{"id":159886,"date":"2022-05-31T12:36:03","date_gmt":"2022-05-31T16:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=159886"},"modified":"2022-06-07T11:00:50","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T15:00:50","slug":"barry-lopezs-darkness-and-light","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/31\/barry-lopezs-darkness-and-light\/","title":{"rendered":"Barry Lopez’s Darkness and Light"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Barry Lopez, McKenzie River, Oregon. Photograph by David Liittschwager.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some days after Barry\u2019s death on December 25, 2020, I pulled every book of his I owned from the shelves around my apartment and stacked them on a corner of my desk. Then I walked down the hill to the used bookshop in the small Oregon town where I live and found several books of his I did not yet own. For a year, I picked at the stack, revisiting passages I recalled vividly or had forgotten. The words would come when I was ready, I figured, so I scribbled sentences on scraps of paper, lost them, found them, rewrote them, in an ambulatory manner I thought might have pleased Barry. He was the only writer who made me feel virtuous for my slowness, which I once heard him call \u201cpatience,\u201d though I believe even Barry knew the fine line between virtuousness and slacking off. He had told me he sometimes admonished his students, \u201cI cannot teach you discipline, and I cannot teach you hunger. You have to find those things inside yourself.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was his request that I write this essay. Or maybe it was not a request, but a suggestion. He had asked it in a way so gentle, so lacking in urgency, that I would sometimes feel as if I dreamed it, but then I would relisten to a voicemail he left me, which I had saved, and there it was: \u201cI\u2019ve got a kind of favor to ask.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When I returned his call, he told me a man was writing a profile for the alumni magazine of the college Barry had attended. The man was interviewing some celebrated writers about Barry\u2019s legacy, but it had struck Barry that these writers were all of his own generation or one below him. Did he even <\/span>have<\/span><\/i> a legacy if few young people read his work, he wondered? Was there any space for his work in the collective conscience, amid an economy of distraction and a literary world enamored with speed? This was two months before he died. I had known Barry only four months.<\/span><\/p>\n

He asked me to \u201cthink about this,\u201d in case the man writing the profile gave me a call, and maybe also to write about his legacy myself if I felt compelled. This is how he was, his profound gestures composed of language so light it seemed to drift off. I told him I would.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I knew Barry Lopez\u2019s name from the spines of books on my parents\u2019 shelves, but the first work of his I read were essays and short stories in <\/span>Orion<\/span><\/i>, to which my parents subscribed when I was sixteen. I thought of Barry then as a \u201cnature writer,\u201d a label I would later learn he resented, but which, at that time, I liked. He had published his first book, <\/span>Of Wolves and Men<\/span><\/i>, to great acclaim in 1978, when he was thirty-three years old, and would write another twenty books of fiction and nonfiction in his lifetime. By the time I became aware of his writing, Barry was a bard among an international community of writers and artists defending the natural world against industrial exploitation. One of the short stories in <\/span>Orion<\/span><\/i> that glimmered out at me was about a man who comes across a sliver of obsidian while walking in the desert and considers pocketing the stone for his daughter, then decides against it. \u201cHe had come upon a time in his life when everything, even the things of God, needed protection,\u201d Barry wrote of the man\u2019s restraint. He implied that in removing it from the landscape, the stone became only an object, but if the man left the stone, he would \u201chave to use his imagination\u201d in telling his daughter about it, thus preserving its particular mystery.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I saw him speak at my college around the time I read the story. I recall, mainly, his bearing\u2014turned-inward, serious, his words impeccably chosen.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After college, I moved West, and that year a friend sent me a link to an interview Barry had done with Bill Moyers. I watched the interview, rapt. Then I watched it twice more. He articulated beliefs I did not yet know I had, but in which I recognized myself clearly and immediately. \u201cWe have a way of talking about beauty as though beauty were only skin deep,\u201d he said. \u201cBut real beauty is so deep you have to move into darkness in order to understand what beauty is.