Field Notes: The Grace Note of the
Canyon Wren by Barry Lopez
Numinous
In this collection of twelve stories, Barry Lopez—the National Book Award–
winning author of Arctic Dreams and one of our most admired writers—
evokes the longing we feel for beauty in our relationships with one another,
with the past, and with nature.
An anthropologist traveling with an aboriginal people finds that, because of
his aggressive desire to understand them, they remain always disturbingly
unknowable. A successful financial consultant, failing to discover his roots
in Africa, jogs from Connecticut to the Pacific Ocean in order to forge an
indigenous connection to the American landscape. A paleontologist is
haunted by visions of wildlife in a vacant lot in Manhattan. In simple,
crystalline prose, Lopez evokes a sense of the magic and marvelous
strangeness of the world, and a deep compassion for the human
predicament.

Personal Review: Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon
Wren by Barry Lopez
Barry Lopez's short stories are challenging in their simplicity. They are
also challenging to describe to anyone who has never read any Lopez.
Deceptively sparse, they are at the same time heavy with meaning, and
rich with imagery from the natural world. This twelve-story collection
opens with "the burbling call" (p. 10) of a cactus wren resonating through
"the stony, cactus-strewn land" (p. 4) of desert arroyos, and ends with a
run down the "really old trails, the Anasazi trails" (p. 154) of the Grand
Canyon. In "Teal Creek," Lopez's narrator curiously witnesses a hermit
living beside a creek in "complete stillness, a silence such as I had never
heard out of another living thing, an unbbroken grace" (p. 22). In another
story, a paleontologist discovers "phantoms" (p. 41), a black bear, a herd
of deer, and a "tawny panther hunkered in the tawny grass" (p. 47) in an
empty, city lot. I was even surprised to find a reference to my small
hometown, Bisbee, Arizona in this collection.Although some are stronger
than others, each of these stories offers its protagonist a sacred encounter
with the natural world we too often ignore. Each story has its own unique
grace note that will leave you with a sense of wonder.G. Merritt
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