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Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven
In this collection of narrative contemplations, reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda but without the drugs, Barry Hulstun Lopez invites us to walk with him in the desert, where "things are rigidly clear and elemental." Away from the world, we see it more clearly. Sweating from all our pores, we remember our body.
Desert Notes is discovery and rediscovery. The desert, the spring, the birds, the rattlesnake, the wind. And man, who, according to an Indian tale, comes to the desert like "a boulder coming down the side of a mountain."
Lopez gives us a fresh language. Desert Notes will lull you and shake you, and you will go back to it in the search for the clear and elemental.
From the first-edition dust jacket.
Desert Notes is discovery and rediscovery. The desert, the spring, the birds, the rattlesnake, the wind. And man, who, according to an Indian tale, comes to the desert like "a boulder coming down the side of a mountain."
Lopez gives us a fresh language. Desert Notes will lull you and shake you, and you will go back to it in the search for the clear and elemental.
From the first-edition dust jacket.
89 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1976
About the author
Barry Lopez
105 books953 followersBarry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
February 12, 2021
Another re-read for me in the wake of the news that Lopez has left this earth. High marks for the inventiveness of form and tone in these short hybrid pieces. We can all learn--or re-learn--some things about language and narrative risk from a book like this. I don't think all of the pieces hold up equally well, but 4 stars in honor of "Twilight" alone, I think. And who doesn't love another stab at a Coyote story?
May 10, 2017
For me, Barry Lopez can do no wrong. His prose is strange and poetic, and perhaps not for everyone. There is a certain mysticism here, although I imagine Lopez might dispute that. I read this, together with 'River Notes.' Each chapter is a musing on nature and man's place in - or outside it. Sometimes these read as short stories, sometimes they are more observational, like a nature diary. What I like and respect most about his work, is how everything slows down so that the reader is there, in the river with the salmon, or observing with the eye of the raven.
September 3, 2026
I liked Desert Notes, or as goodreads star rating would define 2 stars: "it was ok." I definitely liked it least of Barry Lopez's three "Notes"- books. I didn't dislike it, it simply did not love me back in the same way River Notes did. The river moved toward relation; it gathered me in, bent, carried, and returned in various ways.
Yeah. A desert doesn't do that.
The desert withholds. It strips the body down and buries it (except for the eyes), which experience glare, the ears silence, the senses misdirection, and the whole body: exposure. It doesn't invite very much - it tests.
Still, there is one story in particular that will stay with me: "The Hot Spring." There's something I recognize in that story. The strange fact that vitality sometimes returns through ugly mercy. A man in one of the stories comes to vitality again maybe even *because a desert hot spring is not beautiful abundance, but life persisting under ugly, reduced, compromised conditions. I recognize something in that move.
Almost 2 years ago, I left my research team (who were in Phoenix, Arizona for two weeks) for a weekend with my parents and daughter. My parents took me to two (if not three or four) extraordinary experiences: Howl at the Moon (an RV community that has a trade market at night where we traded palm dates for stuff RVers had personally made), which is a story for another time, and "a Hot Spring."
This hot spring was not one you needed to pay for. It was not curated into a spa, rather, it was a hot spring on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land outside Phoenix and plunked between factory farm agriculture sites. It was set up along the highway, so it wasn't a hidden wilderness spring, and it did not feel like a sanctuary arranged for any kind of intentional aesthetic. It was exactly what it was: a public space by the road between irrigated farms in a desert. It was deliberate and made for use - a concrete slab surrounded by a chain-link fence almost like a public pool, but unmaintained. The shifts in the concrete left it cracked and drifting, no worries - just put a bunch of plastic grating squares on the uneven ground. What's more, someone, in some distant timeframe, had decided the geothermal water might be fun if routed through some tarred PVC pipes punched with holes that made a kind of makeshift splash pad (or shower?) to one side of the rectangular depressions in the earth. Someone must have provided the oversized aluminum ladder that descended into only one of the pools (the other you had to climb in and out of without the aid of a ladder). Some ragged palms provided minimal shade making the place a bona fide location where strangers could lower themselves in and stand in the small pools side by side in the hot mineral water under the Arizona sky.
The tubs were full the day we arrived. The water was flowing. People were soaking.
And it was kind of roughly inviting. It was a roadside oddity (like so many in the Arizona desert, honestly) that once you're in it everyone else treats as entirely ordinary. The place had the spareness of something built for use and then left to endure the weather, constant shift of bodies, minerals, heat, wind, sand, the algae, neglect, and repetition. The concrete was stained. Things smelled. The hoses lay to the side of the pool in loops. The chain link fence made no pretense of enchantment, as the PVC pipe spat out water with blunt practicality.
