Essay: Lopez – “The Mappist”

Why do we write? Writers write for a variety of reasons. Some write to discover meaning or perhaps to change the world whilst some write to make name. Or, as George Orwell once said, “One motivation to write is sheer egoism” (Brain Pickings 1). Whatever our initial intention to write may be, ultimately, our written work becomes a microcosm of multiple reasons. One such writer who writes with the intention of providing a microcosm of reasons is Barry Holstun Lopez. Lopez’s work is eerily similar to an “arctic white-out” — when a blizzard reaches such a dense level that it becomes impossible to differentiate between snow clad land and air (The Guardian). The horizon slowly dissolves into a blinding depthless light. You seem to stumble around a place where only verticality is trusted. Such is the intensity of Lopez’s work, who blinds us with the sheer detail with which he engages us in his essays. His meticulous detail on the theme of wilderness, his defining quality, is what makes us “stumble”(The Guardian). It removes a step from our stairs of predefined assumptions and throws us into a thoughtless fall.
Lopez is, as considered by many, “the most important living writer about wilderness” (The Guardian). Yes, Lopez does draw his inspiration from nature but his purpose, in my opinion, is not to be a nature or wilderness writer. There is a saying that “we go to the wilderness to be healed” , but Lopez does not use the wilderness for it’s therapeutic qualities but rather for it’s harsh tutelage (The Guardian). After reading his essays, particularly, Dixon Marsh, The Mappist & The Stone Horse I strongly believe that Lopez isn’t a nature or wilderness writer. Throughout the three texts Lopez has a recurring notion that nature is capable of conferring a suppleness and an air of mystique upon those who encounter it.
I believe that, throughout these texts Lopez portrays himself (and his persona) as one of that last writers of a “questing but lost generation” (The Mappist 6). This “lost generation” is first claimed in The Mappist where the cartographer Corlis Benefido believes that Lopez is like a torch bearer of this generation of people. This recurring notion is mentioned in the other texts where, “ [Lopez] spent several hours with the horse” or “[Terrin MacDonald] drove nine miles … [hiked] five miles over hilly ground” (The Stone Horse 409)(Dixon Marsh 3). What these quotes have in similarity is the level of dedication that this “lost generation” possessed. This was a generation that appreciated and worked on something with a drive of pure passion (The Mappist 6). This common theme slowly introduces the belief that Barry Lopez is much more than a nature or humanitarian writer. He was the torch bearer of this “lost generation” —  a set of writers whose mechanism of writing and story telling was deeply linked with their physical experiences that seemed almost exaggerated or mystical (sense of magical realism).
The mystical atmosphere that Lopez is creating in “The Mappist” proves that Lopez is much more than just a non-fiction nature writer. “It proves Lopez [is] a master of quiet tales” since this text explores the crossroads of the external world which includes society and human culture, with the story hinting (teasing almost) that it suggests more than what it sows (The Mumpismus). “The Mappist”, is in a way, a homage to the Argentine novelist & essayist Jorge Luis Borges, as it draws a parallel to the obsession that Lopez (narrator in The Mappist) has with an (initially) unknown cartographer/author who makes meticulous and impressive maps and guides. The level of detail was so high that Lopez believed that this author “had not written a travel book but a work about the soul of” a place (The Mappist 1). Borges is renowned for his contribution to “philosophical literature and the fantasy genre” and whose work was the “first” to be categorized under magical realism — the genre that “The Mappist” delves into (Borges 1).
Lopez does eventually track down the original author of the maps — the now hermetic Corlis Benefido, and meets him, sees his new collection of maps — maps created with incomparable detail (without the help of computers) and depths. At this point, Benefido makes a claim that only people from this “lost” generation could make “I could show you the whole coming and going of the Mandan nation, wiped out in 1837 by a smallpox epidemic” (The Mappist 6). To make such a (exaggerated) claim can only be pulled off by Benefido since he belongs to that generation — filled with the tenacity and dedication that, in Lopez’s opinion, seems to be lacking in the current generation.