\u201d He meant that to opt for beauty but not darkness was to cling to false hope, that real hope required an awareness of both darkness and beauty at once. To make space in one\u2019s own mind for both was to remain open to a \u201cfull expression\u201d of life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After I saw the interview, I began reading Barry\u2019s books, and I noticed how violence and beauty cohabitated in all his work. In <\/span>Of Wolves and Men<\/span><\/i>, he wrote of both the admiration and hatred humans have for wolves, the former rooted in a longing for intimacy with nature even as humans grow more distant from it; the latter, in a species of fear called <\/span>theriophobia\u2014<\/span><\/i>\u201cfear of the projected beast in oneself,\u201d or, as Barry saw it, fear of the darkness we all possess. In \u201cOrchids on the Volcanoes,\u201d from his 1998 essay collection <\/span>About This Life<\/span><\/i>, he observed a wreckage of dead birds in the Galapagos, \u201ccrumpled on the bare ground like abandoned clothing,\u201d and \u201cthe stark terror\u201d of the place, where \u201cinnocent repose and violence are never far apart.\u201d He often invoked the concurrence of light and dark by pressing life\u2019s fragility against the brutality of landscapes. <\/span>Arctic Dreams<\/span><\/i>, which won the 1986 National Book Award, was constructed almost entirely from this dichotomy, beginning in the introduction, where Barry wrote, \u201cI had never known how benign sunlight could be \u2026 How run through with compassion in a land that bore so eloquently the evidence of centuries of winter,\u201d to the end, where, after hundreds of pages of detailed observation, his point strikes the reader as startlingly succinct:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of a leaning into the light.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I loved that line when I read it\u2014\u201cleaning into the light,\u201d a stalk tilting toward the sun\u2014and I love it now, even after Barry\u2019s death when the passage containing it became one of the most quoted in his oeuvre.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2013, Barry published the essay \u201cSliver of Sky\u201d in <\/span>Harper\u2019s<\/span><\/i> about being raped as a child. His rapist had been a doctor, a friend of his mother\u2019s, who feigned charity by offering to entertain her sons. In the years Barry suffered these serial assaults, he wrote, \u201cthe deepest and sometimes only relief I had was when I was confronted with the local, elementary forces of nature: hot Santa Ana winds blowing west into the San Fernando Valley \u2026 ; winter floods inundating our neighborhood when Caballero Creek breached its banks on its way to the Los Angeles River.\u201d Looking upward at a flock of birds filled him with \u201cencouragement.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This nesting of natural beauty inside the horror of the essay\u2019s disclosures was perhaps a better explanation than any for why pairing dark with light felt necessary to Barry. \u201cI took from each of these encounters a sense of what it might feel like to become fully alive,\u201d he wrote. But it was recently, in reading his posthumous essay collection, <\/span>Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World<\/span><\/i>, that this necessity struck me with more devastating clarity. \u201cThe linchpin of my existence as a California boy was the ever-forgiving, ever-soothing light,\u201d he wrote in \u201cMissing California,\u201d published for the first time in the collection:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That, and for me the flocks of birds that pulled me into the sky, pulled me up and out of myself \u2026 Of course, it was the pedophile who gave me eight tumbler pigeons on my birthday, the pigeons that deliberately lose aerodynamic life and plummet to earth as though shot by a gun, only to pull out of it a few feet from the ground and soar stiff-winged toward the open sky.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The essay ends there, on the realization that the birds who relieved his suffering were a gift from the man who caused his suffering. He makes no attempt at explanation.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is something else Barry wrote about often: the unfathomable. He wrote about unfathomable violence\u2014his visits to Auschwitz, and the Washita River in Oklahoma, where, in 1868, the Seventh Cavalry massacred dozens of peaceful Cheyenne men, women, and children, then slit the throats of their horses.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He wrote about the unfathomable in a spiritual sense, too, for which he preferred the word mystery<\/em>. In <\/span>Of Wolves and Men<\/span><\/i>, he advised his readers that he was incapable of answering all our questions, but we shouldn\u2019t worry, since \u201cto allow mystery, which is to say to yourself, \u2018There could be more, there could be things we don\u2019t understand,\u2019 is not to damn knowledge. It is to take a wider view.\u201d He dealt similarly with a conflict he perceived between Indigenous knowledge gathered through generations of immersion in nature and knowledge derived from Western methods of scientific study. The latter, he argued, too often discounted what couldn\u2019t be proven by science, while the former tended to allow some things to remain beyond human understanding. \u201cA solution to a mystery is perhaps not a sign of wisdom,\u201d he told Moyers. \u201cI am perfectly comfortable being in a state of ignorance before something incomprehensible. And it\u2019s in that moment that you\u2019re driven to your knees and you believe. I wouldn\u2019t call it religious. It\u2019s just what happens when you open up to the extraordinary circumstances of being alive.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But it <\/span>was<\/span><\/i> religious, in a sense. Among the revelations that have come to me from reading Barry\u2019s work was one I found in his posthumous collection, in an essay titled \u201cMadre de Dios.