As the literary world mourns the recent passing of acclaimed environmental author Barry Lopez, one of his arguably most impactful essays rises to the surface of the shimmering body of California desert literature like a wild stallion galloping in from a mirage across a dry lakebed with magic and surprise.
It’s “The Stone Horse,” the author’s deeply etched journey through a desert known and unknowable, in search of a legendary stone horse intaglio.
Lopez, a National Book Award winner who passed away Dec. 25, has long been lauded by critics and readers as one of contemporary literature’s most lyrical writers, and is cherished by environmentalists for his tactile explorations of human–wilderness relationships in some of the planet’s most remote places through prose that is rich in metaphor and imagery. Lopez, a global traveler, had deep roots in the Mojave Desert, where he spent part of his childhood, a connection that inspired his book, “Desert Notes/River Notes.”
“The Stone Horse,” first published in Antaeus Magazine in 1986, and later included in Heyday’s “No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts” anthology, reveals the author’s intrepid quest for a spiritual–historical–cultural archaeology site as he drives deep into eastern Riverside County’s western Colorado-Sonoran Desert, not far from the Colorado River, in search of a sacred site he heard about.
“A BLM archaeologist told me … where to find the intaglio. I spread my Automobile Club of Southern California map on his desk, and he traced the route with a pink felt-tip pen … ’You can’t drive any farther than about here,’ he said, marking a small X.”
Historic intaglios, or geoglyphs – gigantic, cleared-out patterns in vast desert stone plains, also known as desert pavement, best viewed from the air – are located across the eastern Riverside and Imperial county’s deserts, as well as throughout the Mojave. The Blythe Intaglios, a world heritage site, are a well-known example, with multiple large anthropomorphic figures etched into a high plain overlooking the Colorado. But Lopez’s mystical stone intaglio is lesser known and extremely difficult to find, given its vastly remote and forbidding desert location.
Lopez’s daring solo journey is exemplary of crystalline journalism and mythical search. His exploration into the remote desert landscape quickly transcends all sense of space and time.
“I felt I had stepped into an unoccupied corridor. I had no familiar sense of history, the temporal structure in which to think: this horse was made by Quechan people three hundred years ago.”
Lopez vividly describes images of wild horses, Montezuma’s armies marauding the plain, invading cavalry, and Native people struggling to survive multiple invasions, as these word-soul experiences flash through his imagination in this altered, unfamiliar geography. As he writes: “These images had the weight and stone of silence.”
The essay continues into a series of questions. When was the elusive stone horse laid out by the Quechan people on the desert floor? When were the first horses brought by Spaniards into their ancestral homeland? Only here, in the vast open expanses, is Lopez able to transport himself into the deep outlines of history as it has been lived and recorded. Before long, he finds the stone horse intaglio, which comes alive for the author in a humbling and inspirational series of hours as he watches the angles of the sun play across its shape, marveling at a stone tool he finds near one hoof. “What kinds of horses would these have been?” he wonders.
Lopez continues his essay reflecting on his own experiences as a horse wrangler in Wyoming, his knowledge of American history, the Spaniard conquests, the introduction of the horse to the Americas, the great displacements and near-genocide of our continent’s indigenous people, who recorded their place in this moment of time and event into the desert, a permanent place marker of their culture, conquest, adaptation and resilience. The stone horse intaglio bears witness, as Lopez writes, and “permits the great breadth of human expression to reverberate.” For this, he is grateful and in awe; his word-evocation of his own experience is a gift to our recorded story-world.
And yet, he recognizes the lonely stone horse intaglio’s great vulnerabilities as it sits alone on the unprotected desert pavement: “The vandals, the few who crowbar rock art off the desert’s walls, who dig up graves, who punish the ground that holds intaglios, are people who devour history. Their self-centered scorn, their disrespect for ideas and images beyond their ken, create the awful atmosphere of loose ends in which totalitarianism thrives, in which the past is merely curious or wrong.”
In 2021, these types of assaults on our IE deserts have never been more acute, and they are infuriating and heartbreaking.
Still, in tandem with the ending of the magical day in which he finds the stone horse intaglio, Lopez ends his poignant essay with words of deep respect and commemoration: “This great, imperfect expression – such as the horse intaglio – is the clarification and encouragement, the urging and the reminder, we call history. And it is inscribed everywhere in the face of the land, from the mountain passes of the Himalayas to a nameless bajada in the California desert.”
The essay ends simply and gently and with a note of hope: “Small birds rose up in the road ahead, startled, and flew off. I prayed no infidel would ever find that horse.”
Ruth Nolan grew up in the Mojave Desert and now teaches creative writing at College of the Desert. She’s a desert conservationist and author and editor of “No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California’s Deserts.”