The Spirited Review - About this Life

About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory by Barry Lopez

About This Life contains some of the author's most powerful writing on the actual subject of writing, as well as observations on landscape and culture. As an introduction to this collection, Lopez begins with a brief personal memoir, sharing his struggle to integrate a diversity of voices into his stories, the shaping of his own identity by the land and sea, and his learning to recognize and embrace his own voice. He recalls his suggestions for a young writer, that she should "read, find out what [she] truly believes, and get away from the familiar... [so that] she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a sense of how fortunate we are to share these things" -- suggestions in harmony with the precepts of nature writing. His own goal as an author? To "contribute to a literature of hope." And so he does.

The first section, "Out of Country", starts with a journey to Bonaire, sixty miles from Venezuela in Caribbean waters. It is a dry, stark island, surrounded by waters rich in coral, in fish, in life. Lopez introduces us to the political and economic history of the place, as well as to the glories of its sea. In his second essay he travels across the world to northern Hokkaido, where he visits with the land and with the human elders of the place, including an Ainu artisan. This passage is a story in subtleties, in quiet walking, in gift-giving and in honor. A tale of reverence.

South he then moves, to Galapagos, then further south, to the Antarctic. And then, with a somewhat ironic twist, he takes us with him as he travels in the belly of the technological beast in a series of freight flights around the world. He provides an eye into the bizarre world of transnational "shipping", where everything from horses to flowers to Porsches are flown. He shares some depressing truths about global commerce, including the story of "a museum director in Los Angeles [who] found it less expensive, for example, to have the museum's entire red sandstone facade quarried in India, airfreighted to Japan to be dressed, and then flown to Los Angeles than to have it quarried, dressed, and trucked in from Minnesota." It is a passage bound to raise questions in us as the consumers of such goods -- what do we purchase, from where, and why?

In the second section, Lopez moves to the aspects of "Indwelling", and stories that reside in the American landscape. He begins with a memorable testament to the cost of our vehicular lives; as he drives from Oregon to Indiana, he stops to move slain animals from the road, to give them some semblance of burial, onto the grass and off of the killing grounds. It is a difficult, painful journey, and a calling to account for the lives we lead and the manner in which we pursue our desires. Then we leap from Indiana to Alaska, where Lopez travels to pay his respects to the wolves and the tundra community, and where he questions the western fear of anthropomorphizing the wild. He turns his pondering to the American geography and the American people -- how we have come to a cultural space that is so ignorant of the place we inhabit. He warns that "Year by year, the number of people with firsthand experience in the land dwindles," and that "...the line between authentic experience and a superficial exposure to the elements of experience is blurred." He presents a powerful argument for knowing a place, for learning it with your hands and feet and nose and ears and eyes, that this is the only way to disrupt the false romanticism that plays so easily into the hands of marketers and manipulators.

Lopez then returns with us back to his homeland, to a dialogue with beavers and a story about a well-rooted artist. "I've never known an artist more insistently local... He wants to redefine the relationship of a clay artist to natural materials in an era of manufactured materials; and he wants to redefine the artist's relationship to community in an era of gallery courting and self-promotion." Lopez has already presented the pain and discord of our rupture with the earth, now he shows us the possibilities when we are firmly grounded in our landscapes. And in the final essay of this section, he invites us into his own writing environment, with one window cracked open to let in the air.

Having journeyed out, and then in, Lopez shares with us his personal remembrances. From the death of his mother he travels back in time to the Grand Canyon in 1954, and to his return there 26 years later, with joy; to Bear River, Idaho, where hundreds of Shoshone people were slaughtered by "American" troops in 1863; to his recent visits through the Los Angeles basin area of his youth, now radically altered. He offers up a tale of his own hands -- what they have held, felt; how they have moved, touched; how they have aged and taken on a history. This is the most sensual essay in the collection; so often Lopez's writing resides just above the surface of its matter, careful in its approach, but here he crosses over into pure sensory expression, into revelation. He then rapidly steps back again to less emotional ground, moving his focus from sensation to perception in an essay about photographing nature, and while his insights into this field are well worth the purchase of the book by themselves, still I have to admit that I mourned a little at his retreat from truly tactile ground.

The last section of the book is brief and peculiar. A series of childhood encounters with death recited in rapid fire; an invitation to murder; a hot day speeding through the midwest in a Corvette; a theft and the subsequent shame, and the process of his moral development... and then the collection ends but for his acknowledgments. After several reads, I still find this final section bewildering; perhaps Lopez felt the need to temper any perception of his balance or vision by demonstrating also a little of his recklessness? The collection has already drawn to such a graceful ending when these last four pieces are inserted; in such a well-balanced work, they seem to be almost intentionally discordant.

Yet overall, in About This Life Lopez has created a powerful, contemplative collection of food for the mind. There is no end to the questions that arise from these stories -- questions about how we live our lives and choose our priorities, live with or without but not under technology, how we reroot ourselves in the land and express the landscapes of our experience. I believe that fellow nature writers will peruse his words for years to come, as we do continue to read, to struggle to define what we believe, and journey out, through, and back within to our own familiar landscapes.

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