\u201d He described his Jesuit upbringing and how he found in Catholicism a \u201csphere of incomprehensible holiness which, in the Western imagination, stands beyond the reach of the rational mind.\u201d Then he recalled an encounter with the spirit of the Blessed Mother, when he was eight years old, trapped in the bed of his rapist. She hovered above the floor, hands reaching toward him, and said, \u201cYou will not die here.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The people I know who have endured unimaginable violence are also those who appear more open than most to spiritual or supernatural occurrences. This does not surprise me. To accept as real an act so evil, for which reason and motive could forever elude its victim, is also to accept that there are things we can\u2019t explain. This humility, Barry seemed to argue, is not just virtuous but essential to our survival, the antidote to unimaginable darkness being unimaginable light.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, spiritual belief is a hard thing to write about. Once, a writing professor told to me that he avoided teaching Barry\u2019s work for fear his students might, in attempting to imitate him, \u201cget a little mushy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I admit I\u2019ve found Barry\u2019s work, dense and sprawling, difficult to read at times; if I don\u2019t quiet everything around me, my mind wanders off. I\u2019ve wondered if this was deliberate, if Barry was challenging readers to a meditation. \u201cPay attention,\u201d he wrote over and over in his books, as he did again in an essay titled \u201cInvitation\u201d from his new collection: \u201cPerhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.\u201d And when I do pay attention, I am mesmerized: I see Barry\u2019s syntactical precision, the carpentry of his paragraphs, the framing built from the crossbeams of his experience. In fiction, especially, his philosophizing was tactile, as in a passage from his only novel, <\/span>Resistance<\/span><\/i>, in which he made the case, yet again, for mystery:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, the terrifying part was the ease with which you could lose your imagination \u2026 In every quarter of life, it seemed then, we were retreating into fundamentalism. The yes\/no of belief, the in\/out of fashion, the down\/up of pharmaceuticals, the on\/off of music, the hot\/cold of commitment, the dead\/live of electricity, the forward\/backward of machinery, the give\/take of a deal \u2026 People endorsed the identification of enemies and their eradication, just to be rid of some of the inevitable blurring.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What I loved so much about this novel, told from the perspectives of nine artists and academics who each receive a letter from their government declaring their work \u201cunpatriotic\u201d and thus a threat to national security, is that it precisely conveys the ideas integral to Barry\u2019s writing without straying into moralization or sentimentalism. Yet what made Barry\u2019s work radical, I now believe, was in fact his willingness to risk these qualities\u2014to reject the common urge to construct from language a bulwark against emotion. \u201cThe things that make us uncomfortable in public are a person who wishes to speak of what is beautiful,\u201d he told Moyers. \u201cThat makes everybody a little bit nervous, because many of us keep this jaded, cynical separateness with the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I saw Barry speak once more, in the fall of 2019, at an event he facilitated for his friend, Robert MacFarlane, who had just published <\/span>Underland<\/span><\/i>. I watched, as rapt as I had been during the Moyers interview. When they finished, I left without introducing myself. What do you say to a person whose work has influenced you so thoroughly that you feel their words and ideas as a substance coursing through your body? How do you convey to a person who has never read your work how much theirs has become a part of yours? You can\u2019t. It\u2019s desperate, and a little bit creepy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So I left before I met Barry. I did not need to tell him that, in my own work, at his urging, I had gone into darkness to find beauty, and by beauty, I mean love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

And so the call came as a surprise. I was driving across Colorado one day in July of 2020 when a friend in New York forwarded me a voicemail. I pulled over, hit play. I recognized his voice, serious but kind in its formality. He was explaining to my friend\u2014whom I now realized was his friend, too\u2014that he had finished reading the book I wrote. My friend had recommended it, and now Barry was asking my friend to pass along his number to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

