by Barry Lopez
OUTSIDE
Contents
Introduction: The Storyteller
Outside: Six Short Stories By Barry Lopez
Desert Notes
Twilight
The Search For The Heron
The Falls
Within Birds’ Hearing
Empira’s Tapestry
Outside: A Visual Meditation
Afterword
INTRODUCTION
THE STORYTELLER
BARRY LOPEZ HAS BEEN publishing short stories and essays in distinguished literary magazines for nearly forty years. The relationship between landscape and the imagination is a central concern in his work, as is the role of storytelling in bringing communities into healthy relations with the land. The essay “Landscape and Narrative” (1984) resonates deeply with the aims and methods of the stories in Outside. The essay opens with a gathering of hunters in Anaktuvuk Pass, in the Brooks Range of Alaska. Lopez sits among a group of men listening to hunting stories, and he is particularly taken with the stories of wolverines. One man’s story of an astonishing encounter between a hunter on a snow machine and an intelligent wolverine dominates the opening, but the effect of the wolverine stories on the group of listeners is even more astonishing: “The landscape seemed alive because of the stories. It was precisely these ocherous tones, this kind of willow, exactly this austerity that had informed the wolverine narratives.” The stories make the landscape come alive because they have truthfully evoked the landscape in its particulars. That is the physical landscape, which Lopez calls the “external landscape” or “exterior landscape” in the essay. Another landscape is the “internal” or “interior” one, and it might be called a spiritual landscape or mental landscape. For Lopez, as for traditional indigenous storytellers, the truth of the story and the value of the storyteller rest in the unimpeachable authority and integrity of the external landscape, which the Navajo say exhibits a “sacred order.” If the story is successful, it brings the external landscape and the internal landscape into harmony, creating a sense of well-being in the listener and healing any disharmonies in the internal landscape. For Lopez, storytelling connects directly to spiritual rituals and ceremonies of traditional indigenous people, and the qualities of storytelling he values most focus on the role of the storyteller in forging a healthy community living in a healthy landscape.
The six stories gathered here show the growth of a storyteller. The collections Desert Notes (1976) and River Notes (1979) are closely linked to one another, and they give us a strong sense of Lopez as a young writer, since many of the stories date from the early to mid-1970s. Field Notes (1994), closer in chronology and form to the collection Winter Count (1981), is the work of an accomplished writer of prize-winning fiction and nonfiction. Even as a young writer, however, Lopez clearly avoids the role of the romantic, isolated artist. His contact with indigenous storytellers reinforces his sense of the writer as serving the cultural memory of a community, reminding us how to live a decent life, how to behave properly toward other people and toward the land. The name he provides for this figure of the storyteller in Arctic Dreams (1986) is “isumataq . . . a person who can create the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.”
Wisdom is not owned by any person or culture or language. In defining its outlines in Arctic Dreams, Lopez imagines a scene in which such wisdom might show itself. “I could easily imagine some Thomas Merton–like person, the estimable rather than the famous people of our age, sitting with one or two Eskimo men and women in a coastal village, corroborating the existence of this human wisdom in yet another region of the world, and looking around to the mountains, the ice, the birds to see what makes it possible to put it into words.” The figures in Lopez’s imagined scene form in effect a group of estimable storytellers from different cultures and traditions. Their goal is first to bind their human wisdom into the land with words and, second, to use their words to bind their human communities together with the land. Storytelling embodies, then, a conversation with the land, and in its most elevated and authentic form it combines the empirical, aesthetic, and spiritual landscapes.
Like the Inuit isumataq, Thomas Merton (1915–1968) figures the wisdom that shows itself through storytelling. Lopez considered becoming a Trappist monk and in November 1966 stayed at the abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, Merton’s monastic home. He was especially attracted to the combination of physical labor and spirituality, to the contemplative life. For Lopez as a young man, the contemplative life involves the risky decision to become a professional writer. It is with a sense of vocation, then, that Lopez quotes Merton’s The Wisdom of the Desert (1960) near the beginning of Desert Notes: “With the Desert Fathers you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one’s life into an apparently irrational void.”
The stories in Outside break from convention with a great enthusiasm for experimentation. The first-person narrators are so persuasive that readers are sometimes fooled into thinking that they represent Lopez himself. The early fictions do not employ conventional characterization, action, plot, conflict, or resolution. The narrators of “Desert Notes,” “The Search for the Heron,” and “Within Birds’ Hearing” resemble one another in their physical and spiritual journeys across the landscape. They encounter animals, sometimes in extraordinary ways that may recall the wolverine in “Landscape and Narrative.” They place their faith in the landscape, in what the landscape can teach them, in the beauty and wonder of the land. They are often solitary, isolated from any social context, but they are not alone.
