore of this coast in sight, that the smoke of campfires was apparent. He does not wonder in his journal who these people were, but he would not have thought their insights, their pharmacology, their knowledge of riverine ecology, their pathfinding skills, any match for his own.
They and their way of knowing were little more than a curiosity for him.
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I AM NOT CAMPED in anything like a “pristine landscape” at Cape Foulweather. The mountain ranges running up and down the Oregon coast have, for example, been swept by natural fire for thousands of years. When I first began visiting here, most of the clearcuts apparent on its slopes were recent ones. Walking these plots of fifty acres or more, passing the inert stumps and the burned-out craters of slash piles, I most often felt grief, not anger. The damage to this once heavily forested ground is greater than what any natural fire has ever caused. Thoroughly exposed soil is vulnerable to erosion from the heavy winter rains that characterize temperate-zone rain forests. The minerals and nutrients a fire would have left behind have been hauled away in the form of merchantable logs; and the loggers and the heavy equipment they brought with them have unintentionally carried in the seeds of exotic plants, which quickly took advantage of the disturbed ground to establish themselves. Once established, some of these “weedy species” drove out native species, and the original ecosystem unraveled.
Clearcutting, as an industrial practice to effect cost-efficient logging, has not been in use long enough for timber managers to be certain exactly what the consequences of employing it might be. The timber industry likes to say that the clearcuts here have been restored or replanted, but these are not the right verbs. It would be more accurate to say that the land is now farmed, because, most often, only one species of tree, Douglas-fir, is replanted. It is favored over all the other trees that once made up the forest here because it is the most valuable of all these trees commercially. Modern lumber production has been streamlined in such a way that this one tree now works better than any of the others in the industrial corridor where wood fiber is brought to market and sold. Biogeographers have argued for years that disrupting natural ecosystems on an industrial scale—mountaintop removal to expose coal seams, clearcutting, large-scale corporate farming, and damming rivers that were historically defined by huge salmon runs—establishes new ecosystems over such a short period of time that long-term consequences are not immediately apparent. Similarly, when British colonizers arrived in India, when Alexander entered Egypt, or when Arab science and philosophy came to the Iberian Peninsula, cultures quickly changed. And with these changes, of course, strong reactionary arguments about the value of an original purity arose, with enormous political, social, and economic consequences.
After such massive biological and cultural disturbances, how is one to evaluate or even construe the meaning of any conjectured primal state of ecological purity, let alone states of cultural purity?
I cannot easily characterize the plant communities of the second- and third-growth forests that surround me at Cape Foulweather. I find it difficult, therefore, to unilaterally condemn an industry (or a culture) for what has taken place here since Cook first glassed these slopes. But it has struck me that one challenge Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection holds up for us, in addition to reckoning with the meaning of the “immigrant” plants and creatures that turn up in a second-growth forest, is the more unsettling idea that undisturbed ecosystems still exist in a constant state of change, with some relationships changing slowly, others more rapidly. Today’s so-called natural landscape is not yesterday’s natural landscape. Heraclitus, insisting that permanence was an illusion, ran afoul of philosophers who believed a putative state of impermanence threatened the very foundation of “stable” societies like Hellenistic Greece. Likewise, Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace met substantial resistance to their idea that biological life changes over time. Darwin’s contemporary the geologist Charles Lyell was ridiculed for his belief that the ground itself was ever in a state of change. How else, he argued, were the seashells found embedded in the sedimentary rock of mountain peaks to be explained?
When Copernicus insisted that Earth was not the center of the universe, and then Darwin and Wallace declared that man was not its ultimate creature, and then Jung and Freud made it clear that the rational mind was not the whole story for Homo sapiens, theologies had to adapt, or at least react. If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured “forests,” tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.
Or so it seems to me, fingering a silver coin in my pocket and sitting on the close-cropped slope of Cape Foulweather, waiting for a storm to blow in.
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WALKING THE STREAM COURSES of the cape, I rise from damp intimate hollows through patches of primordial forest, into high, natural openings from which I can see far inland and, in the opposite direction, silent water out to the very edge of the sky. The chiaroscuro faces of the inland mountains, most of them, are scarred, inscribed with a filamentary network of roads and way-tracks to accommodate logging machinery, firefighting crews, and the maintenance vehicles that service power lines and cell towers. At sea, the wind-burnished water, lifted by waves and pushed onward by currents, bears trawlers and, farther out, bulk freighter traffic. Those square miles preserve no history of what is happening, as I watch. The whitecaps on a windy day collapse, the ships’ wakes disappear, the skittering takeoff track of a seabird fades out, leaving no record of its having been there. A glaucous-winged gull gliding above me takes the invisible line it writes in the sky with it as it slides downwind, a line that ties on a slant a cloudless airy cerulean sky with the dense black-green of the ocean.
