Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  This was only one more example, Pete and I agreed, of how some angry or unstable people express their distress. Around the same time as the incident at Port Arthur, an Indonesian soldier killed nineteen people and wounded thirteen at an airport in Timika. And a former scoutmaster, Thomas Hamilton, shot and killed sixteen children, their teacher and then himself at a schoolhouse in Scotland.1

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  SEVEN MONTHS AFTER the massacre, Bryant was sentenced to prison “for the term of his natural life.” The Broad Arrow Café was torn down and the prison grounds were reconfigured. The local community would spend the ensuing years sorting out their emotional response to Bryant’s descent on Port Arthur. There would be much speculation about why he murdered so methodically and relentlessly, following two small children around the base of a tree, for example, until he’d shot them dead next to their dead mother.

  Bryant’s name came up for me during dinner once with an Australian friend visiting in Oregon. She was from Tasmania and told me she’d actually taught Bryant in a special class for children with learning disabilities, in Hobart, along with four other boys. All five, she said, were prone to violent behavior. According to her, two later killed themselves, and one of the other three, like Bryant, also committed murder. She characterized Bryant as obtuse and withdrawn, a brooder. He seemed always distracted, she said. And lonely. She believed he’d bought the surfboard—he didn’t know how to surf—in order to join a group of surfers who’d rejected him. When he inherited some money, she told me, he used it to travel to California several times so he could visit Disneyland. By himself.

  Her recollection of him as slow-witted and someone with limited social skills was later confirmed for me by a woman, a psychologist, who had employed Bryant as a yard worker for a while. She and her husband could finally no longer put up with Bryant’s interminable mumbling monologues, she said, and with his wandering errantly all over their lawn with the riding mower. She did not dislike him, she wrote me in a letter, but could do nothing to help him. (Around the time of his trial, to judge from news reports, it was popularly believed that Bryant was suffering from Asperger’s syndrome. A court-appointed psychiatrist agreed.)

  The policemen who arrested Bryant when, clothes ablaze, he ran out of a bed-and-breakfast he’d set fire to—he’d killed two people inside and left a third behind, tied to a staircase—smothered his flaming clothing and got him airlifted out for treatment to a hospital in Hobart that was also the destination of eighteen of the people Bryant had wounded. Numerous death threats were made against the officers who tried to save Bryant instead of killing him, and many Tasmanians said during the trial that they would kill Bryant in the courtroom if they could get close enough.

  The proper response to Bryant and the mayhem he was responsible for is grief. He is apparently unable either to comprehend the immorality of what he did or to understand his culpability. (He giggled in the docket during his sentencing and attempted to engage people in the courtroom to goof around with him.) To feel grief for everyone who was part of the tragedy. And admiration for those who managed to, or are still trying to, find their way out of the trauma. And gratitude to those who did not respond in violent ways but worked toward some semblance of a resurrected moral order in the midst of the hurricane Bryant unleashed.

  Australia does not kill people convicted of capital crimes. Bryant, who has spent virtually all of his years since being convicted in solitary confinement, has several times tried to kill himself. If he had been killed for what he did, it is unlikely he would have understood why.

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  WHENEVER I RECALL Port Arthur, though I’ll always carry images of the swift, indifferent violence of that April afternoon, I think most often of how beautiful the landscape there is, and how much of human endeavor, human endurance, is apparent in humanity’s effort to rebuild in the wake of catastrophe. In the boreal fall of 2008, fearful that in my own comfortable life in the United States I had lost a sense of real human plight, I traveled to Lebanon to visit refugee camps and then on to Tajikistan, at that time the most impoverished of the old Soviet Republics; then to Afghanistan and finally to northern Sumatra, where people were still trying to put their lives back together after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

  The local people I was directed to for interviews in these places by my host, Mercy Corps, the international relief agency, were men and women with great poise, great compassion, great capacity for understanding. Each day they systematically addressed themselves to meeting their neighbors’ basic human needs—physical safety, food and clean water, employment, and affection. These were people others deferred to naturally, because they knew them to be the most fully aware, the most trustworthy. And it was they who returned to me a sense of deep faith in the human capacity to overcome nearly every threat to the dignity and possibility of human life, in circumstances that call into question the ability of people to survive severe trauma emotionally and physically intact.

  Despite the fact that none of them was, formally, a tribal person, and that some were still in their thirties, these were elders. Not surprisingly, none was officially affiliated with their national government’s often-compromised plans to aggressively develop their country’s commercial infrastructure. Instead, in developing jobs, they leaned strongly toward arranging small loans for enterprising individuals from not-for-profit sources, declining to link up with large-scale business and government infrastructure.

  Standing there in my driveway that morning, reading about an unpredictable moment in the life of the psychopath Martin Bryant, I would have appreciated the counsel of an elder. How does one manage horror like this without cynicism, denial, or indifference? How does one not feel incapacitated by the inevitability of more Martin Bryants, more Stephen Paddocks (fifty-nine killed, more than five hundred wounded at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas), more Omar Mateens (forty-nine killed, more than fifty wounded at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando)?

