|
|
By Mike Bonner
Many of us have had troubled, abused, or neglected childhoods. Few of us have the ability to render personal pain,
anguish, and the quest for meaning into exquisite meditations on the natural world and our place within it.
Barry Lopez, the acclaimed Oregon author and natural explorer who died on Christmas Day, 2020, was just such a person.
It is not the purpose of this tribute to gather the threads of Lopez's unique life, list his numerous literary achievements,
or recount the continents, oceans, peoples, regions, and native cultures he so earnestly interviewed.
This is instead meant to focus on certain themes in the life of a gentle, curious, talented, and spiritual man, whose
presence and words profoundly enriched us.
The poignant modes of thought Lopez celebrated are not universally embraced. But Lopez's writings will long echo among
readers who care about nature, the world, life, and the peculiar mysteries of existence human beings are evidently fated to
confront.
In the book that won Lopez the National Book Award in 1986, Arctic Dreams, he writes about his experiences in the far
North, describing the underlying richness of a seemingly barren landscape. In turns, Lopez considers the frozen terrain, the
wildlife, the stunted forests, and the rough, stoic subsistence culture of the Indigenous Inuit people.
"I believe in all human societies there's a desire to love and be loved," Lopez wrote, "to experience the
fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one's life."
This was written in stark contrast to Lopez's earliest experiences. Like countless post World War II baby boomers,
Lopez was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which he revealed late in life. Out of that, he matured into a deeply religious
young man who prayed daily and for a time even considered the Catholic priesthood.
After attending a rigorous parochial high school, Lopez enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. A superb student,
he received undergraduate and graduate degrees, the latter a Master's in 1966.
Also around this time, Lopez's writing career began to flourish. His stories appeared in print, and from that point
on he was primarily a working writer, turning his curiosity, love of nature, and thirst for authentic experience into a steady
stream of compositions, treasured for their scientific acumen and philosophical eloquence.
Somehow, the lure of 1960s Oregon drew Lopez to our state, finding and renting a rustic property in Lane County near
Finn Rock. The McKenzie River was within walking distance of his door. There Lopez would remain for the next half century,
eventually purchasing the property and leaving only when he and wife Debra Gwartney fled the Holiday Farm fire in September,
2020, which reduced his beloved home and possessions to blackened cinders.
It is ironic that a man whose foremost concern was how to live in harmony with nature should be made homeless near
the end of his life by the very forces that have driven that balance right to the edge.
In his writings, Lopez was particularly adept at framing questions about the out-of-balance relationship western cultures
have with nature, as in this telling anecdote from Arctic Dreams:"The Tununirmiut informed the Yankee whalers plundering
the bowheads at Pond's Bay,far from their own homes. That getting rich; was not what they were doing. Getting rich was to
have a good family life, and be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one's homeland."
Despite this advice, the nineteenth century whalers went on plundering, until there were too few bowheads left to make
it profitable. The slow-reproducing marine mammals remain an endangered species to the present, numbering about 8,000 survivors.
Throughout his life, Lopez immersed himself in the aspirations of Indigenous peoples, often finding himself at odds
with western commercial values. He was horrified by the prospect of oil drilling in the Arctic National Refuge, and the threat
it posed to rare polar species.
In a 2001 essay, Lopez criticized what he called "the adolescent impulses that fuel our consumer economy and the
dilemmas posed by our ravenous oil consumption."
Climate change was on Lopez's mind long before he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, fighting a valiant but ultimately
losing battle against the disease, culminating in his death on Christmas Day, 2020. He told The Guardian in 2019 that we are
living in "emergency times, but that the mutilated world we live in must be loved, even if it seems at times we are swimming
in gasoline."
When one thinks about the life and wounded heart of a remarkable man like Barry Lopez, these words by Ernest Hemingway,
another lover of nature and wild places, come readily to mind:
"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it
kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure
it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry."
We are fortunate that what the world had in store for Barry Lopez made a minor exception in his case, postponing the
special hurry, and allowing us seventy five years of a beautiful man's poetic dreams.
The End
Mike Bonner of Eugene is the author of MAVO -- High School in the 1960s, Freshman Year, a comic memoir of a Portland,
Oregon USA adolescence.
Below is the link to Mike Bonner's original Barry Lopez piece in the publication Free For All, February, 2021.
February 2021 Free For All Springfield, Oregon
|
|
|