by Barry Lopez
In one of the uncanny accidents by which life is shaped, I saw the woman the following year in New York. It was late in winter. I saw her through a window, reaching for her water glass in a restaurant on West 4th Street, that movement.
It was early in the evening, hardly anyone there. I crossed the room and asked if I might sit down. She did not move. The expression in her face was unreadable. I recounted, as respectful of her privacy as I could be, how I had first seen her. She smiled and nodded acquiescence. For a moment I was not sure it was the same woman. She seemed veiled and unassuming.
She was a photographer, she said. She had been photographing in St. Petersburg when she went out that afternoon to Sanibel. I had been on vacation, I told her; I taught Asian history at the University of Washington—we found a common ground in Japan. A collection of her photographs of farms and rural life on the most northern island, Hokkaido, had just been published. I knew the book. In memory I saw images of cattle grazing in a swirling snowstorm, a weathered cart filled with a dimpled mound of grain, and birdlike hands gripping tools. In those first moments the images seemed a logical and graceful extension of her.
We talked for hours—about bumblebees and Cartier-Bresson, haiku, Tibet, and Western novels; and I asked if I could see her home. There was by then a warmth between us, but I could sense the edges of her privacy and would rather say good night, seal the evening here, hold that memory, than burden either of us. There is so much unfathomable in human beings; we so often intrude, meaning no harm, and injure for no reason. No, she said, she wouldn’t mind at all.
We walked a great many blocks north, then east toward the river. There was ice on the sidewalks and we linked arms against it. Her apartment was a flat above weathered storefronts. We sat on a couch in a spacious room painted white, softly lit, with several large photographs on the wall, of seagrass and of trees in a field in Michigan. I had thought there would be shells somewhere in the room, but there were not that I saw.
I began looking through one of her published books, black-and-white photographs of rural Maine. She fixed a gentle tea, like camomile. We sipped tea. She was very quiet and then she spoke about the shells. Whenever there was time, she said, she went out looking. When she was in Australia to work or in the Philippines, or on the coast of Spain. When she first began she would collect them. Now it was rare that she ever brought one home, even though she continued to search, hoping especially to see a hypatian murex and other shells that she might never find, or find and leave. When she took vacations she used to go alone to exotic beaches on the Coral and South China seas, and to places like the Seychelles. Then, more and more, she stayed home, going to Block Island or Martha’s Vineyard, to Assateague Island or to Padre Island in Texas, spending days looking at the simplest whelks and clams, noting how very subtly different they all were. The day I had seen her, she said, was one of the times she had gone to Sanibel to walk, to pick up a shell, turn it in the white tropical light, feel the cusps and lines, and set it back. As she described what she saw in the shells she seemed slowly to unfold. The movement of her hands to her teacup now had the same air of reticence, of holy retrieval and graceful placement that I had seen that day. She spoke of limpid waters, of unexpected colors, mikado yellow, cerulean blue, crimson flush, of their baroque and simple structure, their strength and fragility. Her voice was intimate, almost plaintive. When she stopped speaking it was very still.
The first pearling of light was visible on the window panes. After a long moment I walked quietly to where my coat lay and from a pocket took the small mussel shell from the Arctic coast. I returned to her. I said in the most subdued voice I could find where the shell had come from, and what it meant because of that day on Sanibel Island, and that I wished her to have it. She took it. What was now in the room I had no wish to disturb.
I crossed the room again to get my coat. She followed. At the door where I thought to try to speak there was a gentle pressure on my arm and she led me to the room where she slept. Her bed was on the floor. Two windows looked east over the city. By the bed was a small white table with a glass top set over what had once been a type drawer. In its compartments were shells.
She slid back the sheet of glass and sitting there on her heels she began to show them to me. In response to a question, she would say where a shell was from or the circumstances under which she had found it. Some were so thin I could see the color of my skin through them. Others were so delicately tinged I had to be told their color. They felt like bone, like water-worn glass and raw silk. Patterns like African fabric and inscriptions of Chinese characters. Cone shells like Ming vases. She turned my hand palm up and deposited in its depression what I at first thought were grains of sand. As my eye became accustomed to them I saw they were shells, that each one bore in infinitesimal precision a sunburst of fluting. The last she lay in my hands was like an egg, as white as alabaster and as smooth, save that its back was so intricately carved that my eye foundered in the detail.
She put the shells back and carefully replaced the glass. There was a kind of silence in the room that arrives only at dawn. Light broke the edge of a building and entered the window, bringing a glow to the pale curve of her neck. In the wall steam pipes suddenly hammered. Her hair moved, as if in response to breath, and I saw the flush outline of her cheek. In that stillness I heard her step among the shells at Sanibel and heard the pounding of wings overhead and imagined it was possible to let go of a fundamental anguish.
