Field Notes - Hardcover

Lopez, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679434534 ISBN 13: 9780679434535

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994

Synopsis

In this new collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past. with nature. In these stories, we find men or women -- sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded -- who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In "Empira's Tapestry." a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life ... In "Homecoming," a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter re-teaches him ... And in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable.

These spare, haunting fictions, building cumulatively on each other, are marked by those qualities we have found in all of Barry Lopez's writing: a sense of the magic and marvelous strangeness of the world, respect for disparate ways of knowing and being, compassion for the human predicament, and a vibrant hope that comes from being alert and attentive to the complex beauties of landscape.

Field Votes is the final book of a loosely connected trilogy that includes Desert Notes (1976) and River Notes (1979) and stands with the best of Barry Lopez's remarkably varied work.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Lopez won the 1986 National Book Award in nonfiction for Arctic Dreams. His short stories, which have received a Pushcart Prize and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. appear regularly in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction. The North American Review Manoa, and elsewhere. His other books include Of Wolves and Men, Winter Count, Crossing Open Ground, and Crow and Weasel.

From the Inside Flap

collection of twelve stories, one of our most admired writers evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another, with the past. with nature. In these stories, we find men or women -- sometimes at odds with themselves, sometimes transcendently well grounded -- who have an experience that is profound, unsettling, and oddly liberating. In "Empira's Tapestry." a gravely ill woman begins to weave a luminous cloth in which is expressed all of the fervent desire she had for her life ... In "Homecoming," a botanist has become so caught up with his academic ambitions that he forgets the names of the wildflowers in his own woods until his young daughter re-teaches him ... And in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema," an anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain for him always disturbingly unknowable.<br><br>These spare, haunting fictions, building cumulatively on each othe

Reviews

This is the third and apparently final book in a trilogy of story collections by the justly admired and National Book Award-winning author (the earlier volumes are Desert Notes and River Notes). Lopez's stories have in common an utterly fresh, pellucid style: He writes about people and animals in nature in a way that is profound but never cloying, and with a sense of elegaic wonder. There are stories in the present volume that Lopez has not surpassed: "The Negro in the Kitchen," a marvelous sketch of the impact of utter liberation; "Sonora," a subtle study of the relationship of landscape and sexuality; "Empira's Tapestry," a deeply touching story of an overlooked woman of great gifts; and "Conversation," a tour de force in which a passionate wildlife advocate tries to break through the "practical" shell of a well-meaning official who thinks he has his priorities straight. All the stories contain moments of sheer magic, all reflect Lopez's abiding passion for the beauty and mystery of the earth and its creatures.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this extraordinary collection, the final installment of a trilogy begun with Desert Notes (1976) and River Notes (1979), National Book Award winner Lopez (for Arctic Dreams, 1986) continues to use nature to teach us about ourselves. Each of the 12 stories in this slim volume creates a mystical world from everyday lives, depicting men and women coming up against situations with which they find themselves surprisingly unequipped to deal. As each character struggles to cope with predicaments that range from failing professions to disintegrating families to death, guidance comes from nature: the song of a wren that leads a man lost in the desert to water (``Introduction: Within Birds' Hearing''); the wildflowers that lead an estranged botanist back to his wife and daughter (``Homecoming''). Often a story revolves around a protagonist learning to let go of convention in order to hear nature. This listening can be approached directly, as when an old friend tries to convince the head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service to recognize that ``our biology is unraveling in a holocaust of extinct species'' and declare the ferruginous hawk an endangered species (``Conversation''). But Lopez does an even better job of illuminating the wisdom of nature when he offers ways of listening that are more like dreaming. For example, a wildlife biologist studying an arctic oasis learns the sorrow of modern animals when he discovers a land where only the souls of those killed properly (when the hunter prays after the kill) can come to search for new bodies (``Pearyland''), and a pack of wolverines teach an Alberta hunter why they don't want to be trapped (``Lessons from the Wolverine''). Through it all, Lopez's prose reads like poetry. His short, simple, and profound tales convey a deep respect for the environment and for the beauty of relationships, knowledge, language, and love. Haunting, seductive, and sensual. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Lopez is known best for his nature writing, especially the National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams (1986), so it comes as no surprise that his passion for the earth is the impetus for his fiction. Each story in this rather impassioned collection involves a person giving himself or herself up to a beloved and, ultimately, sacred place. These are tales, then, of solitude, contemplation, and grace. The volume's introduction, "Within Birds' Hearing," sets the tone. It's a remarkably dramatic piece about a man whose life is saved, on a reckless trek across the desert, by his unarticulated faith and the seemingly miraculous intervention of birds. In "Teal Creek," a humble narrator records his lifelong fascination with a quiet, meditative man, a genuine anchorite, living alone in the woods. Lopez's characters, several of whom are scientists, often experience telepathic connections to other people, animals, and forces such as the wind. In the best of his fablelike stories, including "Sonora" and "The Runner," these associations are magical and meaningful. In the stiffer, more propagandistic tales, Lopez's politics overwhelm the delicate structure of his narrative. In either case, however, Lopez's prose has a preternatural heft and reverberation, and his stories possess the haunting significance of dreams. Donna Seaman