An active tabula rasa, the ocean, with its leaden and bellwether skies.
These scenes, inland and oceanward, as I follow creeks and elk trails through patches of old-growth forest, or put my binoculars on some anomaly seaward, encourage two thoughts that have organized my perceptions in nature for decades. First, diversity is not a mere characteristic of life—the wands of a salmonberry bush in front of me, say, stand erect differently from the wands of
sword fern beside it; or, out there, a harbor seal, a sea mammal, pursues its prey, a canary rockfish. Diversity is a condition necessary for life. Diversity creates the biological tensioning that makes life in general vigorous and sustainable. It’s diversity that ensures perpetuity. The loss of diversity, on the other hand, threatens all life with extinction.
The second thought is that understanding strategies for successfully adapting to change in an ecosystem—change, like diversity, being part of the foundation that perpetuates life—has long been the central responsibility of wisdom keepers in every human society. Their special skill was, and is, the ability to recall multiple techniques for human survival. This library of possible scenarios represents a crucial repository in each society. Whether the change facing a people comes on swiftly, like the protean surface of the ocean for the ocean strider, or arrives slowly, so slowly that it masquerades as unchanging permanence, like trees standing in a primordial forest, the responsibility of the wisdom keeper is to recognize the early signs of significant change, to look into the past, and to locate, again, a through line to the future.
Conceding the inevitability of change is not the same as passively accepting whatever change comes along. By putting economic growth on an equal footing with the preservation of human health, by promoting a need to possess and to consume that borders on the pathological, and by permitting industries to run roughshod over landscapes in order to create financial profit, the governments of industrialized nations have supported the changes that are primarily responsible for the befouled and poisonous environment that in many places has become our heritage. What resistance humanity is able to mount to the juggernaut that many call “the economy” is essentially an objection to the indifference toward human and nonhuman life that drives the juggernaut. A clearcut is not the outward sign of a healthy economy but of an indifference to life. And the denigrated “weedy species” that have arrived to replace some of the native species after the trees are harvested are not lesser beings, but a sign of life’s fundamental resistance to the threat of extinction.
When I pause in a clearing to glance west at the setting sun, at the horizontal reach and vertical thrust of cathedral rays there rendered visible by clouds—with their tints of pink and salmon, of tawny orange and ocherous yellow, and some evenings, dragon’s-blood reds—I try not to let it pass as only the striking image of a particular waning afternoon—the clarity just then of the air, and the less uniform color of the sea—but to see the inflammation as a conflagration, and wonder whether it’s only a delusion to wish for the continuation of promising human life on a planet we are remaking with the Sixth Extinction. What would happen to our plans for survival if we were no longer stymied by a belief in the virtue of permanence or no longer distracted by the hope of returning to a world that has already come and gone?
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WHEN I WAS a boy most of the model planes I assembled were the planes of warfare—fighters and bombers. American boys were encouraged back then to think of life, broadly speaking, in these terms—combat, and the unending struggle necessary to make things right. The model plane that has remained longest in my life, though, the plane that I have had the greatest affinity with, is a passenger aircraft from the 1930s, a four-engine seaplane called the Martin M-130. Today I keep a 1⁄72-scale wood model of an M-130, the China Clipper, in the room where I write. It has a twenty-inch wingspan and is dressed in Pan American Airways livery. When I was young, this plane represented for me the possibility of traveling to the faraway world. This type of large amphibious aircraft, along with its sisters at that time, the Boeing 314 Clipper and the Sikorsky S-42, needed only a stretch of relatively calm open water in order to put down at seaside locales—Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Singapore, Cape Town. In my imagination all these places—the quintessence of the exotic for a California boy in the mid-1950s—were characterized by continuous balmy weather and endless sunshine.
The Martin M-130, all but forgotten now, drew extraordinary attention when it debuted. One hundred and fifty thousand people gathered at Alameda, California, to watch the China Clipper take off from San Francisco Bay on its first transpacific flight, on November 22, 1935. The promise of adventure these planes incorporated—a Depression-era version of the nineteenth-century Grand Tour—was short-lived, however. Their movements were soon restricted by the onset of World War II. Some believe the Hawaii Clipper was shot down by Japanese fighter planes over the Pacific east of Manila, on July 29, 1938. The Philippine Clipper, on loan to the U.S. Navy, flew into a mountainside in California, on January 21, 1943. And the China Clipper, based in Miami during the war, hit a submerged object on landing at Port of Spain, Trinidad. It sank on January 8, 1945. These three were the only M-130s ever built.