Nothing in this space was softened for us. Nothing was picturesque.
When I stepped down off the ladder into the water, the first sensation was not any kind of life-affirming vitality, but slime. My right foot immediately found the slick green-brown life of algae on concrete along with that unnerving sense of recoil when your foot cannot classify what it encounters as "clean" followed immediately by a visceral sense of hesitation and instinct to step back on to the ladder, say no, and preserve some idea of cleanliness or comfort, or both. I clearly, hadn't been "stripped down" to the essentials enough. Nonetheless, I still sank in lower and began to tread. Both my parents were already in and floating around, so I considered if they could do it - what was my problem? With the slime still there, and unmistakably alive under my feet, it all just became part of it. Did I mention the slime was on the concrete walls too? This was the price you paid to ride this ride - you stayed because this spring was not offering purity - it was offering a specific kind of contact.
I know this place as one that asks you to give up refinement. No tidy expectations. Strangers' bodies, shoulder-deep in brackish water, faces lifted to the sun, talking or not talking about working in the fields all day. Someone left their sandals right by the edge where you are leaning. My daughter thought nothing of it at all as she ran through the light and water spraying through the punctured pipe. My parents were there, my daughter was there - the generations of my family all arranged around this improbability, I mean heat basin, in the desert - each of us accepting it in its own way. There was a kind of comfort in the experience that arrives without any polish. Around us the desert was bone dry and immense. Beyond the fence were sand, scrub, dusty gravel, a scattered few RVs, road, sky, and raw distance. But inside a roughly 20x20 anomaly was warmth, bodies, chatting, steamless heat, and the strange intimacy of having a bath with strangers by a highway. It was warm water rising in a hard place, making a temporary community of whoever had come (and could withstand) sitting in it.
That's what stuck with me about Lopez's "The Hot Spring" - a man drives out into the desert with almost nothing: a sleeping bag, a tarp, a few dishes, cereal, tea, no books, no paper. He passes through lava flows, obsidian forest, sage, empty shacks, alkaline desert. He arrives at the spring and performs the story's odd exact ritual: strip down, walk naked across the desert wind, and enter the water. The spring is not comfort in any decorative sense. It is a temporary reanimation of his own life's vitality. Dust and sweat lift off his body. The water works on him, and for a moment he imagines that he has come to life again.
That is the part I recognized. Lopez wrote this story when he was 24 years old - this is early Lopez — not yet, to my mind, as finely crafted as the later collections, but already circling the scattered, solitary figures who would become central to his moral imagination. Lopez’s man feels desert-like to me: emptied out, solitary, stripped of ornament, carrying almost nothing because almost nothing is what he can bear to carry. He does not go to the spring for beauty. He goes because somewhere under the crust of things, warmth still rises. It doesn't save him, it gives him temporary proof of vitality, that he has "come to life again." It matters for the story that the spring is rough, questionable, unadorned, solitary (in his experience), maybe even repellent, but always offering proof that warmth still rises from underneath barrenness. A reminder that the body is still reachable through a temporary return of feeling and "reanimation."
The hot spring is where the desert allows one small exception in its otherwise immense severity. It isn't "generous" - but it will open up an unnerving basin of mercy, and after it's all done - I have watched my own child walk back into the desert wrapped in a white towel as the heat immediately dried her blonde hair into a glaring gold in the harsh light. It was an experience where the water simply rose from the earth in the unsanitized shape of a pool.
Maybe that's why Desert Notes is less lovable to me than River Notes. It doesn't flow the same way. Instead, its stories dried the throat, left me with a severed bird's foot, a napkin map, a man walking through desert wind after a dip in a spring.
And yet, when I reflect on the concrete spring in my memory, I know such spareness and severity have their own strange value - the experience comes to you stripped down. It asks you to suffer what it offers, to leave without being transformed exactly, and admit: "that was okay" but, honestly...not great, and yet you still do not dislike it.
Yeah. A desert doesn't do that.
The desert withholds. It strips the body down and buries it (except for the eyes), which experience glare, the ears silence, the senses misdirection, and the whole body: exposure. It doesn't invite very much - it tests.
Still, there is one story in particular that will stay with me: "The Hot Spring." There's something I recognize in that story. The strange fact that vitality sometimes returns through ugly mercy. A man in one of the stories comes to vitality again maybe even *because a desert hot spring is not beautiful abundance, but life persisting under ugly, reduced, compromised conditions. I recognize something in that move.
