Horizon

Barry Holstun Lopez, 1945-2020

Book - 2019

"From the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men, an epic, revelatory work that recollects the travels around the world and the encounters--human, animal, and natural--that have shaped an extraordinary life. Taking us nearly from pole to pole--and across decades of lived experience--Barry Lopez gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that moves through six regions of the world: from western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the Paleoeskimos who trekked across northern... Canada, the colonialists who plundered central Africa, an Enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into Japan during the time of the shoguns, and today's ecotourists in the tropics. Throughout his journeys--to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on Earth--and via friendships he forges along the way with scientists, archaeologists, artists, and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world. Vivid, lyrical, and capacious, voicing concern and frustration along with humanity and hope, Horizon is a crowning achievement by one of America's most necessary voices."--Dust jacket.

Saved in:

2nd Floor Show me where

910.4/Lopez
2 / 2 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor 910.4/Lopez Checked In
2nd Floor 910.4/Lopez Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Travel writing
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2019.
Language
English
Main Author
Barry Holstun Lopez, 1945-2020 (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiv, 572 pages : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [519]-529] and index.
ISBN
9780394585826
  • Author's Note
  • Prologue
  • Introduction: Looking for a Ship
  • 1. Mamaroneck
  • 2. To Go/To See
  • 3. Remember
  • 4. Talismans
  • Cape Foulweather
  • Coast of Oregon
  • Eastern Shore of the North Pacific Ocean
  • Western North America
  • Skraeling Island
  • Mouth of Alexandra Fjord
  • East Coast of Ellesmere Island
  • Nunavut
  • Canada
  • Puerto Ayora
  • Isla Santa Cruz
  • Archipiélago de Colón
  • Eastern Equatorial Pacific
  • Jackal Camp
  • Turkwel River Basin
  • Western Lake Turkana Uplands
  • Eastern Equatorial Africa
  • Port Arthur to Botany Bay
  • State of Tasmania
  • Northern Shore of the Southern Ocean
  • Southeastern Australia
  • State of New South Wales
  • Western Shore of the South Pacific
  • Graves Nunataks to Port Famine Road
  • Queen Maud Mountains
  • Central Transantarctic Mountains
  • Northern Edge of the Polar Plateau
  • Antarctica
  • Brunswick Peninsula
  • Shore of the Strait of Magellan
  • Southern Chile
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Scientific Binomials
  • Overview Maps
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

BACK IN THE MID-1980S, when Barry Lopez published his acclaimed best seller, "Arctic Dreams," the perils facing the ecosystems, animals and peoples of the Far North stemmed mostly from nature - the basic hardships of existence in a rugged landscape. Signs of looming change were there, but apocalypse wasn't skulking on the horizon like a rising Arctic sun. Oil exploration and mining were starting to boom, though, bringing an explosion of roads and heavy machinery. Local communities were feeling the impact of that "rude invasion." Lopez fretted about the region's future, but concluded that "in behaving respectfully toward all that the land contains, it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us." Looking back across the decades, you want to scream to the world to do things differently: Stop dismantling ecosystems, stop burning fossil fuels, start cooperating before everything falls apart. Today, as we watch the cascading impacts of industrial development and climate change transform the Arctic and many other parts of the globe, it's increasingly possible to imagine the "stifling ignorance" not as a distant memory but as our epitaph. With a very real environmental and existential crisis at hand, Lopez takes us back to the Arctic, as well as to other farflung places where he has spent time over the years - searching both memory and meticulously recorded field notes to reconstruct his experiences, mining their accumulated wisdom, seeking glimmers of hope. "Horizon" unfolds over several decades, and many thousands of miles, in six main locations: the Oregon coast, the Canadian Arctic, the Galápagos, Kenya, Australia, the Antarctic. The book is autobiographical but not an autobiography - except to the extent that Lopez's life of exploration has come to define him. It is his response to his own question: "Having seen so many parts of the world, what had I learned about human menace, human triumph and human failure?" The answer fills 500 pages that feel at once like a reverie and an urgent appeal. "Horizon" is beautiful and brutal, uplifting and bleak, a