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Crossing Open Ground
The author travels through the American Southwest and Alaska, discussing endangered wildlife and forgotten cultures.
In Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez weaves the same invigorating spell as in his National Book Award-winning classic Arctic Dreams. Here, he travels through the American Southwest and Alaska, discussing endangered wildlife and forgotten cultures. Through his crystalline vision, Lopez urges us toward a new attitude, a re-enchantment with the world that is vital to our sense of place, our well-being . . . our very survival.
In Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez weaves the same invigorating spell as in his National Book Award-winning classic Arctic Dreams. Here, he travels through the American Southwest and Alaska, discussing endangered wildlife and forgotten cultures. Through his crystalline vision, Lopez urges us toward a new attitude, a re-enchantment with the world that is vital to our sense of place, our well-being . . . our very survival.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
About the author
Barry Lopez
59 books864 followersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 105 reviews
June 13, 2011
As an collection of journalistic pieces and essays, Crossing Open Ground is slightly less consistent in its overwhelming awe than Lopez' other works. His earlier, more explicitly journalistic pieces seem less impressive than the later works, which tend to be the ones that spend more time drawing connections and pondering. There are several of the latter kind of work in this collection, and they are all gems among the accumulated sediment of modern thinking about the human place in nature. Essays like "Landscape and Narrative" and "The Passing Wisdom of Birds" stand out; "Children in the Woods," "Searching for Ancestors," and "Yukon-Charley" are nearly as crucial. Barry Lopez has two incredible gifts as a an intellectual writing about his particularly important topic. His abilities as a prose stylist, informed by wide and deep reading and aided by an apparent habit of thoughtful revision, convey his message in deeply resonant language. His message, his peculiar perspective, is of course what makes the resonance stick. His viewpoint is deeply radical without being ideological or narrow. It embraces the dignity of so much of human lives while acknowledging the tragedy of so much of modern industrial life. He's the best. Between himself, Derrick Jensen, and David Abram, you're probably set on getting a great modern perspective on environmental issues.
December 19, 2021
Barry Lopez was a gifted writer (1945-2020), his words are poetry, "his tone is intimate," and he manages to walk that fine line we all need to learn to walk, where we can disagree without judging or alienating. His is a gentle spirit, in tune with the wonder of the world, of nature and of our place in it.
If Lopez were a poet, he would be Mary Oliver. He not only visited nature, he worked alongside those who studied and loved it. These essays are from different parts of the world and tell the story not only of Nature, but of Humankind. I highly recommend this book.
If Lopez were a poet, he would be Mary Oliver. He not only visited nature, he worked alongside those who studied and loved it. These essays are from different parts of the world and tell the story not only of Nature, but of Humankind. I highly recommend this book.
July 30, 2012
Outstanding set of 14 essays that help the reader experience special places and people in the Northwest, Arctic, and desert Southwest and the meaning of the individual's place in nature. Lopez renders a rich feast of first-person experience balanced with effective coverage of the historical and cultural context and enlightening reflections on the spiritual and ecological implications of his topics. This is achieved with a remarkable economy and precision in his prose. Of course I want more of each story, which is why I am often pained by short stories, poetry, and essays; but the pleasure of these short pieces resonate in the same way a still pond ripples after a pebble is tossed in. I can look forward to "Arctic Dreams" for a longer visit in his mind. No simple tree-hugger or nirvana preacher, he gently nudges the reader toward a commitment to respecting and participating in the wonders of life on Earth and consideration of adapting approaches used by indigenous cultures.
September 4, 2010
the great barry lopez composes prose as rich and sustaining as the landscapes he so effortlessly considers. crossing open ground collects fourteen essays, written during the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s, that were printed previously in a wide array of publications including harper's, outside, wilderness, orion nature quarterly, and notre dame magazine. as one of our eminent nature writers, lopez travels throughout the west to explore the great abundance and diversity of some of our nation's most pristine settings. lopez's writing seamlessly blends science, philosophy, and history in a first-person narrative that is as beautifully crafted as it is insightful and inspiring.
the essays contained within crossing open ground vary greatly in theme and subject, though lopez's abiding humility before the brilliance of the natural world is evident throughout. among the collection's strongest pieces are "a presentation of whales" (about the mass beaching of 41 sperm whales on the oregon coast in 1979), "the passing wisdom of birds" (recalling the senseless mass destruction cortés wrought upon the resplendent avian populations of tenochtitlan in 1520), "grown men" (a touching tribute to three mentor-like friends), "searching for ancestors" (about the vanished anasazi), "landscape and narrative" (regarding the intersection of storytelling and nature), and "a reflection on white geese" (about the large number of visiting bird populations on tule lake in northern california). without a single extraneous essay, crossing open ground aptly exemplifies lopez's literary proficiency and leaves the reader with a lasting sense of awe, wonder, and respect for the natural world.
as the anasazi had a complicated culture, so have we. we are takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. we search for order in chaos wherever we go. we worry over what is lost. in our best moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are benefiting by these acts. one of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.
~
beyond this- that the interior landscape is a metaphorical representation of the exterior landscape, that the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives- beyond this there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.
our national literatures should be important to us insofar as they sustain us with illumination and heal us. they can always do that so long as they are written with respect for both the source and the reader, and with an understanding of why the human heart and the land have been brought together so regularly in human history.
~
one learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it- like that between the sparrow and the twig. the difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.
the essays contained within crossing open ground vary greatly in theme and subject, though lopez's abiding humility before the brilliance of the natural world is evident throughout. among the collection's strongest pieces are "a presentation of whales" (about the mass beaching of 41 sperm whales on the oregon coast in 1979), "the passing wisdom of birds" (recalling the senseless mass destruction cortés wrought upon the resplendent avian populations of tenochtitlan in 1520), "grown men" (a touching tribute to three mentor-like friends), "searching for ancestors" (about the vanished anasazi), "landscape and narrative" (regarding the intersection of storytelling and nature), and "a reflection on white geese" (about the large number of visiting bird populations on tule lake in northern california). without a single extraneous essay, crossing open ground aptly exemplifies lopez's literary proficiency and leaves the reader with a lasting sense of awe, wonder, and respect for the natural world.
as the anasazi had a complicated culture, so have we. we are takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. we search for order in chaos wherever we go. we worry over what is lost. in our best moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are benefiting by these acts. one of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.
~
beyond this- that the interior landscape is a metaphorical representation of the exterior landscape, that the truth reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives- beyond this there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.
our national literatures should be important to us insofar as they sustain us with illumination and heal us. they can always do that so long as they are written with respect for both the source and the reader, and with an understanding of why the human heart and the land have been brought together so regularly in human history.
~
one learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it- like that between the sparrow and the twig. the difference between the relationships and the elements is the same as that between written history and a catalog of events.
June 1, 2010
Barry Lopez has a new fan here. Beautiful, thought-provoking nature writing.
The essay about the beached whales in "A Presentation of Whales" brought me to tears.
I particularly loved "Landscape and Narrative". There are so many excellent passages in this section, but here's just one:
"This feeling, an inexplicable renewal of enthusiasm after storytelling, is familiar to many people. It does not seem to matter greatly what the subject is, as long as the context is intimate and the story is told for its own sake, not forced to serve merely as the vehicle for an idea. The tone of the story need not be solemn. The darker aspects of life need not be ignored. But I think intimacy is indispensable - a feeling that derives from the listener's trust and a storyteller's certain knowledge of his subject and regard for his audience. This intimacy deepens if the storyteller tempers his authority with humility, or when terms of idiomatic expression, or at least the physical setting for the story, are shared."