I sat on the roadside a long time. I dialed the number, got an answering machine. I hardly remember what I said. I was headed into the mountains to camp for a while. A few weeks later, in early August, I received another voicemail:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Hi Sierra, it\u2019s Barry Lopez calling. I hope you had a good trip. I\u2019m looking at some photographs this morning of Blackfoot people trying to find a way out of their dilemma in 1915, moving through a whiteout on horseback, so I Xeroxed the image and wrote a letter to a friend and said, \u201cHow I\u2019m starting to feel trying to get out of here, wherever we are.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We spoke on the phone not long after that. For the same reason I fear meeting writers I admire, I now fear having to distill our first conversation onto the page. Can I just say it was one hour among the most essential of my life?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He said kind things about my book. They seemed the kindest things anyone had ever said about my book, I believe because Barry was a writer whose perspective on the world I had long nurtured in myself, so the parts he chose to notice were parts meaningful to me already. Then he told me what he had been reading and writing and asked what I was writing, too. I explained my new book as precisely as I could, adding, when I stumbled, that I had only begun, that I had not yet decided how much I should write before I sent pages to a publisher. He replied that with every book he ever wrote he had, at some point, inevitably wondered, <\/span>Why wasn\u2019t this given to someone smarter than I am? <\/span><\/i>Then he advised me to never build an outline too soon because \u201cthe idea of writing is not to find what you\u2019re looking for.\u201d He added, \u201cAnd you have to know what you stand for. You have to resist the temptation to do things for money or fame, because you\u2019ll wake up when you\u2019re forty years old and not know who you are.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I had turned thirty-three that week. I felt young all of a sudden, my life full of possibility. I felt a warmth toward Barry rising in my throat. He asked for my mailing address in case he came across an article or book he wished to send, and he suggested I visit him soon; we both lived in Oregon, a few hours\u2019 drive apart. It was the beginning of the pandemic, but I could stay in his guest cottage, we could eat outside, and his wife could take me kayaking on a river beside their house. In the meantime, Barry advised, I should call his landline whenever I wished. He would answer ninety percent of the time, and his wife, the writer Debra Gwartney, would answer the other ten.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s\u2014\u201d Barry began, pausing long enough for me to wonder what adjective he would choose. Then he said, \u201c\u2014first-rate.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We spoke a handful of times that summer and fall. We would talk about what he was working on and what I was working on, about books he recommended and ideas that had come to him lately, and then he would say, \u201cWell, I shouldn\u2019t keep you from your writing.\u201d I could have talked to him forever, but I hung up because I didn\u2019t want him to think I was greedy, and of course it was not me who had limited time, but Barry. He only once mentioned his cancer. He was rationing his efforts, he said, finishing an essay collection and some short stories. He often referenced his most recent book, <\/span>Horizon<\/span><\/i>, published in 2019, which I sensed he was proud of. Later, Robin Desser, Barry\u2019s editor at Random House, and previously at Knopf, would tell me it had taken so long for Barry to write the book that she feared he might die before he finished it. He had signed the contract before Desser became his editor, and in her first years working with him, he wrote other books, until they agreed, in her words, \u201cthat it would be better to direct his energies to his major opus.\u201d Whenever Barry visited New York after that, he hand-delivered a typewritten manuscript, requesting that Desser not read it but keep it on her desk so she knew he was writing. \u201cOf course, I would sort of look at it,\u201d Desser said. \u201cBut I also thought, I\u2019m preserving my own reaction to this, because I felt somewhat shamanistically that if I didn\u2019t read this version, maybe the final one would come sooner.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Horizon<\/span><\/i> is indeed an opus\u2014not a memoir, exactly, but a literary consummation of his wanderings. It revisits places that shaped his thinking, reinforces the stitching of his ideas across landscape and time. \u201cA long life might be understood \u2026 as a kind of cataract of imperfectly recollected intentions,\u201d Barry writes:<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of one\u2019s early intentions fade. Others endure through the inevitable detours of amnesia, betrayal, and loss of belief \u2026 But, too, the unfathomable sublimity of a random moment, like the touch of a beloved\u2019s hand on one\u2019s burning face, might revive the determination to carry on, and, at least for a time, rid one of life\u2019s weight of self-doubt and regret. Or a moment of staggering beauty might reignite the intention one once had to lead a life of great meaning, to live up to one\u2019s own expectations.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book rarely gets more personal than this, yet it strikes me as some of Barry\u2019s most intimate writing, deepening the idea fundamental to his work that what people most desire is \u201cto love or be loved,\u201d and that all human pain, particularly loneliness, emerges when a person fails to feel either.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the same way that he repeatedly invoked the coexistence of light and dark or insisted we pay attention, this idea is a refrain from much of his prior work. In <\/span>About This Life<\/span><\/i>, Barry wrote, \u201cAlthough I\u2019m wary of pancultural truths, I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved.\u201d Years later, in the interview with Moyers, he mused that everyone, at some time, \u201cis driven to a point of despair \u2026 I think they don\u2019t quit because there is a capacity for, a desire for reciprocated love that brings you back to life.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I asked Desser if she thought Barry repeated himself because he wasn\u2019t sure his readers heard him. She believed this was true, but added, \u201cWhen someone writes music, you can tell that this is Beethoven, or this is John Coltrane. There\u2019s a theme that\u2019s recognizable. These are the things that matter to Barry, so they reoccur \u2026 And this message about love, how many times can we hear that? Many times. We need to hear it many times.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