Despite their short lives and violent endings, these airborne “clipper ships” were potent symbols for me of an expanding (and, of course, contracting) world. They held out the possibility of pursuing a life of adventure and, at the same time, represented the risk that attaches to any such quest. As a seventeen-year-old in Greenwich, England, I walked through and clambered over as much of the dry-docked tea clipper Cutty Sark as the ship’s guards would permit. It was the last clipper of its kind and I was desperate to get the feel of it—its shrouds, the catted anchors, the glass dome of the binnacle compass, the rows of belaying pins. I wanted to climb the mainmast to the crosstrees, to gaze down and to look out away from up there.
In my unexperienced mind, the M-130 became a symbol for me of casting off, of the potential and promise inherent in departing the known.
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COOK’S RESOLUTION, a converted collier, was a compact 111-foot three-masted vessel with a crew of 110, including officers. Its shallow draft permitted it to sail close to shore, and its bluff bows and the relatively light armament it carried gave it storage room enough between decks to sail long distances without being resupplied (except for water, wood, and fresh provisions). The ship was square-rigged on the main- and foremasts; the mizzen was square-rigged on top, with a fore-and-aft sail on a boom below, making the ship a type of barque. Fore and aft between its three masts, and between its bowsprit and foremast, and on booms extending from its spars, the Resolution carried a variety of jib sails, trysails, spankers, and possibly, above the mainsails, royals. It occasionally carried, in addition, topgallants on its fore- and mainmasts, and above them, conceivably, moonrakers, to wring the last bit of advantage out of a favorable wind.
This once precise and vibrant vocabulary of seaman’s argot, of now-opaque terms for sheets of canvas, like spritsails, drivers, bonnets, and spinnakers, is today completely lost to most of us. They are sounds without referents, like the distinction between a ship’s tender and its snow, or the purpose of a dog thimble in a ship’s running rigging, or the position of a ship’s dolphin striker. In Cook’s time, sailors were expected to know a jib sail from a studding sail in the dark, and how to raise or strike each one quickly, in any weather, at any hour. The effective management of it all was dazzling.
At the Oregon Historical Society Museum in Portland, a meticulously constructed wood model of HMS Resolution is occasionally put on display. I’ve gone several times to the museum and sat in a chair for a few hours each time studying it. Among other things, it’s possible to learn from this model that from the eleven nine-paned window panels in the captain’s cabin, in the stern of the ship, nine facing aft and two facing forward on the cabin’s wings, Cook was able to take in all but about 25 degrees of the horizon. The droop of foot ropes, called horses, on the spars and of ratlines on the mast shrouds contrasts sharply with the straight taut lines of stays and guys, the standing rigging that secures the masts. And a helmsman’s view forward from the double wheel is partially blocked by the ship’s yawl (stored inverted on the midship hatches) and by standing rigging secured at the beakhead, below the bowsprit.
The trimness of the model give
s a viewer the impression that whatever the sea might throw at it, the ship will weather the blow. It appears prepared for all eventualities. On the three voyages that culminated Cook’s career, masts were, indeed, sprung; dry rot spread through the ship’s framing timbers, ruining them; the hull of the Endeavour was stove in; and storms tore the ship’s running rigging loose and ripped its sails to shreds. But the men sailed on, with eerie indifference to the threats they faced, like being washed overboard or falling to their death on the spar deck. It was widely known, certainly, that work for men crewing a sailing ship was unremittingly demanding, fatiguing, and dangerous; less well known today, because illiterate sailors left so few records, was how unconsoling and unremunerative the work was. By temperament, most sailors, according to their biographers, were rebellious, strongly fraternal, belligerent, hardy, and unsympathetic. Like other naval captains who employed civilian crews, Cook had to convince them that what they stood to accomplish as explorers, by their obedience and diligence, was worth their injuries, the punishment he doled out, and the diet of terrible food they were served. I would prefer to have heard in full any one of a commanding officer’s profanity-laced exhortations to his crew to serve the expedition well, than to have access only to the brief sanitized summaries of these harangues and cajoles that turn up in officers’ journals, where one finds very few comments or observations from ordinary seamen on what, if anything, the discovery and charting of an unknown world might have meant to them.
Another book I once took with me to Cape Foulweather—which I read in a motel room in a nearby town, after a different storm drove me off the cape—was a Dictionary of Disasters at Sea During the Age of Steam, 1824–1962, a two-volume work. I could find no comparable record for sailing ships in the eighteenth century, but sensed that these volumes would nevertheless convey the gist of what might await a crew like Cook’s. The books reported, briefly and bluntly, the fate of many ships lost at sea in those years, or described incidents where there was great loss of life though the ship itself did not sink. Thousands of sailors were washed overboard in storms in an era when few of them knew how to swim. Fire spread through ships after an accident in the galley, a hull was can-openered by an uncharted rock, a ship was dismasted by a typhoon or entombed by a rogue wave or overwhelmed by leaks. Ships were idled in the doldrums and ran out of water and food. The dead were shoved overboard, the living ate bits of rope and hoped for rain to fill their buckets.