Almost 2 years ago, I left my research team (who were in Phoenix, Arizona for two weeks) for a weekend with my parents and daughter. My parents took me to two (if not three or four) extraordinary experiences: Howl at the Moon (an RV community that has a trade market at night where we traded palm dates for stuff RVers had personally made), which is a story for another time, and "a Hot Spring."
This hot spring was not one you needed to pay for. It was not curated into a spa, rather, it was a hot spring on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land outside Phoenix and plunked between factory farm agriculture sites. It was set up along the highway, so it wasn't a hidden wilderness spring, and it did not feel like a sanctuary arranged for any kind of intentional aesthetic. It was exactly what it was: a public space by the road between irrigated farms in a desert. It was deliberate and made for use - a concrete slab surrounded by a chain-link fence almost like a public pool, but unmaintained. The shifts in the concrete left it cracked and drifting, no worries - just put a bunch of plastic grating squares on the uneven ground. What's more, someone, in some distant timeframe, had decided the geothermal water might be fun if routed through some tarred PVC pipes punched with holes that made a kind of makeshift splash pad (or shower?) to one side of the rectangular depressions in the earth. Someone must have provided the oversized aluminum ladder that descended into only one of the pools (the other you had to climb in and out of without the aid of a ladder). Some ragged palms provided minimal shade making the place a bona fide location where strangers could lower themselves in and stand in the small pools side by side in the hot mineral water under the Arizona sky.
The tubs were full the day we arrived. The water was flowing. People were soaking.
And it was kind of roughly inviting. It was a roadside oddity (like so many in the Arizona desert, honestly) that once you're in it everyone else treats as entirely ordinary. The place had the spareness of something built for use and then left to endure the weather, constant shift of bodies, minerals, heat, wind, sand, the algae, neglect, and repetition. The concrete was stained. Things smelled. The hoses lay to the side of the pool in loops. The chain link fence made no pretense of enchantment, as the PVC pipe spat out water with blunt practicality.
Nothing in this space was softened for us. Nothing was picturesque.
When I stepped down off the ladder into the water, the first sensation was not any kind of life-affirming vitality, but slime. My right foot immediately found the slick green-brown life of algae on concrete along with that unnerving sense of recoil when your foot cannot classify what it encounters as "clean" followed immediately by a visceral sense of hesitation and instinct to step back on to the ladder, say no, and preserve some idea of cleanliness or comfort, or both. I clearly, hadn't been "stripped down" to the essentials enough. Nonetheless, I still sank in lower and began to tread. Both my parents were already in and floating around, so I considered if they could do it - what was my problem? With the slime still there, and unmistakably alive under my feet, it all just became part of it. Did I mention the slime was on the concrete walls too? This was the price you paid to ride this ride - you stayed because this spring was not offering purity - it was offering a specific kind of contact.
I know this place as one that asks you to give up refinement. No tidy expectations. Strangers' bodies, shoulder-deep in brackish water, faces lifted to the sun, talking or not talking about working in the fields all day. Someone left their sandals right by the edge where you are leaning. My daughter thought nothing of it at all as she ran through the light and water spraying through the punctured pipe. My parents were there, my daughter was there - the generations of my family all arranged around this improbability, I mean heat basin, in the desert - each of us accepting it in its own way. There was a kind of comfort in the experience that arrives without any polish. Around us the desert was bone dry and immense. Beyond the fence were sand, scrub, dusty gravel, a scattered few RVs, road, sky, and raw distance. But inside a roughly 20x20 anomaly was warmth, bodies, chatting, steamless heat, and the strange intimacy of having a bath with strangers by a highway. It was warm water rising in a hard place, making a temporary community of whoever had come (and could withstand) sitting in it.
That's what stuck with me about Lopez's "The Hot Spring" - a man drives out into the desert with almost nothing: a sleeping bag, a tarp, a few dishes, cereal, tea, no books, no paper. He passes through lava flows, obsidian forest, sage, empty shacks, alkaline desert. He arrives at the spring and performs the story's odd exact ritual: strip down, walk naked across the desert wind, and enter the water. The spring is not comfort in any decorative sense. It is a temporary reanimation of his own life's vitality. Dust and sweat lift off his body. The water works on him, and for a moment he imagines that he has come to life again.
That is the part I recognized. Lopez wrote this story when he was 24 years old - this is early Lopez — not yet, to my mind, as finely crafted as the later collections, but already circling the scattered, solitary figures who would become central to his moral imagination. Lopez’s man feels desert-like to me: emptied out, solitary, stripped of ornament, carrying almost nothing because almost nothing is what he can bear to carry. He does not go to the spring for beauty. He goes because somewhere under the crust of things, warmth still rises. It doesn't save him, it gives him temporary proof of vitality, that he has "come to life again." It matters for the story that the spring is rough, questionable, unadorned, solitary (in his experience), maybe even repellent, but always offering proof that warmth still rises from underneath barrenness. A reminder that the body is still reachable through a temporary return of feeling and "reanimation."
