Horizon Page 3
As I look back, I can see how determined I was as a college freshman to immerse myself in any one of several artistic pursuits. I felt the desire acutely as a fledgling actor, responding to complicated blocking directions from a director. (In theater classes, I marveled at how the emotional underpinning of a play could be made visually apparent by establishing certain patterns in an actor’s movements.) I felt this same affinity with patterns in my initial efforts to write fiction, and with photography, as I began making images of landscapes in the countryside around me in northern Indiana and southern Michigan. I pored over the black-and-white images of Minor White and Harry Callahan, of Edward Weston and Wynn Bullock, struck by their completeness, by the cleanness of the compositions. I hoped to emulate them, and also to embrace the compassion of photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, though I could not imagine intruding on people in order to reveal human suffering the way they did.
I can appreciate now, fifty years on, of course, that several other things were also in play when I decided not to pursue a career in aeronautical engineering. When I was nine, a friend of the family gave me eight tumbler pigeons. I spent hours out of mind with those birds, mesmerized by their arrowing and wheeling across the sky, by the way they deliberately lost aerodynamic lift and fell through the air, tumbling end over end for hundreds of feet, falling as though felled by birdshot, only to swoop out of it acrobatically just before they hit the ground. I remember the way tiny pressure gradients in the atmosphere caused flocks of them to teeter in flight, making transparent air masses visible. Watching them, I felt incredulous, gleeful.
In those same years I also put together dozens of model planes. I suspended them from the ceiling of my bedroom with sewing thread, fighter planes and bombers like the P-38 and the B-24, but, too, “flying boats” like the PBY Catalina, the Martin PBM Mariner, and the Martin M-130. These large planes could reach destinations in the world where no runways had yet been built, by putting down instead on bays and lagoons. When I woke in the night and looked up, these planes were arrayed above me like constellations. They were as alluring as any arrangement of stars I knew.
Some nights I would imagine myself in the cockpit of one of these airplanes, an aircraft without armament, without bombs. I’d roll out over the moonlit San Fernando Valley and head inland over the mountains, bearing off over Mount Whitney and heading south into Mexico. I’d push on through the night like Beryl Markham, just a few thousand feet above the skin of the earth. Coming home over the western Caribbean and then the Gulf of Mexico, I’d see the first rays of the sun in the east, an hour before they crossed the Sierra Nevada and lit up the crowns of eucalyptus trees in the San Fernando Valley.
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THE AESTHETICS OF airborne flight I reveled in collided, in my freshman year, with instruction in the tensile strength of aluminum, with wind tunnel mathematics, and with the empiricisms of aeronautical engineering. I could not locate, either in chemistry or in physics, anything like the tachycardia, the pounding heart, that rose up in me whenever I turned my pigeons out against the tropical blues and cloud banks of a California sky, or saw thirty or forty of them bursting from the crown of a gum tree, triggered by some signal not apparent to me. I could not find anywhere in my coursework in calculus the headlong spirit of Saint-Exupéry, scudding over dune crests in Western Sahara beneath a bejeweled sky. The meaning of Icarus’s defiant and incautious bravado was never addressed in my physics seminar.
As a seventeen-year-old, I longed for direct experience with the world. Most of my impulses, however, were purely metaphorical, without shape or purpose. Like so many immature boys, desperate to achieve some kind of standing, I floundered—inarticulate, self-conscious, and defensive.
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I LEFT THE UNIVERSITY itself regularly during those years to explore landscapes in the upper and lower Midwest, driving a 1951 Buick Roadmaster, my first car, which I kept illegally off campus. I drove hundreds of miles to see whatever might be there in northern Michigan or in trans-Mississippi Iowa. Traveling, I came to understand, assuaged something in me. After graduating from prep school in 1962, I’d spent two months being driven through western Europe in a compact Fiat bus with fifteen of my male classmates and a couple of tutors. We drove eastward from Portugal across Spain and France, over the maritime Alps into Italy, and south as far as Rome, then came back north through Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, and West Germany, arriving again in France, in Lorraine, and going on to Paris. We crossed the Channel to Dover from Calais and took a train to London. On our last day in Ireland, I rowed a stretch of the River Shannon in a punt, alone, not wanting this luminous journey—from the art galleries of the Prado in Madrid to the bleakness of the Brenner Pass; from the fields of crosses and Stars of David in cemeteries across Artois and Picardy to the austere Cliffs of Moher in County Clare—ever to be finished.
The stimulation of that journey—the geographies, the art, the food, the conversations with tradespeople—was intoxicating. I wanted this stimulation somehow to frame my way in the world.