  It’s little different from what happens when some militia’s rocket tears through a house, burning, maiming, and decapitating. You get up off the floor, tend to the wounded, bury the dead, clear the debris, and start over again. You seek consolation with your neighbors, help them recover from their disaster, and discuss with them strategies to mollify the angry, the indignant, the headstrong, the self-important, and the righteous. You nurture the belief that this is not all we are.

  At least this is what I heard men say one afternoon in a meeting hall in a northern Afghan village, Dūābī Ghōrband, when I asked about the Taliban. They spoke of their opposition to the Taliban, to militias of any kind, and of farming, and of the importance of caring for their children. What confounded me was that they were seemingly entirely unaware that others, all over the world, victimized by militias, thought as they did.

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  ONE EVENING I came across a brief article in the British journal Nature about the discovery of tiny zircon crystals in the Jack Hills of Western Australia. The crystals were dated to 4.27 billion years before the present. I immediately wrote to the two authors, asking if it might be possible to visit the site. I wanted to see the line and color of the place, find out how it was situated in the surrounding land, and of course learn from them how they found the crystals and which process they’d settled on to date them, and so on. I told them that, as chance had it, I was actually going to be flying to Perth, where they were both teaching at Curtin University, in the weeks ahead, en route from Zimbabwe to the Northern Territory. Could we get together?

  I never heard back from them. Several years later, when I returned to Perth with the intention of exploring the Jack Hills, we did catch up. One of the authors told me he hadn’t responded to my letter because “this is the sort of lunatic request you might get from an American.”

  His point made, he then went out of his way to help me. He drew
a detailed map of the roadless area in the Jack Hills where he and the other scientists had worked. He showed me samples of the rock formation in which they had found the crystals, so I might recognize the terrain and geology when I got there. He arranged for me to stay with the manager of the sheep station on which the search area in the Jack Hills was located. He also insisted on paying for our lunch that day.

  I flew up to Meekatharra from Perth, rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and drove west about 120 miles on an unsigned dirt track, arriving at the manager’s house in the late afternoon. He and his daughter had a meat pie in the oven, and he wanted to know whether I took milk with my tea. They could not have been more accommodating.

  That evening after supper I sat out on the veranda with the manager, taking our final cups of tea. When I asked, he set out for me some of the logistical problems he faces running a sheep station of this size (about 83 square miles) by himself, having to control feral animals grazing on the station as well as predators going after the lambs. He had to make sure in this dry country that the sheep had enough water. We ended up talking about how fortunate we’d each felt in the lives we’d chosen, and agreed that no matter what you did with your life, there was always more to know.

  A stone walkway led from the veranda across a small, neatly trimmed lawn to a hip-high hog-wire fence and, beyond that, an open yard. His plane, not a car, was parked there, under the converging crowns of two massive gums.

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  ON THAT SECOND EFFORT to connect with the geologists at Curtin University, I flew from the States to Sydney and then took the Indian Pacific passenger train to Perth. It departed Sydney every few days, crossed the Blue Mountains in the Great Dividing Range, and then went on to Adelaide before starting across the Nullarbor Plain on the longest stretch of straight railway in the world—296 miles. On the far side of the Nullarbor, a treeless, semiarid, hardly inhabited landscape, lay the historic gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie and the hills of the Darling Range, before the train dropped into Perth at the East Perth Terminal. The journey from Sydney, situated in a maritime climate, takes nearly four days and crosses the drainages of two of Australia’s three longest rivers, the Murray and the Darling, in pastoral country just west of the Great Dividing Range. The Nullarbor is casually referred to by Australians as “a desert,” but Australia’s truly formidable deserts—the Simpson, the Great Victoria, the Tanami, the Great Sandy—lie far to the north of the train line.

  Before we left Sydney I asked the porter in my sleeping car if he thought I might ride in the train’s locomotive for part of the journey. From there, I said to him, I’d have a view forward of the train as well as away to both sides, and I’d be able to talk to the engineers about their work. He said he didn’t think so. Besides, he said, if I was riding up there in the locomotive, I might easily miss a meal.

  I said I wasn’t worried about the meals. He said I should then step back out onto the train platform and make my case directly to the engineers. I did, and they said it would be fine to ride along. They were going to make a brief stop for water a few miles out of Sydney. When they did, I should step out onto the platform like I was going to stretch my legs, then stroll forward and climb up into the cab. Which I did. As my need for sleep (and the occasional meal) allowed, and the spacing of train platforms that necessitated our stopping permitted, I spent most of the journey across Australia with teams of engineers in the cab of the locomotive.

  That first night, when I returned to my own cabin at about three a.m., I found my supper sitting on my bedside table, carefully wrapped in aluminum foil to keep it warm. The following day, when I took the seat assigned to me in the dining car for the first time, my table companions greeted me cordially. Two elderly sisters, accompanied by their teenage niece. One of the women asked if I’d gotten on at Adelaide. I said no, that I’d actually gotten on in Sydney.

