About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read online

  Acclaim for BARRY LOPEZ’s

  About This Life

  “[Barry Lopez] can bring the light of an arctic summer’s midnight to your living room.”

  —The Columbus Dispatch

  “Lopez writes with a photographer’s keen eye, a novelist’s sure-handed way with detail and a biologist’s attention to scientific accuracy.”

  —Newsday

  “About This Life is a shimmering window on the richness of the world [and] the vagaries of memory.”

  —Portland Oregonian

  “Whether he is visiting remote islands or sites closer to home, Lopez provides a sincere look at what is marvelous about his surroundings, and his book admirably adds to what he calls a literature of hope.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Curiosity, fresh insight, and luminous, precise prose … is generously on display here.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Lopez is a careful and caring writer … he truly shows us the world’s magic.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “[Lopez has] that rarest of keen eyes, the one that can home in on the face in the mirror and see truly.”

  —The Denver Post

  BARRY LOPEZ

  About This Life

  Barry Lopez is the author of six works of nonfiction, including Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men; six works of fiction, including Field Notes and Winter Count; and a novella-length fable, Crow and Weasel. His work appears regularly in Harper’s, where he is a contributing editor, as well as in The Paris Review, Orion, The Georgia Review, Outside, and elsewhere. The recipient of numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award for nonfiction, he lives in western Oregon.

  Also by

  BARRY LOPEZ

  NONFICTION

  Arctic Dreams

  Of Wolves and Men

  FICTION

  Lessons from the Wolverine

  Field Notes

  Crow and Weasel

  Winter Count

  River Notes

  Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter

  Desert Notes

  ESSAYS

  Apologia

  The Rediscovery of North America

  Crossing Open Ground

  VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by Barry Holstun Lopez

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover

  in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

  Vintage Books and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged

  the Knopf edition as follows:

  Lopez, Barry Holstun, [date]

  About this life / Barry Lopez. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80650-5

  1. Lopez, Barry Holstun, [date]—Biography.

  2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS3562.067Z464 1998

  813′.54—dc21

  [B] 98–14257

  Author Photograph © Nancy Bennett Evelyn

  www.randomhouse.com/vintage

  v3.1

  For Mary Holstun Lopez

  for Adrian Bernard Lopez and John Edward Brennan

  for Sidney Van Sheck and Dara Emery

  and for my brother, Dennis Holstun Lopez

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  A Voice

  PART ONE

  Out of Country

  1 Searching for Depth in Bonaire

  2 A Short Passage in Northern Hokkaido

  3 Orchids on the Volcanoes

  4 Informed by Indifference

  5 Flight

  PART TWO

  Indwelling

  6 Apologia

  7 In a Country of Light, Among Animals

  8 The American Geographies

  9 Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire

  10 The Whaleboat

  PART THREE

  Remembrance

  11 Replacing Memory

  12 A Passage of the Hands

  13 Learning to See

  PART FOUR

  An Opening Quartet

  14 Death

  15 Murder

  16 Speed

  17 Theft

  Acknowledgments

  Text Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  A VOICE

  I WAS BORN east of the heights of New Rochelle in the watershed of New York’s Mamaroneck River in the winter of 1945. In the spring of 1948 my father, a billboard advertising executive, would move us away, to a home in rural California at the foot of the Santa Susana Mountains in the San Fernando Valley, far from this suburban landscape just thirty miles from New York City. I would never know why. Perhaps the move was an effort to save a marriage gone awry, or maybe he hoped to capitalize on prospects in southern California after the war.

  For a long time I thought of California as the beginning, the place where my life took a distinctive shape, but something had already begun. When I recall incidents from those first three years in New York, some still vivid as a bowl of oranges on a summer windowsill, several seem to bear directly on my later life, to be adumbrations. Or perhaps that is only how memory works.

  We lived on the second floor of a six-story apartment building situated on Orienta Point in the town of Mamaroneck. It faced onto Mamaroneck Harbor, an embayment of Long Island Sound. My parents, avid sailors, had a membership in the Nanhook Yacht Club, which was affiliated with “The Orienta”—a primary attraction for people who chose to live there.

  A great lawn sloped north from the building down to a seawall and a narrow beach, off which sailboats were moored. My earliest memories are of crawling off a blanket onto this cool, prickly turf under a huge elm. Flower beds had been planted along the building’s east side, and I remember walking in them with my mother to pick flowers as tall as I was. I remember the aroma of the soil in summer and the way the bare earth puckered to a dry crust after an early morning watering.

  The odor and the flowers’ colors in the garden attracted me. To ensure visits there with Mother, I’d sometimes line my alphabet blocks up on a windowsill—our windows were right above the gardens—and push them out. She’d take me along to retrieve them while she gathered bouquets.