The Lover of Words
YOU MUST UNDERSTAND SOMETHING the other way around first: he was a common gardener. He was Mexican and he lived in the barrio of East Los Angeles, and though his profession came to him inexorably, father to son, his awareness of a world apart from his menial labors was both sublime and pervasive. He was a reader of fictions, in English and Spanish. He was thirty-one, unmarried, diffident, and preoccupied with words, not as a linguist might be but only as an autodidact would be: he understood the power of words to draw forth feeling and to mesmerize. He understood how words healed.
He did not conceive his existence, as a well-read man whose sense of affluence came as easily from an encounter with a felicitous phrase as it did among roses, as anomalous, for his perceptions were not directed that way. Nothing in his own mind told him his life was either eccentric or incongruous; he was not aware that the idea of his existence was clichéd. So whatever objection there was to him—haughty regard in a clerk who waited with him at a bus stop while he read The Autumn of the Patriarch—took place beyond him. He was astute enough to have developed a hedgerow, pleasant as lilacs, that separated him from engaging conversation with employers and most Anglos. But he did not apprehend it as a barrier, for he had no inclination to dwell on contrivance in life, or the reasons for it. He was in touch with subtle currents only to preserve an undisturbed life.
Several things were important to him. He did not wish to lead an eleemosynary existence. He did not wish to be distracted from ritual, either from the cultivation of plants in the shaded gardens of Beverly Hills or from sequence in a life of readings, whereby one book leads by diaphanous but ineluctable threads to the next. But these were not ideas in his mind; he was as ingenuous with himself as he was with everyone he met. And preternaturally quiet; there was a haunting quietude both inside and outside him, and in the penumbra of this order one might have expected wild beasts to be as tractable as daffodils.
He was not unaware; he accepted the servitude and the iniquity of his position apart from the living of his life. He understood racism, but his spirit was not crushed by it. He had found, in the same way a tree sends its roots down in search of water and its limbs to find light, a plane of alignment, and he was partly invisible in it. He nourished himself with words and he took another kind of sustenance, as necessary, from daily contact with the soil.
He had found, by a subterranean and labyrinthine route, some way around hatred, too, so that his anger in the face of cravenness and savagery was no less, but he was not obs
essed with revenge or rectitude. He slept deeply; he read at dawn in a quality of light that moved him on occasion as deeply as the words in his lap. Yet he was not conscious of escape.
He appreciated the quality and design of his tools and was solicitous after them. He was expert in the repair of machinery. And he wrote poetry in the evening, against a breeze from the window. It was not brilliant poetry, for he could not effect the transition from what he admired to what he wrote, but this did not come into his mind. The lines were not insipid or the emotions exaggerated. He tended to them with the same care with which he gardened, but not the same industry, and here lay his sense of humor, and balance.
He knew several women, with whom he sometimes spent the night and in whose company he would almost emerge from the chrysalis of his life. He was not bothered by thoughts of loneliness or wasted time or ambitionless existence or any of the other pronouncements made more on his life than to his person by his employers. He was in their view only a peculiar and ingratiating Mexican, to be impugned as one would speak distractedly of the weather.
As long as he was at a remove from such people he was untouched by their condescension and presumption; and he attended carefully to this remove.
At an all-but-unfathomable depth in his spirit, however, there lay an irreducible idea, medieval and adamantine, about the replicating quality of metaphor and the physical revelation of abstract ideas. As he tended to his bushes and plants, to the trimming of lawns and hillsides of ivy, he drew himself along in a world of cultivated ideas, trimmed and watered as expeditiously, from which arose an atmosphere as salubrious.
As a stone waits millennia to trip a certain horse on a well-worn path, so now did this convergence between ideas and work begin to take shape in his mind, to cross over a threshold, become real, and occupy him.
One day, his brown arms girdling a load of palm fronds, he paused mid-step, as if trying to remember something, aware of the sweep of ineffable evening color behind him, and grasped a passing vision of destruction. He walked up the hill thinking of tulip bulbs.
The unraveling of himself was like the retreat of a tide, an undeniable movement but not apparent at any particular moment. Only with reference to the same points could he be sure of the change. He found himself wishing his poetry were more accomplished; he ruminated while he worked about the rudeness and unexamined prejudice of the children of his employers. He found cupidity in himself, and became aware of a vague resentment toward his surroundings. He developed a mean-spirited attitude toward what he read and realized he had a capacity for smugness. He had never, in all his life, been so aware of himself. And he suspected it was this preoccupation that began to exacerbate so severely a sense of drowning.
Once outside himself and thus an observer he became lost. Each of his actions took on such metaphysical weight he was hamstrung by the simplest tasks. Trimming rosebushes, once a graceful movement with him, was now a desultory and inefficient feint. The mechanical exigencies of lawnmowers defeated him. Food lost its taste. He stopped reading.
The more he thought, the more unhinged he became, until finally he believed he must speak with someone. Of the women he knew, only one could help, and all she could do was offer him her belief in his spirit, and it was not enough for him.
No one, he realized, could understand the unfolding of his predicament because he had not taken anyone in.
