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Y'know, I don't wanna saunter
down trails that've been blazed so well and so widely before, hewed and
hoed with
weed-whackers and lawnmowers and road-graders.
I don't wanna be redundant with anyone - I wanna add. So I'm compelled to read
others of my ilk - an
ilk I admittedly feel uneasy in, like all ilks - that ilk known as
Western
American nature writers. Thus
up in my
hands and into my eyes have gone Muir and Austin and Abbey and House
and
Haig-Brown and Rains Wallace, and, at the insistence of a friend, Barry
Lopez,
with his collection Crossing Open
Ground.
Barry Lopez. Y'know...fuck him. Yes,
I've no doubt he was (was
- he's dead) a very kindly man, but, well - fuck him. This realm,
translating the transcendence of total fusion with the Wild into words,
having the reptile and mammal and human brains all enlivened and
melding with the energy of land and water and air and plants and
animals, requires an equivalent language, a language of passion, of sex
and grief and euphoria and love and hate and hilarity. And Lopez? Oh,
fuck, the guy is so...dull. Prim. Lethargic. Ingenuous. Cowardly. And
so as a messenger through words of the power of Mother Earth and the
Wild - he fuckin' sucks.
He and his wife never had kids - no
surprise, because he probably never fucked her, let alone licked and
tickled her in all the right spots.
The book I've got states he's won a
bunch of accolades - for example, the American Book Award - from a
bunch of mainstream organizations or clubs or whatever. I'm not
surprised given the book has nothing within it to offend - and the
converse, that it's nothing within it to inspire. That such amazing
"artists" as Paula Abdul have won Grammys from a mainstream
organization does not reflect the quality or value of the art. So
Lopez's awards? I'm not impressed.
His writing style just does not reflect
the subject. The Wild can be geologically slow, lightning fast, and
everything in between. Lopez's writing, however, is only the former -
it fuckin' drags. The dude barely uses contractions (e.g., it is to
it's) to tighten shit up, spelling out nearly every goddamn word, like
his stuffy-ass professors probably demanded at Notre Dame. He dribbles
out way too many expletive sentence forms, which just waste time and
space. Example: "In the cave there are certain mysteries..." (p. 59) -
dude, how about "The cave holds mysteries..."? Another: "There are a
handful of miners in Yukon-Charley" (p. 87) - y'know, they live there,
so how's about we hone it closer to truth and write "Several miners
live in Yukon-Charley." Too many prepositional phrases, also, but I'll
just carp about the one that vexes me most - "...period of time..." (p.
30). "An extent of time of time," in other words.
Congruent to the dynamic speed of the
Wild is the color - Gawd, man, it swings from such overwhelming
vibrancy to sullen greyscape and everything in between. And Lopez?
Fuck, the most colorless, gutless prose. His similes, for example, are
fucking weak, inappropriate, inaccurate, demeaning, and even
insulting...yeah, insulting. He compares the music emanating from
thousands of Snow Geese to..."cries of athletic men" (p. 28). In other
words, a couple dozen meathead jock football hooligans whoop-whooping
it up on some razed field - that seems a minimization, a slander to the
far more numerous, grander, graceful birds saturating the aural space
of the far larger open land of northeastern California. He compares the
expansion of experience to euphoria when intimately engaged with a Wild
land - the Grand Canyon in this case - with being "snapped...like
fresh-laundered sheets "(p. 43). A bleached, lifeless bedsheet just out
of the dryer to represent the transcendence that engaging deeply in the
Wild can inspire? That's just wrong. Possibly the worst, among many
more (e.g., "...quick as popping a button on a shirt"; p. 58; "...the
smell of cinnamon"; p. 75; "...a snap of the fingers"; p. 154), is when
he compares the uniqueness of three resourceful, wise, super-cool dudes
to "...the color of a peach" (p. 190). He fuckin' compares three
kick-ass men with so much connection to the Wild with a goddamn
domesticated fruit that's red and orange - that's fucking
insulting.
His word choices - the stuffy, genteel
background the cat came from shines through and doesn't reflect the
lust or rage or frigidity that Mother Earth can be. Not once did I read
a word with a sensual connotation, let alone a curse word (at least one
from his mouth - he puts 'em in the mouths of the bull-riders in "On
Bulls"), but I read the goddamn Ivory Tower "euphony" way too many
times. And "pi meson" (p. 163)? Wouldn't it have been clearer, and
understandable to more people, to just write "energy"? The guy can't
even refer to shit as shit - instead, we get the Victorian-esque,
evasive "evacuation of the bowels" (p. 49) or "droppings" (p. 64, 97)
from animals. When escaping a near-death experience, what's more
effective to say - man, I nearly evacuated my bowels into my pants - or
what actually conveys the experience far more emphatically - I nearly
shit myself! And "droppings"? Hmm, such as the salmon carcass the bear
casts aside after gnashing the belly meat and head? Such as the bits of
grass that escape the rotating munch of a hare? Such as the water
rolling off the duck's back onto the riverbank's cobbles? Those, too,
are droppings, but that's not what's meant, which is shit. So just grow
the fuck up, ditch the euphemisms, and say it straight and concise -
SHIT!