The hot spring is where the desert allows one small exception in its otherwise immense severity. It isn't "generous" - but it will open up an unnerving basin of mercy, and after it's all done - I have watched my own child walk back into the desert wrapped in a white towel as the heat immediately dried her blonde hair into a glaring gold in the harsh light. It was an experience where the water simply rose from the earth in the unsanitized shape of a pool.
Maybe that's why Desert Notes is less lovable to me than River Notes. It doesn't flow the same way. Instead, its stories dried the throat, left me with a severed bird's foot, a napkin map, a man walking through desert wind after a dip in a spring.
And yet, when I reflect on the concrete spring in my memory, I know such spareness and severity have their own strange value - the experience comes to you stripped down. It asks you to suffer what it offers, to leave without being transformed exactly, and admit: "that was okay" but, honestly...not great, and yet you still do not dislike it.
July 14, 2011
While I am reading Barry Lopez's magnificent new book Horizon, I am also re-reading his other works between its chapters. I originally read these, and his other books, when they were published many years ago, expectantly purchasing them as soon as they were issued at bookstores throughout the West, following the career of an amazing writer, occasionally getting them signed at author events.
At the time, I thought his fictional "Notes" series of three books (Desert Notes, River Notes, and Field Notes) was remarkable even in the then very active field of environmental/nature writing of the 1970s and 1980s. This was the almost mythical time of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, and many others. Now, Lopez's early books stand out as exceptional writing far above the current standards and taste, in any genre. Highly recommended for their literary depth, mystical insights, poetic music, emotional power, and uniquely evocative language.
At the time, I thought his fictional "Notes" series of three books (Desert Notes, River Notes, and Field Notes) was remarkable even in the then very active field of environmental/nature writing of the 1970s and 1980s. This was the almost mythical time of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, and many others. Now, Lopez's early books stand out as exceptional writing far above the current standards and taste, in any genre. Highly recommended for their literary depth, mystical insights, poetic music, emotional power, and uniquely evocative language.
December 26, 2013
You can definitely tell this is one of his earlier works.. the stories fluctuate between beautiful portraits of landscapes to tales with direction and that tinge of surrealness that I love.
November 20, 2017
This short book has more in common with poetry than essays or even short stories. They are vignettes that are not true to reality, perhaps more like folklore or fairy tales. They are somewhat odd little pieces are all reminiscent of the desert, being fully in the desert. It's interesting and lyrical. Not quite like what I expected but I enjoyed it well enough.
November 16, 2022
My favorite piece in this slim book was Twilight, for its surrealism and description, and though I didn't get as taken with the other short chapters or stories, I enjoyed it. More like a 3.5 stars for me!
December 25, 2024
A quick beautiful read. Really brought me back to my days of living in the desert which I dearly miss. Lots of poetic outlooks on the desert and life, sometimes a misunderstood beauty. The desert is a source of inspiration and life.
June 16, 2017
Another inspiring book by Lopez; small and concise and poetic.
January 16, 2020
I don't remember the exact date I read this. 1995 is only a guesstimate
April 16, 2020
a surreal and sometimes lovely skinny book about the desert - i felt it in my body and then sometimes closer to my spirit.
June 11, 2021
still good
June 17, 2021
A collection of sensuous, strange, and lyrical stories that truly capture the stark beauty of the desert.
October 7, 2021
Like a jewel in a desert , love this book , intense and smart and brief and vast in his ideas and metaphors, it is official, am a new fan of barry lobez literature
March 14, 2022
Lopez is a true poet.
March 28, 2024
A good book to read while visiting a desert. Especially the stories that describe the wind.
April 22, 2025
Not what I thought it was going to be.
February 10, 2025
Experience the desert as if it were a dream.
Is it?
Is it?
December 6, 2014
I would like to tell you how to get there so you may see all this for yourself. But first a warning: you may already have come across a set of detailed instructions, a map with every bush and stone clearly marked, the meandering courses of dry rivers and other geographical features noted, with dotted lines put down to represent the very faintest of trails. Perhaps there were also tiny warnings printed in tiny red letters along the margins, about the lack of water, the strength of the wind and the swiftness of the rattlesnakes. Your confidence in these finely etched maps is understandable, for at first glance they seem excellent, the best a man is capable of; but your confidence is misplaced. Throw them out. They are the wrong sort of map. They are too thin. They are not the sort of map that can be followed by a man who knows what he is doing. The coyote, even the crow, would regard them with suspicion.