  “Then you must be quite hungry,” she said.

  I said indeed I was. And the other sister remarked that I had missed quite a lot besides meals, because, in fact, from the dining car you’re able to see to both sides of the tracks. I agreed. And we all were in agreement, too, starting out as we were now across the Nullarbor, that this journey was providing us with a terrific education.

  I thought their niece, driven to the extremes of boredom by our table banter, which mostly concerned Australian history and had nothing remotely to do with things that truly mattered to her, was several times about to bite through her lower lip.

  In the locomotive one day, studying a Michelin map of the state of South Australia, I saw that we would be passing just to the south of Maralinga. Between the cold war years of 1956 and 1963, the British conducted a series of nuclear bomb tests here. (I wondered if the sisters would be mentioning this to their niece.) From Woomera, east-southeast of Maralinga, the British had also launched missiles toward the Great Sandy Desert, hundreds of miles to the northwest. They considered the area a wasteland, though it was actually thinly populated by Walmajarri and several other Aboriginal tribes. The Australian authorities sent representatives out to clear the target areas of Aborigines before the missiles were launched; but the country was vast and they were not certain they’d been able to contact everyone living there. (The tests of the warhead’s delivery system were deemed too important to delay.) The Australian authorities also attempted to reach Aboriginals who would be affected by fallout from the warheads detonated at Maralinga. After the testing ceased, Aboriginals who had been removed from their traditional lands to allow for the tests to take place were denied further access to them. (In 1994 the Australian government made compensation payments to the tribes involved, for the usurpation of their lands.)

  One day on the Nullarbor the train suddenly ran into a wall of water, a rainstorm so fierce the windshield wipers could not, for some minutes, keep the glass clear. When the storm passed to the east and the sun broke through the trailing clouds, we saw a double rainbow off to the south. It seemed to span a dozen miles of the desert. In the same moment we saw more than a hundred kangaroos bounding north and west across the plain, then veering away to the west as they approached the train tracks and the hurtling train. The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now. For some reason we all felt compelled to shake hands.

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  IN MEEKATHARRA, men at the shop where I rented the four-wheel drive wanted me to understand that the roads I proposed to follow to Nookawarra, the sheep station, were not all that easy to locate. They were, in fact, easy to lose. I said I was familiar with the problem they were referring to and that I would be all right.

  The physical evidence that sets a human-occupied landscape apart disappeared almost entirely a mile west of Meekatharra. Soon I had only the road to guide me and a grid of fence lines, some sections of which proved to be miles long, well-tended wire fencing, as taut and as straight as men could make it. I was usually within sight of a fence line to the north (my right), frequently close alongside it; the road—a less insistent domestication of the arid plain—bent to the shape of the land and so was more graceful than the fence line.

  The main problem with navigating dirt roads that traverse extensive sections of fenced land becomes apparent when the road passes through a gate. If the gate is open, you leave it open. If closed, you close it behind you. Because there are often only a few gates in very long stretches of fence line, vehicles converge toward a gate from many directions. Once the vehicle is through the gate, the tracks radiate away in as many directions. Without the help of a landmark it might not be possible to pick out the main track again. Similarly, in isolated villages in arid land the world over, it’s easier to drive into the village on a dirt track than it is to locate the main track on your way out of the village, because local residents with distant destination
s create such a fan of diverging routes as they depart.

  At several places on the dirt track, headed west to Nookawarra, I drove away from the gate in the wrong direction. A quarter-mile or so out, it was obvious that I’d done this. These “errors,” however, never raised the fear that I was “lost” in unfamiliar country, or that I was going to be “delayed.” This far from clocks, the fear of being delayed lost much of its urgency. When I’d reached him by radiotelephone from Perth, my host reminded me of this, saying the drive from Meekatharra was three and something hours and that if I arrived “sometime after three,” he would consider it being punctual.

  I had only one difficult moment, when the narrow track I was on entered the equipment yard of a pastoralist and passed, like a private driveway, between a couple of his buildings. The man stared me to a stop and bluntly asked what my business there was. I told him I was on my way to meet a Mr. Richard Brown at Nookawarra. I showed him my hand-drawn maps, given to me by Bob Pidgeon at Curtin University, who I’m sure had passed this way many times. He glanced at them and then waved them away, as if they were gnats annoying him.

  “You tell ‘Mr. Richard Brown’ to let me know when he’s got some bloke coming for a visit, understand?”

  I said I completely understood his point. His point was that he owned the land I was driving on, and further, I was intruding on his privacy. Like many pastoralists, he felt a challenge to his legal right to the land was likely to be in the air whenever a stranger showed up, because of the peremptory way the land had originally been acquired, by sweeping its first occupants out of the way. He was irascible, I supposed, because he knew some people thought his hold on the land was ethically tenuous.

  I volunteered to him that his station seemed very well kept. His machinery appeared well maintained, his sheds in good repair. In the part of America I lived in, I told him, people value these indications of serious purpose and frugality. We looked for it when new neighbors moved in.