***
"Gone Back into the Earth" about his trip water rafting the Colorado through the Grand Canyon with Paul Winter has left an indelible picture in my mind and I'd love to listen to the music Paul Winter recorded during that trip.
"A Reflection on White Geese" is beautifully descriptive, but also tackles the problem of disappearing wetlands as humans drain and build upon them. This essay was written back in October 1982. The draining of wetlands has gone on unabated since then and I mourn their loss.
The essay about the beached whales in "A Presentation of Whales" brought me to tears.
I particularly loved "Landscape and Narrative". There are so many excellent passages in this section, but here's just one:
"This feeling, an inexplicable renewal of enthusiasm after storytelling, is familiar to many people. It does not seem to matter greatly what the subject is, as long as the context is intimate and the story is told for its own sake, not forced to serve merely as the vehicle for an idea. The tone of the story need not be solemn. The darker aspects of life need not be ignored. But I think intimacy is indispensable - a feeling that derives from the listener's trust and a storyteller's certain knowledge of his subject and regard for his audience. This intimacy deepens if the storyteller tempers his authority with humility, or when terms of idiomatic expression, or at least the physical setting for the story, are shared."
***
"Gone Back into the Earth" about his trip water rafting the Colorado through the Grand Canyon with Paul Winter has left an indelible picture in my mind and I'd love to listen to the music Paul Winter recorded during that trip.
"A Reflection on White Geese" is beautifully descriptive, but also tackles the problem of disappearing wetlands as humans drain and build upon them. This essay was written back in October 1982. The draining of wetlands has gone on unabated since then and I mourn their loss.
June 28, 2016
"One learns the landscape not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by perceiving the relationships in it."
Caribou crossing - Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
I didn't really doubt it, but I was happy that Lopez's lyrical writing and mood continued into his essays, having only read his creative short fiction to date. There were many strong essays, but the one that stuck with me the most may have been "Landscape and Narrative", quoted here. Lopez shares stories from his travels and expeditions with scientists in the Arctic, archaeologists in the southwest, and shares memories of people who helped shape the person he is today.
The words in some of these essays have stayed with me over the days since I read it... and this may precipitate a purchase of my own copy, to come back to again and again.
February 14, 2016
The first day I moved to San Francisco, I went to Ocean Beach for an afternoon walk on a bright and sunny day, and I fell in love immediately. I loved that the name of the beach was simply, Ocean Beach and I loved the waves and the colors and scents and sounds and how close I lived to the ocean (about 2 miles). I don’t remember how long I walked before I reached a crowd of people around a beached whale that had washed ashore and been stranded. I remember thinking, like Annie Dillard, “this is a great place to live, there’s a lot to think about.” I was stunned at the size of it and the smell was too much for me, so I spent less time that I wished I had looking at it. It was partially roped off and there was no one trying to touch it or bother it; they were waiting to bury it. I didn’t know why they couldn’t save it, and I was saddened. I have spent a lot of time along the shoreline since then and have never seen such a sight again. It was before smart phones with cameras, and I am glad and sad at the same time. I think it would have been an important lesson to look at from time to time, about the fragility of life, the capriciousness of tides, how “bad” exists with “good”, death in Eden, and how small my life is compared to a whale.
Barry Lopez, a living god of nature writing, stunned me with the story of forty-one stranded sperm whales on the coast of Oregon in “A Presentation of Whales.” Imagine my experience above multiplied x 41. It boggles the mind, it has to. All that life lost. It advanced scientific knowledge a hundred-fold they said; they said again, there was no way to save the whales even if local boats had been willing to try and they weren’t. The difference was that the whales were still alive, some were, and there was the dilemma of whether to euthanize or even how to since science knew so little of the sperm whale, they didn’t know how. He wrote a detailed, succinct journalistic piece about it but remarked, “As far as I know, no novelist, no historian, no moral philosopher, no scholar of Melville, no rabbi, no painter, no theologian, had been on the beach.” The account that could have been made of this surreal, holy moment, by a poet perhaps, watching these gargantuan creatures blink their eyes, track all movement, breath every 15 minutes, flapping their fins and vibrating the earth, making clicking noises, as they died. I wonder if I could have stood it; it is the quintessential Dillard “gap” where the holy light streams down, if you can bear it. One scientist “put his face near the blowhole of one of the whales: a cylinder of clean, warm, humid air almost a foot in diameter blew back his hair.”
“Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots. At fifty tons it is the largest carnivore on earth. Imagine a four-hundred-pound heart the size of a chest of drawers driving five gallons of blood at a stroke through its aorta; a meal of forty salmon moving slowly down twelve-hundred feet of intestine…the sperm whale’s brain is larger than the brain of any other creature that ever lived…With skin as sensitive as the inside of your wrist.” Yes, imagine this magnificent creature alive, watching you. They weren’t able to determine exactly how the stranding happened, but they were near a river that might have been leaking toxins (it was the 1980’s) or there was extremely loud machinery in the water that might have interfered with their echolocation and even sanity. The essay also highlights the best and worst of human nature, and again underscores the point I recently reread in Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, “where you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because Evil loves Paradise as much as Good.”
There’s more in this collection of essays. Much more. Lopez writes powerfully. Critics say, “he makes the reader at home with himself and the world. Anyone who has ever felt lost should read this book.” Another says, “Lopez looks at flocks of geese…and the tracks of Arctic fox in the snow, and then he tells us about ourselves.”
More. “Gone Back into the Earth” tells of a trip down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, and is the perfect example of a trip that changed him. I always want to ask people, what surprised you about a trip they just returned from, what felt like home, what challenged you, what changed you? Some look at me strangely, and try to answer, but I love the idea that any foray into the world has the power to change you if you are open to it. “Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this known dimension of distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…”
“I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life’s deep, coursing threads…Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.”
“I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.”
“A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.”
“I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick intimate pounding of the heart.”
“The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first.”
More and more. “Landscape and Narrative” speaks of how storytelling connects us as humans and also how it leads us to being more fully ourselves. “I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.” The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
“Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order…each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health…Among the various sung ceremonies of this people-Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway- there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).”
Barry Lopez, a living god of nature writing, stunned me with the story of forty-one stranded sperm whales on the coast of Oregon in “A Presentation of Whales.” Imagine my experience above multiplied x 41. It boggles the mind, it has to. All that life lost. It advanced scientific knowledge a hundred-fold they said; they said again, there was no way to save the whales even if local boats had been willing to try and they weren’t. The difference was that the whales were still alive, some were, and there was the dilemma of whether to euthanize or even how to since science knew so little of the sperm whale, they didn’t know how. He wrote a detailed, succinct journalistic piece about it but remarked, “As far as I know, no novelist, no historian, no moral philosopher, no scholar of Melville, no rabbi, no painter, no theologian, had been on the beach.” The account that could have been made of this surreal, holy moment, by a poet perhaps, watching these gargantuan creatures blink their eyes, track all movement, breath every 15 minutes, flapping their fins and vibrating the earth, making clicking noises, as they died. I wonder if I could have stood it; it is the quintessential Dillard “gap” where the holy light streams down, if you can bear it. One scientist “put his face near the blowhole of one of the whales: a cylinder of clean, warm, humid air almost a foot in diameter blew back his hair.”