She told me that by the time he wrote <\/span>Horizon<\/span><\/i>, and especially after he published the essay about his childhood abuse, she sensed that Barry felt relief in mostly having said what he wanted to say, and now his task was to unite all he ever said into a single work that refracted his ideas through the variable lenses of the far-flung places in which he had reported. The book, like his life\u2019s work, \u201ccontained multitudes,\u201d she said, in how it encompassed vast geographies and histories yet returned, always, to the same idea\u2014to love.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The book wasn\u2019t everything, though. In the closing pages, Barry warns against taking it as his last word: \u201cWe assume sometimes that whatever the dying say at the end, or last write down, represents a conscious final thought, but I don\u2019t believe this is very often true. What is really going on at the end mostly goes unspoken and \u2026 remains unknown to the living.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Was he saying that death is a preservation of mystery? Those closer to him know better than I do how much of himself he left out of his books. My phone calls with Barry, like my experience reading his work, were intimate but never revealing. We said almost nothing about our personal lives. I never told him, for example, that his first call came the week I ended a decade-long partnership, that our conversations spanned the loneliest period of my life, that his voice brought me comfort, that whenever I conjured an image of him in the house he called me from\u2014a house he had lived in over fifty years, in a forest he once described in an essay as the place a person knows so well they \u201csense that they <\/span>themselves<\/span><\/i> are becoming known \u2026 and this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world\u201d\u2014I felt relief from my own unmooring.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In September, I moved my belongings into a new apartment, then drove to Northern Michigan to see my parents. The day I arrived, fires caught in Oregon. The late-summer smoke had become an annual frustration, and I was grateful to have escaped it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then a friend wrote asking where Barry lived. His town was engulfed in flames, she said. I called his house; neither he nor Debra answered.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The next morning, the smoke had drifted over Lake Michigan. I woke to an eerie, familiar light, a muted-orange patch on the bedroom door. I went kayaking with my parents, paddled around a point to a broad beach where we watched the cloud loom like a wave stalled before its crest. I would later learn from my friend in New York that Barry and Debra were woken by firemen pounding on their door and fled with only essential belongings. The house had been saved but not the forest, nor an outbuilding containing Barry\u2019s papers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It has become a trope that writers whom publishers have long placed in the box called \u201cnature writing\u201d flinch at the term like it\u2019s an epithet. \u201c \u2018Nature writing\u2019 has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,\u201d Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. Their complaint is that the label consigns writers to an obscure literary corner, whereas what they have chosen as their subject\u2014most succinctly, survival\u2014is as fundamental a story as it gets. \u201cI\u2019m not writing about nature. I\u2019m writing about humanity,\u201d Barry told Moyers. \u201cAnd if I have a subject, it is justice, and the rediscovery of the manifold ways in which our lives can be shaped by the recovery of a sense of reverence for life.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I agree with Barry. It was not his descriptions of arctic summer or of forests along the McKenzie River, beautiful as they may be, that drew me to his work; it was the way he made clear our predicament, which is that <\/span>violence toward land begets violence toward people, and vice versa,<\/span> <\/i>that violence of any kind wounds both victim and perpetrator, heaving across space and time, marking land and bodies, drawing us all into a collective trauma that perpetuates by its own momentum.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider the way he describes the Spanish incursion into the New World in his most concise book, <\/span>The Rediscovery of North America<\/span><\/i>:<\/span><\/p>\n