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BY THE TIME I was in my early twenties, I’d spent one summer wrangling horses in Wyoming and another in summer stock theater in Helena, Montana. I’d driven across all but one or two of the lower forty-eight. I’d returned to Europe, to England and to my stepfather’s ancestral land in Asturias, in Spain, and I’d published my first stories. I was still deeply uncertain, however, about what to do. Before I married, I visited a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, thinking this might be my life’s destination. It wasn’t. (The monk Thomas Merton was living there at the time. His autobiography and other of his books had been inspirational for me in prep school and college.) In 1968, married now and in possession of a master’s degree, I moved to Oregon to begin work on a second graduate degree, a master of fine arts in creative writing, thinking I would do best to follow a career in teaching. I was quickly disillusioned by the program but matriculated at the University of Oregon for several more semesters, studying folklore, journalism, and Native American culture. By that time, however, life in a university had come to represent, for me, mostly domestic comforts and unconscious detachment from the workaday world. Life in classrooms began to seem intolerably hermetic, an unsafe place in which to remain, I thought, in spite of the intense stimulation that far-ranging, learned conversations there always seemed to provide.
I began to travel more after that, to travel specifically, almost incessantly, throughout the American West. I left behind any lingering aspirations I still had to work in the theater, and after some modest success as a landscape photographer, I put my cameras down as well. I wanted to see and write about landscapes I thought I could have an informing conversation with, and about the compelling otherness of wild animals.
These trips away from home in the early seventies—home by then was the west slope of the Cascade Mountains in western Oregon, a two-story house on a white-water river, where I still live—would eventually encompass traveling with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory in Australia and working with a group of Kamba men in Kenya searching for hominid fossils. I would travel up the Orinoco River in Venezuela, through the Queen Maud Mountains in Antarctica, and down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Wuhan. I’d explore the cliff walls at Bamyan in Afghanistan, where two massive Buddhas, a husband and wife, once stood for 1,500 years as genii loci before being destroyed by cultural extremists. I’d travel in northern Japan, the Middle East, and the South Pacific.
Initially I thought of myself on these journeys as a reporter, traveling outward from a more privileged world. I believed—as well as I could grasp the idea back then—that I had an ethical obligation as a writer, in addition to an aesthetic one. It was to experience the world intensely and then to put into words as well as I could what I’d seen. I was aware others could see better than I, and also that other people were not a
ble to travel in the way I had begun to, going away habitually. And whatever a reader might make of what I tried to describe, I already understood that their conclusions might not match my own. I saw myself, then, as a sort of courier, a kind of runner come home from another land after some exchange with it and its denizens, carrying, by way of a story, some incomplete bit of news about how different, how marvelous and incomprehensible, really, life was, out beyond the pale of the village in which I had grown up.
Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?
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IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN the artist Saul Steinberg who once described himself as a writer who draws. For a while, after I put my cameras down in 1981, I thought of myself, pretentiously, certainly, as an artist who wrote. I was someone alert to visual imagery and drawn to movement through, and to arrangements made within, different volumes of space. I attended to this kind of thing in my written work much as I had done in my early photographs. I juxtaposed, emphasized, and hoped delicately to balance in these written compositions whatever the components happened to be.
Somewhere along this path, writing essays and stories, and many years into my work, I began to sense the ways in which I had changed as a writer over time. I wondered then whether it would be instructive to return to some of the places I’d visited earlier, to see how much could be learned from what would now, obviously, be different circumstances. I believed I’d reported carefully and accurately on what I’d first encountered; but I wanted to experience these places all over again, to go back, for example, to the High Arctic, to return to Galápagos, to make another trip to Antarctica. (In fiction, too, I’d developed scenarios set in specific landscapes—the agricultural California of my boyhood, the streets of Manhattan, the temperate rain forest that became my home in 1970, the Jimbocho district of Tokyo, but the imperative here, to revisit, was not so strong.)
I’d missed a lot, I knew, on my first passes through these places. On a second pass, whatever I might take in, I had faith the overall experience would affect me differently. I’d overnight in different spots; the weather would not be the same; and there would be the influence of books I’d read in the interim. And the illuminations and failures of my own life that had come along since would certainly reshape earlier perceptions.
One can never, even by paying the strictest attention at multiple levels, entirely comprehend a single place, no matter how many times one might travel there. This is not only because the place itself is constantly changing but because the deep nature of every place is not transparency. It’s obscurity. I’ve never been drawn to the idea of writing definitively about anything, especially the Heraclitean nature of cultural geographies. In revisiting these places, then, I was more interested in how, in reviewing my previous experience of that location, I might find another truth, one different from the one I first wrote about. I was also interested in how my memory of a place might trigger new emotions, and in how the truth of such emotions might differently inform the facts I had once so carefully gathered. The anthropologist Carl Schuster, speaking about comparing cultural epistemologies, people’s ways of knowing, once wrote, “Nobody has the vaguest notion of what this world is really like; the only thing that can be safely predicted is that it is very different from what anybody supposes.” Schuster was raising an objection to the sometimes condescending positions scientists and academics take in speaking about reality and human fate. He was advocating for the sort of emotional and spiritual relationships all cultures experience in their encounters with their places, and which many of these cultures still enshrine alongside their more empirical, or analytical, responses to those same places, finding those perceptions equally valid in furthering an understanding of what is, finally, beyond understanding.
