About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  † About four a.m. one December night in Hong Kong, I stood at the top of our air stairs scanning close-by office buildings with my binoculars. Decorated Christmas trees twinkled on a dozen floors. I’d seen Christmas trees banked with brightly wrapped gift boxes in Muslim Dubai and in the Buddhist city of Bangkok, as well as in Amsterdam and Houston. The displays, of course, had nothing to do with the Christianity of, say, Joseph of Arimathea. “This time of year,” one pilot told me while we waited for cargo in Hong Kong, “we’re flying freighters out of here wingtip to wingtip.”

  * Pilots refer to newer planes like the Boeing 777 and the Airbus 320 synecdochically as “glass cockpits,” planes in which the information most frequently reviewed is displayed in color overlays on videolike screens. The instrument cluster in older jet aircraft is referred to collectively as “steam gauges.”

  * The turbulence we encountered over Anchorage on the flight with the horses was the worst one pilot had ever experienced. On another flight outbound from Anchorage, the freighter built up the heaviest loads of ice the chief pilot had ever had to contend with.

  PART TWO

  Indwelling

  6

  APOLOGIA

  A FEW MILES EAST of home in the Cascades I slow down and pull over for two raccoons, sprawled still as stones in the road. I carry them to the side and lay them in sunshot, windblown grass in the barrow pit. In eastern Oregon, along U.S. 20, black-tailed jackrabbits lie like welts of sod—three, four, then a fifth. By the bridge over Jordan Creek, just shy of the Idaho border in the drainage of the Owyhee River, a crumpled adolescent porcupine leers up almost maniacally over its blood-flecked teeth. I carry each one away from the pavement into a cover of grass or brush out of decency, I think. And worry. Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?

  I do not stop to remove each dark blister from the road. I wince before the recently dead, feel my lips tighten, see something else, a fence post, in the spontaneous aversion of my eyes, and pull over. I imagine white silk threads of life still vibrating inside them, even if the body’s husk is stretched out for yards, stuck like oiled muslin to the road. The energy that once held them erect leaves like a bullet, but the memory of that energy fades slowly from the wrinkled cornea, the bloodless fur.

  The raccoons and, later, a red fox carry like sacks of wet gravel and sand. Each animal is like a solitary child’s shoe in the road.

  Once a man asked, Why do you bother? You never know, I said. The ones you give some semblance of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness.

  In Idaho I hit a young sage sparrow—thwack against the right fender in the very split second I see it. Its companion rises from the same spot but a foot higher, slow as smoke, and sails off clean into the desert. I rest the walloped bird in my left hand, my right thumb pressed to its chest. I feel for the wail of the heart. Its eyes glisten like rain on crystal. Nothing but warmth. I shut the tiny eyelids and lay it beside a clump of bunchgrass. Beyond a barbedwire fence the overgrazed range is littered with cow flops. The road curves away to the south. I nod before I go, a ridiculous gesture, out of simple grief.

  I pass four spotted skunks. The swirling air is acrid with the rupture of each life.

  DARKNESS RISES in the valleys of Idaho. East of Grand View, south of the Snake River, nighthawks swoop the roads for gnats, silent on the wing as owls. On a descending curve I see two of them lying soft as clouds in the road. I turn around and come back. The sudden slowing down and my K-turn at the bottom of the hill draw the attention of a man who steps away from a tractor, a dozen yards from where the birds lie. I can tell by his step, the suspicious tilt of his head, that he is wary, vaguely proprietary. Offended, or irritated, he may throw the birds back into the road when I leave. So I wait, subdued like a penitent, a body in each hand.

  He speaks first, a low voice, a deep murmur weighted with awe. He has been watching these flocks feeding just above the road for several evenings. He calls them whippoorwills. He gestures for a carcass. How odd, yes, the way they concentrate their hunting right on the road, I say. He runs a finger down the smooth arc of the belly and remarks on the small whiskered bill. He pulls one long wing out straight, but not roughly. He marvels. He glances at my car, baffled by this out-of-state courtesy. Two dozen nighthawks careen past, back and forth at arm’s length, feeding at our height and lower. He asks if I would mind—as though I owned it—if he took the bird up to the house to show his wife. “She’s never seen anything like this.” He’s fascinated. “Not close.”