  I also remember the glare of light on the harbor and the snap of white sails coming taut in a breeze. In warm weather I was closely watched like other children on the beach, but I recall wading out into the water as if I were alone, and wanting to go farther. I could see across to Shootfly Island and the estuary of Otter Creek. Away to the east, where Turkey Rock and Hen Island stood out, lowlying Peningo Neck protected the harbor from the open waters of the Sound.

  Standing in seawater stirred to wavelets by the wind, my head thrown back, I’d turn slowly to gaze at the towering crown of the elm, backlit and twinkling in noon light, turn and catch the long horizon of the sound to the east, keep turning to follow scudding sailboats on that wind. On the hottest days I sought out the shade of the big elm, but I would go back in the water again to experience that peculiar yearning—to swim, to sail, to go. I would wait in the water for something to emerge, to appear in that empty space above its surface.
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  Shortly after my brother was born in 1948, my father drove out to California. My mother and brother and I flew west afterward in a Constellation. (I remember a living-room-like atmosphere at the rear of this plane, where couch seats were arranged in a horseshoe around a table, and going into the terminal at Love Field in Dallas with one of the stewardesses to eat dinner while my mother attended to my infant brother.) My parents divorced two years later, and my mother began raising us with a dedication I would not understand or appreciate for years. She taught home economics during the day at a junior high school; twice a week she taught night school at a junior college. She also worked at home as a dressmaker.

  My images of our first house, when I was three or four and my father still lived with us, are of the way it sat apart, surrounded by alfalfa hay fields. Our street was a macadam-surfaced ditch meant to funnel heavy winter rains into the Los Angeles River. It also served as a corridor for heading sheep to summer pastures in the Santa Susanas. On different days we might be stuck in the car for either reason.

  After my father left, not to be seen again, Mother bought a small one-bedroom house on a half acre of land in the town of Reseda. For boys my age growing up then in the northern San Fernando Valley, adventure unfolded in fruit orchards and wisteria hedges, in horse pastures and haylofts, and around farming operations, truck gardens, and chicken ranches. During these same years the Los Angeles River channel, another haunt, was floored and walled in concrete, so we saw the last of that river’s natural days. We hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains and we caught rides on slow freights west from Reseda to Canoga Park and back. We rode our bikes out as far as Porter Ranch, the rural fringes of valley settlement where braceros worked the fields and where encounters with coyotes, jackrabbits, and even rattlesnakes were not unusual.

  Mother frequently drove my brother, Dennis, and me into the Mojave Desert on weekends, or up to Antelope Valley or away to one of a dozen beaches from Zuma, west of Malibu, to Pismo, up north near San Luis Obispo. We spent summer weeks in camp at Big Bear Lake or with Mother’s friends at Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains.

  One advantage of growing up in a single-parent home (it wasn’t called that back then, of course; “broken home” was the preferred term) is that if your mother is an interesting or handsome woman, she can attract the attention of interesting men. My brother and I knew several such men, all but one in my memory impeccable in their conduct and generous toward us. I remember picnics at the home of a movie stuntman who kept a rambling, jerry-built house in an unspoiled part of the Calabasas hills, where he’d dammed a creek to create a swimming hole. And picnics at the summer house of a man who was the gentlest person I ever knew, a horticulturalist at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden whom for a long time I wished my mother would marry. With them and Mother I experienced the crash of Pacific storm surf on the deserted beaches of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. I felt the hysteria that came with brush fires fanned by Santa Ana winds and caught the astringent smell of creosote bush after a desert rain.

  In the middle of what was, for me, this intensely physical landscape, another man emerged who engaged a different part of my mind. He was an aeronautical engineer at Hughes Aircraft and also an artist. He’d taught my mother painting in college in Alabama and had been her first husband. After their divorce, he moved to California and remarried. When my father left he became like a father to me. He drove a blue-gray sports car, an Austin Healey convertible, and I rode with him swiftly along winding Mulholland Drive above the city and down the broad promenade of the Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. One Christmas he built a large layout for my trains, a landscape of papier-mâché mountains and tunnels with a handcrafted bridge and a scenic backdrop he’d painted.

  For years I believed my childhood nothing out of the ordinary, but it was a sort of bohemian existence. Mother was strict with Dennis and me about table and social manners. She disciplined us and was conscientious about our schooling and protective of our emotional lives. But I remember no impatience, no indifference toward imagination. She embraced our drawings, our stories, and our Tinkertoy kingdoms, and she drove us to many intriguing places in our green 1934 Ford coupe—to Boulder (later, Hoover) Dam, the La Brea Tar Pits. And she invited engaging, independent men and women to the house for dinner.