As the years went on, I felt I wanted to look again at nearly everything I had seen.
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MY INTENTION IN rereading my field notebooks and drafting Horizon was to walk the distance between that moment in 1948, standing in the harbor shallows as a boy amid the sailboats of wealthy residents living at the Orienta, and a winter day in 1994 when I visited, for perhaps the tenth time, Cape Foulweather, a headland on the Pacific coast of Oregon, the locale of Captain James Cook’s first landfall in North America. What does the man who made camp that day on the flank of Cape Foulweather, to wait for a late winter storm, hope to find, recalling some scenes from his boyhood while at the same time trying to imagine Cook’s Resolution there in front of him, approaching on a shoreward tack, the ship having emerged first as a pindot on the horizon and then grown in a few hours into a full-blown three-masted square-rigger, half its sails reefed, rust stains bleeding from its scuppers and staining the black sides of its hull?
On that long-ago morning in March of 1778, the forest-shrouded mountains of Oregon’s Coast Range had loomed dark beneath low-lying clouds. The wind was whipping layers of rain through the rioting air and Cook’s ship, close-hauled a few miles offshore, was plunging and yawing through cross seas. Over the course of several days, the storm would bully the Resolution off miles to the southwest before its crew could bring it about and begin beating northward again. By then the Resolution had been shoved so far offshore the lookouts would miss seeing the mouth of the Columbia River, two days later. That wouldn’t happen—for Europeans—for another fourteen years.
How far had I traveled between a boyhood longing to go and this reflective time on the flanks of the cape, having gone? And having seen so many parts of the world, what had I learned about human menace, human triumph, and human failure? Or about my own failings and fallibility? I tumbled these questions through my fingers regularly on Cape Foulweather, like familiar coinage.
There is no originality in this, of course. We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there. My further desire in planning this book was to create a narrative that would engage a reader intent on discovering a trajectory in her or his own life, a coherent and meaningful story, at a time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives. At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future.
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I SPENT MANY DAYS over a period of about ten years camped on the heights of Cape Foulweather—the name Cook gave it that day, the seventh of March, 1778—absorbing the moods of the Pacific as they changed. From the shoulder of the cape, the ocean’s broad back is a vastness not to be had in a single view, any more than a sidelong view of the beloved’s cheek can carry anything like the full impact of the lover’s straight-on gaze. Could I, I asked myself once, within the protean and stage-like expanse of that sea, imagine, in the same moment of looking, another vastness—a sere sand plain in the Namib Desert in Africa, say, trembling there over the water’s opaque surface and carrying a barely discernible herd of six oryx traveling? Or could I conjure, in that same volume of oceanic space, a boyhood memory—an afternoon in the Mojave Desert, searching for coyotes, disoriented in a vastness of creosote bush—without losing either image, the real one before me or the remembered one? Or, watching a fresh wind raise the hackles of the sea, could I hold simultaneously in my memory a night of breezes easing occasionally through a hotel-room window in Mindanao, soft as a horse’s sigh, and then the screeching, predatory wind that for hours thrashed the tent wall by my head one subzero night in Antarctica?
What had changed for that boy in Mamaroneck Harbor, whose mother, seated in the shade of an oak, looked up regularly from her needlepoint to find him once more in sunlight coruscating on the water?
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WHEN I BEGAN to visit Cape Foulweather in the early nineties, it was for no particular reason beyond my admiration for James Cook. The cape wasn’t far from my home and I loved watching the birds, the fishing boats, the changing weather. The view of the ocean alone, seen from the rise of the cape, high above a rampart of sea cliffs, was often dramatic. Some days the sea was so side-lit, so serene, that for dozens of square miles the water seemed to be a pane of ribboned glass, the light reflecting from its surface so molten the pupil of my eye could not close down tightly enough to produce any texture. On certain summer nights, the air was transparent enough for me to make out detail in the opposite direction, twenty miles to the east, an inland mountain range bathed in lunar light. At the same time, I was able to see off to the north, opposite the arc of the moon’s course, an immeasurable, glittering field of undimmed stars.
I periodically spent a sequence of mostly idle days on the cape, camped each time in the same recovering clearcut. Apprenticeship was what this had turned into. Occasionally, sitting amid young trees in the clearcut, I’d pick up some small thing, a Sitka spruce cone or the translucent wing of a dragonfly, and attempt to sketch it. I failed repeatedly to create with my pencil anything worth a second look; but in that hour of drawing I would gain insight, not only into the shape of the object but into its overall form, its third dimension. I’d grasp the temporality of it, or on occasion, the fractal scaling of its parts, or in some other way be drawn into intimacy with it.
These innocuous palm-sized bits of life were as provoking of thought and emotion for me as the sudden appearance of a mountain lion might have been. I reached for small objects to feel their contours, to get the heft or the texture of them. Or I’d rotate and hold them in such a way as to get sunlight to refract through their crystals, as you might with a feather, or so the sunlight would illuminate deep shadows in a bit of bone.