There is, I should warn you, doubt too about the directions I will give you here, but they are the very best that can be had. They will not be easy to follow. Where it says left you must go right sometimes. Read south for north sometimes. It depends a little on where you are coming from, but not entirely. I am saying you will have doubts. If you do the best you can you will have no trouble."
(When you get there you may wish to make up a map for yourself for future reference. It is the only map you will ever trust. It may consist of only a few lines hastily drawn. You will not have to hide it in your desk, taped to the back of a drawer. That is pointless. But don't leave it out to be seen, thinking no one will know what it is. It will be taken for scribble and thrown in the wastebasket or be carefully folded and idly shredded by a friend one night during a conversation. You might want to write only a set of numbers down in one corner of a piece of paper and underline them. When you try to find a place for it - a place not too obvious, not too well hidden so as to arouse suspicion - you will begin to understand the futility of drawing maps. It is best in this case to get along without one, although you will find your map, once drawn, as difficult to discard as an unfinished poem.)
There is, I should warn you, doubt too about the directions I will give you here, but they are the very best that can be had. They will not be easy to follow. Where it says left you must go right sometimes. Read south for north sometimes. It depends a little on where you are coming from, but not entirely. I am saying you will have doubts. If you do the best you can you will have no trouble."
(When you get there you may wish to make up a map for yourself for future reference. It is the only map you will ever trust. It may consist of only a few lines hastily drawn. You will not have to hide it in your desk, taped to the back of a drawer. That is pointless. But don't leave it out to be seen, thinking no one will know what it is. It will be taken for scribble and thrown in the wastebasket or be carefully folded and idly shredded by a friend one night during a conversation. You might want to write only a set of numbers down in one corner of a piece of paper and underline them. When you try to find a place for it - a place not too obvious, not too well hidden so as to arouse suspicion - you will begin to understand the futility of drawing maps. It is best in this case to get along without one, although you will find your map, once drawn, as difficult to discard as an unfinished poem.)
April 27, 2010
This short book is about Lopez's experience in the desert and the imagination and inspiration it inspired. Except for the introduction, the stories make almost no sense, although this could be passed off as a matter of personal taste and interest. The introduction describes his experience driving a van across a desert playa or, rather, watching his van move across the desert without him driving it. The van is made to drive in lined out roads and to meet stop lights. On the desert playa, the van operated freely, with no constraining rules. This might be the underlying theme behind Lopez's stories.
January 25, 2020
I honestly don't know what to make of this little book. My book only had the DESERT NOTES section, so I haven't read RIVER NOTES. I picked this book up because it was recommended in the guidebook of the Wild Unknown Archetypes when working with the Desert archetype. That is the archetype for the month on my platform, so I decided to purchase this little book. It is an easy read, and I liked some of the sections. The Raven, Twilight, and the Blue Mound People was my favorite. Other sections I failed to see how it related to the desert, and honestly why it mattered. I also wish there was more to do with the reflections in the eye of the raven, which really peaked my interest.
June 1, 2009
I've just re-found this book, and it is a trip back in time. A trip to a very much younger self, when I'd just left the deep green woods of Washington state for the stark, seer vistas of the desert. This book, with its poetry and mysticism, helped me learn to see, to hear, to breathe in and know the magic that is the desert. It taught me to endure its terrible and wonderful silences, and ultimately to love it even more than the place of my youth.
This is magical, mysterious, esoteric and sublime, written in spare, perfect prose that transports the reader entirely.
This is magical, mysterious, esoteric and sublime, written in spare, perfect prose that transports the reader entirely.
January 25, 2009
Compared to his other stuff, almost all of which I love, this one is very surreal and hard to follow the first time through. I liken it to being lost in the desert, or suffering from mild heat stroke or dehydration and feeling a bit disoriented. If you love the desert you will learn to love this book and will find yourself going back to it again and again.
May 20, 2008
A series of short prose-like essays on the desert and its influence on people. Beautiful.
July 14, 2012
An excellent collection of shorter fiction by Barry Lopez, highly recommended for those who liked River Notes and Winter Count.
September 27, 2012
metaphysical .. my saving grace
January 23, 2013
poetic, metaphysical, catches the feel of the desert.
July 10, 2013
This is the best book on the desert I have ever read, and that is it. Mysterious, dreamy and full of magic just like the desert itself. Genius in my opinion.
July 30, 2014
Very poetic language as he describes the the desert...which has been a land of my passion ever since I read Desert Solotaire way back in the early 80s.
January 8, 2016
Poetry as prose. A new mainstay for my rucksack, for many hikes to come. Surreal, beautiful, breathing with life.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews