by Barry Lopez
News that legal title to the 64,000-acre coffee plantation on Isla San Cristóbal that they planned to revitalize was encumbered (which reached them in Los Angeles) was, for the time being, a setback. But the colonists were not discouraged. They simply rededicated themselves to achieving the larger goal—making the colony economically sustainable by capturing and freezing lobsters for export to the Ecuadorian mainland. They’d been forced to leave behind in San Pedro the equipment needed to run the freezer in Wreck Bay properly but were confident they could cobble something together until they could retrieve the machinery.
On the morning of August 19, 1960, the captain of the Western Trader found the dock at Wreck Bay too dilapidated to accommodate the ship. The ramshackle village they expected to see was actually a settlement in good shape; and the handful of needy peasants they’d imagined greeting were actually about a thousand relatively happy Ecuadorians. Welcoming and polite, the Galapageans were puzzled by the notion that their government thought they needed help. And when the refrigeration engineer came to report to the others on the condition of the freezer plant they expected to take over, he said it was beyond repair.
It took four or five days for the Arcadian dream of the Island Development Company to fall apart completely. It is not clear precisely what sabotaged the colonists’ plan to establish a mid-Pacific utopia, dispensing the fruit of its labor to local residents and leading exemplary lives guided by egalitarian principles; but the endemic corruption of Ecuador’s government, and a lack of full disclosure on the part of a couple of Ecuadorian businessmen negotiating with the American organizer of the expedition, seemed a good place to start—if one didn’t concede that the plan was daft to begin with.
One of the colonists, a young man of nineteen at the time, later wrote that the enterprise was “a flight of mad fancy that captured the imagination at the cost of ignoring too many realities,” such as the distance between the Galápagos colony and potential Ecuadorian markets for their lobsters.
I met with this young colonist one afternoon some fifty years later, at his home in Redmond, Oregon, and listened to him describe what he’d gotten himself into all those years ago. He’d taken many lessons away from the experience, he said—he himself had stayed on in the Galápagos, working at odd jobs, before moving to mainland Ecuador to work for a while—but the lesson he most wanted to discuss in detail with me was the group’s belief that they would be helping out the Ecuadorian community of Puerto Baquerizo Moreno at Wreck Bay. He said his companions had so convinced themselves of the worthiness of this idea, were so imbued with the notion that they were performing honorable work in the world, that achieving one of their goals, to “vastly improve” the lives of the Galapageans, was for them simply a given. The reality—that the Galapageans were doing fine, better than the colonists, actually—came as such a shock that the dream of being benefactors in a remote part of the world fell apart for most of them in a matter of hours—and some of the colonists had invested their life’s savings in the venture.
The man I interviewed, Stan Bettis, said the impact of the realization that they had been foolish, that they were the victims of a confidence game that depended on their innocence about the world beyond their home borders, was staggering. “We weren’t going to improve anyone’s life, and we were faced with the wreckage of our own,” he said.
The idealistic vision of designing a human community in complete harmony with a place, of a group of people coming together to deal fairly and lovingly with one another, through good times and hard, is an aspiration deeply embedded in Western thinking about our own future. It accounts for the magnetism and popularity, at different points in our history, of concepts like the Christian’s Isles of the Blest, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, the sailor’s Fiddler’s Green, and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, with its story of the Tibetan elysium of Shangri-La, evocations of irenic sanctuaries far from the trials of human life, places without violence or greed, Edens where no one covets or disrespects. A belief in the existence of such places tinged the thinking and shaped the expectations of many explorers poring over nautical charts, in an era when considerable white space was still left to the imagination. When Cook put an end to the notion that a habitable continent might exist in the Southern Ocean, he nevertheless left a blank space behind on late eighteenth-century maps. If there actually was a continent within the ambit of his circumnavigation of the ice barrier he had found in all longitudes, he said it was a frigid and inhospitable place. It was; but fifty years later an Estonian explorer named Thaddeus von Bellinghausen discovered its shore, and the filling in of Earth’s last large blank spot began.
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AFTER COOK, we were able to locate the coordinates of our position on Earth dependably with sets of numbers—latitudes and longitudes. They gave us a sensation of precision and irrefutability, and they glow today on the screens of our handheld GPS units. We no longer define our positions by the contours of the land we stand on, the texture of the soil, the colors and density of the vegetation, the rete of gravity-driven water in rills, brooks, and rivers. We fully embrace the coordinates Cook gave us, but in everyday use they represent a kind of Esperanto.
After Cook, there were far fewer places left for men to imagine they could run off to. Popular misconceptions about life on islands in the South Pacific, which Cook inadvertently encouraged, would nevertheless remain viable for many decades, well into the present, the idea of escaping the disappointments and burdens of quotidian life by abandoning home and sailing for one of the Pacific’s tropical destinations. (Gauguin went there to paint, Robert Louis Stevenson to write.) Cook’s voyages widened the gap between rational thinkers, on the one hand, and mystics like the metaphysical poets, working with another sort of geography; and the promise of landscapes or situations that might provide humanity with everlasting relief from its troubled dreams began to fade from the Western imagination. After Cook, humanity was forced to accept the absence of a boundary beyond which the prospects for humanity would surely improve, though that tradition lives on with the quest to put people on the moon and to explore the outer planets.