In the other three stories, the first-person narrators focus on human communities, both in their weakness and in their potential strength. “Twilight” begins and ends with the narrator seated upon a “storm pattern rug woven out of the mind of a Navajo woman, Ahlnsaha.” The first half of the story details the numerous owners of the rug from 1934 to 1966, each of whom becomes progressively less certain—or truthful—about the tribal origin of the art or what its proper function should be. The second half of the story evokes, in present tense, the narrator’s visions as he sits on the rug at twilight, “the best time to see what is happening.” In contrast to the lies told by salespeople in the first part of the story, the narrator’s fleeting visions deliver momentary truths. The visions mix images of nature and culture as the narrator works through the senses of sight, hearing, and smell. The visions deliver an ambiguous sense of truth—sometimes promising much, sometimes little. In hearing the flight of the gray eagle over the desert, however, the listener becomes exquisitely intimate with the landscape. In creating that sense of intimacy in the reader, Lopez works powerfully on a personal level and creates yet another sense of intimacy.
By such writing, we come to accept that magical transformations join human beings to the landscape and to one another. The narrator of “The Falls” accepts as fact that his unnamed friend is a shamanistic shape-shifter who can become part of the landscape. The narrator’s intimacy with his friend allows him to tell of the man’s vision quest in the Crazy Mountains as if he were himself part of the man’s journey. The man visits the narrator occasionally, at ten-year intervals, but even when the narrator misses a visit he can sense his friend’s presence. At the climax of these repeated visits, the narrator witnesses the man’s leap from the falls, and he implies that the man becomes a salmon as he dives into the water.
Clearly, Lopez’s narrators bear witness to extraordinary patterns and purposes. They must listen attentively to what their story must become. Those are the elevated demands placed on Marlis Damien, the narrator of “Empira’s Tapestry.” Impressed by Marlis’s storytelling, Empira gives Marlis the storyteller’s stick from Ghana, appointing her the witness of Empira’s life and art. By telling her story
truthfully, Marlis gathers the threads of Empira’s tapestry, showing that she understands Empira’s admirable strength and integrity.
By such gatherings, individuals and communities can flourish. The storyteller is vital to the community and to a healthy landscape, but the vital relationship is also reciprocal. Barry Lopez shows his gifts as a storyteller. And by such gatherings as this one, we show our reverence for estimable lives and places. In those ways, we participate, along with Lopez, in the long history of storytelling. We become part of the atmosphere in which wisdom shows itself.
—JAMES PERRIN WARREN
SIX SHORT STORIES BY BARRY LOPEZ
In the early 1950s, when people living in the Los Angeles Basin spoke of going away for the weekend, often east over the mountains to the Mojave Desert, they would say that they were going “to go outside.”
DESERT NOTES
DESERT NOTES
I KNOW YOU ARE TIRED. I am tired too. Will you walk along the edge of the desert with me? I would like to show you what lies before us.
All my life I have wanted to trick blood from a rock. I have dreamed about raising the devil and cutting him in half. I have thought too about never being afraid of anything at all. This is where you come to do those things.
I know what they tell you about the desert but you mustn’t believe them. This is no deathbed. Dig down, the earth is moist. Boulders have turned to dust here, the dust feels like graphite. You can hear a man breathe at a distance of twenty yards. You can see out there to the edge where the desert stops and the mountains begin. You think it is perhaps ten miles. It is more than a hundred. Just before the sun sets all the colors will change. Green will turn to blue, red to gold.
I’ve been told there is very little time left, that we must get all these things about time and place straight. If we don’t, we will only have passed on and have changed nothing. That is why we are here I think, to change things. It is why I came to the desert.
Here things are sharp, elemental. There’s no one to look over your shoulder to find out what you’re doing with your hands, or to ask if you have considered the number of people dying daily of malnutrition. If you’ve been listening you must suspect that a knife will be very useful out here—not to use, just to look at.
There is something else here, too, even more important: explanations will occur to you, seeming to clarify; but they can be a kind of trick. You will think you have hold of the idea when you only have hold of its clothing.
Feel how still it is. You can become impatient here, willing to accept any explanation in order to move on. This appears to be nothing at all, but it is a wall between you and what you are after. Be sure you are not tricked into thinking there is nothing to fear. Moving on is not important. You must wait. You must take things down to the core. You must be careful with everything, even with what I tell you.
This is how to do it. Wait for everything to get undressed and go to sleep. Forget to explain to yourself why you are here. Listen attentively. Just before dawn you will finally hear faint music. This is the sound of the loudest dreaming, the dreams of boulders. Continue to listen until the music isn’t there. What you thought about boulders will evaporate and what you know will become clear. Each night it will be harder. Listen until you can hear the dreams of the dust that settles on your head.
I must tell you something else. I have waited out here for rattlesnakes. They never come. The moment eludes me and I hate it. But it keeps me out here. I would like to trick the rattlesnake into killing itself. I would like this kind of finality. I would like to begin again with the snake. If such a thing were possible. The desert would be safe. You could stay here forever.
I will give you a few things: bits of rock, a few twigs, this shell of a beetle blown out here by the wind. You should try to put the bits of rock back together to form a stone, although I cannot say that all these pieces are from the same stone. If they don’t fit together look for others that do. You should try to coax some leaves from these twigs. You will first have to determine whether they are alive or dead. And you will have to find out what happened to the rest of the beetle, the innards. When you have done these things you will know a little more than you did before. But be careful. It will occur to you that these tasks are silly or easily done. This is a sign, the first one, that you are being fooled.