story of the universal human condition set in some of the most distinctive places on earth. "We are the darkness," Lopez writes, "as we are, too, the light." Now in his 70s, a grandfather, and facing down his own mortality (he has spoken publicly about coping with advanced prostate cancer), Lopez worries deeply about the world he is leaving behind. But he also sees eternal possibility in the power of telling stories, about the world and about ourselves. With "Horizon," Lopez has mapped the "enduring threads" of his own journeys, "at a time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives. At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future." Lopez declines to provide specific dates for the travels he chronicles, except to place most of the book's trips roughly in the period from the late 1980 s through the early 2000s. It's just long enough ago to feel vaguely quaint: no cellphones, only the earliest stirring of a GPS. Camped in a logging clear-cut above Cape Foulweather, Ore., sometime in the mid-1990s, Lopez reflects on the life of James Cook, the 18th-century British explorer whose success in filling in gaps on the world's maps enabled us "to picture the entire planet, the whole of it at once." A fascination with Cook (and other explorers who populate the book) spurs Lopez, over the years, to follow some of Cook's sea routes and visit exact points where he disembarked. Often Lopez is struck by the differences between what Cook described and present conditions. On Cape Foulweather, he finds denuded slopes, vanished biodiversity, absent native Alsea people, a slew of invasive plants - not to mention the appearance of a cellphone tower protruding from a mountaintop. But Lopez also cautions against embracing easy notions about ecological, or cultural, purity. Ecosystems are always in flux. A blanket contempt for invasive species carries an uncomfortable whiff of anti-immigrant sentiment. One of the strongest messages Lopez delivers in "Horizon" is that without learning to embrace diversity, without listening to the tales told by cultures other than our own, we risk obliteration. Instead of simply lamenting Cape Foulweather's "ghosted landscape," he tries to use it as a point of departure for imagining what might come next. Still, wherever Lopez goes, he is never far from a disquisition on humanity's merciless ways. Rising from his bed one night in the tropical heat of Isla Santa Cruz, in the Galápagos, he walks alone (a frequent habit that makes for some of the book's best bits) to the beach and watches a group of brown pelicans asleep on the bay. The birds' vulnerability - "oblivious just now to all that is hidden and potentially threatening in the lightless world we share" - leads his train of thought to Spanish conquistadores releasing vicious dogs on Indians, and from there to the European bankers who underwrote the slave trade in West Africa, and on to the present horrors of Boko Haram. It's all, ultimately, in the service of pondering the roots of barbarism, and how we ignore the barbarism unfolding in our own society at our peril. Strangely, though, these relentless reminders of egregious acts don't diminish the appeal of seeing the world through Lopez's eyes. His reverence for exploring every corner of the world, even the sites of its most shameful histories, is infectious. Rarely does Lopez decline an offer of adventure, no matter how potentially grueling the trip might be. Traveling, he writes, "turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity. It helps one understand that all people do not want to be on the same road." Lopez's journeys often start in ways that make you shake your head. (More than a few trips begin with a banal sentence like: "In the austral fall of 1987 I was traveling through Namibia with a few people." You know, as one does.) One night he reads a paper in the scientific journal Nature about the discovery of some 4.27-billion-year-old zircon crystals in remote Western Australia. He immediately emails the researchers about visiting the field site - because he just happens to be headed to Perth soon, "en route from Zimbabwe to the Northern Territory." The scientists initially ignore his request. But he persists, and several years later he's finally on his way to the Jack Hills. He flies from the United States to Sydney, and then goes by train to Perth, persuading the engineers to let him ride in the locomotive. One day, crossing the vast Nullarbor Plain, "the train suddenly ran into a wall of water," a drenching rainstorm. When the weather clears, a double rainbow appears. And then a mob of kangaroos arrives, over a hundred of them, leaping across the plain. "The sight of it was so exhilarating the three of us in the cab nodded an affirmation to one another. Whatever was wild and lyrical in the timeless world, we were in the middle of it now." Lopez proceeds in a rented