“Imagine a forty-five-year-old male fifty feet long, a slim, shiny black animal cutting the surface of green ocean water at twenty knots. At fifty tons it is the largest carnivore on earth. Imagine a four-hundred-pound heart the size of a chest of drawers driving five gallons of blood at a stroke through its aorta; a meal of forty salmon moving slowly down twelve-hundred feet of intestine…the sperm whale’s brain is larger than the brain of any other creature that ever lived…With skin as sensitive as the inside of your wrist.” Yes, imagine this magnificent creature alive, watching you. They weren’t able to determine exactly how the stranding happened, but they were near a river that might have been leaking toxins (it was the 1980’s) or there was extremely loud machinery in the water that might have interfered with their echolocation and even sanity. The essay also highlights the best and worst of human nature, and again underscores the point I recently reread in Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things, “where you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because Evil loves Paradise as much as Good.”
There’s more in this collection of essays. Much more. Lopez writes powerfully. Critics say, “he makes the reader at home with himself and the world. Anyone who has ever felt lost should read this book.” Another says, “Lopez looks at flocks of geese…and the tracks of Arctic fox in the snow, and then he tells us about ourselves.”
More. “Gone Back into the Earth” tells of a trip down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, and is the perfect example of a trip that changed him. I always want to ask people, what surprised you about a trip they just returned from, what felt like home, what challenged you, what changed you? Some look at me strangely, and try to answer, but I love the idea that any foray into the world has the power to change you if you are open to it. “Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this known dimension of distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one’s life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie… Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics…”
“I feel that my fingers have brushed one of life’s deep, coursing threads…Speak, even notice it, and it would disappear.”
“I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.”
“A thought that stayed with me was that I had entered a private place in the earth. I had seen exposed nearly its oldest part. I had lost my sense of urgency, rekindled a sense of what people were, clambering to gain access to high waterfalls and a sense of our endless struggle as a species to understand time and to estimate the consequences of our acts.”
“I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick intimate pounding of the heart.”
“The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first.”
More and more. “Landscape and Narrative” speaks of how storytelling connects us as humans and also how it leads us to being more fully ourselves. “I think of two landscapes- one outside the self, the other within. The external landscape is the one we see-not only the line and color of the land and its shading at different times of the day, but also its plants and animals in season, its weather, its geology… If you walk up, say, a dry arroyo in the Sonoran Desert you will feel a mounding and rolling of sand and silt beneath your foot that is distinctive. You will anticipate the crumbling of the sedimentary earth in the arroyo bank as your hand reaches out, and in that tangible evidence you will sense the history of water in the region. Perhaps a black-throated sparrow lands in a paloverde bush… the smell of the creosote bush….all elements of the land, and what I mean by “the landscape.” The second landscape I think of is an interior one, a kind of projection within a person of a part of the exterior landscape. Relationships in the exterior landscape include those that are named and discernible, such as the nitrogen cycle, or a vertical sequence of Ordovician limestone, and others that are uncodified or ineffable, such as winter light falling on a particular kind of granite, or the effect of humidity on the frequency of a blackpoll warbler’s burst of song….the shape and character of these relationships in a person’s thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature- the intricate history of one’s life in the land, even a life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf, are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
“Among the Navajo, the land is thought to exhibit sacred order…each individual undertakes to order his interior landscape according to the exterior landscape. To succeed in this means to achieve a balanced state of mental health…Among the various sung ceremonies of this people-Enemyway, Coyoteway, Uglyway- there is one called Beautyway. It is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time (a Navajo definition of beauty).”
November 13, 2008
Loooved it. My copy (from the library) has this hand-inscribed note written on the front cover, by who-knows-who: "Read this and you know ME! With love to Uncle James and Aunt Olive." At the end of reading this collection of nature essays, I felt like I knew myself better, and that guy who wrote the note, and everyone else who lives on this planet. Lopez is an amazing writer who really captures the expanse of the earth and what it means about who we are and what we can do.
I am obsessed with the essay "Landscape and Narrative." All you writers, PLEASE try to get your hands on this essay and read it!! It touches on subjects like truth vs. authenticity in writing, the link between settings and characters' internal states, and the fundamental heart of storytelling. SO good.
Other favorite essays: A Reflection on White Geese, Gone Back into the Earth, Yukon-Charley, A Presentation of Whales, Children in the Woods, and The Passing Wisdom of Birds.
I am obsessed with the essay "Landscape and Narrative." All you writers, PLEASE try to get your hands on this essay and read it!! It touches on subjects like truth vs. authenticity in writing, the link between settings and characters' internal states, and the fundamental heart of storytelling. SO good.
Other favorite essays: A Reflection on White Geese, Gone Back into the Earth, Yukon-Charley, A Presentation of Whales, Children in the Woods, and The Passing Wisdom of Birds.
November 10, 2012
Lopez has shown me an entire universe in a stone, a creation as large as the earth in a grain of sand. Some phenomena are too complex for me to understand through direct observation; but I can understand them through analogy. This is what Lopez has done for me in Crossing Open Ground. I met Lopez a few years ago, and in the process of our brief interaction, we both brought something of great worth to that place. We both walked away with a greater capacity to observe and understand.
July 3, 2018
this guy has soil.
("soul" autocorrected to "soil" and that seems appropriate)
("soul" autocorrected to "soil" and that seems appropriate)
December 15, 2023
The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert's walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.
To bridge the chasm between a colonial attitude toward the land and a more filial relationship with it takes time. The task has always been, and must be, carried into the next generation.
To bridge the chasm between a colonial attitude toward the land and a more filial relationship with it takes time. The task has always been, and must be, carried into the next generation.
February 6, 2017
So many quality, game-changing books missing from high school and collegiate literature courses. This is one of those books, and is really a collection of nonfiction essays written over a decade (late '70s to late '80s), still as relevant today, and especially with regard to today's political landscape (trying its best to eradicate our natural landscape), and the precarious state of our wild places.
Rather than tell you how much I enjoyed this book, and how essential it (and books like it) could and should be for our national integrity and environmental policy, I'm going to leave you with two of my favorite passages and hope you'll read the rest:
"The insistence of government and industry, that wilderness values be rendered solely in economic terms, has led to an insidious presumption, that the recreational potential of wild land, not its biological integrity, should be the principal criterion of its worth."
"An argument for wilderness that reaches beyond the valid concerns of multiple-use—recreation, flood control, providing a source of pure water—is that wild lands preserve complex biological relationships that we are only dimly, or sometimes not at all, aware of. Wilderness represents a gene pool, vital for the resiliency of plants and animals. An argument for wilderness that goes deeper still is that we have an ethical obligation to provide animals with a place where they are free from the impingement of civilization. And, further, a historical responsibility to preserve the kind of landscapes from which modern man emerged."
[Five stars for passionate essays of worth and eye-opening importance, and for being, sadly, all too timeless.]
Rather than tell you how much I enjoyed this book, and how essential it (and books like it) could and should be for our national integrity and environmental policy, I'm going to leave you with two of my favorite passages and hope you'll read the rest:
"The insistence of government and industry, that wilderness values be rendered solely in economic terms, has led to an insidious presumption, that the recreational potential of wild land, not its biological integrity, should be the principal criterion of its worth."
