AT ONE WITH THE NATURAL WORLD - Barry Lopez's adventure with the word & the wild

Commonweal, March 24, 2000 by Nicholas O'Connell

They never saw it coming. Barry Lopez and three scientists were making bottom trawls in a twenty-foot boat several miles out from Pingok Island on the North Slope of Alaska, one of the most desolate and remote regions of the planet. Skirting the edges of the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, they concentrated on their work and ignored a storm moving in from the southwest. Before they realized what was happening, the wind pushed a large ice floe toward them, sealing them off from open water and pinning the craft on four sides.

Lopez and the others had prepared for such an emergency. In addition to scientific equipment, they carried flares, extra food, extra clothing, a tent, sleeping bags, and other survival equipment, including a radio. But they realized that, even if someone heard their distress signal, they had no way of describing their present location, and, with the storm moving in, they had no idea of how far the pack ice might drift to the east. Lest they become yet another footnote in the long record of Arctic disasters, they had to find a way to get free.

Taking advantage of a momentary shift in the ice, they managed to force the boat through a narrow passage. They widened the passage with ice chisels and gunned the boat's twin ninety-horsepower engines, trying desperately to reach open water. When thirty feet of ice stood in their way, they used ice anchors, lines, and a block and tackle to pull the 3,000-pound craft out of the water, across the ice and into the next channel.

But this channel, too, was closing. Lopez went to look for another escape route. Several hundred yards ahead, he raised his ice chisel to signal that he had found one. By the time the boat reached him, however, this channel had narrowed. One of the men positioned the prow of the boat against the seaward ice, revved the engines, and widened the gap to six feet. Then he reversed course and sped up the channel. The others chopped madly at the ice, trying to keep it away from the props. Finally, they heaved and lifted and shoved the boat into the open water. They were home free-or so they thought. They fell into the boat, exhausted from the effort. The seas were now running at six feet. Waves burst over the top of the boat. The men erected a canvas shelter to shield themselves from the water and hunkered down to endure the ride back to Pingok. Like the others, Lopez was dressed in heavy clothes and foul weather gear, but unbeknownst to him, he had torn the seams in the shoulder of his parka while freeing the boat. The right side of his body was soaked.

He shivered and drifted in and out of consciousness, unaware of what was happening and why he was so cold. Fortunately, the others recognized his predicament. They peeled off his wet garments, dressed him in dry wool clothing, and pushed him underneath the tarp to protect him from the elements. He sat in a stupor and simply tried to brace himself against the boat. When the others shouted that they had reached Pingok, he realized he was safe. He dragged himself out of the boat and into the camp, where he ate dinner and fell asleep.

After the storm passed, Lopez walked the beach and reflected on the incident. A fit, strong, barrel-chested man used to living and working outdoors, he felt embarrassed at being reduced to a dead weight, but the close call made him marvel at the early Arctic explorers who had endured much greater hardships, traversing the forbidding landscape in flimsy crafts without adequate clothing or survival equipment. In the sixth century Saint Brendan set off from the west coast of Ireland in a small currach made of wicker and oxhide to search for the Isles of the Blessed. What drove him to cross the Arctic landscape in such an exposed boat? After pondering the example of Brendan and other Arctic explorers, Lopez later concluded in Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), a National Book Award-winner: "Arctic history became for me, then, a legacy of desire-the desire of individual men to achieve their goals. But it was also the legacy of a kind of desire that transcends heroics and which was privately known to many-the desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world."

This desire for a safe and honorable passage through the world animates not only Arctic history, but also Lopez himself. Each of his twelve books of fiction and nonfiction represents a search for such a passage. Though he's known primarily as a nature writer, his work always poses large ethical questions: What does it mean to lead a dignified and virtuous life? How are we to treat others, especially the weak and powerless among us? What are our responsibilities toward the nonhuman world? Such questions pervade his fiction and nonfiction, from early works such as Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976) to About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (1998).

Lopez prefers to set his stories in remote, sometimes desolate locales- the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Galapagos Islands, the Sonoran Desert- but, important as the physical environment is to his narratives, they finally turn on issues of metaphysics. What are the trustworthy patterns in this life? How can we discern them? How can we overcome our propensity to doubt? In a postmodern culture where the possibility of knowledge is often denied and a glib nihilism frequently prevails, Lopez offers a refreshing sense of hope and possibility. His work attempts to reconcile an intimate and scientific knowledge of the physical world with Christian virtues of hope, dignity, and charity. This effort to yoke together such seemingly disparate traditions grows out of his Roman Catholic upbringing and his Jesuit and University of Notre Dame education. As he puts it: "I grew up in a Roman Catholic tradition, and was deeply affected by it. The part that affected me was the tradition of the Desert Fathers, the Jesuits, and the monastic tradition-not the things one normally hears about Catholicism. An image I have from childhood is of a group of men and women praying somewhere in the desert, and the reason chronically myopic and selfish people have not destroyed us with nuclear weapons is that, in a rarefied and metaphorical way, there have been these enclaves of monastics praying. What keeps these things from exploding, perhaps, is that each of us in his own way is saying his prayers."