four-wheel drive to a sheep-ranching outpost where a geologist has arranged lodging, 120 miles from the nearest town "on an unsigned dirt track." When he arrives, the rancher and his daughter have "a meat pie in the oven, and he wanted to know whether I took milk with my tea." One day, as Lopez is heading out to the geology site, the rancher offers him a rifle and asks if he'd mind shooting any wild goats he encounters. Lopez declines. But through evening chats on the veranda, the two men form a bond; the rancher ultimately visits Lopez at home in Oregon. This knack for making friends in the most unlikely places resonates long after you turn the last page. "Are we not bound," he asks, "to learn how to speak with each other?" Had we mastered that skill 30-odd years ago, would we be where we find ourselves today, grappling with violent xenophobia while forests incinerate, oceans rise and acidify, magnificent organisms everywhere fade away? Where will we be three decades on, if we don't take heed? There is still time, though not as much as there once was, to shape what's coming. 'What had I learned about human menace, human triumph and human failure?'

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* As a preternaturally curious boy subjected to coast-to-coast upheavals, Lopez dreamed of traveling the world, and travel he has, with serious intent, to 70 countries, becoming, along the way, a much-lauded writer of conscience who illuminates the nexus between natural and human history. In his most encompassing, autobiographical, passionately detailed, and reflective book, a life's travelogue, he shares memories, stories, observations, concerns, condemnations, and hope. Prodigiously attentive out in the world and rigorous on the page, morally inquisitive and bracingly candid, Lopez pegs this expansive narrative to places that have special resonance for him, beginning with Oregon's Cape Foulweather, so named by Captain James Cook. Lopez visits archaeological sites in the Canadian High Arctic, takes measure of environmental pressures on the Galápagos Islands, participates in fieldwork in East Equatorial Africa, studies penal colonies in Australia, and searches for meteorites in Antarctica. Each place on Earth goes deep, writes Lopez, as does he. Sharply attuned to the wonders and decimation of the living world, the endless assaults against indigenous people, and the daunting challenges of a changing climate, Lopez tells revelatory tales, poses tough questions, and shares wisdom, all while looking to the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A globe-trotting nature writer meditates on the fraught interactions between people and ecosystems in this sprawling environmentalist travelogue. Essayist Lopez (Arctic Dreams) recounts episodes from decades of his travels, most of them tied to scientific investigations: camping on the Oregon coast while considering the exploits of British explorer James Cook; examining archaeological sites in the high Arctic while reflecting on the harshness of life there; hunting for hominin fossils in Kenya while weighing human evolution; scuba-diving under an Antarctic ice shelf while observing the rich marine biota. His free-associative essays blend vivid reportage on landscapes, wildlife, and the knotty relationships among the scientists he accompanies with larger musings on natural history, environmental and climate crises, and the sins of Western imperialism in erasing indigenous cultures. It's often hard to tell where Lopez is going with his frequent digressions: one two-page section skitters from global cancer rates past a one-eyed goshawk he once saw in Namibia to an astrophysics experiment at the South Pole to detect dark matter, with no particular conclusion. Still, his prose is so evocative-during a tempest at sea, "veils of storm-ripped water ballooned in the air around us" amid "the high-pitched mewling of albatrosses, teetering impossibly forty feet away from us on the wind"-and his curiosity so infectious that readers will be captivated. Photos. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Lopez is a natural philosopher in an almost literal sense, sharing his observations on the natural world and how different cultures have made sense of it and one another. His ruminations take us on a peripatetic journey around the globe and across the sweep of time with major sections of the book set on the Antarctic ice, the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, a small island in the Canadian arctic, the Galapagos, Australia, and the coast of Oregon. Each setting provides the fodder for a discursive meditation on his personal travels, the landscape and local ecology, humankind's impact on the environment, and the painful effects of histories of colonialization on indigenous populations. A recurrent theme is the role of elders in a culture, not as mere repositories of institutional knowledge but as nonlinear thinkers who draw on their cultural past to see new ways of solving problems based on empathic listening and letting go of assumptions. VERDICT While not a memoir or travelog, this first-person account is ideal for anyone who likes nature writing that also manages to bring philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history to bear with a personal guide. [See Prepub Alert, 9/24/18.]-Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of -Toledo Lib. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations."Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another." So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galpagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, "unlike mefelt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning." The author's chapter on talismansobjects taken from his travels, such as "a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite"is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli's Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he'd met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years' worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, "we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes."Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1.   Mamaroneck     A history, one purporting to depict the life trajectory of the grandfather reading by the pool, could easily begin 65 years before that moment in Hawai'i, in an embayment of Long Island Sound called Mamaroneck Harbor. Here is a stretch of sheltered water, a surface barely roughened that day by a wind blowing westward from the direction of Crane Island. A boy who cannot yet swim wades steadily farther out into the salt water, under the shepherding gaze of his mother. She's hardly fifty feet away, a dark-haired woman in her middle thirties, her legs tucked beneath her, her belly round with a second child. She's sitting on a wool blanket, embroidering a needlepoint image of field flowers erect in a vase. It's 1948. She's conversing with a friend underneath a large white oak tree on Orienta Point, on the Westchester County coast of New York. The boy halts when he reaches water up to his chin. She watches him steadily now. He wants to go farther, to swim out past Turkey Rock, out farther even, out beyond the Scotch Caps, two islets on the distant rim of the Sound. Past that lies a horizon of water. A blank page. He turns for shore, scuttling sideways like a crab in ripples that break over his small shoulders. A few months later, with the approach of a New England winter and following the birth of his only sibling, the boy moves with his family to a valley in Southern California, an irrigated expanse of farmland. Groves of oranges and walnuts, fields of alfalfa. Peach orchards. The irrigated San Fernando Valley. This Mediterranean plain is bounded to the south by the Santa Monica Mountains, to the north by the snow-capped San Gabriels. A different life for him, now. A different geography. An unfamiliar climate. Different races of people. One day, a couple of years after the family arrives, the father leaves. He returns to his first wife, living in Florida with their son, and the boy and his mother and younger brother begin together another sort of existence. His mother teaches home economics at a junior high school in Northridge and, at night, dressmaking at Pierce Junior College, near Calabasas. Other evenings she works at home, creating couture clothing for her clients. The father writes from Florida. He promises to send money but never does. The three of them, anyway, seem to have all they need. The boy is curious, but wary. A suburban crow. He makes friends with other boys in his neighborhood and with his classmates at Our Lady of Grace, a Catholic grade school in Encino. He gets to know a few of his mother's students, the sons of braceros working in the vegetable fields north and west of their house in Reseda. He learns to ride a bicycle. He rides and rides, as far north in the valley as Granada Hills and west all the way to Chatsworth. Their mother takes the boys out into the western Mojave Desert, to the eastern Mojave and the Grand Canyon, and south to the San Diego Zoo and across the border into Mexico. One afternoon the boy stands on the shore of Topanga Beach, fronting the great Pacific just east of Malibu. He watches comber after comber crash the strand, stepping clear of the waves' retreating sweeps each time, as his mother has asked. He understands that this foaming storm surf has arrived on the beach from someplace else. Here, temperate air embraces him, an onshore breeze softens the burn of the sun's rays on his white skin. Its light splinters on bits of quartz in the sand at his feet. This, too, is new to him, a feeling of being cradled in harmless breezes and caressed by light. Years later, walking alone in faraway places, he