  The parents of some of my classmates and some of Mother’s friends worked in the motion picture industry and in television, but I do not remember that their professions colored my life in any untoward way. Work in Hollywood, like work at Lockheed or other aircraft companies, didn’t seem any more remarkable to us as children then than farming or teaching. I was more interested, actually, in farming and in what was done by people who worked astride a horse, a mysterious and magnificent beast, with its shuddering flanks and high nickers.

  One unusual thing about those years was that I raised pigeons. Many of them were tumblers, a kind of bird that folds its wings and then plummets from a height, only to pull up sharply inches from the ground. A tumbler then beats its way back up into the sky from which it plummets again. Sometimes a dozen or more will tumble together, careening past each other as they fall.

  Watching the pigeons fly was an experience so exhilarating I would turn slowly under them in circles of glee. They would spiral above the house before flying off every day, and the tumblers would fall toward an adjacent field. They’d disappear behind lofty banks of aging eucalyptus north and south of the house in flocks of thirty and forty. When they returned in the afternoon, I found that faithfulness, their soft cooing at dusk in the pigeon coop, as soothing as my mother’s fingers running through my hair.

  I could not have understood at this age of course, only eight or nine, what it might mean to have a voice one day, to speak as a writer speaks. I would have been baffled by the thought. The world I inhabited—the emotions I imagined horses to have, the sound of a night wind clattering ominously in the dry leaves of eucalyptus trees—I imagined as a refuge, one that would be lost to me if I tried to explain it. The countryside around me was a landscape full of small, wild animals. When I walked alone down windbreaks of Russian olives or up sandy washes and met them, I’d stand still until they went on. They did not seem to my mind animals that wanted to be known.

  My future, as I vaguely pictured it then, would include going to high school in the valley, maybe Stanford University afterward, and then perhaps I would work toward owning a farm. Like my friends, though, I had few concrete thoughts beyond repairing my bike and being included at the periphery of the circle of older boys, the ones who possessed such gleaming, loud, extraordinarily powerful, and customized automobiles.

  When I was eleven my mother married again, and we moved back East to an apartment in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan on East Thirty-fifth Street. I would live there for six years before going away to college. This change was wrenching: socially, economically, and geographically. I was bewildered by it—a penthouse apartment, Jesuit prep school, Saturday afternoon trapshooting at the New York Athletic Club’s Travers Island range, debutant balls at the Plaza and the Pierre. Gone were the rural, agricultural, and desert landscapes to which I was so attached. They were replaced by summers on the Jersey shore and by visits to eastern Alabama, where my mother had grown up. But, for the first time, I had an allowance. And I began to grasp from my new classmates, all boys, what went with this new life with no cars, where no one bicycled alone at night to the sound of big sprinklers slow-chucking water over alfalfa fields.

  I recall a moment that first eastern summer of 1956, a scene I’ve come back to often. My parents put Dennis and me in a summer camp on the North Fork of eastern Long Island for a few weeks. Among my bunkmates were Thom and John Steinbeck, the writer’s two sons. On parents day, John and Elaine Steinbeck would come over from their home in Sag Harbor in a cabin cruiser. He would row a dinghy in to shore to fetch the boys and take them back out for the afternoon to the moored boat. I might have been reading “The Red Pony” or other stories
in The Long Valley then. What I most remember, though, was that this man had come here from California, like me, and that things seemed to be going well for him. I was having a difficult time that first summer adjusting to city life. I missed the open-endedness of the other landscape, with its hay fields and its perimeter of unsettled mountains. And what I missed was embodied somehow in this burly man, rowing the boat away with his boys. Before I left for college I read all of Steinbeck’s books. I drew from them a sense of security.

  Later that same summer my parents rented a house for a few weeks near Montauk Point, at the tip of Long Island. My father, as I would always refer to him later, took my brother and me fishing several times on charter boats. As it happened, Peter Matthiessen—a writer I would later come to admire and get to know—was captaining just such a boat out of Montauk that August. Thirty years later, crossing Little Peconic Bay to the west of Montauk with him, in a boat he was thinking of buying, we tried to determine whether it could have been his boat that my father had hired one of those times.

  I thrived in the city in spite of the change in landscape. I focused on my studies—Latin, history, English literature, French, art (a class taught by the painter John Sloan’s widow)—a standard Jesuit regimen, light in the sciences. I developed into a fast, strong athlete, and graduated with letters in three varsity sports and a scholastic average high enough to have gained me entry to almost any university.

  I felt privileged rather than deserving of all this. I understood that my Jesuit education, my social and economic class, my good grades, my trained and confident young man’s voice, my white skin, and the hegemony of my religion all pointed toward being well received in the world. In my private heart, though, thinking back to the years in California and forgetting those early days of privilege at Orienta Point, I felt I was dressed in borrowed clothes. How did I come to be here?