About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory

by Barry Lopez

  A characteristic movement of Jack’s hands is to bring two disparate things together, keeping them there side by side. Sometimes he seems like a man come from some great distance in time. One of the first things Nora told me about him was that he was “about a thousand years old.”

  MY CONVERSATIONS AND working days with Jack were always marked by long silences, as if we were fishing for steelhead together in the coastal rivers and not inclined to talk much because it broke our concentration on the fish. Late one night when he was stoking the front port and we were sitting together for four or five minutes at a time, Jack told me about a pot he’d placed in Tanner’s River, the river the creek he lives by drains into. He told me he waded out and put it down in the current and left it there for several months, and that when he came back and pulled it out, holding it up to the light and letting the water spill down his arms, he was astonished to find he felt the same way he’d felt taking the pot out of the kiln. Jack, who is childless, never looked across at me but kept his eyes on the fire.

  When he sat down again, I told him that for several years I had been walking in the current of the river by my house. In summer the current is clear, the river no deeper than three feet, and you can see the bottom on the other side more than three hundred feet away. It’s a strong current, I said, but I’d learned to walk in it without a staff by not having any specific goal, no particular place I had to get to, nothing I had to do. I just wanted to be in the current. I wanted to feel it against my legs, feel it against my arms when I swept them back and forth in the cold water. I wanted the undulation of it to enter my flesh. I wanted to take the physical sensation and translate it.

  “The kiln’s just like the river,” said Jack. “We’re trying to get back inside something here.”

  The next morning, before I left, I walked up the creek on Jack’s place to a spot where beaver had been working. They’d built a series of dams, and the water there was so calm I could follow the convolution of clouds in its surface. Ravens called around me, that complicated raw cry and pop and cluck and mutter they can make. I thought of the beaver back home on Quartz Creek, and imagined beaver all over the mountains carrying on despite all that had happened to the country they lived in. I saw their forbearance.

  At the next unloading, Jack gave me one of his large pots. It was fall. I took it home and put it out in the middle of the river to overwinter.

  MIDWAY THROUGH my time at the kiln, Jack had a one-person show at a local gallery. I came up for the opening on a cool, wet October night.

  Jack’s work was poorly displayed, the pieces not arranged to show them at any advantage. Too much of it was set against a wall, like painting. Jack had set some firewood and shanks of bark out to signal a larger causality. He’d also posted this statement on the wall in typescript:

  Each pot tells a story. The story emerges in the process. It becomes visible in layers—layers of earth and fire, layers of emotion, ideas and change. Between the layers there seems to be a vibration—a connecting field of invisible dust, only felt, unmeasured and pointing to the unknown.

  The wood-fire kiln is the window that opens into this beautiful dynamic place. Through this window I’m allowed to participate and engage in this fundamental process. Between the living layers of expression, the kiln holds me, somewhat like a rock might be held in the middle of the river’s flow. We’re both looking for possibilities on our journey to the sea. Maybe I could compare it to a burning star, held in the center of this vibrating space, waiting to burn out.

  Wherever or whatever this place is, it’s where I’m happy—between the layers of ash, floating, swirling, bouncing along like some lucky, created fool. Enjoy the pottery and thank you for coming to take a look.

  People mill through the gallery for an hour before Jack begins a formal slide presentation. The crowd is an admixture of university professors, art critics from Portland, potters from inside and outside the Dragon Kiln community, local environmentalists, some of Jack’s logging and farming neighbors, and a three-man crew he’s been working with at a paying job aboard a National Marine Fisheries Service boat.

  His presentation is disarmingly open, unpretentious. He begins by saying that, starting out, he wanted to make pots that reflected “what I grew up around” and that he liked “unpredictable energy.” Because he “didn’t have a lot of money,” he took “whatever materials were available to me and tried to make it work.” He became fascinated with flame patterns and with the way his pots were warping and bending, revealing the space around them. He started “looking more closely at living textures” in the woods and tide pools. He began melting local rock into his pots. “This kind of thing,” he says, “got me out of my studio.” When he saw the way salt ate into some of his vessels, it occurred to him “that there was a new way to make an opening in a pot.”