Humanity was left with an almost completely explored planet, faced with seemingly intractable moral and social problems, but, importantly, with a not yet fully tested imagination.
William Blake, prominently in Western history, wanted to rid the human imagination of a particular kind of darkness, the darkness that leads to despair, to hatred and war, by opening it wider to both the real and the numinous dimensions of the world. He wanted humanity to realize the immeasurable breadth of the human imagination, its capacity to rise above fatal despair, even as the world grew darker at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Somewhere, Camus wrote: “The world is beautiful, and outside it there is no salvation.”
Blake and Camus were asking us to set aside our cherished illusions and to engage instead with the problems they both saw coming.
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ONE WARM AUGUST AFTERNOON I was trying to comprehend a technical article about the refraction of light, trying to get around the dense mathematics in it and arrive at the heart of the miracle. I was seated on the hood of my truck, leaning back against the windshield for support. The ocean lay off to the left in its silence. I had my binoculars beside me, to fetch birds that were occasionally passing through, far away; but for some minutes my attention had really been fixed on the dark line of a spruce forest, a familiar sight to me, a mile or so to the north. I knew this forest, having driven past it often over the years. It had always seemed to me impenetrable. The trees grew so close to one another that the interior of the wood appeared entirely closed to sunlight. And because so many dead limbs lay jackstrawed between them, the trees presented the visitor with a formidable navigational maze. A dirt track, a skid road, separated this sprawling forest from a recovering clearcut to the south. The wood was a thing apar
t.
I set the article about light aside, put some things in a rucksack, locked the truck, and took the road from the landing downhill. I briefly lost sight of the forest walking through the steep valley below my camp, regaining it when I reached a ridge. The same logging road led me directly to its edge, a ruler-straight perimeter, like the stockaded wall of a fort.
Fifty feet or so after I entered the wood, I turned around to mark the scene I’d just left. I could still see the clearcut beyond the picket line of trees lit up by a cloudless sky. I was viewing it now from a shadowed place, like the entrance to a cave. Wild animals, predators as well as their prey, often travel this way, slightly inland from light falling on a clearing, from an exposure that might compromise them. I went in deeper, glancing back occasionally, fearful of losing the scene, which grew less unified as I walked on. If I lost it, how would I get back? Which direction would I go?
At some point my anxiety increased noticeably. I’d reached an emotional limit. I could barely discern now the sunlit landscape behind me. The light appeared as tiny rays, like stars in a night sky or the sun viewed through a colander. All around me was shadow, a dimness with no flux to it to indicate the source of light. I sat down at the base of a tree, facing the clearcut, perhaps two or three hundred yards away. I felt obscured here, unknown to the world. Above me was only dimness, no shred of sky. The dark enveloped me like a gas. I could still see where I should go if I felt the onset of true terror, which might easily emerge from this untenanted wood, triggered by the surfacing of vivid memories of threat, of menace and violence, recalled from unsettling movies. I tried to prevent those images from taking shape in my conscious mind, from turning me back toward the faint wall of distant sunlight.
Eventually I found a calmness that let me remain braced against the same tree but this time facing in the opposite direction, into the deeper dark, a place I knew was Earthly but which I imagined to be like the darkness at the edge of the expanding universe, the unbounded Empty Nothing that the universe was hurling itself into at the speed of light.
I strained to hear any sound, but detected none. This deep in the wood, there was no hint of movement. And then, without warning, I encountered anguish. The wall of darkness in front of me seemed suddenly dense with the kind of agony and despair I perused nearly every day in international reports about the fate of nameless thousands of the defeated, in the Horn of Africa, in South Sudan, and in Syria, their lives falling like black snow in some bleak corner of the world, these lives made expendable by the indifference of those who’ve never heard of them, or who, if they have, have looked away. In the gloom before me I saw the vast terrain of the defenseless, murdered.
I had wanted, I suppose, to frighten myself by walking so far into the forest. Instead, I let my head drop to my chest and felt impotent compassion, the weight of the horror we force on one another in our manic quests for greater satisfaction.
I left this spot, a watchtower from which I had looked into an absence of light, a space seemingly infinite in every direction, and step by step reentered a world of differentiated objects, conscious again of the force of gravity, pulling my booted feet back to the soft duff of the forest floor. Moment by moment, I waded into the growing light. Whatever might have compelled me to run from the darkness behind me, to run from whatever ghouls it might have harbored, was no longer present. I felt weirdly cleansed of the ancient cowardice that causes us—for reasons of self-preservation, they say—to turn away from the suffering of strangers.
I came into the clearing unable to feel any indignation about the butchery apparent in the clearcut before me, unable to condemn anyone for the failure of spirit that led them to feeling indifferent where the life of a stranger was concerned. I wanted only the flow of water down my throat, and to return home, not caring how long this might take, not fearing nightfall with its obliterations and demons.