  I trust, later, he will put it in the fields, not throw the body in the trash, a whirligig.

  NORTH OF PINEDALE in western Wyoming on U.S. 189, below the Gros Ventre Range, I see a big doe from a great distance, the low rays of first light gleaming in her tawny reddish hair. She rests askew, like a crushed tree. I drag her to the shoulder, then down a long slope by the petals of her ears. A gunnysack of plaster mud, ears cold as rain gutters. All of her doesn’t come. I climb back up for the missing leg. The stain of her is darker than the black asphalt. The stains go north and off to the south as far as I can see.

  On an afternoon trafficless, quiet as a cloister, headed across South Pass in the Wind River Range, I swerve violently but hit a bird, and then try to wrestle the gravel-spewing skid in a straight line along the lip of an embankment. I know even as I struggle for control the irony of this: I could easily pitch off here to my own death. The bird is dead somewhere in the road behind me. Only a few seconds and I am safely back on the road, nauseated, lightheaded.

  It is hard to distinguish among younger gulls. I turn this one around slowly in my hands. It could be a western gull, a mew gull, a California gull. I do not remember well enough the bill markings, the color of the legs. I have no doubt about the vertebrae shattered beneath the seamless white of its ropy neck.

  East of Lusk, Wyoming, in Nebraska, I stop for a badger. I squat on the macadam to admire the long claws, the perfect set of its teeth in the broken jaw, the ramulose shading of its fur—how it differs slightly, as does every badger’s, from the drawings and pictures in the field guides. A car drifts toward us over the prairie, coming on in the other lane, a white 1962 Chevrolet station wagon. The driver slows to pass. In the bright sunlight I can’t see his face, only an arm and the gesture of his thick left hand. It opens in a kind of shrug, hangs briefly in limp sadness, then extends itself in supplication. Gone past, it curls into itself against the car door and is still.

  Farther on in western Nebraska I pick up the small bodies of mice and birds. While I wait to retrieve these creatures I do not meet the eyes of passing drivers. Whoever they are, I feel anger toward them, in spite of the sparrow and the gull I myself have killed. We treat the attrition of lives on the road like the attrition of lives in war: horrifying, unavoidable, justified. Accepting the slaughter leaves people momentarily fractious, embarrassed. South of Broken Bow, at dawn, I cannot avoid an immature barn swallow. It hangs by its head, motionless in the slats of the grille.

  I stop for a rabbit on Nebraska 806 and find, only a few feet away, a garter snake. What else have I missed, too small, too narrow? What has gone under or past me while I stared at mountains, hay meadows, fencerows, the beryl surface of rivers? In Wyoming I could not help but see pronghorn antelope swollen big as barrels by the side of the road, their legs splayed rigidly aloft. For animals so large, people will stop. But how many have this habit of clearing the road of smaller creatures, people who would remove the ones I miss? I do not imagine I am alone. As much sorrow as the man’s hand conveyed in Nebraska, it meant gratitude too for burying the dead.

  Still, I do not wish to meet anyone’s eyes.

  IN SOUTHWESTERN IOWA, outside Clarinda, I haul a deer into high grass out of sight of the road and begin to examine it. It is still whole, but the destruction is breathtaking. The skull, I soon discover, is fractured in four places; th
e jaw, hanging by shreds of mandibular muscle, is broken at the symphysis, beneath the incisors. The pelvis is crushed, the left hind leg unsocketed. All but two ribs are dislocated along the vertebral column, which is complexly fractured. The intestines have been driven forward into the chest. The heart and lungs have ruptured the chest wall at the base of the neck. The signature of a tractortrailer truck: 80,000 pounds at 65 mph.

  In front of a motel room in Ottumwa I finger-scrape the dry, stiff carcasses of bumblebees, wasps, and butterflies from the grille and headlight mountings, and I scrub with a wet cloth to soften and wipe away the nap of crumbles, the insects, the aerial plankton of spiders and mites. I am uneasy carrying so many of the dead. The carnage is so obvious.