"An argument for wilderness that reaches beyond the valid concerns of multiple-use—recreation, flood control, providing a source of pure water—is that wild lands preserve complex biological relationships that we are only dimly, or sometimes not at all, aware of. Wilderness represents a gene pool, vital for the resiliency of plants and animals. An argument for wilderness that goes deeper still is that we have an ethical obligation to provide animals with a place where they are free from the impingement of civilization. And, further, a historical responsibility to preserve the kind of landscapes from which modern man emerged."
[Five stars for passionate essays of worth and eye-opening importance, and for being, sadly, all too timeless.]
May 5, 2020
Connections with nature....many passages in essays are so beautifully written that I have copied them down. Other stories make your head shake with disgust at some of the ways we humans behave toward our natural world. Lopez' soul is found in the landscape and he can take yours there, too.
January 25, 2021
I read selections from this (mostly the essays set in the north) years ago, and revisited following his death. Some pieces of course aged better than others, and I was especially struck by the surrealism of reading "nature writing" that predates the climate crisis.
August 30, 2023
This wasn't as good as Lopez's other titles I've read. I think because there was a mix of essays in here, some really worked and some sadly didn't.
The Stone Horse, A Reflection on White Geese and Searching for Ancestors were my favouite essays.
The Bull Rider and A Presentation of Whales didn't work for me at all as they detailed animal cruelty and man's inherent need to control, dominate and decimate animals.
A real mixed bag by Lopez and not a collection I'd return to.
Off this one goes to my community book exchange.
The Stone Horse, A Reflection on White Geese and Searching for Ancestors were my favouite essays.
The Bull Rider and A Presentation of Whales didn't work for me at all as they detailed animal cruelty and man's inherent need to control, dominate and decimate animals.
A real mixed bag by Lopez and not a collection I'd return to.
Off this one goes to my community book exchange.
November 20, 2021
I loved the lucidity of Crossing Open Ground's highpoints, and certain veins running through this collection were absolutely worth following. At times, the themes felt loose and wandering- a style that works for some authors, but to me, Barry Lopez is at his best when he is precise. Lopez' affinity for science plays out in the structuring of this collection's introductory and concluding essays (the conclusion bravely puts forth two small solutions for solving the issue of the decoupling of nature and society), but these bookends felt incomplete and lackluster. Crossing Open Ground is worth reading cover to cover, but Landscape and Narrative, Yukon Charley, A Presentation of Whales, Children in the Woods, and Grown Men carried the most soaring and impactful passages.
August 9, 2024
I feel so much respect for Barry Lopez for developing a genre that is important for me. But also the genre has come a long way since the 80s -- some of this didn't feel as relevant to me as it might once have.
The essay on the mass whale beaching was horrifying. But the very short piece on being in the forest with children is one that will stick with me for a long time.
The essay on the mass whale beaching was horrifying. But the very short piece on being in the forest with children is one that will stick with me for a long time.
January 22, 2021
Just a beautiful collection of Nature writing which makes you reassess the way you exist in the world.
December 30, 2021
I’m glad to start to get to know Barry Lopez, very overdue on my part.
February 2, 2021
In his collection of essays, noted writer, traveler and environmental activist Barry Lopez travels to remote regions of North America to explore the interaction between humanity and nature. Common themes in these essays include humanity's relationship with nature and the relationship between landscape and the human experience. The essay begins with a summary of the geological and human history of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts in southern California, and how, in the 20th Century, that history has been neglected, ignored, abused, explored, and unfortunately often vandalized. Following the reluctantly offered directions of an archaeologist (who wants to prevent the object of the author's quest from being exploited), the author finds his early-morning way to the remote, barely visited location of an intaglio of a horse. As he looks down at the eighteen-by-eight foot portrait, created through the careful placement of a particular kind of stone, the author becomes aware of the generally remarkable accuracy of the horse's proportions, and the way different angles of light and viewing give it different aspects of seeming life. As Barry Lopez considers what he sees, he reflects on how it and other intaglios were meant to be viewed.
After leaving "the stone horse," the author takes some time to make note of its physical details, and of his own experiences - to do so while at the site itself, the author comments, would have felt somehow disrespectful. Mr. Lopez writes of his fears of what might happen to the horse if it was discovered, worrying that the curious or the careless would damage it. Finally, he writes of how the fact of the horse's very existence reminds him of the length of time humanity has been around, and of the variety of experiences humanity has encountered. "This great, imperfect stretch of human expression is the clarification and encouragement, the urging and the reminder, we call history. And it is inscribed everywhere in the face of the land."
The writing of this essay is, in many places, reverent in tone. This is partly because the writer adeptly describes the silence and stillness of his early morning visit to the horse in ways that evoke places in which spiritual experiences take place and/or felt. This sense of reverence can be seen as a manifestation of the author's apparent thematic intent with both this story and many of the essays in this collection - the idea that nature, and respectful manifestations of humanity's relationship with nature, must themselves be treated with respect. His concern about what might happen to the horse, for example, foreshadows similar concerns expressed throughout the collection about what might happen, and indeed what IS happening, to nature, to history, and to traces of human existence in both, as the result of incautious exploration and insensitive exploitation. Meanwhile, his comments at the essays conclusion offer foreshadowing of their own - specifically, of similar comments made throughout the narrative about the centuries old relationship between humanity and landscape.
If you liked "The Stone Horse" I hope you will enjoy "A Presentation of Whales" (a very sad story about the beaching of 41 sperm whales like the always awesome Moby Dick near Florence along the Oregon Coast in 1979; spoiler alert: we humans do NOT acquit ourselves well in that essay) and "Searching for Ancestors" -- the latter of which concerns Barry Lopez's time exploring, measuring and working on an archeological dig at the Anasazi ruins known as "Keet Seel" in the Navajo National Monument with the anthropologist Robert Euler. Recently, I learned that Robert Euler is a pretty influential figure in the author's former life - specifically, one who triggers in him further contemplation and/or action on the implications of archaeological research. It is through working with Robert Euler that Barry Lopez comes to an important realization - namely, research into the past lives of ancient civilizations isn't just about learning what they did, or even about who they are. It's about discovering connections between past and present humanity that, in turn, give us clues about how humanity can, in the present, more effectively and respectfully connect with nature in the way humanity did in the past. The recurrent theme of humanity's relationship with nature and the relationship between the flora, fauna and animals (broadly and inaccurately termed "landscape" in my humble opinion, Guv'nor!) and our ancestral and present human experience are interwoven throughout this most excellent, but somewhat depressing book. As noted above, our current lack of humanity, understanding and connection to a disintegrating and dying natural environment does NOT look good in the end. I sincerely hope the Biden Administration can help turn it around before it truly is too late.
Humanity's Relationship with Nature -- Each of the essays in this collection explores and documents different ways in which humanity, as individuals and as a community, interacts with nature. The author writes about interactions based on science ("The Lives of Seals"), respectful exploration and contemplation ("Gone Back into the Earth"), and domination and control ("The Bull Rider"). On occasion he writes of how interactions defined by each of these perspectives sometimes come into conflict with one another ("A Presentation of Whales"). He also writes about interactions in the past ("Searching for Ancestors" and others) and the present ("Yukon Charley ..." and others), finding parallels across history in how human beings have behaved with respect and/or a determination to exploit. Throughout all these essays, the author's central thematic contention is that the more humanity can live in harmony with nature, the more likely both nature and humanity are to not just survive, but thrive. He tends to view exploitative and / or arbitrary choices based in human efforts to control nature (i.e. the drawing of "Borders") as perhaps necessary but not as important or defining as much of humanity seems to view them. The collection suggests that because there is so much about nature that humanity cannot know, or will never know, that approaching nature with an attitude of peaceful respect and/or cooperation is, and will be, the most productive way for both nature and humanity to coexist. Ultimately, the collection suggests that no matter how destructive humanity becomes, nature and its innate, transcendent wisdom will endure, survive, and perhaps even triumph ("The Lives of Birds").