  He says he wanted to make pottery “to express where we live,” and glances around at the audience, as much as to say that he realizes this is a kind of unorthodox idea, but is wondering what could be saner.

  He became interested, he continues, in the design of anagama kilns after a cave kiln he built in a hillside behind his house suggested a way to bring wood fire more directly into play. He shows slides of the Dragon Kiln in various stages of development, and then begins showing examples of the work of everyone in the community that’s grown up around the kiln, as if everyone there in the audience understands that no one can manage such a thing by himself. He speaks knowledgeably about other people’s work, offering praise only for what he truly admires. He says he likes one man’s work (radically different from his own) because “it’s coming from somewhere, a real place [the industrial belt of the Midwest], and that’s what he’s about.” He says of another person’s work that he “always leaves room for the wood to be involved.”

  Toward the end of his presentation Jack is depicting things integral to his work, but the connection is lost on some of the audience. He’s showing slides of a recent fishing trip to Alaska, of the people he works with and their boat, and of his neighbors at work in the woods.

  The last few slides are of slash burning on clearcuts in the Coast Range. He says that fire, like the felling of trees, is an expression of the human activity of logging, making clear that his own vision has also been shaped by the years he worked for Crown Zellerbach.

  By the end of the show, Jack’s allegiance to his community, his regard for physical labor, and his preoccupation with the processes rather than the objects of life have been reiterated on several levels. It’s apparent he works every idea he has through the filter of local materials, local geography, local people. No artist I’ve ever met flies so completely in the face of a tradition of the elite, or so completely ignores elitism as a worthy or desirable goal. What he is looking for, he makes clear, is a reintegration of “man” and “nature,” something like the conformity between a river and its bed. And in this he is as unconscious and striking a protégé of Thoreau as possibly exists in the world of American art.

  Jack closes with two questions for the audience. First, he asks, how do you relate to natural materials? What do they mean to you, and what is the history of your relationship with those materials? Second, what are the possibilities for wood fire? What are the possibilities for human wood-firing?

  I bought one of Jack’s large pots for a friend in California and milled among the crowd until it thinned and only Jack and a few friends were left. It was suggested we all go somewhere for coffee, but it was late and Jack wanted to get home. A couple of weeks before, Jack had quoted a passage to me from Jiro Hirada’s A Glimpse of Japanese Ideals. “The essence of real beauty,” wrote Hirada, “may be gathered from the commonplace, from what lies close around us in life. By learning to appreciate this truth, our lives will doubtless be enriched and ennobled.”

  “These words,” Jack wrote later, “personify the mind of the Dragon.” They relate to “the calm serenity of what may be termed a commonplace scene,” two men, their backs to each o
ther, felling black locust in a woodlot.

  It takes about five hours to drive from Jack’s house to mine, to cross the Coast Range, move up the Willamette Valley and then up the McKenzie into the Cascade Range. I got home from Jack’s opening just before dawn and watched first light rise in the woods and infuse a stream of river fog. I heard birds calling out repeatedly as the day began to brighten. I was relieved to be home. I went down to the riverbank and sat, weary from the drive, wanting the refreshment of cool air in my lungs and on my face. In that morning stillness, the hesitation of breath that bridges night and day, I heard a characteristic river sound, a sound that can be unsettling at night and which in daylight is often dismissed as something else. It is a shifting on the cobble bottom of the river, a muffled thud coming from a place where the current has prized a rock loose and wedged it differently in the bed.