Infused with magic and mystery, these 12 stories are frequently more lyric than narrative. The protagonists include anthropologists, botanists, and investment counselors, and settings range from Greenland to Australia, with intermediate stops in Manhattan and inside the Washington, D.C., beltway. Within such varied contexts, Lopez skillfully develops a recurring pattern: chance encounters bring isolated individuals to moments of sharp insight. In "Pearyland," for example, a biologist travels to a remote region to study the ecology of death and acquires there a disturbing vision of life. Lopez has won prizes for both fiction and nonfiction, and this collection is the final volume in a trilogy that also includes Desert Notes (LJ 6/15/76) and River Notes (LJ 11/1/79). Recommended for general collections.
Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

TEAL CREEK


In the Magdalena Mountains east of Ordell, in country that's been called the Bennett River country since the time of white people, an anchorite (as I would later come to understand the word) settled. His name was James Teal. He drove in when trillium were in full flower, April of 1954, in a green 1946 Dodge and stayed first for several weeks at the Courtyard Motel in Ordell before moving up onto the Bennett.

He brought no remarkable possessions. He walked with a slight limp, which my father thought might be from a war wound. He was tall, lean, his face vaguely Asiatic. I remember people noticed right away that he was not an intruder, and was easy to speak to. For a stranger who didn't have a job, or a way of life that fit him anywhere, he drew remarkably little suspicion in Ordell. Days, he was out of town in his car--people saw him walking in and out of the woods at different places; evenings he spent around the motel. He ate supper at Dan and Ruella's cafe or the Vincent Hotel. He didn't go into the bars. He bought groceries, like everyone, at Clyde's on Assiniboine--that's long gone now--and bought rope and pipe and things at Cassidy's Feed, which had a hardware section back then.

People like my father who always watched everything just a little said they saw less of him as summer went on. I don't remember, really, seeing much of him myself. I was infatuated with Esther Matthews and I missed a lot then, I suppose. But by the end of summer, August, he was gone.

After that, from the winter of '54--'55 on, he lived up on the Bennett. He gave the Dodge over to Wilton Haskin, who owned the Courtyard--some say he traded the car for rent or tools or meals, but if he did it was Wilton who likely got the better end of the deal. Wilton drove the car until he died in the fall of 1975. Then his son Clarence drove it another ten years.

Teal lived in two places I knew of on tributaries off the Bennett. One was at Cougar Creek and the other was on Lesley Creek, though for some reason then we called it White Dog Creek and now, like myself, some people call it Teal Creek.

Teal understood very well how to get on alone up there. He found spots where hot springs surfaced near south-facing benches, where he had light enough for a garden--which meant he looked the country over more closely than anyone I ever knew, or heard of. I was only inside the second cabin he built, but the first one must have been much like it, tight and simple. He broke and moved a lot of rock at the second place, a terrible amount of work, really, to make a good foundation for a one-room cabin. And he built a flume there at the second place, a wood chute to carry the flow of water from the hot spring through at floor level. He packed a woodstove in and had creek water, and he built a porch big enough to cover some of his firewood and a daybed.

I was thirteen the summer he moved up on Cougar Creek. I didn't go up that way to hunt or wander or fool around. No one did. At the time all the country around there was so open, so empty of people, no one much kept him in mind. He wasn't any trespasser. It was all federal land. We would see him in town once or twice, early in the spring or late in summer. He'd work a few weeks for Wilton, buy staples at Clyde's, and then hitch back out to Bennett River. From the highway he'd walk up Cougar Creek to his place or, later, the four miles up White Dog Creek.

Those times he'd hitch back out of town, once I got my license, I'd think about offering him a ride. He was the most beguiling person to me, beckoning, like the first pungent smell of cottonwood buds. He seemed as independent and benign as the moon. But I was shy and my father disapproved of that kind of curiosity.

I went away to college in '59. Summers I worked with my father, a heavy-equipment contractor. In the summer after my junior year we were building logging roads back up from the Bennett. One night, halfway home, I missed my wallet and turned the truck around, certain it had fallen out at the work site. I found it on the ground alongside the grader I was driving. By then it was after seven, but the sky was still bright, and I got to thinking about James Teal. Without knowing why, without really looking at what I was doing, I pulled off the road at Lesley Creek bridge and sat there. I wanted to see his place. I wanted to talk with him. Where did he come from? What sort of things did he work at? Did he have a family somewhere? I wondered if he was purely white, but I wouldn't admit to the rank curiosity, the willingness to invade his privacy. I'd never had a conversation with the man. I had no reason at all to be calling.

