Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  But perhaps this particular situation will not materialize, and the calculus here is incorrect.

  Where are the rutters, the compilations of sailing instructions and warnings, that we need to successfully navigate a threatening future? What will prove to be the metaphorical gridwork of latitudes and longitudes, the dependable charts for human navigation that will let us heal the rift between knowing something and feeling something, a chasm the Enlightenment created for us when it privileged the ability to know over the ability to feel? What will be the grid of metaphorical rhumb lines and meridians in a new portolano, one that will not permit the integrity and profundity of the local to slip away in order to serve a vision of the grand?

  Lines of latitude and longitude speak most eloquently to the head. Mastering them can make a person feel confident and smart. In a similar way, committing to memory the myriad associations among species of animals and plants in a particular locale can make one feel competent when navigating a route over land. The Alsean hunter knew where he was and where he was going in a way different from Cook’s. Cook’s view was an overview, peering downward, figuratively, from a great height to take in specific details. Hawai‘i, for example, was a detail. The Alsean’s view was upward, from fine distinctions into the grandeur of the larger sphere that was Cook’s dominant reality.

  It seems a person would need both points of view to become fully informed, a knowledge of both the extreme complexity of the local (which Cook had neither the time nor the inclination to acquire) and the unbounded enormity of the grand overview. If one has a capacity for appreciating both, the customary arrangements of space and time that constrain imagination become veils. They are no longer rigid walls. The old arrangements of time and space that contribute to a sense of impossibility when we face the worst situations are no longer able to defeat our capacity to imagine.

  With the indigene’s acute awareness of the depth and intricacy of the local, the myriad relationships that, attended to, create the sustaining wholeness of his immediate world, and with a visionary’s awareness of a fabric comprised of all these local universes, more options for humanity become apparent.

  The idea that a person could be both indigenously rooted and internationally aware beggars belief, but the emergence of individual traditional elders at international forums on the future, and the world-wise lucidity of their testimony, implies the existence of more such people.

  I think of Ranald MacDonald as an unfinished man, not as an elder, because the erratic path of his life suggests he was never able to determine what he meant by his life. He became, instead, a kind of poseur, an actor. This is why Elizabeth Custer did not take him seriously. To her, he was inauthentic. Cook, of course, on the other hand, mostly knew what he wanted his life to mean and knew that humanity would benefit from his having filled in most of the large geographical spaces still blank at the time of his birth; but he lacked MacDonald’s intuition about menace, and MacDonald’s sense, I think, that one day the world of nation-states, which Cook was helping to shape, might falter, and that then the world would need to be mapped out all over again.

  If Cook was the person with an overview, MacDonald existed somewhere in that same reality but with an awareness that the local knowledge of his Chinook family was slowly becoming almost worthless. It was being erased. His effort to warn the Japanese about the cultural nerve gas that had felled his own people was prescient. He prefigured the utility of the bicultural mind in international affairs, and the conventional failures of his life seem inconsequential alongside this.

  * * *

  —

  ON WHAT WERE SOMETIMES melancholy evenings for me, when I would watch the last movements of the ocean before the night’s walls fell, leaving only the sound of the surf, I would occasionally recall the life journeys set out in works like Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor or Brahms’s A German Requiem, the human passage from abject grief about life’s realities to exalted peace. My knowledge of classical music is thin, but some pieces have spoken to me so forcefully over the years they’ve become unforgettable. Music that evokes the darkness in our lives but which at the same time elevates a listener’s emotions by transcending that darkness remains with me because it is exactly this ability to launch the heart in the face of despair that I find astonishing in certain singular people I’ve met. They have every reason to give up—poverty, the threat of prison, ethnic persecution, civil war, dictatorship—yet they do not falter. Something in the lyricism of this music calls forth feelings of hope, of faith in the enduring ability of ordinary people to overcome difficulty. (It does if one’s cultural foundation happens to include a sensitivity to this particularly Western musical tradition, which it very easily might not of course for, say, the Igbo, the Yi Chinese, the Inuit, and so on.)

  Early in the Brahms Requiem, the hardship and longing Western people experience in life are limned, evoking the sorrow they feel, knowing that death is inevitable; and then their capacity to transcend death is celebrated. This path out of darkness unfolds in seven sections. In the fifth section, “You [Who] Now Are Sorrowful,” the soprano’s voice, trembling on the highest notes, releases feelings of hope in the listener, prefiguring the phrases of profound peace with which the seventh section ends.

  No doubt this music, as I say, speaks this way only to a small portion of humanity; but the arrangement of these tones, and the changes in tempo that deal with human suffering, sorrow, and death, make it possible for some who listen to rise above despair.

  Other musics I’ve experienced in foreign settings apparently healed and inspired the strangers around me as profoundly, though I remain ignorant of the themes and intentions of these other composers. It is also true that some composers—Mahler comes immediately to mind—who address the darkness we all face are not as popular in our age because there is not sufficient lyrical relief in their work, while certain other composers—Mendelssohn would be one—are less appealing in the modern age because there is not enough darkness in their compositions.