I'd criticize Lopez's jokes, but he has
none. Ain't no humor in this motherfuckin' tome. But Momma Earth, She
sure got some humor - you ever watched river otters? Raccoons? Minks?
Newts bumbling around on land? They're
fucking hilarious.
The dude seems to have an overly
optimistic - childish - view of government. I nearly gagged when I read
that his buddies' experiences in the Grand Canyon might surface "in a
note of gratitude to nameless faces in the Park Service" (p. 53), as if
the agency were some angelic godsend savior of wilderness. The truth is
that the agencies can sometimes benefit their charges but also harm
'em, as Abbey comprehensively delineates so well, and so much better,
in his polemic on the National Park Service in Desert Solitaire. Lopez
applauds the generosity of the United States Forest Service on spending
"its" money on torching the dead, stranded whales in "A Presentation of
Whales" (wow, what an engaging title) - he seems unaware that that's
not the USFS's money - that's the people's money. (Digression. Lopez
writes that many sharks had come inshore to eat the dead whales -
doesn't that intimate that the whales' carcasses would've been a
welcome bounty for innumerable plants and algae and animals, just like
carcasses of post-spawn salmon are to bears and eagles and trees and
grapes? And if so, wouldn't burning the whales deprive all that other
life of those nutrients? He never bothers to question the burning.) He
writes of the government employees making shit up about possible
"medical risks" from the dying whales to keep the public from the
creatures and seems to find nothing wrong with such lies...and ya
wonder why so many distrust the government - because of that. He
laments when one observer yells at a cop who's telling a well-meaning,
nice man and his daughter trying to ease the dying of one of the whales
by pouring cold water on its head to stop it, and the way Lopez writes
it, what he laments isn't that the father and daughter aren't allowed
to comfort the poor whale, but that the cop's interference is
questioned. He admires a G-man biologist for speaking "...without
scientific distance," and yet in the same paragraph describes how the
G-man told concerned crewmembers that they were "collecting" seals but
never what they were really doing - killing 'em (p. 158). And what a fucking government
stoolie bitch. He laments that when the Charley River
Watershed is designated as a wilderness, the subsistence hunters, who
live with rather than over the Wild, will be kicked off as a result,
but he doesn't fire back that that'll happen over his dead body, or
that he'll support their defiance of the government by staying put,
only that he doesn't want to be the one to tell 'em to leave (p. 89). Coward.
But, like that cold, smug asshole
Peterson, Lopez ain't all bad. He's aware that the current
overdominance of deterministic thinking disengaged from both the Wild
and the uniqueness of place severely limits the healthy evolution of
life. The dude nails it in his approbation for Carl Sauer's idea of
bioregionalism (actually, the idea winds all the way back through
Powell to the California Indians), which does follow the Wild's
divisions (i.e., watersheds) and not those silly, nonsensical imaginary
lines that carve up this country's states and counties. Several times
he intimates that to really understand, you gotta have more than just
your intellect engaged - gotta have your heart and soul, too, gotta
have intuition and emotion and experience as well as logic. These,
though dry, ain't bad:
With the loss of self-consciousness, the landscape opens (p. 44).
An indigenous philosophy...may also be derived from a people's continuous attentiveness to both the obvious (scientific) and ineffable (artistic) order of the local landscape (p. 67).
...the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in paradox, irony, and the contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives - beyond this there are (eh, despite another unnecessary expletive) only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics (p. 71).
Clearly Lopez is (was) very
knowledgeable: his descriptions of the history of North American
Indians, such as in "The Stone Horse" and "Searching for Ancestors,"
are very instructive. He knows the animals well, too, such as the geese
he writes about; he can identify which bird species a feather came from
(I only rarely can do that). Ya gotta be skillful to ride wild rivers
in rubber rafts and canoes, to freeze your ass off in Arctic waters, to
immerse yourself in real wilderness with just another person or two -
and survive. With such characteristics, he could've cut a killer field
or natural-history guide.
And as a writer, at least based on this
book, that's what he should've been, a field-guide writer, not an
artist singing about the mystical realm of Mother Earth. And that
highlights that to really express the power, the euphoria and anguish
that is the multifaceted relationship between humanity and Wild that is
Nature, ya gotta get your head and words out of the ass of the Ivory
Tower.
In summary - fuck this book.
REFERENCES
Lopez, B. 1989. Crossing open ground. Can't Remember, Vintage.