I hope you won’t be here long. After you have finished with the stone, the twigs and the beetle, other things will suggest themselves, and you must take care of them. I see you are already tired. But you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can’t keep leaving.
Do you hear how silent it is? This will be a comfort as you work. Do not laugh. When I first came here I laughed very loud and the sun struck me across the face and it took me a week to recover. You will only lose time by laughing.
I will leave you alone to look out on the desert. What makes you want to leave now is what is trying to kill you. Have the patience to wait until the rattlesnake kills itself. Others may tell you that this has already happened, and this may be true. But wait until you see for yourself, until you are sure.
TWILIGHT
TWILIGHT
I AM SITTING ON a storm pattern rug woven out of the mind of a Navajo woman, Ahlnsaha, and traded to a man named Dobrey in Winslow, Arizona, for groceries in August 1934.
In the fall of 1936 a Swedish farmer, Kester Vorland, his land gone out from under him in the Depression, leaves his wife and three children in the car and, picking his moment perfectly, steps back into the store to steal the rug while Dobrey is busy in the back with a broken saddle. He trades it the next day in Flagstaff for groceries and $25 cash and moves on to Needles. It is bought later by a young man named Diego Martin who takes it back to San Bernardino, California, with him. He boasts of it to his friends, a piece of shrewd buying. When he is married in 1941 he gives it to his wife and, one flat September night, they make love on it, leaving a small stain that the girl, Yonella, can easily point out but which Diego will not believe, even when she shows him. He believes it is a stain left by an insect; he forbids her to show the rug to anyone after this. He dies in a bar fight in Honolulu on April 16, 1943, a corporal in the Marines. Yonella sells everything. An old woman with red hair and liver spots on her throat pouch named Elizabeth Reiner buys the rug for $45 and takes it home with her to Santa Barbara. In 1951 her daughter comes to visit and her grandson John Charles who is ten begins to covet the rug; when the mother and daughter fall into an argument over something, the older woman angrily gives it to the boy (she snatches it down off the wall), a demonstration of her generosity. She later tells her daughter not to come back again and begins to miss the rug and feel foolish. The boy doesn’t care. He vows he will always write her at Christmastime, even if his mother forbids it.
On the train from Los Angeles to Prairie du Chien the boy keeps himself wrapped in the rug like a turtle. He sits on the bed in his underwear with it over his shoulders and watches Nebraska. When he is sixteen John Charles falls in love with Dolores Patherway who is nineteen and a whore. One night she trades him twenty-five minutes for the blanket, but he does not see it this way: it is a gift, the best he can offer, a thing of power. That night she is able to sell it to a Great Lakes sailor for $60. She tells him it is genuine Sioux, there at the battle of the Little Big Horn, and will always bring a good price. The sailor’s name is Benedict Langer, from a good Catholic family in Ramapo, New Jersey, and he has never had hard liquor or even VD but in three weeks in the service his father said would make a man of him he has lain in confusion with six different women who have told him he was terrific; he has sensed a pit opening. The day after he buys it Benedict gives the blanket to a friend, Frank Winter, and goes to look for a priest in Green Bay, the football town. In March 1959 Frank mails it to his parents for an anniversary present (it has been in his footlocker for eighteen months and smells like mothballs, a condition he remedies by airing it at night from the signal deck of the USS Kissell). He includes with it a document he
has had made up in the ship’s print shop to the effect that it is an authentic Pawnee blanket, so his parents will be proud, can put it up on the wall of their retirement home in Boca Raton, Florida, next to the maracas from Guadalajara. They leave it in the box in the hall closet; they do not talk about it. Mr. Winter confides to his wife in the dark one night that he doesn’t believe in the powers of medicine men.
On July 17, 1963, Frank Winter dies instantly when his foot hits a land mine in the Mekong Delta. His father waits a month before donating the blanket and the boy’s other belongings to Catholic Charities. Father Peter Donnell, a local priest, a man of some sensitivity, lays the rug down on brown wall-to-wall carpeting in the foyer of the refectory of the Catholic Church in Boca Raton, arranging two chairs and a small table precisely on it (he likes especially the Ganado red color) before the Monsignor asks him to remove it. Father Donnell keeps the rug in his room, spread out flat under his mattress for a year. He takes it with him when he is transferred to Ames, Iowa, where it is finally bought in an Easter bazaar as Father Donnell endures a self-inflicted purging of personal possessions. It is bought by antique dealers, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Wishton Spanner of Jordan Valley, Oregon (as they sign the register). The following winter I buy it from Mrs. Spanner who tells me the rug has been woven by a Comanche who learned his craft from a Navajo, that she bought it on the reservation in Oklahoma. It is certified. I take the rug home and at dusk I undress and lie down under it so that it completely covers my body. I listen all night. I do not hear anything. But in this time I am able to sort out all the smells buried in the threads and the sounds still reverberating deep in the fibers. It is what I have been looking for.
It is this rug I have carefully spread out now, east and west over the dust. It is only from such a height above the floor of the desert that one is able to see clearly what is going on.