will remember and long for this sensation. A friend of his mother, a man the boy hopes will one day be his father, is accompanying the family that day at Topanga Beach. He tells the boy that far off across the water, farther away even than the storm that makes these waves, is the extremely ancient country of China. The boy has no image of China. The tall, long-fingered, long-legged, soft-spoken man in khaki trousers moves through the boy's mind with the hesitating grace of a flamingo. The boy imagines that the man knows many things. He works at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and some days brings the boy with him to work. His name is Dara. He points out differences among the plants; he pots with the boy in the greenhouses. He explains how a large flowering plant like a jacaranda grows from a small seed. The boy's most favorite trees now are eucalypts, the tall River red gums and Blue gums that flank Calvert Street in Reseda where he lives. He likes the royal towering of them, the shedding boles, slick beneath his hands, the fragrance of the hard gumnuts. He carries a few of these buttons in his pockets wherever he goes. He likes the defiant reach of these trees, how they crowd and rake the blue sky, and how the wind chitters in their leaf clusters. He feels safe hiding in their shadows. Dara tells him that around Los Angeles they're called "skyline trees." He likes that. Originally from Australia, he says, but they grow all over the world, wherever the right conditions can be found. It's the same for the frangipani trees and bougainvillea vines growing at the Botanic Garden. Those two, along with the eucalypts, says Dara, are now found everywhere "in the colonial subtropics." The boy can't picture Australia, but he is transfixed by the idea that some trees are carried off from their first country and then grow happily in other places. When he lies in bed at night, imagining the future he wants, a strategy he uses to probe the vague precincts of his dreams, the boy envisions the Botanic Garden and thinks about Dara, how gently Dara's hands handle plants. By now, though, he has also learned about some things less comforting. More threatening. He circumspectly regards the lives of poisonous Black widow spiders living in the garage alongside his house, red hourglasses gleaming on the females' tummies. When he talks to adults about the rattlesnake that startled him and his friend Thair while they were walking in the Santa Monica Mountains one morning, hunting for alligator lizards, he enjoys the way adults attend closely to his story. The snake had snapped at them when they teased it. He doesn't tell his listeners that he and Thair beat it with a stick until it was dead. One weekend at Zuma Beach the boy is stung by a wounded Portuguese man-of-war, a deep ocean creature, foundering wounded in the surf. An ambulance comes to take him, vomiting and shivering, to the hospital. He trusts the shelter of the towering gum trees and wonders about the power of Portuguese man-of-wars. The two things are now entwined in his mind. He is ashamed of having killed the snake and of his silence about it.   Most every Saturday the boy goes with his mother and brother to the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, at Third and Fairfax, driving over from the valley in his mother's dark-green, 1941 Ford. He loves the shine and heft of the fruit. He has to reach higher than his head in order to feel within the tilted boxes for greengage plums, for kumquats and nectarines. He likes to heft the Belgian endives, to feel the brush of wetted carrot tops across his forehead, to grip a cassava melon in both his hands. They're like his first pets. A friend of his mother owns an avocado ranch near Fallbrook. Her husband, a DC-6 pilot who flies every week to Honolulu and on to Tokyo for American Airlines, is not much interested in answering the boy, who wants to know how this actually occurs, Los Angeles to Honolulu, then to Tokyo. The boy has considered that he will one day have a ranch something like the one this couple operates. He'll raise avocados and perhaps Asian pears, which break as cleanly against his teeth as McIntosh apples. This life appeals to him. He'll truck his produce and buckets of cut flowers--snapdragons, carnations, irises--to the market. He'll keep bees to pollinate his flowers and fruit trees, possibly offer their honey for sale, along with fresh eggs, asparagus, and pomegranates at a stand by the side of the road, like the fruit-and-vegetable stands his mother shops at on the drive home from school every day. Most nights the boy consoles himself as he falls asleep with the certainty of the destination he has chosen. He will operate a tractor, dragging a harrow to break up the clods of dirt left behind after he discs the field where he will grow annuals. He'll determine exactly how to set out the sprinklers to irrigate the varieties of roses in his gardens. He'll light smudge pots on cold winter nights to keep the orchards from freezing. The more he imagines a truck farm, the less anxious he feels about the strange man who has come into his life, a man who is not like Dara.   