The Relationship between Humanity and Landscape -- A key component of the author's exploration of humanity's relationship with nature is his exploration of how human beings interact with, and are defined by, a particular aspect of nature - specifically, the landscape. This thematic concern is touched in several of the collection's essays, most notably in "The Stone Horse", "Gone Back Into the Earth" and "Yukon Charley ...", all of which describe the author's inner contemplation of how both the outer and inner lives of human beings are shaped by their relationships with the land and environment around them. This theme is primarily explored, however, in "Landscape and Narrative", in which he discusses the relationship between storytelling and the landscape from which stories emerge. The author's thematic contention is that not only does landscape have a profound, defining effect on how human society evolves and on how individuals themselves evolve (again, this particular idea is touched on throughout the collection). He further contends that the way humanity (as a society or as an individual) treats and/or views landscape is emblematic of how humanity views its relationship with nature as a whole - as something to be passed through and/or exploited, or as something to be harmonized with and respected. The author portrays himself as discovering the importance and/or value of this latter perspective, while the collection as a whole repeatedly suggests that it's important for humanity as a whole to come to a similar realization, before both the history and the present-day innate integrity of the landscape are exploited beyond recognition or value.
The Danger to Nature Posed by Humanity -- At the same time as he's describing and/or commenting on various positive aspects of humanity's relationship with nature (including the creative inspiration portrayed in "Gone Back into the Earth"), the author also repeatedly, and pointedly, comments on how humanity has exploited, and continues to exploit, nature in insensitive, ultimately destructive ways. Here it's important to note that the author makes this point not only in terms of his contemporary experiences of such exploitation (such as those documented in "A Reflection on White Geese" and "The Bull Rider") , but also refers to particularly vivid historical examples of such attitudes and practices ("The Passing Wisdom of Birds.")Here, however, it's also important to note that the author is himself not always sure what constitutes a destructive attitude when it comes to nature - specifically, where science crosses a line between acquiring important information and exploiting natural occurrences for gain. The tension between these two views of science is portrayed with particular effectiveness in a couple of essays. The first is "A Presentation of Whales", in which scientists (given the rare opportunity to study the biology and physiology of reclusive sperm whales) come into moral and ethical conflict with environmental activists determined to ease, if not end, the suffering of the beached whales. The second essay in exploring the conflict between naturalist and science is "The Lives of Seals," in which scientists researching possible effects of industrialization on a community of seals are viewed with hostility by the crew of the research vessel carrying them to their destination. In this particular essay, the author describes the means by which the scientists and the crew came to a mutual respect of each other. Mr. Lopez goes on to suggest that communication and understanding, as practiced by the two sides on this particular conflict, are the means by which humanity can evolve a lasting, consistent theory and practice of interacting with nature in a way that benefits the former without destroying the latter.
About the Author -- Travel author and essayist Barry Lopez was the winner of several awards for his considerations of, and commentary on, the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The essays in this particular collection are evidence of his ongoing concern with nature itself and the various ways in which humanity has interacted with it in the past, and continues to interact with it in the present. He is particularly interested in how indigenous peoples, in both the distant past and more immediate present, seem to have established and maintained relationships with nature that have been grounded in respect, while explorers and industrialists of both past and present have viewed nature as an aspect of existence more to be exploited than harmonized with. A particularly interesting aspect of the collection is the sense of discovery, communicated and experienced by the author, associated with several of his experiences. There is the sense that he is on both a personal and professional journey of exploration, drawing connections between what he observes as a writer and chronicler of the nature/human relationships and what he comes to understand about his own experience of that relationship.
It is important to note that the author published this particular collection in 1988, a period in North American history (i.e. the administration of US President Ronald Reagan) in which corporate exploration of and utilization of the natural world began a course of expansion unprecedented in both range and scope. It's also important to note,though, that the author's work continued in the decades since, and that many of the concerns he raises in relation to events of that time continue in contemporary society.
Sadly, Barry Lopez died in December, 2020 leaving behind an awesome body of work worthy of further exploration. Rock on and be well, mes Amigas and Amigos . . . and I hope the above will help you enjoy the book. "There be a lot of depth to this one," he said in his best pirate, mad Captain Ahab voice. It is an exceptionally good and emotionally moving collection of essays.
After leaving "the stone horse," the author takes some time to make note of its physical details, and of his own experiences - to do so while at the site itself, the author comments, would have felt somehow disrespectful. Mr. Lopez writes of his fears of what might happen to the horse if it was discovered, worrying that the curious or the careless would damage it. Finally, he writes of how the fact of the horse's very existence reminds him of the length of time humanity has been around, and of the variety of experiences humanity has encountered. "This great, imperfect stretch of human expression is the clarification and encouragement, the urging and the reminder, we call history. And it is inscribed everywhere in the face of the land."
The writing of this essay is, in many places, reverent in tone. This is partly because the writer adeptly describes the silence and stillness of his early morning visit to the horse in ways that evoke places in which spiritual experiences take place and/or felt. This sense of reverence can be seen as a manifestation of the author's apparent thematic intent with both this story and many of the essays in this collection - the idea that nature, and respectful manifestations of humanity's relationship with nature, must themselves be treated with respect. His concern about what might happen to the horse, for example, foreshadows similar concerns expressed throughout the collection about what might happen, and indeed what IS happening, to nature, to history, and to traces of human existence in both, as the result of incautious exploration and insensitive exploitation. Meanwhile, his comments at the essays conclusion offer foreshadowing of their own - specifically, of similar comments made throughout the narrative about the centuries old relationship between humanity and landscape.
If you liked "The Stone Horse" I hope you will enjoy "A Presentation of Whales" (a very sad story about the beaching of 41 sperm whales like the always awesome Moby Dick near Florence along the Oregon Coast in 1979; spoiler alert: we humans do NOT acquit ourselves well in that essay) and "Searching for Ancestors" -- the latter of which concerns Barry Lopez's time exploring, measuring and working on an archeological dig at the Anasazi ruins known as "Keet Seel" in the Navajo National Monument with the anthropologist Robert Euler. Recently, I learned that Robert Euler is a pretty influential figure in the author's former life - specifically, one who triggers in him further contemplation and/or action on the implications of archaeological research. It is through working with Robert Euler that Barry Lopez comes to an important realization - namely, research into the past lives of ancient civilizations isn't just about learning what they did, or even about who they are. It's about discovering connections between past and present humanity that, in turn, give us clues about how humanity can, in the present, more effectively and respectfully connect with nature in the way humanity did in the past. The recurrent theme of humanity's relationship with nature and the relationship between the flora, fauna and animals (broadly and inaccurately termed "landscape" in my humble opinion, Guv'nor!) and our ancestral and present human experience are interwoven throughout this most excellent, but somewhat depressing book. As noted above, our current lack of humanity, understanding and connection to a disintegrating and dying natural environment does NOT look good in the end. I sincerely hope the Biden Administration can help turn it around before it truly is too late.
