Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven by Barry Holstun Lopez (review)

166 Western American Literature When the Cherokees and other Southern tribes were removed to the Indian Territory in the infamous Trail of Tears incident, some Cherokees fled to the mountains; their descendants are still there, mainly on the North Carolina side of the Great Smokies. Some, like Carter’s ancestors, settled on the Tennessee side. Little Tree began living with Granpa and Granma in 1930. He learned the Indian ways of living, including hunting and fishing. He helped to grow corn and assisted Granpa in his trade of converting the corn to liquid, which was more potable, portable, and profitable. He was taken away from his grandparents, who were deemed unfit to raise him because Granpa had once been convicted of moonshining. He was placed in an orphanage run by members of a strict religious sect, where as a “bastard” (his father and mother had been married Cherokee style) he was told he was doomed to hell. There he was beaten unmercifully for naively telling his class in school about the mating season of deer. The most vivid loving portrait in the book, other than those of Granma and Granpa, is that of the old Cherokee, Willow John, who rescued Little Tree from the orphanage so that he could live with Granma and Granpa until their death. The Education of Little Tree, though colored by Carter’s mature thinking, is filled with sentiment and nostalgia, seasoned with a fair amount of realism and plain speech. The result is pleasing; Carter writes more convincingly about Little Tree than he does about Josey Wales. Little Tree is undoubtedly a better subject for a novel. ORLAN SAWEY, Texas A&I University Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven. By Barry Holstun Lopez. (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews & McMeel, Inc., 1976. 89 pages, photos, $5.95.) Traditionally the desert is a symbol of barrenness, of sterility, of life versus death. In his book Desert Notes Barry Lopez uses the desert as a test site for discovering one’s self. He urges his reader to go to the desert to find life, to be reborn. Lopez’s trip to the desert is a mental one. The desert mystique provides the transportation through symbols and metaphors. This eighty-nine page book contains twelve succinct chapters, twelve individual psychological journeys employing basically different sets of metaphors and symbols. The continuity of the book is found in the ideas, the philosophy of man and desert and not in the tales the narrator presents. The subtitle of Desert Notes, Reflections in the Eye of the Raven Reviews 167 contains a major symbol, the raven. The chapter entitled “Raven” con­ trasts this desert denizen, a loner, to the crow, the city man symbol. The desert notes are those thoughts as interpreted by a true desert dweller. Lopez totally identifies himself with the desert. The crow’s essential prob­ lem is he “does nothing alone.” (p. 17) Consequently, the crows who came to the desert died and were reduced to “blue dust.” (p. 19) In order to be reborn in the desert, one must be prepared like the raven to face the solitude, to face one’s self. In a more elaborate flight of imagination narrator Lopez unfolds the mystery of the Blue Mound People. Here the desert mystique is at its fullest with the metaphors and symbols most intricately developed. His fanciful tale of the Blue Mound People is a satire bordering on science fiction. Lopez mocks the anthropologists’attempts to identify ancient man by techniques such as radiocarbon dating. “Radiocarbon dating has pinpointed the time of inhabitance at 22,000 ±1430 years B.P.” (p. 47) The scientists offer theories, give statistics, all from the presence of physical objects. You cannot know people by objects; you know them by thoughts. Thoughts. Thoughts cannot be radiocarbon dated. Lopez is confident he solved the mystery of these people lacking vocal chords and numbering 200 who lived on meat and vegetables without tools for killing the animals and without soil for growing vegetables. Just as the crows’ black bodies had turned to blue dust, so also were the people’s mounds of blue dust, a color which Lopez repeatedly uses. At the base...