by Barry Lopez
Cook, I think, did not entirely trust the assumptions behind the Enlightenment principles that urged him to measure, to record, and to define the world. He did not completely concede the authority that lay behind gradations of social rank, perhaps even naval rank. He spent his life charting raw space, putting down grids and elevations, but he also understood what could not be charted, the importance of the line that separated the known from the unknown. He understood what occurred in the silence between two musical notes. He also knew, I believe, the indispensability of this.
* * *
—
WHENEVER I TRAVELED to Cape Foulweather, I took a pair of binoculars with me. Sometimes I brought along a catadioptric telescope. Since early childhood I’ve been enchanted by the possibility of seeing farther, enthusiastic about the way a few convex and concave glass surfaces can resolve a distant scene into a crisp, isolated image.
Sometimes when I made the journey from home to the cape, I was forced to set up camp in rainy or snowy weather, and learned what that taught. It was easier to hike in the surrounding hills during stretches of dry, clement weather; and of course it was also possible to see farther then, if the atmosphere was clear. On starry nights I inspected the surface of the moon with the telescope, crater by crater. I picked out distant ships, trailed by their dark wakes in the moon’s beryl light. During the day I followed migrating gray whales and flocks of migrating white-winged and surf scoters offshore. With my binoculars I could inspect minutely the slope in a recovering clearcut north of me and resolve the nearly uniform emerald green there into greens of lesser and greater saturation, separating the leaves of salmonberry, for example, from those of red flowering currant or great hedge nettle.
The binoculars and the telescope tunneled the space around and above me, making the indefinite more distinct, the general more specific.
They made the space I was in larger, and my intimacy with that space greater.
* * *
—
THE CLEARCUT I usually camped in was about ten years into its recovery. The felled trees had been hauled away, the limbs, stumps, and rotting logs bulldozed together and burned. The exposed soil had mostly been replanted to a single species of tree, the commercially valuable Douglas-fir, and something of a forest was in the making again, as volunteer Sitka spruce, red alder, and shore pine (also called lodgepole pine) began to emerge in the understory. Red elderberry, evergreen huckleberry, and salal stood out in the ground cover, and where the ground was wetter, sword fern and sedges were growing. In summer, smooth yellow violets, wild strawberry, fireweed, pearly everlasting, yarrow, and native dandelion brightened the scene, as did the small fruits of Oregon grape and domestic holly.
It is reassuring to know the names of these native plants, and to be able to distinguish them from so-called invasive species like woolly mullein and European beachgrass, all this in order to appreciate the character of the place; but this is not necessary. The urge to distinguish between native and non-native plants has become, for some, a xenophobic pastime. Camped here, I’ve often thought my long-standing aversion to clearcuts is no longer really warranted. Aesthetically, fresh clearcuts are as off-putting as patches of mange on a dog. And the evidence of an indifferent and rapacious harvest in such places is sometimes offensive, the battlefield aftermath from the felling of enormous trees, the ashes and masticated earth that industrial logging leaves behind. One might wonder, picturing Cook cruising offshore here two centuries and some decades ago and exchanging shouted communications with his lookouts, whether he speculated at all about an avarice like that of the conquistadores coming to life here one day.
However it might be viewed, the throttled Earth—the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit—is now our home. We know the wounds. We have come to accept them. And we ask, many of us, What will the next step be?
One Sunday afternoon in Lebanon, I rested my forehead against the trunk of a cedar in a protected, remnant grove of them in the Barouk Forest, in the Al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve. These were the fabled cedars of Lebanon (Cedrus libani), in the mountains southeast of Beirut. I did not feel the grief I thought I might over the nearly complete disappearance in Lebanon of this species of tree. I felt only respect for these few that were left. The bark of the tree I stood beside had been polished to a sheen by tens of thousands of handstrokes, each person’s caress a mixture of their own regret, affection, and forbearance.
This is what we have now, not the cedars of Lebanon some of us once imagined, reading the ancient texts.
To enumerate the species of native plants that are left today on the deforested flanks of Cape Foulweather would be to provide a vocabulary without a syntax. To write the history of plants here, a chronicler would have had to reside among them for many decades. It’s work few have any time for now.
And the value of possessing such a coordinated litany has become problematic.
* * *
—
I DROVE OUT to the margin of the Pacific Ocean that day in February when I heard the storm was coming, anchored my tent in the lee of the truck in case the storm came hard, and went to sleep after I had supper. At first light, I stood with my steaming coffee in a stir of mist marking the advance of the storm, and thought again of Cook and of all I had seen from this platform high above the ocean.