Still, that evening I went up the creek. Dusk was long enough to see by for a few hours and I carried a flashlight to come back. I walked along a deer trail, just a few yards into the trees, a narrow path cushioned with moss and fir needles. No stranger would guess a man occasionally passed there.

It was dark when I finally descried the cabin. I saw its angles silhouetted in trees against the sky. Teal was standing on the porch, looking into the woods, but not toward me. In hearth or candle light I saw he wore a white T-shirt tucked in his trousers and that he was barefoot. I squatted down on the trail. Two Swainson's thrushes were calling, back and forth. After a while they were quiet and Teal went in. I heard the door close, the metal latch fall.

I felt foolish and at the same time a little frightened. I'd come all this way, then said nothing, and had hidden from the man. I couldn't understand why I was scared, but I got so dizzy I had to sit. I felt myself in a kind of sinkhole in the darkness. I knew if I walked up to the cabin and spoke to him I'd be all right. But I turned back on the deer trail. My skin prickled. I ran fast, imagining feral dogs chasing me down. I tangled in limbs and blackberry vines. All the way out to the road I felt an edge of panic.

At the truck I calmed myself. It wasn't Teal that had frightened me. It wasn't the dark, either. What scared me was the thought that I might have injured him. I knew right then what it meant to trespass.

Late in the summer of 1967, I moved back to Ordell and went to work full-time for my father. I had married a woman named Julie Quiros from Stuart River. I'd finished four years in the army, none of it, I've always been grateful, in Vietnam, and we'd had a daughter, Blair. My mother's younger brother, despondent, involved with another woman, had shot himself and his wife, and their three children, all girls, had come to live with my parents. Clyde Brennan had closed his store and another market had opened up.

Teal, like the first wildly colored harlequin duck I ever saw, had been somewhere at the edge of my thoughts all that time, ever since that night. When I got home I asked my father if he'd seen him recently. He said yes, Teal had been in town that August, had worked a little for Wilton, the same as always, then he'd gone back out to his place--and certainly, whether it was federal land or not, it was his place by now.

What could he believe in? I wondered. What allowed him to be comfortable out there from one year to the next? Whatever his beliefs were, he didn't bother anybody with them. Whenever he came to town he got on easily with people. I remember even a few times he played softball with us, laughing as much as anyone when he dropped easy pop flies or struck out. Did he keep a tidy shelf of books up there? And which books would those be? Did he reel and crouch in the moon's light?

Though I'd never done so as a boy, I knew there were spots along the Bennett good to swim in, and on an Indian summer day in September of '67 I took Julie and Blair up to a place past Teal Creek. They swam. I couldn't keep my attention on them. I felt my unseemly curiosity, the cowardice and insistence of it, and I knew Julie was aware that something was running in my mind.

I looked over at her, at the soft, veined line of her neck, where it rose from her shoulders.

"You know that fellow Teal?" I asked.

"The hermit?"

"I don't know, really." After a while I said, "When I was fourteen, a man named Ephraim Lincoln told all of us a story about Teal, one morning at Clyde's during hunting season. He said he found where Teal had walked barefoot in the snow and seen where he'd knelt down for a long time by a little waterfall, then lay out full, naked. I shook my head and laughed right along with the older men, but everyone knew that the scorn was wrong, misdirected. It was Ephraim who was lewd, a corrupt individual.

"Ever since then, I've known I wanted to protect Teal. And that I should--that I'm meant to--receive something from him. I don't know what it is."

Julie rested her fingers on my arm.

That fall instead of going up Enid River to look for deer with a friend I went alone up the Bennett. I planned to walk in along Cougar Creek and just roam around. If I saw Teal's first cabin, well, fine. I'd look it over. I knew I wouldn't shoot any deer up there, no matter. It would have been wrong, mixing those things.

I got about a mile up Cougar Creek and then knew I shouldn't be in there. I turned back, feeling a familiar dread and misgiving. Then, a short way down the trail, I was fine. It occurred to me that maybe Teal was dealing with menace, that out here he went chin to chin with an evil I could not imagine. The knowledge that he might do this shamed me. Where was my own courage, my own resolution?

That winter I began reading to Blair at night. We started off with fairy tales, but the most interesting stories to us after a while were Indian stories, ones collected by George Bird Grinnell and James Willard Schultz from Cheyenne and Blackfeet and Gros Ventre people not so far away, over in Montana and Wyoming. At first I thought Blair would be bored. The stories were mostly about young men traveling, or about the creation of the world. But she liked them. The stories were simple, without ir...

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679434534
• ISBN 13: 9780679434535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 159