Horizon

by Barry Lopez

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  THE READING TOOK PLACE in a sunlit space that had a view down toward Sydney Harbor. People had a few questions after I spoke and read and then most went on their way while I shook hands with a few people and signed some books. Among the last of those who introduced themselves was a man named Luke Davies, a poet finishing his degree at a local university and teaching in Sydney. He had come over to the museum on his lunch hour with a signed copy of his second book of poems, Absolute Event Horizon. He said he’d dedicated one of the poems to me. He didn’t appear to be looking for congratulations for his work or for a way to insinuate himself. He seemed at peace with his life, a guileless person. We spoke for a few moments and shook hands goodbye. As he turned to leave, I asked if there was a way I might contact him. He gave me a phone number and I told him I was going to be in the city for a few days and might call.

  The following morning I took a long walk in Sydney’s botanical garden with an Australian landscape painter, John Wolseley, whom I’d once traveled with through Watarrka National Park in the Northern Territory. Later we went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales together where a number of his paintings were up, a retrospective show. He walked me through the galleries, making humorous, self-deprecating remarks but being serious, too, about the importance of art in a highly industrialized and commodified world. I admired the way he could infuse the static space of a canvas with time, creating images that were not animated by time but where both the presence and passage of time were clear.

  I felt a peculiar sense of camaraderie as John and I went along, passing, at one point, the gallery where I’d spoken the day before. Our aesthetics were different, but we were enthusiastic about many of the same questions, like how to render and comprehend the way time gives space another dimension. John’s life was so unselfconsciously about art. He was someone who had become his own idea.

  That evening I called Luke. I told him I wanted to visit Botany Bay, where Cook had made his first landfall in Australia, on April 28, 1770. Did he want to come along? Luke lived at Bondi Beach, next to the water in east Sydney. He said it would be easy for him to come by the hotel and pick me up.

  We drove past the airport, crossed the Georges River on the Captain Cook Bridge, then turned east onto a road that went out to Inscription Point, on Kurnell Peninsula, where we parked the car. The fair weather of the past few days was holding—salubrious might have been the word—behemoth cumulus clouds with flat bottoms and rounded shoulders in a cerulean sky, holding faint shadows in their thick folds.

  Cook’s landfall here marked the beginning of a major shift in European thinking about possibilities for trade in the South Pacific. In 1606, Willem Janszoon, a Dutch sea captain, made the European discovery of the Gulf of Carpentaria, on the northeast Australian coast, west of Cape York. His landing on the shore there, the exploration of the west coast of the continent in 1619 by Frederik de Houtman, and of the southwestern coast in 1627 by François Thijssen and Pieter Nuyts, established a Dutch claim to a “new Holland,” the east and most of the south coasts of which had not yet been seen by Europeans.

  In 1642 Abel Janszoon Tasman, in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, set out from Batavia in the Heemskerck with a consort, the Zeehaen, intending to expand the sphere of Dutch influence to the south. He rounded the northwest and southwest capes of Australia, discovered and doubled the Tasman Peninsula (he assumed it was the continent’s southeastern cape, not knowing it was the south coast of an island, Tasmania), and continued on to “new Zealand,” leaving the east coast of Australia unexplored. He returned to Batavia in 1643 via Torres Strait, which separates Cape York Peninsula from Papua New Guinea, having discovered neither Bass Strait, which separates Tasmania from Australia, nor the Great Barrier Reef.

  In an informal sense, Tasman was the first European to circumnavigate Australia, to prove that it was not the northernmost part of a fabled southern continent. The question of whether New Holland included an inland sea was still unsettled, however, and would remain so until 1798–1803, when Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and then Flinders and Nicolas Baudin charted all the rest of Australia’s coastline that remained undemarcated. Flinders’s surveys, made in several ships, confirmed that there was no entrance to an inland sea north of the Southern Ocean’s Great Australian Bight. Australia was one landmass, not two.