  10

  THE WHALEBOAT

  THIS MANY PAGES into the book, I can feel it in the small of my back. A congressional report, four pounds twelve ounces, dead across my thighs as a paving stone. I am reading it closely in an overstuffed chair in the fifteen-foot-square, second-story room in which I’ve worked for nearly thirty years. Aside, the bare floor of shiplapped Douglas fir is dappled with moving shadow, sunlight blinking through the limbs of a forest beyond the glass windows. Birdsong passes through the glass—robins, guttural ravens, rasping Steller’s jays. Once in a while the staccato cry of a pileated woodpecker, the whistle of an osprey. The Doppler rise and fall of passing cars on the road along the river occasionally distracts me from the description of human tragedy braced on my legs.

  The book, a focus of my research for a book, is General Adolphus Greely’s Report on the Proceedings of the United States Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay, Grinnell Land. Published in 1888, this first of the two volumes is 545 pages long, bound in sheepskin of a light fawn color, grained to look like calf and blind-tooled with a scorching iron. Greely’s salient subject here is the disaster that befell him and his party on tiny Pim Island in the Canadian high Arctic in 1883–1884. Of the group of twenty-five men who overwintered, sixteen perished from exposure and starvation. Another man drowned, an eighteenth was executed. The living stole one another’s food and ate the dead. On an overcast August morning in 1987 I visited the ruins of their wretched encampment, a site by a small pond from which they were rescued after the most callous government delays. For several hours that day I perambulated the low stone walls of their roofless hut, picking my way around scraps of abandoned clothing, rusted cans, and wind-thrown squares of boat canvas. I stood on a nearby rise, head bowed like a tardy preacher before a neat row of sagging depressions, the graves of the first to die.

  This morning, reading Greely’s book and recalling the visit, I make notes on a yellow pad. I review in my mind the exact contour of rock and soil the general refers to when he writes, “just to the east of our hut …”; but, too, I know what it would look like if one approached from the other side, came at it from the east, so that it lay “just to the west …” I’ve gone there to see.

  Reading assiduously in this chair every day I’m sometimes distracted by a movement, a sound nearby—the tick of wood grain in the house as it adjusts to warming air, a flash of sunlight outside in the leaf crown of wind-burst alders, the whirr-buzz of a hummingbird hanging briefly at a windowpane. Notes on the desk flutter and skid in a breeze and I’m drawn, just now, from the brutality of Greely’s winter quarters into a more insistent reality, one here in the room, another out past the windows. Two separate realities, inside and out, but they elide subtly. I know this room, well enough to work its layout in the dark, to reach within a book or two of the right title on shelves holding hundreds of books, or land a crooked toss in the wastebasket. I could round the drop-leaf table of Honduran mahogany in front of me, upon which is stacked research for the work of which Greely’s narrative is a part, step around this furniture here in darkness, and not clip a thigh. Yet, each day I spot something in the room too long unremembered, or see it as if for the first time; and then if I’m not careful whatever it is will pull me off the task at hand—Greely’s anxious men, now, struggling to get a whaleboat upturned on the walls of their stone hut to create shelter and make a ridgeline for stretched canvas. My gaze has left the sentence and holds now on the wooden model of a whaleboat across the room, a dry fly landing on a trout pool.

  I saw the model for the first time in 1988, in a store in Camden, Maine, with a friend, the painter Alan Magee. It was a stunning piece of handwork, but I wanted to think about it for a few weeks. I finally wrote my friend and asked if he could locate the store again, purchase it for me, and have the store send it on along with the name of the model maker. The urge to possess the boat grew out of my desire to scrutinize it. The fashioning of its parts and their assembly showed such exacting attentiveness to detail, the model was didactic. I could sit with it and a work like Willits Ansel’s The Whaleboat: A Study of Design, Construction and Use from 1850 to 1970 and, using both, plumb the reality. The gaff rigging of the sails, the placement of the tubs of whale line between the thwarts, the shape of the lion’s tongue, the arrangement of the first and second irons in a crotch on the starboard wale—all these things could be clarified for me in three dimensions.

  I purchased the model because it was beautiful, vivid, and correct, and because it bore so well an elaborate and arcane history of human encounter with the wild. Like many objects in this room, once fixed upon it gushed.