Seven miles to the south, the navigation light at Yaquina (yah-QUIN-ah) Head flashed its warning. Three miles to the north, fishing boats were wallowing in freshening seas off Depoe Bay, the water there soon to become more treacherous. From a certain perspective, storm vigils like mine—waiting for the mist to harden into rain, for the wave troughs to deepen under the surging wind, trying to read the surface of the sea where, for hours on end yesterday, nothing much seemed to be going on—all of this might strike some as a setup for boredom. I’ve found myself blanking out here, even on bright spring days when warm breezes enlivened the land and thousands of nesting common murres, double-crested and pelagic cormorants, and Cassin’s and rhinoceros auklets were diving and swooping the water. On those days when I couldn’t focus, I’d retreat to the front seat of my truck to read or doze. I was soon back, though, weirdly attentive to the apparently uneventful landscape.
It’s been my experience that these hours of perusing the water, here or while at sea—taking in the occasional bird or surfacing whale, watching light shift on the surface—induce an awareness of another sort of time, a time that fills an expansive and undifferentiated volume of space, one not easily available elsewhere. On those days, such a seemingly mindless vigil offers relief from the monotony of everyday experience.
During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve also had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our disaffections with modern life—the tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption; the embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state; the entitlement attitudes of those in power; the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other humans to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy; and their widespread occurrence suggests that these problems are intractable.
I can’t say what this other way of looking at these situations is, how a huge domed space like the daylit ocean, a space almost entirely free of objects and offering a different sense of time passing, might provide a perspective to make banal human failure seem less enduring, less threatening; but taking in this view, I always sense that more room for us to maneuver exists. That what halts us is simply a failure of imagination.
The history of art in the West, I believe, can be viewed as the history of various experiments with volumes of space and increments of time, with frequencies of light and of sound. Art’s underlyin
g strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction. The authority of art, its special power to illuminate, was partially eclipsed in Western culture by the Scientific Revolution. After that, art’s place in everyday life became increasingly more decorative, its influence undermined by science’s certainty, its insistance on authority given little more than polite notice. The history of the separation of art from the natural world is older than the history of the separation of art from the world of reason, but this breach, too, has had a staggering effect on how humans grapple with their fate. Art does not aspire to entertain. It aspires to converse. It, too, like Clausius’s statement of the second law of thermodynamics, the one about entropy, is about fated life.
When the coastal storm I’ve been waiting for finally comes, it will bring its musics, the active colors of its pummeled skies, and wind to choreograph the movements of the clouds. It will crack land and sea with its pellets of rain. It will dim the sun. If the response is awe, not analysis, that, really, is all that is needed.
* * *
—
IT WAS AT Cape Foulweather one day, sitting on a chair on the roof of my truck with a pair of binoculars, that I realized I have never in my life gotten quite enough of the Pacific. With its forever-changing surface, its rafts of sea ducks and reflections of sky, its ferocious surf, its handling of intrusions by the dry land, it seems knowable, even definable. Below its surface are its invisible parts—its volcanoes, canyons, and abyssal plains, mapped but still largely obscure. It’s from there, from this immense crater, that the primordial Earth, according to many, flung off the material that became its single moon.
It is my hope one day to be able to descend into this wilderness, to aim a spotlight into the extensive darkness.
On January 23, 1960, at a little after one in the afternoon local time, two men seated on small stainless-steel boxes inside a forged steel-alloy cabin, a sphere slung like an udder beneath a ballast chamber filled with gasoline, settled gently onto a patch of ivory-colored silt on the floor of the Mariana Trench, a spot in the western Pacific later to be named the Vitiaz Deep. They were at a depth of 35,800 feet. The pressure on the walls of the observation sphere was 7.97 tons per square inch. In that moment, less than seven years after a Sherpa mountaineer named Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealand mountaineer Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Mount Everest (29,035 feet), Don Walsh, an American naval lieutenant and submariner, and a Swiss oceanographic engineer named Jacques Piccard reached Earth’s other vertical extreme. Today, Everest—the Nepali word for it, sagarmatha, means “forehead of the sky”—has become a crowded and occasionally deadly tourist attraction. The stretch of ponded sediment where Walsh and Piccard spent twenty minutes together remains a Styx-like corner of humanity’s inquiry, a ghostly scene in the ocean’s hadal depths.
Don Walsh lives now on the edge of the Pacific near Myrtle Point, Oregon. He is an unassuming man, a retired naval captain with a broad background in oceanography and exploration, an engaging and authoritative individual given to self-deprecating humor. When I visited him at his home, he recounted for me the details of the dives he had made in the Trieste, the bathyscaphe that took him and Piccard to what Piccard called “the basement of the world.” It was apparent from the way he tried to render these moments for me that the experience had affected him deeply. Decades later, the achievement remained nearly beyond description for him. He had descended through an Earthly region, one without sunlight and without weather, to land on a soft plain of talc-like powder called marine snow, an accumulation of bony detritus, the remains of billions of creatures that had died over eons in the nearly seven miles of water above. More than anyone before them, he and Piccard had been “in” the Pacific. They had reached its other, lower surface.
