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    Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
    Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
    Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
    Ebook81 pages53 minutes

    Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven

    By Barry Holstun Lopez

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A freelance writer and photographer invites the reader to walk with him through the desert where life is clear and elemental.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 25, 2013
    ISBN9781449452780
    Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven

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    Reviews for Desert Notes

    3.5/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I didn't connect with this one as much as the other works I have read by this fine author, but it was still worth the read. Barry was at his best when observing the wild critters and landscapes--the people parts just don't resonate the same.
    • 1/5
      Read this many years ago and found it appealing, if not memorable.On re-reading, I could not get much past the Introduction and opening chapters wherethe author DRIVES relentlessly and recklessly across the desert floor,with no feeling about the plants and animal life he is destroying. Very sad.

    Book preview

    Desert Notes - Barry Holstun Lopez

    INTRODUCTION

    With the Desert Fathers you have the characteristic

    of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social

    context in order to swim for one’s life into an

    apparently irrational void.

    —Thomas Merton

    The land does not give easily. The desert is like a boulder; you expect to wait. You expect night to come. Morning. Winter to set in. But you expect sometime it will loosen into pieces to be examined.

    When it doesn’t, you weary. You are no longer afraid of its secrets, cowed by its silence. You break away, angry, a little chagrined. You will tell anyone the story: so much time spent for nothing. In the retelling you sense another way inside; you return immediately to the desert. The opening evaporates, like a vision through a picket railing.

    You can’t get at it this way. You must come with no intentions of discovery. You must overhear things, as though you’d come into a small and desolate town and paused by an open window. You can’t learn anything from saguaro cactus, from ocotillo. They are just passing through; their roots, their much heralded dormancy in the dry season, these are only illusions of permanence. They know even less than you do.

    You have to proceed almost by accident. I learned about a motor vehicle this way.

    I was crossing the desert. Smooth. Wind rippling at the window. There was no road, only the alkaline plain. There was no reason for me to be steering; I let go of the wheel. There was no reason to sit where I was; I moved to the opposite seat. I stared at the empty driver’s seat. I could see the sheen where I’d sat for years. We continued to move across the desert.

    I moved to the back of the vehicle—a large van with windows all around—and sat by the rear doors. I could hear the crushing of earth beneath the wheels. I opened the doors wide and leaned out. I saw the white alkaline surface of the desert slowly emerging from under the sill, as though the van were fixed in space and the earth turning beneath us.

    I opened all the doors. The wind blew through.

    I stepped out; ran away. When I stopped and turned around the vehicle was moving east. I ran back to it and jumped in. Out the driver’s door; in through the back. I got out again, this time with my bicycle, and rode north furiously until the vehicle was only a speck moving on the horizon behind me. I curved back and crossed slowly in front of it. I could hear the earth crumbling under the crush of my rubber tires and the clicketing of my derailleur gears. I lay the bike down and jogged alongside the vehicle, the padding of my sneakers next to the hiss of the rolling tire. I shifted it into neutral through the open door and turned the key off. I sat in it until it came to rest. I walked back for the bicycle.

    Until then I did not understand how easily the vehicle’s tendencies of direction and movement could be abandoned, together with its systems of roads, road signs, and stop lights. By a series of strippings such as this one enters the desert.

    When I first came into the desert I was arrested by the space first, especially what hung in a layer just above the dust of the desert floor. The longer I regarded it the clearer it became that its proportion had limits, that it had an identity, like the air around a stone. I suspected that everything I’d come here to find out was hidden inside that sheet of space.

    I developed methods of inquiry, although I appeared to be doing nothing at all. I appeared completely detached. I appeared to be smelling my hands cupped full of rocks. I appeared to be asleep. But I was not. Even inspecting an abandoned building at some distance from the desert I would glance over in that direction, alert. I was almost successful. Toward the end of my inquiry I moved with exquisite ease. But I could not disguise the waiting.

    One morning as I stood watching the sun rise, washing out the blue black, watching the white crystalline stars fade, my bare legs quivering in the cool air, I noticed my hands had begun to crack and turn to dust.

    DESERT NOTES

    I know you are tired. I am tired too. Will you walk along the edge of the desert with

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