  Music has a remarkable capacity to revitalize one’s expectations, music as different as Bach’s Mass in B Minor and John Luther Adams’s modern Pulitzer Prize–winning composition, Become Ocean.

  If I remember, I always try to bring recordings of music like this with me on a trip.

  * * *

  —

  THE IDEA THAT I would somehow encounter an illuminating insight at Cape Foulweather, a coming together there of complex feelings I had about injustice, about the apparent intractability of ethnic and religious factionalism, that I might discover a cause for hope, seemed thoroughly uneducated to me some days. Delusional. But I persisted. I subscribe, I suppose, to a popular notion, that “the [undisturbed] land heals,” that it can bring the disheveled or distracted mind to a state of calm transcendence. Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one’s own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self. But my days at the cape were sometimes too much like days in my studio. I was consciously pursuing insight, the sort of thing that might come suddenly to the writer as well as to the reader at the end of a short story. What I trusted in, and what did not exist in my studio, was what Iñupiaq Eskimo acquaintances in Alaska call (in translation) “earth and the great weather.” The earth is always in a state of enduring change—ice breaking up on the rivers in spring, caribou grazing on the tundra, red foxes preying on northern red-backed voles—but it gives us an image, or an illusion, of constancy. Passing through and over the land is the weather. Experiencing this fundamental dynamic, the enduring earth and the changing weather, and not the static interior of my rooms, was the right setting in my mind for getting out of myself and trying to address the questions I had.

  The cape in its entirety, then, occasionally served as “the larger scheme of things” for me.
>
  * * *

  —

  ONE NIGHT I woke to soft sounds. I listened hard for clear definition, but the disturbance was difficult to characterize, even when I came fully awake. These were sensations occurring between a sound and a feeling, but unmistakably there. I rose to my knees, pivoted, and slowly unzipped the front flap of the tent. Five Roosevelt elk. They stopped grazing, looked about, as if there might be other beings than me staring at them, and slowly walked on. I dressed and stepped out into the cool air. It wasn’t too dark to follow them a ways through the recovering clearcut. I navigated by feeling my way along the gravel road they were following beneath a clear sky and its stars. The preternatural silence suggested something imminent, or that I was at a crossroads between my own and another world.

  I thought about these mute elk, about the fact that it was “the middle of the night,” and about the absence of light to navigate by. I could barely make out the shape of my tent with the truck parked next to it, fifty feet away. The two loomed together like some sort of space vehicle, to which I was attached by a tether. The salient thing in that moment, however, was how the elk had just appeared. And then disappeared.

  A friend of mine, a physician, once spoke to me about an expedition he had been on which had taken him to see mountain gorillas at the Virunga volcanoes in Congo, orangutans in Borneo, Komodo dragons in Indonesia, and giant pandas in China, all living “in their natural habitat.” When I related this story to another friend of mine, he pointed out that these animals were protected by armed guards, and that people came to see them every day in organized groups. “These are wild animals, yes,” he said, “but they are not free animals.”

  I’d never made this distinction, but saw that he was right. The elk that night were free animals. There was no expectation that they might entertain anyone, and they were not exotic enough to draw crowds. Their temporal schedules were their own. They browsed the mountainsides, drank from the creeks, slept where they would, gave birth in seclusion, and made do with the clearcuts and roads, even with hunters. They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wished.

  The poet Robinson Jeffers often explored the meaning of freedom, by which he meant not “freedom to do” but “freedom from.” For him, being free from unnecessary interruption and from scrutiny was essential to the moral, psychological, and artistic development of a human being, and of humanity in general. He believed freedom was more important than equality, a conviction that caused some critics to characterize Jeffers as a misanthrope. What he meant by taking this stance, though, I believe, was that equality was contingent on freedom. He might have been willing to go so far as to say that for humans wishing to establish and maintain a social contract, the sine qua non of a stable human society, they had to understand that this was not possible except in the hands of fully mature people, people, in the modern idiom, who had “gotten over themselves.”

  Perhaps I’m in a minority, feeling that the instability of my own country is partly the result of its support of an adolescent’s ideal—that people should be free to do whatever they want—and its obsession with personal gratification, whatever the cost. Lives without restraint are eventually ruinous, to those individuals and to the social and physical world around them. The hedge fund manager who amasses material wealth with no thought for the fate of the pensioner he cheats ruins lives. He is a kind of suicide bomber.

  The political rhetoric in my country of recent years has included the notion that America is reviled by the citizens of other countries because these citizens resent (or are jealous of) our freedom. The disturbing thing about this naïve thought is that relatively few people in America are able to lead lives in which they are truly free. Like citizens in a dictatorship, to survive they must learn to toe the lines they’ve been urged to toe, though they have grown to believe that this kind of regimented, obeisant, bounded existence actually represents freedom. They—we, I suppose—cannot risk thinking otherwise.

  I don’t hold myself apart from those who seem to me to be living with a misapprehension about freedom; but I find it alarming when someone says, for example, that their laptop is designed to do exactly what they want, when it was in fact designed to function efficiently only when the operator does what the machine wants. Or that the cubicles so many enter every morning (with no guarantee that their spot will be there the next day) really represent the shape of what the people in them might want for themselves and their families. Or that unsolicited phone calls, random police snooping, invasive “easy listening” music in public spaces, unnecessary searches at security checkpoints, and political and commercial microtargeting programs made possible by Big Data represent welcome intrusions.

  Jeffers hated this element of unconscious imprisonment in American culture and was marginalized as an artist for suggesting that such a thing existed.

  The elk I saw that night no doubt have someone’s drone waiting for them in their future, a curiosity machine for its owner’s idle entertainment, groping for titillating moments in a neighbor’s private life or looking for elk to poach.

  * * *

  —

  ON A CLEAR SUMMER AFTERNOON, gazing across the settled surface of the ocean from a high vantage point, and considering the horizontal border that runs between the blue rim of the bowl of the sky and the dark, opaque plain of the water, looking into all that unthreatening space, I sometimes thought of leaving, of a journey out across that tabula rasa of unstructured space; and I felt the questing energy inherent in that image rising up. Numerous human traditions include allegories in which a hero departs his or her homeland for an unknown land, a quest for wealth beyond the horizon—the wealth the Grail symbolizes, personal material wealth, or the wealth that redounds to a community when a hero slays a threatening monster in the outlands.

  How does one calculate real wealth today, confronted with that unparsed space? The questing heroes who came to the Americas from Europe and Russia, beginning in the fifteenth century, had no wealth in mind but material wealth. It was not other kinds of knowing that they were after, knowledge of the ways other humans dealt with things that were incomprehensible; and for most of them, geographical discoveries, though much was made of these later, were an afterthought. It was the possession of material wealth or of a potential source of that wealth that moved most of these explorers to action. And it was the legitimacy of such a quest, in the minds of many, that justified whatever was needed to succeed at this—theft, mayhem, dishonesty, genocide, parsimonious stockpiling. When denounced by people like Bartolomé de las Casas, the conquistadores said they worked for their god, and Sir Francis Drake held up his letter of marque.

  Where in all of this do the lives of formerly free animals, like the elk that passed by that night, fit? How do elk object to the drone? How does anyone resist the many forms of daily invasion? If one intends to run, what is the destination?

  * * *

  —

  THE CAMP I usually made on the cape was about 105 crow-fly miles south of the entrance to the Columbia River. The first Western trading post built there was erected on Chinook land in 1811 by representatives of John Jacob Astor’s newly founded Pacific Fur Company. (His company had the distinction of building the first American fort west of the Rocky Mountains, six years after Lewis and Clark arrived at the mouth of the Columbia.) Astor’s men made use of a Chinook trade network already in place, which extended from the river’s mouth north and south up and down the Pacific coast and far inland to the east along the Columbia River. The commerce in furs was lucrative for Astor, but political jockeying between Britain and the United States for the right to nationalize these fur-rich lands and to control the trade in them forced Astor to relinquish his foothold in Astoria to the North West Company in 1813 (later to merge with the Hudson’s Bay Company). The settlement at Astoria became Britain’s Fort George, and Astor concentrated afterward on monopolizing the fur trade around the Great Lakes and on the upper Missour
i River.

  John Jacob Astor amassed a staggering fortune marketing the pelts of lynx, wolverine, bear, ermine, beaver, fox, mink, marten, fisher, river otter, and wolf. When he died in 1848, he was the wealthiest man in America. In 1893 two of his grandsons built a bank in New York City at 21 West 26th Street, from which they managed part of the family’s business. My stepfather happened to buy this building in the late 1940s. In the late 1950s, when I was just entering my teens in New York, I could not get it out of my head how much wealth the Astors represented, wealth on a scale with the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. Thinking like a thirteen-year-old, I became convinced that the Astors had buried bags of silver dollars or stacks of banknotes in water- and vermin-proof boxes in the bowels of this building, where they would be overlooked by thieves more intent on cracking the door to a huge walk-in safe on the first floor.

  What my stepfather might have thought of my obsession with these riches I can’t guess. To humor me, though, and a friend of mine I invited to come along, he took us to the building’s subbasement one Saturday morning when his offices were closed. I had already located earlier a spot in the subbasement’s east wall where bricks were loose in the mortar. Working a few of them free and using a flashlight, I’d also discovered there was a crawl space running north and south behind the wall. My friend and I now worked more of the bricks loose and set them aside, creating a narrow portal through which we pulled ourselves.