Read Online Resistance by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Barry Lopez
Tags: Fiction
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brush. When I reined in to see better what was up, the coyote gave me a look. It raised hairs in the runnel of my spine.
These signs made me more alert and hopeful. When I reached the head of the draw, I got off the horse and sat the ground awhile with the reins in my hand. None of the country around was familiar from the earlier time, though it had a freshness to it you didn’t see farther south.
I picketed the horse and waited out the late afternoon light with some expectation—and fear, should the bear show up. When dark filled out the last unshadowed ground, I went to sleep on boughs of sagebrush I’d cut and worked into a mat.
I awoke with no memory of dreaming, but with a heavy feeling of being in empty and unfamiliar rooms. I was hungry, though not yet light-headed. Right away I saw the horse had pulled his picket. From the drag marks, I saw he’d headed back down the coulee to where Virgil was camped. It was not so far I couldn’t walk it alone in a few hours.
I saw no one unusual thing that day. No bird flew over. I heard no movement close or far in the brush nor any animal call or cry. The landscape seemed as primed as I was for something to happen, though, its edges almost glittering they were so sharp. But night fell again and I turned in with my stomach empty and now in knots. Surely, I thought, tonight I will dream.
Awaiting sleep, kept from it by a kind of irritation, a frustrated desire for resolution, I thought my way eventually to a crossroad I knew well. On one side was this high plains country I lay in, resilient and uncapturable. In all the years I’d ridden through it, across its hills and dry water-courses, first as a boy and then as a man, it had seemed on the verge of an offering, a pronouncement. If I would but give in to it, it would speak. On the other side were what I might call the impulses of reason, the temptation to figure out every problem—personal, social, financial—the seduction behind the belief that one could engineer a solution.
I might have lain there, I knew, peeling back the layers of silence around me, until I heard the rustling and voices of animals that had lived in this place long ago, until I heard water coursing in the dry creek nearby; but I chose the opposite way. I allowed myself to feel that I had been slighted. Despite my sincerity and concentration, I had not been given anything remarkable this day to work with, no even tenuous sign to lead me on. Why not a feather, falling from a passing bird, which I would have run to catch? Or the appearance of a wolf, longer gone in this country than the grizzly? But the day had produced nothing, not even a striking stone I wanted to pocket.
Rankled, and now fully awake, I consoled myself with the thought that I had made, against the cold distance of my father and the early, violent death of my mother, a good life. I had a family coming, my work was just, and it was exactly the right work for me. I’d chosen all this deliberately, knowing the scope of my life and work would be small, but believing it would be authentic.
Where could I go from this place, then? At twenty-nine I continued to experience what I once named the Great Burden, the weird combination of oppression and challenge which grows out of knowing the incompetence of the powerful. And I believed in the possibility of work that had to be done in every corner of the world because of it. Friends in Basra and Riyadh, people I had gone to law school with, had sent me newspaper clippings about our country’s empire building in Saudia Arabia and Kuwait, strategies that would one day come to a head in the oil wars. I’d grown up reading about Minamata disease, part of heavy industry’s collateral damage. I’d grown up furious about François Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes and the assassination of Juan Domingo Perón, and the killing fields of Stroessner, Pol Pot, and Suharto. The corruption of the Marcoses was a fresh memory, along with the dead of Bhopal.
These signs made me more alert and hopeful. When I reached the head of the draw, I got off the horse and sat the ground awhile with the reins in my hand. None of the country around was familiar from the earlier time, though it had a freshness to it you didn’t see farther south.
I picketed the horse and waited out the late afternoon light with some expectation—and fear, should the bear show up. When dark filled out the last unshadowed ground, I went to sleep on boughs of sagebrush I’d cut and worked into a mat.
I awoke with no memory of dreaming, but with a heavy feeling of being in empty and unfamiliar rooms. I was hungry, though not yet light-headed. Right away I saw the horse had pulled his picket. From the drag marks, I saw he’d headed back down the coulee to where Virgil was camped. It was not so far I couldn’t walk it alone in a few hours.
I saw no one unusual thing that day. No bird flew over. I heard no movement close or far in the brush nor any animal call or cry. The landscape seemed as primed as I was for something to happen, though, its edges almost glittering they were so sharp. But night fell again and I turned in with my stomach empty and now in knots. Surely, I thought, tonight I will dream.
Awaiting sleep, kept from it by a kind of irritation, a frustrated desire for resolution, I thought my way eventually to a crossroad I knew well. On one side was this high plains country I lay in, resilient and uncapturable. In all the years I’d ridden through it, across its hills and dry water-courses, first as a boy and then as a man, it had seemed on the verge of an offering, a pronouncement. If I would but give in to it, it would speak. On the other side were what I might call the impulses of reason, the temptation to figure out every problem—personal, social, financial—the seduction behind the belief that one could engineer a solution.
I might have lain there, I knew, peeling back the layers of silence around me, until I heard the rustling and voices of animals that had lived in this place long ago, until I heard water coursing in the dry creek nearby; but I chose the opposite way. I allowed myself to feel that I had been slighted. Despite my sincerity and concentration, I had not been given anything remarkable this day to work with, no even tenuous sign to lead me on. Why not a feather, falling from a passing bird, which I would have run to catch? Or the appearance of a wolf, longer gone in this country than the grizzly? But the day had produced nothing, not even a striking stone I wanted to pocket.
Rankled, and now fully awake, I consoled myself with the thought that I had made, against the cold distance of my father and the early, violent death of my mother, a good life. I had a family coming, my work was just, and it was exactly the right work for me. I’d chosen all this deliberately, knowing the scope of my life and work would be small, but believing it would be authentic.
Where could I go from this place, then? At twenty-nine I continued to experience what I once named the Great Burden, the weird combination of oppression and challenge which grows out of knowing the incompetence of the powerful. And I believed in the possibility of work that had to be done in every corner of the world because of it. Friends in Basra and Riyadh, people I had gone to law school with, had sent me newspaper clippings about our country’s empire building in Saudia Arabia and Kuwait, strategies that would one day come to a head in the oil wars. I’d grown up reading about Minamata disease, part of heavy industry’s collateral damage. I’d grown up furious about François Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes and the assassination of Juan Domingo Perón, and the killing fields of Stroessner, Pol Pot, and Suharto. The corruption of the Marcoses was a fresh memory, along with the dead of Bhopal.
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