  In Illinois, west of Kankakee, two raccoons as young as the ones in Oregon. In Indiana another raccoon, a gray squirrel. When I make the left turn into the driveway at the house of a friend outside South Bend, it is evening, hot and muggy. I can hear cicadas in a lone elm. I’m glad to be here.

  From the driveway entrance I look back down Indiana 23, toward Indiana 8, remembering the farm roads of Illinois and Iowa. I remember how beautiful it was in the limpid air to drive Nebraska 2 through the sand hills, to see how far at dusk the land was etched east and west of Wyoming 28. I remember the imposition of the Wind River Range in a hard, blue sky beneath white ranks of buttonhook clouds, windy hay fields on the Snake River plain, the welcome of Russian olive trees and willows in western creek bottoms. The transformation of the heart such beauty engenders is not enough tonight to let me shed the heavier memory, a catalog too morbid to write out, too vivid to ignore.

  I stand in the driveway now, listening to the cicadas whirring in the dark tree. My hands grip the sill of the open window at the driver’s side, and I lean down as if to speak to someone still sitting there. The weight I wish to fall I cannot fathom, a sorrow over the world’s dark hunger.

  A light comes on over the porch. I hear a dead bolt thrown, the shiver of a door pulled free. The words of atonement I pronounce are too inept to offer me release. Or forgiveness. My friend is floating across the tree-shadowed lawn. What is to be done with the desire for exculpation?

  “Later than we thought you’d be,” he says.

  I do not want the lavabo. I wish to make amends.

  “I made more stops than I thought I would,” I answer.

  “Well, bring in your things. And whatever I can take,” he offers.

  I anticipate, in the powerful antidote of our conversation, the reassurance of a human enterprise, the forgiving embrace of the rational. It waits within, beyond the slow tail-wagging of two dogs standing at the screen door.

  7

  IN A COUNTRY OF LIGHT, AMONG ANIMALS

  THE UTUKOK RIVER FLOWS north out of Alaska’s De Long Mountains in the western Brooks Range, east along the base of a treeless spine called Archimedes Ridge, then north again across the tundra and into the Arctic Ocean at Kasegaluk Lagoon. No one lives along its two hundred miles of braided channels or in the hills nearby. Inupiat people occasionally set up fishing camps at the river’s mouth, but they do not venture far inland. The country, several thousand square miles of it draining into the Utukok, belongs to the resident animals.

  The benign and seemingly endless light of an arctic summer here and the abrupt musical notes of nesting birds in the great silence impart a gentleness to this landscape; a profusion of arctic lupine and other flowers vaguely familiar to a temperate-zone eye make the gentle hills seem knowable and hospitable, but this northern edge of the continent must be viewed as foreign territory. Human beings are infrequent summer visitors. Most of them are biologists who stay a few weeks and then are gone. Or geologists, whose prospecting for oil makes the fieldwork of the biologists exploring this ecosystem seem more compelling—and meeting the gaze of resident caribou somewhat unsettling.

  It seems presumptuous in a country so far-flung to be inquiring into the lives of animals—wolverine and the wolves and grizzlies that hunt the caribou—but the best biologists know you have to come to places like this to understand animals. A few will go further and tell you that, really, you must spend a lifetime at it, your own and the animal’s. But few are able to. Like the rest of us they run out of money or management transfers them, or they simply go back to thinking about human beings.

  So, even though a few field biologists have the wherewithal to get to places as untrammeled as the drainage of the Utukok River, rarely do they approach the heart of our difficulty in assessing animal lives. In addition, under the press of orthodoxy in Western science, they tend to overlook mystery. They dismiss, for fear of the complexity they introduce, many factors that set an individual animal apart from the standard description of the species. Fearful of being thought anthropomorphic, they shy away from any evidence of reason or emotion in animals. In formal reports they imply that such incidents never occur or are rare. But working up your field notes in the earth’s wildest places—up here on the Utukok—you feel vaguely uncomfortable. You are very far from home. Your language is spoken by no one in the region.