  The boat, ten inches long, its mast rising seven inches above the keel, was built on a scale of 1/3″ = 1′ by Harry McCreery, Bangor, Maine. Shortly after I purchased the boat I wrote to ask him which woods he’d used in its construction, and whether his model was based on the New Bedford whaleboat of about 1860. It was, he wrote back. And the many hand-carved pieces, he explained, were all of basswood, but he’d stained them differently to mimic the contrasts between the dozen types of wood to be seen in an unpainted, full-scale boat. Whaleboats utilized white oak in the keel, spruce for thwarts, and were floored with pine. The exterior planking was rot-resistant cedar, the oars ash, the loggerhead (around which the whale line was belayed) was made of hickory, the bow chocks of lignum vitae.

  In the years when the construction of this boat was routine work, boatwrights possessed a sophisticated knowledge of the properties of various species of wood, knowledge so rarefied a man could build a boat that exceeded his ability to reason. By combining portability (lightness), strength (resistance to rack and torsion), and propellability in such a canny way, American whaleboat builders brought to perfection a nautical design descendant from European shallops, on the one hand, and Algonquin oceangoing canoes. In the mid-nineteenth century this durable “surf boat” could be found at work in every corner of the world, from the Mozambique Channel to the Beaufort Sea, from the Azores to Tasmania. It was simple to construct (meaning easy to repair), its materials were relatively inexpensive, and even with slight men at the oars it was quick and maneuverable on the water. The joinery and bracing employed in it and the varying degree of flexibility in the woods used in its construction left it rigid but still supple. It successfully resisted the forces that threatened its integrity at the same time that it gave in to them.

  I like to glance at the model when I’m working. I don’t know a hundredth of what Mr. McCreery knows, or Mr. Ansel, but that day in Camden I saw perfection, and now I have it before me. The boat’s a reminder of a kind of intelligence I respect.

  Looking up from Greely’s tome, I have become aware of a knot in my lower back. I twist sideways and arch my spine to relieve tension. My eyes drift from the boat, positioned in a glass case atop a tall oak filing cabinet, pass over a paulownia wood tansu in which I store manuscripts, traverse a set of birch-veneer shelves full of books and mementos of travel, and exit a set of three double-hung windows framed in unpainted pine in the south wall.

  Beyond the windows, past the combination of incandescent lamplight and tree-filtered sunl
ight in this room, beyond the tidiness of my quarters, stands an unmanaged wood. The dark, tall trunks contrast sharply this morning with sheets of sunlight. Fronds of Western red cedar bob and gyrate in a light breeze. Leaves of Indian plum shaped like lanceolate blades and the palmate leaves of maples obscure and flick sunshine. The pigments of green among these trees alone—emerald on to celadon—are difficult to be definitive about. The cedar and yew greens are darker than those of Indian plum, hazelnut, and maple; but where light and shadow intervene, matte and gloss shift the hues’ intensity. Too, the delicate structure of a cedar frond holds color less firmly than the broad leaf of a maple.

  Beyond the first picket of well-formed trunks by the house a space drops, a deep well of air that opens above a clearing. (I can’t see the floor of the clearing from my chair. The house stands above it on an old riverbank which slopes down twenty feet.) Past the clearing, a buffer of the same species of trees fronts a two-lane highway parallel to the south wall of windows. On the other side of the road, about a hundred and fifty feet away, a last wall of trees rises, the same species again, but here mixed with Oregon ash, black cottonwood, and vine maple.

  Outside the last forest plane the McKenzie River flows westward at a brisk four knots, fed by snow and glacier melt, groundwater, and cold artesian springs in the Cascades. The river is about three hundred and fifty feet wide here and three or four feet deep. Its piebald bottom of cobble rock is visible nearly all the way across. On the far side, a mountain bears up steeply through old-growth forest for about six hundred feet. The land there has never been mined, logged, homesteaded, or otherwise disturbed by human enterprise, except for the dozing of a dirt road which parallels the river.