  Early in his naval career, Cook established himself as a cartographer by creating impressive charts of the coasts of Newfoundland. His charts of Australia’s east coast—Flinders, a great admirer of Cook, was full of praise for their accuracy—became the basis for England’s claim to eastern Australia, called New South Wales by the British to distinguish these lands from those of New Holland.

  When Cook looked beyond the entrance to Botany Bay at dawn on April 28, he thought the embayment, beyond high headlands on either side of the entrance, comprised a large, sheltered harbor. He entered the bay later that afternoon and anchored off its southern shore. Perhaps it was Eora people he saw camped there on the beach. Whoever they were, they all but ignored the ship, continuing to go about their business. When a landing party put ashore, the Eora walked away, leaving two men armed with spears standing to meet the sailors. When people from the boat tossed iron nails and colored beads to them, they ignored the trinkets; when someone shot off a musket, the Eora barely flinched. They had never seen, probably, nor ever heard about sailing ships like the Endeavour—or people like these Europeans.

  As the party stepped ashore—the first to do so was eighteen-year-old Isaac Smith, Cook’s wife’s cousin—the two Eora men retreated from the beach and joined the others who’d withdrawn into the fringing forest of gum trees. As members of the landing party approached the Eora’s bark huts, the owners stepped back farther into the trees. The sailors found a few children hiding behind a warrior’s shield in one of the huts and gave them strings of beads. When Joseph Banks picked up some fishing spears to examine—he had them taken back to the Endeavour—he suspected they might have poisoned tips. He cautioned Cook to stand well away from the Eora.

  Cook’s officers and crew, shouting at the Eora, denouncing them as cowards, went off in search of freshwater and wood, which they continued to load aboard the Endeavour over the following week. Banks and others with an interest in natural history explored the perimeter of the bay and the lower reach of the Georges River. The field parties made a large collection of plants, work that later inclined Cook, long after he’d left the area, to change the name he’d originally given the place, “Sting ray’s harbour,” to Botany Bay.

  When the onshore winds that had kept Cook penned in Botany Bay longer than he wished finally abated, he sailed out between the headlands and northward up the coast. Over the following four months he would chart nearly the entirety of the shoreline—and his expedition would almost end tragically when the Endeavour ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.

  Cook wrote that Botany Bay was “Capacious safe and commodious.” The field parties’ notes describe waters rich with oysters, clams, and mussels, trees of imposing size (likely casuarinas), and impressively large flocks of cockatoos, parrots, and waterfowl. The naturalists judged the soil’s potential to support farming poor and said they were puzzled by the Eora’s lack of interest in the gifts they were offered (the Eora having drifted back onto the beach to occupy their huts, opposite the anchored Endeavour). “All they seem to want,” Cook wrote in his journal, “was for us to be gone.”

  An Ordinary Seaman from the Orkneys, thirty-year-old Forby Sutherland, died of tuberculosis while the Endeavour lay at anchor in the harbor. Cook named the inner point of the south headland for him and he was later buried at sea.

  The general impression of Botany Bay that Cook, his officers, and the supernumeraries aboard took away was favorable, even enthusiastic. Nine years later Banks recommended the area to Parliament as a destinatio
n for prisoners. Eight years after that, the First Fleet sailed for Botany Bay. On arriving the captain decided instead to go ashore at a smaller harbor just to the north, Port Jackson, a place that would one day become the city of Sydney.

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  LUKE AND I WALKED OUT to Sutherland Point and read the inscription there on a plinth, erected close to a spot where Cook had ordered his date of departure, May 6, 1770, and the name of his ship carved in the bole of a tree. The public park where the plinth stood—the tree is long gone—seemed now part of a thoroughly humbled place at the tip of the Kurnell Peninsula, in contrast to the wild land Cook had found there more than 230 years before.