Humanity's Relationship with Nature -- Each of the essays in this collection explores and documents different ways in which humanity, as individuals and as a community, interacts with nature. The author writes about interactions based on science ("The Lives of Seals"), respectful exploration and contemplation ("Gone Back into the Earth"), and domination and control ("The Bull Rider"). On occasion he writes of how interactions defined by each of these perspectives sometimes come into conflict with one another ("A Presentation of Whales"). He also writes about interactions in the past ("Searching for Ancestors" and others) and the present ("Yukon Charley ..." and others), finding parallels across history in how human beings have behaved with respect and/or a determination to exploit. Throughout all these essays, the author's central thematic contention is that the more humanity can live in harmony with nature, the more likely both nature and humanity are to not just survive, but thrive. He tends to view exploitative and / or arbitrary choices based in human efforts to control nature (i.e. the drawing of "Borders") as perhaps necessary but not as important or defining as much of humanity seems to view them. The collection suggests that because there is so much about nature that humanity cannot know, or will never know, that approaching nature with an attitude of peaceful respect and/or cooperation is, and will be, the most productive way for both nature and humanity to coexist. Ultimately, the collection suggests that no matter how destructive humanity becomes, nature and its innate, transcendent wisdom will endure, survive, and perhaps even triumph ("The Lives of Birds").
The Relationship between Humanity and Landscape -- A key component of the author's exploration of humanity's relationship with nature is his exploration of how human beings interact with, and are defined by, a particular aspect of nature - specifically, the landscape. This thematic concern is touched in several of the collection's essays, most notably in "The Stone Horse", "Gone Back Into the Earth" and "Yukon Charley ...", all of which describe the author's inner contemplation of how both the outer and inner lives of human beings are shaped by their relationships with the land and environment around them. This theme is primarily explored, however, in "Landscape and Narrative", in which he discusses the relationship between storytelling and the landscape from which stories emerge. The author's thematic contention is that not only does landscape have a profound, defining effect on how human society evolves and on how individuals themselves evolve (again, this particular idea is touched on throughout the collection). He further contends that the way humanity (as a society or as an individual) treats and/or views landscape is emblematic of how humanity views its relationship with nature as a whole - as something to be passed through and/or exploited, or as something to be harmonized with and respected. The author portrays himself as discovering the importance and/or value of this latter perspective, while the collection as a whole repeatedly suggests that it's important for humanity as a whole to come to a similar realization, before both the history and the present-day innate integrity of the landscape are exploited beyond recognition or value.
The Danger to Nature Posed by Humanity -- At the same time as he's describing and/or commenting on various positive aspects of humanity's relationship with nature (including the creative inspiration portrayed in "Gone Back into the Earth"), the author also repeatedly, and pointedly, comments on how humanity has exploited, and continues to exploit, nature in insensitive, ultimately destructive ways. Here it's important to note that the author makes this point not only in terms of his contemporary experiences of such exploitation (such as those documented in "A Reflection on White Geese" and "The Bull Rider") , but also refers to particularly vivid historical examples of such attitudes and practices ("The Passing Wisdom of Birds.")Here, however, it's also important to note that the author is himself not always sure what constitutes a destructive attitude when it comes to nature - specifically, where science crosses a line between acquiring important information and exploiting natural occurrences for gain. The tension between these two views of science is portrayed with particular effectiveness in a couple of essays. The first is "A Presentation of Whales", in which scientists (given the rare opportunity to study the biology and physiology of reclusive sperm whales) come into moral and ethical conflict with environmental activists determined to ease, if not end, the suffering of the beached whales. The second essay in exploring the conflict between naturalist and science is "The Lives of Seals," in which scientists researching possible effects of industrialization on a community of seals are viewed with hostility by the crew of the research vessel carrying them to their destination. In this particular essay, the author describes the means by which the scientists and the crew came to a mutual respect of each other. Mr. Lopez goes on to suggest that communication and understanding, as practiced by the two sides on this particular conflict, are the means by which humanity can evolve a lasting, consistent theory and practice of interacting with nature in a way that benefits the former without destroying the latter.
About the Author -- Travel author and essayist Barry Lopez was the winner of several awards for his considerations of, and commentary on, the relationship between humanity and the natural world. The essays in this particular collection are evidence of his ongoing concern with nature itself and the various ways in which humanity has interacted with it in the past, and continues to interact with it in the present. He is particularly interested in how indigenous peoples, in both the distant past and more immediate present, seem to have established and maintained relationships with nature that have been grounded in respect, while explorers and industrialists of both past and present have viewed nature as an aspect of existence more to be exploited than harmonized with. A particularly interesting aspect of the collection is the sense of discovery, communicated and experienced by the author, associated with several of his experiences. There is the sense that he is on both a personal and professional journey of exploration, drawing connections between what he observes as a writer and chronicler of the nature/human relationships and what he comes to understand about his own experience of that relationship.
It is important to note that the author published this particular collection in 1988, a period in North American history (i.e. the administration of US President Ronald Reagan) in which corporate exploration of and utilization of the natural world began a course of expansion unprecedented in both range and scope. It's also important to note,though, that the author's work continued in the decades since, and that many of the concerns he raises in relation to events of that time continue in contemporary society.
Sadly, Barry Lopez died in December, 2020 leaving behind an awesome body of work worthy of further exploration. Rock on and be well, mes Amigas and Amigos . . . and I hope the above will help you enjoy the book. "There be a lot of depth to this one," he said in his best pirate, mad Captain Ahab voice. It is an exceptionally good and emotionally moving collection of essays.
December 15, 2011
I was on the bus and it occurred to me there was a passage about landscape, storytelling and lying that struck me and though I forget the exact quote and won't go back to find it, I am provoked to think about how it is so easy to trust nature and the landscape, that truth and language are not so much an issue or required; that there is no real question posed about being. We do not fear an unfaithfulness in nature's utterances. And further finding myself on the bus reading this, it occurred to me too how safe such an allegiance (to the driver)is. I do not typically think to worry about the reckless acts of others - save for the rare snicker from the back over my attire or sun-burnt pate. But once the contemporary human begins to orate directly upon us, faith and our footing fail us. We are dragged along upon someone else's tilting, winding path, only hoping not to find ourselves upon a precipice gazing down in a singular lack of togetherness with the ground. We find ourselves in a kind of free-fall without any hope of landing softly; there are only cacti and vultures waiting for the ultimate failure of lingual competence between antagonists. The landscape on the other hand is a truly sound protagonist; there is no doubting it, for it has no intention but acts as it will, as it must and we can be comforted all along as we are nearly swept off the earth at the same time by natural disaster or the failing of aging organs...
I have faith that one day I will be taken back into this grand scheme. Therein my true faith resides. Not in human nature, that is, as we have misunderstood it. We choose as we progress, and therefore even reason fails us in this way: being choice at all it goes against nature!
Mr. Lopez has privileged us with a close view of his direct and very personal contact with a landscape I feel I could love were I fortunate enough to be an outdoors person. Such is story telling. A privileged impossibility.
I have faith that one day I will be taken back into this grand scheme. Therein my true faith resides. Not in human nature, that is, as we have misunderstood it. We choose as we progress, and therefore even reason fails us in this way: being choice at all it goes against nature!
Mr. Lopez has privileged us with a close view of his direct and very personal contact with a landscape I feel I could love were I fortunate enough to be an outdoors person. Such is story telling. A privileged impossibility.