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I COULD SEE CHANGES in the skies to the north at dusk that told me the storm was now on the doorstep. I made another cup of coffee and my supper and checked the tension in the guylines anchoring the rain fly over my tent. I could tell from the flocking behavior of some of the birds, or so I thought, coming in off the ocean or headed in larger groups than usual for shelter, that the storm was only hours off.
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ONE BRIGHT MARCH DAY I sat at the edge of cliffs that mark the foot of Cape Foulweather. I had spread open on my lap a sketch map of Cook’s 1778 approach. I tried to impose it on the ocean before me. No whitecaps this afternoon, as there had been for him, just the sea’s hard metallic scales, rippling like chain mail over the shoulders of shallow rollers arriving in sets of five from the west. Cook approached that morning to within about ten miles, according to the research behind this sketch, then crossed back over his own wake and stood out to sea for the night. After several days of approaching the coast and retreating because of heavy weather, Cook departed, bearing away to the southwest with his consort, HMS Discovery, and altogether some two hundred officers and sailors, having had a glimpse of the last temperate rain forest on the planet to be discovered. Ashore, perhaps a few Alsean hunters studied the thing that had come so close during those four days, perhaps as close as three miles. They wouldn’t have been able to make out the two barefoot sailors standing at the head of the lower mainmast, straining to read the near-shore waters for possible reefs. Like the other ratings aboard, these men would have been wearing short breeches tied below the knee—petticoat trousers—and short double-breasted woolen pea jackets over collarless shirts and a red waistcoat. Around their necks, black silk scarves; on their heads, brimless black three-cornered hats. On the right foot of one, perhaps, was the tattoo of a rabbit, on his left foot a rooster, charms to keep him from drowning. What the Alsean hunters would have appreciated most about the two men was the unbroken intensity of their scrutiny of the near-shore waters.
A “canoe” of this size would not have been incomprehensible to the Indians. What would have seemed unusual was the absence of paddles and the spider-web maze of lines about the main deck—braces, stays, clew lines, lifts, tacks, nave lines, leech lines, halyards, and sheets. And the towering masts, with a dozen canvas sails full of wind. And the single man at the double helm, seemingly alone in controlling the direction of travel. And the clear glass windowpanes of Cook’s quarters, above the wood transom in the stern.
Or maybe, like Aborigines seen walking along the beach as Cook approached the eastern shore of Australia in April 1770, they glanced only briefly to seaward before returning to the pace and importance of what they were doing, paying the ship no further mind.
Twenty-seven years after Cook’s landfall at the cape, Lewis and Clark would arrive at the mouth of the Columbia. Nineteen years after that, Ranald MacDonald would be born at the river’s mouth, on the south bank.
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THE STORM ARRIVES late in the evening. It batters the tent with pellets of rain the size of honeybees. The wind blows hard through the night and into the following afternoon, yanking at the crowns of trees, hurling rain in sheets I can hear breaking over the metal body of my truck. The following afternoon the wind tapers off to squalls crashing through, and to spiraling vacuums of mist that cause my inner ears to ache. The sun sets behind aubergine clouds and darkness overcomes the clearing, absorbing the truck and the tent huddled in its lee. No stars are visible. I pass another damp night. In the morning I pin a few things to a line, which begin to dry in the pale light. Maybe they actually will. Before the day is out, I will have hiked down into one of the valleys of the Siletz and returned from the enlivened creek flowing there. Even in this logged-over landscape, soaked and gleaming, contradicting the apparent desolation of the clearcut, where stillness now accompanies the silence, I can imagine something like the original creation, however mythic that thought might be. Or the blueprint of another creation, unknown
and unplanned.
The wildness around me here, the clearing where I camp and the stands of undisturbed old-growth Sitka spruce beyond, within which the brightest light at midday is still only crepuscular, is not a point of arrival for me. It is my point of departure.
Skraeling Island
Mouth of Alexandra Fjord
East Coast of Ellesmere Island
Nunavut
Canada
78°54'02" N 75°36'39" W
I’m forty-two years old and have not been back in the Canadian High Arctic for six years. I’ve missed it, the look of this country in summer especially; but it has not missed me, of course, an occasional visitor, someone inspired by its line and color, by its immensity. If the harassments of everyday life, the emotional tangle and constricted spaces we all must navigate daily take a toll, here is where I’d come to revive, to wash out my clothes. This quiet landscape, the tundra under my thighs at this moment, indifferent as it might be to the presence of a squatter, is nevertheless heartening. It responds to my inquiring hand, to my scrutinizing eye, my flâneur’s search for nothing in particular—or it will, if I demonstrate by my gestures a degree of respect, a capacity for wonder. This, at any rate, is the belief that guides me here, a belief that the physical land—a broadly encompassing term—is sentient and responsive, as informed by its own memory as it is by the weather, and offering within the obvious, the tenuous.