On its descent, it’s possible the Trieste passed through one of the Pacific’s still poorly understood sonic tunnels (the Trieste wasn’t outfitted with the instruments needed to detect one), corridors through which the sound of an erupting submarine volcano, for example, travels very fast for thousands of miles, undiminished in intensity and relatively undiffused. The nature of these transmission tunnels was of great interest at the time to the U.S. Navy, and their characteristic makeup—a specific combination of salinity, temperature, and pressure—was one of many things about this pelagic frontier turning over in Walsh’s mind on the way down to the floor of the Vitiaz Deep. No one really knew then how foreign (or familiar) this realm of the planet might prove to be.
If Walsh could have seen into the darkness beyond the bright cones of his searchlights on that descent in 1960, he would have seen dark scarves of turbidity snaking off a continental shelf near Guam and streaming across the plain below, evidence of the complexity of deep subsurface oceanic currents, currents that belie the notion of order that two-dimensional maps of the ocean’s surface currents often convey, with their neat boundaries and points of convergence—just here, say, is where the Humboldt Current meets the South Equatorial Current, and just there is where the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current meet. As is the case with many maps covering large areas, the greater the scale, the less reliable the information, no matter how elegantly or beautifully presented.
Walsh described his historic dive in striking detail—the khaki-colored naval uniform he wore that day, the brown dress oxfords he had on, the small American flag he brought with him. It was chilly inside the cramped, unheated sphere, and there were long silences during the four-hour and thirty-eight-minute descent and the three-hour and twenty-seven-minute ascent, partly because the taciturn Piccard hardly spoke. The sound Walsh recalls most frequently is the creak and groan of the steel sphere as it adjusted to changes in pressure and temperature. At the bottom, in 38° F water, they saw a single sole-like fish (Chascanopsetta lugubris) about a foot long, undulating across what had long been thought a lifeless plain. It swam slowly out of Walsh’s view of it through the bathyscaphe’s single miniature window, four inches across and five inches thick.
Piccard once described the floor of the Pacific as “a vast emptiness beyond all comprehension.” In the years since he and Walsh made their dive, scientists have embraced the theory of plate tectonics; discovered deep-ocean thermal vents and their ecosystems of sulfur-based life (life chemically dependent on sulfur, not solar radiation, for its metabolism); discovered hundreds of new species of deep-ocean dwellers; and mapped much of the planet’s deep-water currents. The emptiness Piccard alluded to has largely been filled in, though his essential impression of the existence of a vastness too extreme to comprehend is neither uninformed nor outdated. This concept of seeing an unbounded emptiness is a recurrent observation today in cosmology, as it was, too, in Piccard’s time, in French existentialism. Cook faced the same “eternity” on the surface of the Pacific once he sailed north of the Marquesas, leaving behind the then lightly reconnoitered precincts of the South Pacific. But it was not solely the size of the Pacific that gave Cook pause; it was his intuition that this ocean could not be rendered with the tools with which he was familiar. No mathematics he knew could make it comprehensible. Even if he had had a globe before him, even if that globe was only the size of a marble, he knew it was impossible to take in the entirety of the Pacific with one look. You had to rotate the sphere to see it all.
Walsh’s one regret about his stupendous feat of exploration was that amid his monitoring of all the gauges in the Trieste and the slight distraction of Piccard’s unfriendly preoccupation with tables of data and his enormous Swiss flag, there had not been sufficient room for astonishment, for an expanded sense of appreciation in the moment. Walsh wrote an article for Life (Piccard wrote one for National Geographic) and filed the required reports with the Navy, but he could not find a way to satisfactorily express the breadth of his wonderment. He
works hard to explain to a stranger the realization of his vision of the absolute depths of the sea. He told me that as a submarine captain, he had not actively considered the character of the ocean below 400 feet, not until that singular universe within Earth’s deepest declivities suddenly filled his awareness of where he was and who he was, an explorer craning his neck to peer out a tiny window at 11°18'30" N and 142°15'30" E, nearly six Grand Canyons deep on the utter bottom of the western Pacific, a scene no person before him had been able to experience.
It was important to Walsh that a human being, not a rover or a probe, first saw the bottom of the Pacific. “You can’t surprise a machine,” he said to me. And it is this capacity to appreciate the unknown, to be surprised by it, he believes, that will always set the human explorer apart from the machine. The moment of surprise informs you emphatically that the way you once imagined the world is not the way it is. “To explore,” he says, “is to travel without a hypothesis.”
As he walked me to my truck, in an effort to convey how completely I appreciated his evocation of the Pacific, I asked Walsh if he happened to know anything about ocean striders. He stopped and exclaimed, “Halobates!”
I was glad to have someone to share my enthusiasm with, someone familiar with these obscure small wild animals.
The life of ocean striders, species in the genus Halobates, is one of interminable exploration. Aquatic insects, they skitter, stride, and skate over the active surface of the open ocean, searching for food and mates, which they locate by some as-yet-unknown method in order to perpetuate themselves. They survive pelting rainstorms, terrific winds, and chaotic seas. If death does not arrive in the shape of a seabird, a fish, or a turtle, they sink alone into the abyss when their time comes, as gently as a fingernail clipping. A life lived alone, and for some entirely out of sight of land.