One winter afternoon the boy follows his mother into the post office at Canoga Park. While she waits in line he studies a 14' x 7' mural on the east wall, Palomino Ponies . He's mesmerized. Years later he will misremember the image when he discovers more work by the same painter, Maynard Dixon. He will think of it, wrongly, as a tableau of American Indian faces in profile, high cheek bones, the burnt sienna and ochre tones of their skin. But there are no Indians in this mural of a California vaquero of the 1840s, racing across a golden grassland behind seven palomino horses. The boy will have conflated the image in the post office with the memory of a better-known painting by Dixon, Earth Knower , and he will have further confused the misremembered image with a childhood recollection of having once encountered Indians on a train platform in Needles late one ninety-degree summer night in the eastern Mojave. He was eight. He and his brother had boarded an overnight train in Los Angeles with a friend of their mother, bound for the Grand Canyon. The boy had stepped out onto the platform in this small California town on the west bank of the Colorado River after midnight, later than he'd ever been up. He saw a dozen Mohaves milling around, or maybe they were Havasupais from the Canyon, waiting for family members to board or disembark. Despite the heat, they'd all pulled shawls forward over their heads, or they were peering out from the cowls of trade blankets. He couldn't decipher the nearly inaudible sounds of the words they spoke. He never forgets the austerity of this scene. The foreignness of these figures. In the post office that day, after he takes in the poise of the rider, the fleet jeté of his mount, the muscular exuberance of the palominos, he remarks to his mother that one day he intends to become a painter. In the moment, perhaps all he really wants is to become a dashing vaquero.   And then suddenly his mother is married again, to a businessman from New York. California is over. The boy moves with his new family to Manhattan. Louder, taller, faster country than his home ground. A different color to its winter sky. Colder weather, fall leaves turning pale yellow on London plane trees, which he initially confuses with California sycamores. When his stepfather points out "Indians," dining across from them in a restaurant, he means people from another continent, not this one. That first summer in New York he's sent with his brother to Camp St. Regis on Long Island's South Fork, near East Hampton. There he meets John, a boy he believes is from California. They share a cabin with four other eleven-year-olds. John's father, the boy learns, has written some books about California, set in the Central Valley, in the boy's mind a place much like the San Fernando Valley. He's actually read one of these books, a collection of pieces called The Long Valley . On Parents Day, the California author arrives by cabin cruiser to visit his sons. He anchors the boat just off the beach where he won't have to encounter the other parents. He rows a pale green dinghy ashore to fetch his sons. They spend the afternoon together with their parents on the cabin cruiser. After his own parents leave, the boy sits on the beach and watches the boat. He waits. The boy who waded in Mamaroneck Harbor and then moved to Southern California, and once thought he wanted to grow avocados or become a painter, now lives in a brownstone in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan. In the fall he will enter the seventh grade at a private Jesuit school on East 83rd Street, and begin serving Mass as an altar boy at The Church of Our Savior on East 38th Street, around the corner from his home. It will take him awhile to fit himself to the place. On that July afternoon at St. Regis he waits, staring at the white vessel. It seems mute to him, with its curtained windows and no one visible on the flying bridge or at the stern. Young John has informed him that his parents have motored over from their home in nearby Sag Harbor, an old whaling town. The boy remembers the name, Sag Harbor. An image of it anchors his growing awareness of the immensity and quietude of whales, and of the enormity and violence of their slaughter. It bothers the boy, years later, that he cannot pry loose a single, memorable detail from the opaqueness of the Steinbeck boat, even after having scrutinized it for an hour. Only the pale green dinghy, hanging crookedly from davits at the stern, stands out. The boat sits almost broadside to him that afternoon on a slowly rising tide. Nothing stirs. He wants to go on reminiscing