Barry Lopez - Desert Notes / River Notes

for Mary and Adrian

In calling up images of the past, I find that the plains of Patagonia frequently cross before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced by all wretched and useless.

They can be described only by negative characters; without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then, and the case is not peculiar to myself, have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile Pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression?

I can scarcely analyze these feelings: but it must be partly owing to the free scope given to the imagination.

The plains of Patagonia are boundless, for they are scarcely passable, and hence unknown: they bear the stamp of having lasted, as they are now, for ages, and there seems no limit to their duration through future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look to these last boundaries to mans knowledge with deep but ill-defined sensations?

Charles Darwin

The Voyage of the Beagle, 1836

With the Desert Fathers you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for ones life into an apparently irrational void.

THOMAS MERTON

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 doesnt, you weary. You are no longer afraid of its secrets, cowed by its silence. You break away, angry, a little chagrined. You will tell anyone the story: so much time spent for nothing. In the retelling you sense another way inside; you return immediately to the desert. The opening evaporates, like a vision through a picket railing.

You cant get at it this way. You must come with no intentions of discovery. You must overhear things, as though youd come into a small and desolate town and paused by an open window. You cant learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

You have to proceed almost by accident. I learned about a motor vehicle this way.

I was crossing the desert. Smooth. Wind rippling at the window. There was no road, only the alkaline plain. There was no reason for me to be steering; I let go of the wheel. There was no reason to sit where I was; I moved to the opposite seat. I stared at the empty drivers seat. I could see the sheen where Id sat for years. We continued to move across the desert.

I moved to the back of the vehiclea large van with windows all aroundand sat by the rear doors. I could hear the crushing of earth beneath the wheels. I opened the doors wide and leaned out. I saw the white alkaline surface of the desert slowly emerging from under the sill, as though the van were fixed in space and the earth turning beneath us.

I opened all the doors. The wind blew through.

I stepped out; ran away. When I stopped and turned around the vehicle was moving east. I ran back to it and jumped in. Out the drivers door; in through the back. I got out again, this time with my bicycle, and rode north furiously until the vehicle was only a speck moving on the horizon behind me. I curved back and crossed slowly in front of it. I could hear the earth crumbling under the crush of my rubber tires and the clicketing of my derailleur gears. I lay the bike down and jogged alongside the vehicle, the padding of my sneakers next to the hiss of the rolling tire. I shifted it into neutral through the open door and turned the key off. I sat in it until it came to rest. I walked back for the bicycle.

Until then I did not understand how easily the vehicles tendencies of direction and movement could be abandoned, together with its systems of roads, road signs, and stop lights. By a series of strippings such as this one enters the desert.

When I first came into the desert I was arrested by the space first, especially what hung in a layer just above the dust of the desert floor. The longer I regarded it the clearer it became that its proportion had limits, that it had an identity, like the air around a stone. I suspected that everything Id come here to find out was hidden inside that sheet of space.

I developed methods of inquiry, although I appeared to be doing nothing at all. I appeared completely detached. I appeared to be smelling my hands cupped full of rocks. I appeared to be asleep. But I was not. Even inspecting an abandoned building at some distance from the desert I would glance over in that direction, alert. I was almost successful. Toward the end of my inquiry I moved with exquisite ease. But I could not disguise the waiting.

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.

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 mustnt 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.

Ive been told there is very little time left, that we must get all these things about time and place straight. If we dont, 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. Theres no one to look over your shoulder to find out what youre doing with your hands, or to ask if you have considered the number of people dying daily of malnutrition. If youve been listening you must suspect that a knife will be very useful out herenot 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 isnt 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.