The essay ends with Lopez asking if Benefideo will mentor his daughter, and then  he drives into the darkness — this ending seems like a metaphor for Lopez attempting to continue the legacy of the “lost generation” through his daughter but Benefido interrupts him and puts the impetus on him by stating that Lopez is rather that last of the generation, a generation that had “an elegant order, something that [showed] the way” perhaps the way to enlightenment we never find out in “The Mappist” (The Mappist 6).
However, in “The Stone Horse” we progress to get a better understanding of what this “way” that Lopez is referring to might be (The Mappist 6). The essay is segregated into three parts. In the first part, Lopez creates a context of the intaglio (the horse) by talking about the history of Southern California. It sets the background of the place — going back generation beyond what we ourselves are able to fathom. The first part refers to the prehistoric rock drawings, where Lopez takes the reader through the 1970s. He simultaneously sets up his theme of the destruction of history through the copious amounts of vandalism done to the archaeological sites all over the world. The second part helps create a personal context of the essay by adding human experiences. Lopez portrays how a single archaeological artifact  —  the stone horse can be a representation of history and come alive at the same time. He writes, “I had no familiar sense of history, … instead a headlong rush of images: people hunting wild horses with spears…” (The Stone Horse 407). The horse itself was more than just an intaglio. For Lopez it was an experience in itself, “In the first moment of recognition [he] was without feeling. [He] recalled later being startled, and that [he] held [his]breath. It was laid out on the ground with its head to the east, three times life size” (The Stone Horse 407). It seemed as if by watching the Stone Horse, Lopez was more aware of his surroundings, “the windless air and the uneven pressure of the earth hard against [his] feet” (407). The stone horse had gripped Lopez and hurled him into a “thoughtless” fall of the history of this horse, the place and the culture of the Quechuan’s who had probably laid this intaglio out.
The aerial photograph that Lopez carries with him feels crude and incomplete when compared to the real life intaglio of the horse since it becomes so much more spectacular in the desert at ground level. What this makes us realize is that history and historical remains often look more spectacular when left untouched by those who come after. The last section is a reflection upon change and the evolution of man’s disrespect for history — signifying that the generation that Lopez was from is dying. It was a “disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken” (408). The horse represents an important concept for the Quechuan people, and seeing this horse the way it was left hundreds of years ago is striking for Lopez. It shapes the way he regards history. His last line says he hopes “no infidel would ever find that horse” (411). We realize that, on one level, this last statement could be his acknowledgement of the current and the future generations to come and how the “way” that his generation was revered for would be lost since these historical artifacts would loose their historical value, in that since they were more than a representation of the culture of a place, the additional value of representing the way of life and the thought mechanism of the people would not be acknowledged.
Dixon Marsh, on the other hand, represents the present and the persona — Terrin MacDonald is very much from this generation, a young girl in her mid 20s who works at the Nevada Office of Public Health as a epidemiologist. “She had been among the first to see the connection between the intensification of the El Nino … her insights had been crucial in understanding the cause of occasional false ups of hanta virus pulmonary syndrome”(Dixon Marsh 1). Analyzing her meticulous nature one could argue saying that Lopez had created a modern version of the “lost generation” but then one could argue saying that anyone with a  meticulous nature ought to be a part of this elegant order of people. But what distinguishes Terrin from every other meticulous person is the sense of fear and caution that she lived with — since she was a “victim of rape in her childhood”, an incident that had also occurred to Lopez as a child (Sliver of the Sky 1).  Lopez was sexually molested by a family doctor in his childhood, and “says the man was never brought to justice” (NPR 1). The doctor, was a therapist for his alcoholic relative in North Hollywood. Lopez said that “[The doctor] said there was something wrong with [him], and that the rape was treatment for that problem.” With this information in context my interpretation of Dixon Marsh changed completely. From being an essay that discusses a epidemiologist and one of her experiments Dixon Marsh could be interpreted on another level as Lopez’s fictional self representation and his unending sense of fear, “When she stayed in motels, she stripped the bed, put her own sheets, blankets” or that she “secured the doors and windows”. Terrin was also a representation of Lopez’s brilliant mind, that constantly multitasks various tasks “She re- shouldered her back, with a leash in one hand and a gun in the other” (Dixon Marsh 1-2) . Terrin had gone up to the mountains to search for a Mountain Lion but was distracted by two strangers and their hunt for the tiltoshmineh (little bugs) which excited her and she got engrossed with the hunt for these tiny bugs. Only at the end of the essay do we realize that Terrin had completely forgot about the mountain lion due to her sheer excitement and emotions for the tiltosmineh and the legends and history behind it.