July 13, 2015
"Barry Lopez, winner of the 1986 American Book Award for Arctic Dreams, weaves the same invigorating spell in Crossing Open Ground. Through his crystalline vision, Lopez urges us toward a new attitude, a re-enchantment with the world that is vital to our sense of place, our well-being ...our very survival."
~~back cover
A lovely set of essays, some lyrical and magical, others more practical and down to earth. But every one worth reading, especially Grown Men, and The Passing Wisdom of Birds, and The Lives of Seals.
~~back cover
A lovely set of essays, some lyrical and magical, others more practical and down to earth. But every one worth reading, especially Grown Men, and The Passing Wisdom of Birds, and The Lives of Seals.
April 4, 2008
This is a collection of essays about exploring the West. It is beautifully written, but a bit condescending at times. It's a little ironic to write about places that are so beautiful that you want everyone to know about them, but you don't want anyone else to go. There is a sense throughout the book that he is "discovering" the west for the reader.
January 29, 2009
Lopez is a fine writer with an astute eye and ear for the world around us-- and how we often both relate and fail to see it. "Landscape and Narrative," an often anthologized essay, stands out as a particularly insightful look into the story of landscape.
September 5, 2015
Barry Lopez is usually engrossing and thought-provoking, but the essays that did that in this book were rare. Not my favorite of his collection.
December 28, 2019
This was definitely good but in comparison to other similar works of his, I found it mostly dull and uninspiring. There are gems within, but for me they were the exception.
May 1, 2024
Credo di aver letto i primi saggi di "Attraverso spazi aperti" una mezza dozzina di volte. Ogni volta li trovo stupendi e mi domando come qualcuno possa scrivere con una simile precisione e delicatezza contemporaneamente. Eppure, non avevo mai finito la raccolta. Forse per una sensazione di sovrastimolazione - nonostante siano nemmeno 200 pagine -, forse per la sensazione che sotto la semplicità della scrittura di Barry Lopez ci fosse un universo con cui entrare in contatto (ci sta). Questo per dire che quando qualche settimana fa sono andato a fare un cammino lungo la costa portoghese, l'idea di portarmi Lopez non era proprio a scatola chiusa. Mentre camminavo lungo queste scogliere, con il rumore unicamente dei miei passi strascicati, il fiato mozzo e l'oceano che sbatacchiava contro le rocce, pensavo a quella frase in uno dei primi saggi, in modo ipnotico, quasi fosse un sassetto da rigirarsi in bocca: "lì non regna un silenzio tale, né si è così lontani da tutto, da riuscire a sentirsi pensare; quello viene dopo. Prima senti il cuore che batte. Prima senti la vita". Era una frase che a ogni passo la sentivo affondare ancora di più nella mia coscienza, sotto il sole che ardeva e ustionava.
Nei quattordici saggi che compongono la raccolta, Barry Lopez cerca di ridefinire il nostro rapporto con il paesaggio, in un momento in cui l'attività umana è sempre più predatoria e devastante. Quando Lopez descrive il paesaggio e ciò che si muove in esso lo fa con una precisione e un'accuratezza che non sono solo formali, ma hanno un'importanza etica ben precisa. E' lui stesso, in uno dei saggi, a spiegare come l'accuratezza di una storia sia l'unico criterio con cui va valutata, poiché solo così può essere giudicata vera. E nella raccolta ci sta un esempio bellissimo di questo tipo di narrazione ed è la storia di quando quaranta balene si spiaggiarono e morirono lungo la costa americana. Quando Lopez ci parla del paesaggio, di fatto, ci sta parlando di quello che molti teologi e filosofi definirebbero il Mistero. Sia chiaro: non sto dicendo che il paesaggio per Lopez è metafora di. No. L'opposto. Sto dicendo che per Lopez il paesaggio E' il Mistero. Il racconto di uomini che più o meno si avvicinano al paesaggio è quindi il racconto di uomini che si approcciano a qualcosa di sacro e straordinario. Lopez racconta anche la vita di alcuni uomini che vivono ai margini della società e completamente inseriti all'interno della Natura. Questi uomini assumono i contorni quasi degli eremiti medievali, asceti che vivono in comunità con il sacro.
Per me, Lopez è uno scrittore semplicemente straordinario. Sia proprio come qualità della sua scrittura, che difficilmente può essere aggettivificata, ma che dà l'impressione di una cura maniacale alla parola, alla consapevolezza che ogni parola, ogni frase, va a costituire un qualcosa di più grande e importante, e quindi tutto deve essere cesellato fino alla più piccola parola, senza però mai essere pomposo o alienante, anzi, sempre costantemente attento a essere diretto e soprattutto accogliente verso il lettore (anche per motivi etici, per rendere il paesaggio qualcosa che tutti possono vedere). Sia perché è uno di quegli scrittori in grado di cambiare la percezione che si ha della realtà. In questo, la sua scrittura è quasi più vicina agli antichi riti magici che alla saggistica moderna. In modo difficilmente descrivibile, leggendo Lopez si ha l'impressione che la frattura fra noi e la Natura, non dico che si sani, ma che viene resa visibile e quindi, forse, se si è abbastanza fortunati, almeno un minimo attenuata.
Nei quattordici saggi che compongono la raccolta, Barry Lopez cerca di ridefinire il nostro rapporto con il paesaggio, in un momento in cui l'attività umana è sempre più predatoria e devastante. Quando Lopez descrive il paesaggio e ciò che si muove in esso lo fa con una precisione e un'accuratezza che non sono solo formali, ma hanno un'importanza etica ben precisa. E' lui stesso, in uno dei saggi, a spiegare come l'accuratezza di una storia sia l'unico criterio con cui va valutata, poiché solo così può essere giudicata vera. E nella raccolta ci sta un esempio bellissimo di questo tipo di narrazione ed è la storia di quando quaranta balene si spiaggiarono e morirono lungo la costa americana. Quando Lopez ci parla del paesaggio, di fatto, ci sta parlando di quello che molti teologi e filosofi definirebbero il Mistero. Sia chiaro: non sto dicendo che il paesaggio per Lopez è metafora di. No. L'opposto. Sto dicendo che per Lopez il paesaggio E' il Mistero. Il racconto di uomini che più o meno si avvicinano al paesaggio è quindi il racconto di uomini che si approcciano a qualcosa di sacro e straordinario. Lopez racconta anche la vita di alcuni uomini che vivono ai margini della società e completamente inseriti all'interno della Natura. Questi uomini assumono i contorni quasi degli eremiti medievali, asceti che vivono in comunità con il sacro.
Per me, Lopez è uno scrittore semplicemente straordinario. Sia proprio come qualità della sua scrittura, che difficilmente può essere aggettivificata, ma che dà l'impressione di una cura maniacale alla parola, alla consapevolezza che ogni parola, ogni frase, va a costituire un qualcosa di più grande e importante, e quindi tutto deve essere cesellato fino alla più piccola parola, senza però mai essere pomposo o alienante, anzi, sempre costantemente attento a essere diretto e soprattutto accogliente verso il lettore (anche per motivi etici, per rendere il paesaggio qualcosa che tutti possono vedere). Sia perché è uno di quegli scrittori in grado di cambiare la percezione che si ha della realtà. In questo, la sua scrittura è quasi più vicina agli antichi riti magici che alla saggistica moderna. In modo difficilmente descrivibile, leggendo Lopez si ha l'impressione che la frattura fra noi e la Natura, non dico che si sani, ma che viene resa visibile e quindi, forse, se si è abbastanza fortunati, almeno un minimo attenuata.