He thought to arrest his downward movement—which baffled and angered him because it proceeded without reason, and he had become too acutely aware of the role of reason in people’s lives—by discipline. He set back to reading. He allotted a certain number of books to read each week. Words he did not know he made lists of, so he would be sure to look them up. His therapeutic attempt to reclaim his self-possessed and undisturbed self was mirrored for him in the gardens he tended; he made judgments on his state and wondered at his progress by studying the movements of his hands among the flowers. How deft? he would ask himself. How portentous? he would ask, and so continue in his own self-destruction.
One afternoon he was cogitating over a word he had encountered that morning and become enamored of immediately because it was a word he felt caught for a moment in its definition the meaning of his condition: sharawadji, a graceful disorder. As one fans a deck of cards he fanned this notion in his mind until in the farrago of ideas he saw himself as metaphysically disheveled but still presentable (even more conscious now of being Mexican), and saw as well the irony of neat gardens, deeply rooted, surrounding the houses of superficial people in moral disarray (thus did he tap his own bigotry). On another day, after he had entered a period of self-pity, he dwelled on the word ahimsa, the doctrine of respect for all living things. And thus did he develop scruples about the rights of aphids and the crying of mown grass. And one evening after work, taking a chance that would not have occurred to him a month before, he entered a guest house and with his list of words began paging through a large dictionary which lay inert on a wrought-iron floor stand. The owner stepped in on him; he was apologetic and properly obsequious, but it was clear almost immediately that something else was required. He attempted an explanation. His nervousness, his clothing, his accent all undid him; what he hoped would pass for erudition suddenly seemed only stupidity. As he held out the list in desperation he realized it resembled something cribbed and illegal, and he felt the penetration of a sense of injustice. Tact held him to a sense of irony. His rage precipitated only a wry smile.
The loss of other jobs that followed he saw as predictable, a result of the moral and metaphysical overlaying he had indulged. He had never, to his mind, indulged himself before. But he was now bereft of that innocence and he besieged himself with endless mental explanations, and scruples that seemed silly even to him, which made him angrier.
In this state he allowed himself, as it were, to sleep with the devil. He accepted unemployment checks and argued with his neighbors, cursing their Mexican traits and otherwise giving evidence of self-directed anger and, of course, his pain. Concern over the state of his deprivation, the collapse of his virtue and the lassitude that accompanied his depression no longer occupied his mind.
What saved him principally was his belief in physical equivalents, his intuition that under another set of circumstances, contrived but sincere, he could set himself right. For this single reason he went to his father. The father regarded the son as dangerously imaginative and was suspicious of his impenetrable privacy. For years he had thought his son a homosexual. He projected impertinence on him and accused him sharply of cowardice. All this flew over the son as would have the release of so many frantic doves. He sought his father’s idea of a place he might go. He explained that he had to get away. He didn’t mean to be taken cryptically and was sure after he had said it that his father would interpret the request perversely. Nevertheless, it was a son and a father. His father told him to visit an uncle in Yuma, a clerk in a motel.
The father hugged his son, abruptly but firmly, when he left.
He expected to be gone a while, to find a job, to spend a few weeks in the mountains to the north. He was fortunate in that he took none of these plans seriously; he simply expected to do whatever was necessary to obliterate a sense of himself. The repressed bigotry in Yuma gave him an edge to work against. His uncle went out each evening dressed with a Mexican sense of fastidiousness, and was largely absent. The closeness of the border bred malevolence and suspicion. Tourists wandered the streets as if in a state of forgetfulness. None of this touched him. Only the sense that he was removed from the gardens of Beverly Hills and that he was Mexican and that he enjoyed reading; and certain knowledge that there would be other bends in the river as dangerous for him farther on.
The room in which he stayed took a breeze in the morning. The afternoon light was indirect and seemed to hover in the room. Suddenly one day he was taken with appreciation at the sight of his hard, blunt thumbs against the white pages of a book. The afternoon heat hung in suspension in the air and he felt a delic
ateness in his belly. He thought of the inscrutable life buried in a wheelbarrow full of bulbs, of the sound of his spade going into the earth, and of his cleverness with water.
He turned pages, and read on.
The Location of the River
ACCORDING TO A JOURNAL kept by Benjamin Foster, a historian returning along the Platte River from the deserts of the Great Basin at the time, the spring of 1844 came early to western Nebraska. He recorded the first notes of a horned lark on the sixteenth of February. This unseasonable good weather induced him to stay a few weeks with a band of Pawnee camped just south of the Niobrara River. One morning he volunteered to go out with two men to look for stray horses. They found the horses grazing near an island of oak and ash trees on the prairie, along the edge of the river. When he saw the current and quicksand Foster was glad the horses had not crossed over.
On the way back, writes Foster—little of his last journal survives, but some fragments relevant to this incident are preserved—the Pawnee told him that the previous summer the upper Niobrara had disappeared.
At first Foster took this for a figurative statement about a severe drought, but the other Pawnee told him, no, the Niobrara had not run dry—in fact, the spring of 1843 had been very wet. It disappeared. That Foster took this information seriously, that he did not treat it with skepticism or derision, was characteristic of him.