  Luke and I stretched out on the grass and talked about the books we’d each been reading. I asked him for a list of writers whose feel for things Australian impressed him. I told him I’d been reading David Malouf, Helen Garner, Tim Winton, and a few others, and thought that Malouf had a great gift. Luke agreed. I asked him more about his own work. He’d just finished a novel, Candy, which would later become the basis for a movie, for which he would cowrite the script. The novel was a fictionalization of his battle with heroin addiction.

  I listened to his description of the broken life out of which the book had come, a life of thievery and scams, of manipulation and self-hatred, of suicidal despair. But here he was, just out of university after the long delay occasioned by his addiction. I’d read his Absolute Event Horizon and thought the poems were very good, the work of a singular imagination. In the middle of our conversation about literature—given a kind of wrenching twist by his telling me about the background for his novel—he said the turning point in his heroin addiction—he’d been clean for three years at this point—came when he read a book of mine called Arctic Dreams. It changed his perspective, he said.

  I understood then why he’d come to the reading.

  I told him about a conversation I’d had a couple of years before this with a few writers at the festival of arts in Adelaide. The festival committee had put some of us up at a resort about thirty miles outside the city in the days before the festival got started, so we could get to know one another a little. One morning after breakfast five or six of us began talking about what we thought we were up to as writers. The group included Canadian novelist Susan Swan, a young writer from India named Vikram Chandra, John Coetzee from South Africa, the American writer Annie Proulx, and David Malouf. Someone asked whether, despite the differences in our cultural backgrounds, despite the difference in gender, in literary taste, in the genres we liked to work in, and in our politics—despite all these differences, was there some subject we were all writing about, one way or another? Everyone immediately said the same word. Community. Why does it fall apart? Can you put it back together? What makes that smallest of communities, marriage, cohere? How do we go on with life when we’ve chosen to remain cut off from our traditional communities, or chosen to remain with others who have no interest in knowing who we are?

  Luke said he could understand that, could see how all of us, including himself, were writing about the functional and dysfunctional dynamics of different sorts of communities, the integrity of which, or the possibilities for reconciliation within which, provided us with a promising, or at least a believable, future.

  The idea seemed so big, so close to self-celebration, we dropped it. But we believed in it.

  We fell silent, basking on our backs in sunlight on the great lawn there, the rain-softened ground. A Greek chorus of lorikeets, of turquoise and king parrots, of cockatoos and galahs, sailed back and forth above us, beautiful, dazzling, streaming colors, the birds babbling and calling sharply, as if they had not yet gotten the word that we were all civilized now.

  Occasionally a 747 or one of the smaller Boeing jets, a 727 or 737, decked out in Qantas or Singapore or KLM or Air Canada livery, lumbered overhead on final approach, pushing against a wind out of the north that we could barely feel on the ground, and floated down to touch the runway at Sydney Airport, which jutted a mile out into Botany Bay like a quay.

  I showed Luke a bit of technology I took out of my backpack and was now about to use, an early version of a handheld GPS device. I said I liked the air of authority it seemed to be equipped with.

  “It’ll tell you right where you are, you know,” I said.

  “Really? It’s that accurate?”

  “Well, it’s very precise, but I don’t know how accurate it is. It says we’re at thirty-four degrees, zero minutes, eleven seconds south latitude and one hundred fifty-one degrees, thirteen minutes, and thirty-two seconds east longitude.”

  Cook made this spot 34° 16' South and 151° 21' East. But it’s the same place, where we lay on the south shore of the bay that afternoon, many years later, watching clouds, the birds, the planes, each of us glad of the other’s company.

  The device has no power to determine any further where we are, by noting that cumulus clouds, with their involuted heads of cauliflower florets, were passing through. Or how the spaciousness of the sky here changed when flocks of birds flew over us in a rush. Or how all this might look if it happened to be raining. The numbers marked a portal, like the address on a house.