May 19, 2020
WOW, this is a FANTASTIC nature writer. This is a collection of shorts and it cautions me...reading Barry Lopez might actually be better than getting outdoors and enjoying nature myself!!
"I do not know, really, how we well survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick, intimate pounding of the heart".
"People who do come here will find, on looking, a mix of color, of smells, of events, that can be found nowhere else in the world. So the country, finally, is exceptional. And the profound elevation of the spirit in a wild place, rejuvenation, does not always require a rush of adrenaline. Sometimes lingering in a country's unpretentious hills and waters offers all one might wish of wisdom".
"These dreams of preservation for the very things that induce a sense of worth in human beings must have been dreamt seven thousand years ago on the Euphrates. They are dreams one hopes are dreamt on the Potomac but suspects may not be, dreams of respectful human participation in a landscape, generation after generation. Dreams of need and fulfillment."
"As the Anasazi had a complicated culture, so have we. We are takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. We search for order in chaos wherever we go. We worry over what is lost. In our best moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are benefiting by these acts. One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret".
"The slow inhalation of light that is the fall of dusk is now complete. The stars are very bright. I lie there recalling the land as if the Anasazi were something that had once bloomed in it".
"It would not in fact become clear for centuries that the metaphysics we had thrown out thousands of years before was still intact in tribal America. America offered us the opportunity to deliberate with historical perspective, to see if we wished to reclaim that metaphysics".
"I do not know, really, how we well survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick, intimate pounding of the heart".
"People who do come here will find, on looking, a mix of color, of smells, of events, that can be found nowhere else in the world. So the country, finally, is exceptional. And the profound elevation of the spirit in a wild place, rejuvenation, does not always require a rush of adrenaline. Sometimes lingering in a country's unpretentious hills and waters offers all one might wish of wisdom".
"These dreams of preservation for the very things that induce a sense of worth in human beings must have been dreamt seven thousand years ago on the Euphrates. They are dreams one hopes are dreamt on the Potomac but suspects may not be, dreams of respectful human participation in a landscape, generation after generation. Dreams of need and fulfillment."
"As the Anasazi had a complicated culture, so have we. We are takers of notes, measurers of stone, examiners of fragments in the dust. We search for order in chaos wherever we go. We worry over what is lost. In our best moments we remember to ask ourselves what it is we are doing, whom we are benefiting by these acts. One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret".
"The slow inhalation of light that is the fall of dusk is now complete. The stars are very bright. I lie there recalling the land as if the Anasazi were something that had once bloomed in it".
"It would not in fact become clear for centuries that the metaphysics we had thrown out thousands of years before was still intact in tribal America. America offered us the opportunity to deliberate with historical perspective, to see if we wished to reclaim that metaphysics".
November 30, 2023
Lopez writes with an appreciation of mystery, and the often unspeakable experiences of wisdom and grace which can be found through deepening relationship with the natural world. These essays are prescriptive at times—the final one in the collection urges a move away from an imperialistic consumption based world view, and into one which upholds the insights of native peoples and seeks to appreciate, not consume, animals, plants, and all members of the natural world.
These essays are also rich in description of place. Plants are named, the historical past is brought in, people who live on the land and lived there before are acknowledged and recounted. This is all to say that Lopez does not simply write of place by naming what is directly before him. As he says in “Children in the Woods,” “nearly anyone can learn the names of things…What takes a lifetime to learn, they comprehend, is the existence and substance of myriad relationships: it is these relationships, not the things themselves, that ultimately hold the human imagination.”
Lopez upholds this sentiment in these essays, by not simply naming or describing things, but unraveling the contexts in which they all exist. Each of these essays left me with a sense of quietness and awe, as I sat with the rich settings and images Lopez had laid before me. Still thinking about dying, beached whales, or a horrific, burning aviary, I looked out my own window. The details of these essays, and the metaphors woven through them, caused me to see the green of the magnolia tree outside my bedroom in greater detail. The relationships Lopez had gestures to extended here too—it was not enough to simply know the names of what I saw, but to look, beyond present place and time, and see a web of relationships.
These essays are also rich in description of place. Plants are named, the historical past is brought in, people who live on the land and lived there before are acknowledged and recounted. This is all to say that Lopez does not simply write of place by naming what is directly before him. As he says in “Children in the Woods,” “nearly anyone can learn the names of things…What takes a lifetime to learn, they comprehend, is the existence and substance of myriad relationships: it is these relationships, not the things themselves, that ultimately hold the human imagination.”
Lopez upholds this sentiment in these essays, by not simply naming or describing things, but unraveling the contexts in which they all exist. Each of these essays left me with a sense of quietness and awe, as I sat with the rich settings and images Lopez had laid before me. Still thinking about dying, beached whales, or a horrific, burning aviary, I looked out my own window. The details of these essays, and the metaphors woven through them, caused me to see the green of the magnolia tree outside my bedroom in greater detail. The relationships Lopez had gestures to extended here too—it was not enough to simply know the names of what I saw, but to look, beyond present place and time, and see a web of relationships.
July 12, 2021
Barry Lopez is such a satisfying writer of nonfiction. These early essays are on varied subjects and give much food for thought.
About geese:
“One wonders … if they would be quite so arresting without their stunning whiteness. When they fly with the sun behind them, the opaque white of their bodies, the white of water-polished seashells, is set off against grayer whites in their tail feathers and in their translucent, black-tipped wings.”
“The birds rose against much darker clouds to the east. There was something vaguely ominous in this apparition, as if the earth had opened and poured them forth, like a wind, a blizzard, which unfurled across the horizon above the dark, soil … great swirling currents of birds in a rattling of wings, … passing through the open spaces in another, counterflying flock, while beyond them lattice after lattice passed like sliding walls …”
About experiencing a new environment:
“Each day we are upended, if not by some element of the landscape itself then by what the landscape does, visibly, to each of us. It has snapped us like fresh-laundered sheets.”
About difficulties:
“ … the whole collection [of hard won specimens] went to the bottom of the Fraser River in a nameless rapids, as quick as popping a button on a shirt.”
“Frozen lenses of underground ice leer like a dark Norwegian secret from beneath the brows of the river’s banks.”
About geese:
“One wonders … if they would be quite so arresting without their stunning whiteness. When they fly with the sun behind them, the opaque white of their bodies, the white of water-polished seashells, is set off against grayer whites in their tail feathers and in their translucent, black-tipped wings.”
“The birds rose against much darker clouds to the east. There was something vaguely ominous in this apparition, as if the earth had opened and poured them forth, like a wind, a blizzard, which unfurled across the horizon above the dark, soil … great swirling currents of birds in a rattling of wings, … passing through the open spaces in another, counterflying flock, while beyond them lattice after lattice passed like sliding walls …”
About experiencing a new environment:
“Each day we are upended, if not by some element of the landscape itself then by what the landscape does, visibly, to each of us. It has snapped us like fresh-laundered sheets.”
About difficulties:
“ … the whole collection [of hard won specimens] went to the bottom of the Fraser River in a nameless rapids, as quick as popping a button on a shirt.”
“Frozen lenses of underground ice leer like a dark Norwegian secret from beneath the brows of the river’s banks.”
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