with John about days in California but, just then, he wants to swim out to the boat and tell the older John that he has read "The Red Pony," that he thinks it very good. He wants to be a part of a family having a conversation on that boat. Suddenly the writer, with his large, balding head, is in the stern of the cabin cruiser, lowering the dinghy to bring the boys back to shore. In the diffused light that penetrates a late afternoon fog the dinghy and its passengers appear wraith-like as they approach. The boy has yet to hear of the River Styx or of Charon, but in the years afterward it is these images that will rise up in his memory when he recalls the moment. That evening in their bunks the boy asks John how he thinks his father has been doing here, in New York City, having moved all the way across the country from California to East 72nd Street. He listens closely, hoping to hear what his bunkmate might have gleaned, having himself already made this adjustment. He hopes to make this same change successfully himself, but senses large, undefined obstacles. He feels a potential for disappointment in his expectations. He is unaware that his bunkmate John did not grow up in California. In the years following, in the silence before sleep comes, the boy sometimes recalls the anonymous cabin cruiser and the afternoon mist obscuring the horizon beyond. He thinks about the California beaches, Zuma and Point Dume on Santa Monica Bay, west of Los Angeles, and about the man his mother decided not to marry, who told him about China, and about jacarandas and eucalypts. He believes there is something he must see one day in China. Or in Japan. Or somewhere far off. This repeated sensation elicits in him a now familiar yearning. Once it came from looking at avocados motionless in his hands, or from hearing the eucalypts on Calvert Street clattering in the wind. Now it comes more often from a desire simply to go away. To find what the skyline has cordoned off. The boy in Mamaroneck Harbor is myself, and I am the grandfather speaking with his grandson in Hawai'i about catastrophe. I have been thinking for a while about the time between those two moments, wondering what transpired in the years in between, during which I saw senseless death and became a witness to the breaking of every commandment I'd learned as a boy, and during which I beheld things so beautiful I couldn't breathe. A few scenes like the ones I've recounted above, broken off from an early life--Mamaroneck Harbor, Zuma Beach, a railroad platform in Needles--are but one way to embark on a larger story about someone who, afterward, would go off repeatedly to look at the rest of the world. Only a sketch then, this, but one I feel makes reasonably good sense. No life, of course, unfolds quite this neatly and comprehensibly around any such rosary of memories. A long life might be understood, however, as a kind of cataract of imperfectly recollected intentions. Some of one's early intentions fade. Others endure through the inevitable detours of amnesia, betrayal, and loss of belief. Some persist over the years, slightly revised. Unanticipated trauma and other wounds certainly might force the car off the road, at any moment, maybe forever, one's final destination lost. But, too, the unfathomable sublimity of a random moment, like the touch of a beloved's hand on one's burning face, might revive the determination to carry on, and, at least for a time, rid one of life's weight of self-doubt and regret. Or a moment of staggering beauty might reignite the intention one once had to lead a life of great meaning, to live up to one's own expectations. My driven life has been one of occasional ecstasy and occasional sorrow, little different, in that, from the lives of many others except perhaps for the compelling desire I've had to travel to far off places, and for what acting on that yearning with such determination has meant for me and for those close to me. I became, almost unintentionally, an international traveler, though not a true wanderer.   Many years after my adolescence in New York, embarking on this autobiography, I wrote to the manager of the Orienta Apartments in Mamaroneck. I wanted to know something more about where I came from and trusted that the building was still standing and that such a person might exist. I described how, as a three-year-old, I had walked a certain path from the elevator to our apartment on the second floor. Could he or she determine the apartment number, having only this information? The manager wrote back right away, including with his letter a few drawings of the building's grounds and some photographs. On one of the drawings he'd marked out the small garden plot where, I'd told him, my mother had grown roses, tulips, and irises. The apartment number, he said, was 2C. Excerpted from Horizon by Barry Lopez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.