  Graves Nunataks to Port Famine Road

  Queen Maud Mountains

  Central Transantarctic Mountains

  Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau

  Antarctica

  Brunswick Peninsula

  Shore of the Strait of Magellan

  Southern Chile

  86°43'39" S 142°07'39" W to 53°25'43" S 70°59'22" W

  To get oriented here is difficult. The light is flat because the sky is overcast. The sun’s weak rays create only a few anemic shadows by which to judge scale and distance. Far-off objects like mountain peaks have crisp edges because the atmosphere itself is as transparent as first-water diamonds; the mountains, though, are not nearly as close as they seem. It’s about −12° F, and the wind is relatively calm, moving over the snow distractedly, like an animal scampering.

  Four of the six people living here are in their tents now, next to their cookstoves, two by two, warming up and preparing their suppers. I’m the fifth of the group, almost motionless at the moment, a hundred yards south of the tent cluster, kneeling on a patch of bluish ice in the midst of a great expanse of white. I’m trying to discern a small object entombed there a few inches below the surface. Against the porcelain whites of this gently sloping landscape, I must appear starkly apparent in my cobalt blue parka and wind pants. I shift slowly right and left, lean slightly forward, then settle back, trying to get the fluxless sunlight to reveal more of the shape and texture of the object.

  The sixth member of our group, wearing a turquoise windbreaker and yellow wind pants with red knee patches, is working at a fuel cache some ways to the west. He’s rolled a snow machine over on its side and is adjusting one of the bogie-wheel trucks, mechanisms that tension the vehicle’s drive belt. He is gauging the tension by tugging on the belt with his bare hands. When the light breeze that’s blowing falls off a bit, the ratcheting clicks of his socket wrench carry several hundred yards to where I am, but I can barely hear them through the fabric of my balaclava and the hood of my parka.

  The three yellow pyramid-shaped tents the six of us are bivouacked in form the points of an isosceles triangle with a long base. They all face north, their backs set against a prevailing katabatic (gravity-driven) wind from the south. The generous space between them is insurance that a fire in one is less likely to spread to another, and the arrangement ensures there won’t be a constricted area where the wind might eddy in a blizzard and pile snow against a tent entrance.

  The arrangement of the camp is simple, tight, and to my eyes elegant. Food caches and equipment stored in the open are flagged so they can easily be located again after a storm. We have an emergency shelter—one tent and its full complement of supplies—buried in a sno
w pit fifty yards to the west should, for example, a cookstove’s flames somehow ignite a tent wall and high winds whip the fire into a conflagration. The place is designed for safety, convenience, and economy of movement

  Seventy-five feet to the north we’ve dug a latrine.

  This arrangement comprises field quarters for a National Science Foundation deep-remote cold camp, established at 7,460 feet in the Transantarctic Mountains, 220 miles from the South Pole. We’ve been living on the rim of Antarctica’s Polar Plateau, part of an ice cap four times the size of Greenland, which forms the continent’s vast interior. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) quadrangle map of the region immediately to the south of us, between us and the Pole, depicts the two southernmost outcrops of bedrock on the planet, Mount Howe and D’Angelo Bluff. The lower half of the map is empty white space. An irregular line, marked “Limit of Compilation,” separates the two outcrops and a few associated crevasse fields from all that lies to the south. Attempting to define this blank space would be like trying to sketch contour lines on a map of the ocean.

  We have no source of heat but our cookstoves, and the four men and two women have been here for nearly two weeks.

  On this summer day in mid-January no one other than the six of us is to be found in the surrounding region. Scientists and support staff living at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station would be the closest. It’s eleven-thirty at night according to my watch, but this far south the hour of the solar day is of no help in trying to understand the situation we’re in, or our sleep rhythms. In a few minutes the never-setting sun will break through all but the last layer of cloud cover. It will hang there, burning in the sky like a molten coin, nineteen degrees above the horizon. Its light will strengthen the triangular shadows of the tents and those of the two of us still working outside.