  IN JUNE 1978 I joined Bob Stephenson, a wolf biologist with Alaska Fish and Game, at a native village in the central Brooks Range called Anaktuvuk Pass. Stephenson owns a home here and for years he has been traveling back and forth from Fairbanks to interview resident Nunamiut (inland Eskimo or Inupiat) about their experiences with animals and to study, with their help, the lives of creatures in the surrounding steep mountains and valleys.

  The belief that hunting cultures like the Nunamiut can offer wildlife biologists invaluable information is not new, but it is now an idea in its ascendancy. And it is not just the daily observations of such hunting peoples that contain a wealth of information about wild animals; in their clothing, dance, and artifacts are metaphorical clues about animal behavior. Generally speaking, native people examine intuitive and personal feelings about wild animals with no fear of anthropomorphism or “pathetic fallacy.” And no incident a person witnesses need conform to prior knowledge. This view is based, of course, on assumptions different from Western views, which presume a species’ behavior remains relatively unchanged and that with the right tools it’s possible to figure out what animals are doing, even to predict their behavior.

  In a place like Anaktuvuk Pass, a still more-or-less intact hunting culture of 110 people, where the senior men have thirty or forty years of experience with wild animals to call on, and the experience of their fathers and grandfathers, one’s prejudices in favor of a superior Western system of knowledge are so obvious, so racist, they bring conversation to a halt.

  During the week we spent in this mountain village, Bob transferred the locations of several new wolf dens to his field maps and made notes every night on a variety of encounters hunters had had with animals during the previous winter. We shared in the Nunamiut’s caribou stew and muktuk (squares of bowhead whale skin and fat, traded up from Eskimos on the coast 200 miles away), and they eagerly partook of our canned fish and cheddar cheese. Late one afternoon a plane took us 230 miles west to a field camp on the Utukok River, where Bob’s current field project with wolves was based and where five other biologists working with grizzly bear, wolverine, and caribou were encamped. I’d just finished writing a book about wolves and was keenly interested in them still, but on this trip I had no greater intention than to pay my respects and to sojourn in their country.

  I DON’T KNOW, of course, whether you’ve ever been in the high Arctic in the summer, but I would begin by telling you how striking the light is. For two months or more the sun doesn’t dip below the horizon. In a treeless, winter-hammered landscape like Alaska’s north slope, the light creates a feeling of compassion that is almost palpable. Each minute of light experienced feels like one stolen from a crushing winter. You walk gently about, respectful of flowering plants, with a sense of how your body breaks the sunshine, creating shadow. You converse in soft tones. The light is—perhaps there is no other word—precious. You are careful aroun
d it.

  The wind always feels close here, a gentle breeze, a heavy blow, the breathing of an unfathomable welter of clouds which passes continually overhead, an ocean in which weather is being conceived. It’s figuring out what it wants to do before moving south and east across North America: now altostratus, now cirrus, now cumulonimbus, like exercises. After lunch a mare’s tail sky; at one in the morning a rainbow appears to the south, half as broad as my fist, driven into the tundra like a sheet of iridescent steel.

  But for the wind against your ear and the keening of fifty species of birds, it is as quiet as the moon. The wind surrounds the bark of a fox and it evaporates. In sun-warmed, goose-down clothing, you turn your cheek to the source of light and feel sheltered; you see amid the dwarf birch and dwarf willow at your feet speckled eggs cradled in birds’ nests. The grace so apparent in first life seems nowhere else so tender, because night never comes here.

  From the slope of a hill above this river, you can look out across two hundred square miles of tundra through air transparent as a polished windowpane. If the Earth were flat you could see all the way to Iowa. It was into this expansive country, this place of interminable light and clear, rolling air, that Bob and I had come. In it we would watch wolves.

  BOB SPENT our first morning in base camp transferring data from his field notebooks to a pile of topographic maps. I heated three gallons of river water, stripped my clothes, and bathed. We were sharing this wall-tent camp with other biologists from Alaska and Montana living in varying degrees of general excitement and anxiety about, respectively, the calving close by of a herd of thirty thousand caribou and the proximity of tundra grizzlies.