All three texts share a common theme of maps. The Mappist, as the name suggests, revolves around Carlos Benefido. But what’s interesting here is that the maps that he creates are more than just the level of detail with which they are created. It’s almost as if the maps had a life of their own and were living beings with emotions and and air of magic in them. Similarly The Stone Horse itself is more than a intaglio with historical significance but it’s more than that. It becomes a map human brilliance during medieval times and becomes a story all on it’s own. Terrin MacDonald in Dixon Marsh is a representation of the mechanism on how Lopez’s mind maps and her persona is a representation of the possible direction that a modern take on this “lost generation” might look like, very much like a map which shows us the “way” (The Mappist 6). Simultaneously these texts create a mechanism, through his detailed styled of writing along with the obsessive need to create a background context for every single essay, that makes me believe that Lopez uses nature as a source for his intentions of writing — which is really to create a sense of understanding that does not follow a strict set of rules and has no presumption that a person goes through when he takes in the view of, for example, the Stone Horse.
“I’ve come upon animals suddenly before … but this was slightly different. I felt I had stepped into an unoccupied corridor” — Lopez’s encounter with the Stone Horse shows his thinking mechanism as he first absorbs the experience and then later recalls it and writes about it. A sense of fear is inculcated into him due to his history with sexual violence. The horse makes him question the history of horses, where did they arrive from, what breed would is it? Lopez’s mind goes on a flurry of progressive thoughts and nothing else seems to matter or be his focus — similar to Terrin MacDonald and her excitement with the tiltoshmineh. Lopez uses primal images to describe his emotions when he “felt a similar tension …the warm remains of a grizzly bear kill, or the still moist tracks of a wolverine” (The Stone Horse 407). His usage of these primal images seems to suggest that primal instinct will always be encapsulated within humans, no matter how “sophisticated” or elegant we may evolve to we will still have a part of our history, our origins embedded into us and in some moments (such as the rapist who committed the heinous crime on Terrin or the doctor who raped Lopez) it gets the better of us. Lopez’s complex thought mechanism throws us into a thoughtless understanding where we are exposed directly to his focus (through his meticulous detailing and use of brackets to provide extra information).
Christin Martin described Lopez as a “man in motion”. While he was interviewing Lopez, “the Oregon-based author was preparing to leave for a series of public readings in Paris, then traveling to Poland for a personal visit to Auschwitz before going to French Polynesia to attend to some translation work ” (On Resistance 1). Lopez ability to work across multiple items shows us the defining quality of this “lost generation” — a generation of brilliant minds who were able to multitask due to their sheer passion but when they faced a certain situation (such as seeing the stone horse) nothing else would really matter and these people would spend hours (just like Terrin and Lopez did) to find out, appreciate and then write down the experience altogether. What drives Lopez and this generation is the belief “that our political situation is so dire that writers must put themselves and their work in front of the body politic” through talking and discussing about the history of a place and it’s significance (since in “The Stone Horse” Lopez speaks about the intaglio but also about the increasing vandalism that was occurring) (2).
Barry Lopez has always been know as a nature writer, famous for his non-fiction. However when we take into account his own history along with seeing his essays with a  different perspective (not from a naturalistic perspective) we realize that his essays isn’t a simple what you see is what you get. Rather Lopez’s essays are more like a paper written with invisible ink, when shined on with UV light it reveals a hidden message. Lopez’s complex thought mechanism — constantly darting from one idea to another but at the same time freezing still (like in the Stone Horse) shows his contradicting nature. His ability to jump into a “unoccupied corridor” and make us readers realize that what we’re reading doesn’t have a temporal thought structure to think on hurls us into a thoughtless understanding where our interpretations are shaped by our own history — that separates our generation from his “lost generation”(Stone Horse 406)(The Mappist 6).