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

Commonweal, March 24, 2000 by Nicholas O'Connell

Lopez subsequently married and moved West. He entered the University of Oregon's graduate program in English, hoping to use it to jump-start his writing career. But he found the program pretentious and dropped out after the first semester. He did, however, meet an important mentor in Professor Barre Toelken, a specialist in folklore, who introduced him to North American Indian myths.

"Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred," he said. "They did not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the divine in both."

Lopez became fascinated with Coyote, the trickster figure of Native American stories. He pored over the Coyote tales, analyzed their structure, and learned how to make the land come alive through story. His first published book, Desert Notes, shows the influence of these tales. It synthesizes many aspects of his background: his early memories of Southern California deserts, his inclination toward desert monasticism, and his interest in Coyote tales.

This spare, sensual, paradoxical work serves as the blueprint for the rest of his oeuvre. Like most of his stories, it is organized around a quest, with the central character journeying into a desert to gain wisdom and learning from people and animals native to it. The book opens with the unnamed narrator stating his desire to discover the secrets of the desert, much as the desert father Saint Anthony sought to know God through prayer, fasting, and self-mortification: "The land does not give easily. The desert is like a boulder. You expect to wait. You expect night to come. Morning. Winter to set in. But you expect sometime it will loosen into pieces to be examined. When it doesn't, you weary."

The narrator senses that the place contains mysterious dimensions. He wants to unlock these secrets quickly, but the landscape frustrates these attempts. Only when he approaches it in a humble, oblique, and respectful manner does it reveal itself to him. Then he can enter into communion with it. At the end of the introduction, the narrator observes: "One morning as I stood watching the sun rise, washing out the blue black, watching the white crystalline stars fade, my bare legs quivering in the cool air, I noticed my hands had begun to crack and turn to dust."

The narrator's patience is rewarded as his hands are transformed into the stuff of the desert landscape, symbolizing his communion with it. Just as the Jewish people in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus and John the Baptist in the New Testament strengthened and purified themselves in the desert, so too the narrator of Desert Notes comes to life through the discipline of the harsh environment. This is a common theme in Lopez's books, articles, and stories: Journeys into the wilderness provide us with a chance to return to an original, uncompromised spiritual self, a self often buried beneath the conventions and distractions of modern urban life.