It set a tone in the Americas. The quest for personal possessions was to be, from the outset, a series of raids, irresponsible and criminal, a spree, in which an end to it\u2014the slaves, the timber, the pearls, the fur, the precious ores, and, later, arable land, coal, oil, and iron ore\u2014was never visible, in which an end to it had no meaning. The assumption of an imperial right conferred by God, sanctioned by the state, and enforced by a militia; the assumption of unquestioned superiority over a resident people, based not on morality but on race and cultural comparison\u2014or, let me say it plainly, on ignorance, on a fundamental illiteracy\u2014the assumption that one is due wealth in North America, reverberates in the journals of people on the Oregon Trail, in the public speeches of nineteenth-century industrialists, and in twentieth-century politics. You can hear it today in the rhetoric of timber barons in my home state of Oregon, standing before the last of the old-growth forest, irritated that anyone is saying \u201c<\/span>enough \u2026<\/span>, it is enough.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are few writers who have made so clear that the exploitation of resources\u2014as well as all the displacement, pollution, ecosystemic collapse, and climate havoc this exploitation engenders\u2014is, as it has always been, a colonial project.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am even less a nature writer than Barry was, but this is where our work overlapped, in that we each spent much of our adulthood around Indigenous communities. Learning from Indigenous people had conferred on him a certain loneliness, in that he would never belong to nor attempt to belong to the communities he visited, and yet he more often identified with their perspectives and methods of existence than those of European American culture. \u201cYou end up on this odd ground where you don\u2019t have many people to talk to,\u201d he told me.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I had asked him to elaborate. Had I never read his writing, I might have thought he was suggesting we shared some sort of romantic and voyeuristic curiosity about cultures unlike our own. But what I believe Barry meant is that being among people who have struggled and continue to struggle to maintain a relationship to their original home made obvious to him his position as a descendant of colonizers, illuminated the legacy he was part of. It helped him more precisely identify that which he now felt obligated to push back against.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He wasn\u2019t perfect on this front\u2014no white writer who has ever tried to find their place among Indigenous stories is. If I have a criticism of Barry, it is that he too often wrote about Indigenous people in the past and not enough in the present. Perhaps he felt that history is a commons, while the ordinary, private lives of people today were verboten to him. Regardless, his work reads at times as a kind of salvage ethnography, edging dangerously close to reinforcing the falsehood that Indigenous cultures and people are dead, or that their value diminished as they were influenced by modernity. (In one short story, he implies the Mandan were completely \u201cwiped out,\u201d which I imagine would offend the Mandan descendants I know.) Then there is a collection of coyote trickster tales Barry published in 1978, which, though Barry carefully states his intentions at the start of the book, still strikes me as straight up appropriative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I will never know why he made these choices or how he felt about them later on. What I do know is that in all his writing about the people he encountered in his lifetime, Barry was respectful, attentive, humble in his awareness of his own fallibility. Desser told me she saw him amend his approach to writing about Indigenous people over time, and his later work reflects this. What remained consistent was his message: That land and people are fundamentally linked, and that a disregard for both could ruin us all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

He called me a month after the fire, from a house in Eugene where he and Debra were living temporarily. He had finally gone back to the property, he said, and it looked \u201clike a flayed human being.\u201d His voice broke when he said this, and it occurred to me that the fire erased for him the sense of knowing and being known. Then he brightened a little, explaining that a friend who accompanied him had found a bit of tree root, still alive. In the spring, they hoped to replant the forest.<\/span><\/p>\n

We spoke only once more, a week later, when he asked me the favor. Eight weeks after that, I learned of his death like most everyone else, from the news.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I never met him. I know he valued my work, but I also know he nurtured many similar, longer friendships, and ours was more significant to me than to him. I suspect Barry first called me to pass along a gift that he once received when he was young from an older, celebrated writer. The writer complimented him \u201cin such a way that you felt you had to continue, and maybe do better just to live up to the implied expectation,\u201d Barry wrote of the encounter. \u201cHere is this person whom I knew but slightly, who in our first meeting found a way to say, with such integrity, I love you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I read of this encounter only recently, in <\/span>Embrace Fearlessly This Burning World<\/span><\/i>. Barry was working on the book when he died, assembling essays that previously appeared in magazines, as well as several yet unpublished. Debra, his wife, helped Desser finish the collection; Rebecca Solnit wrote the introduction. The essays span three decades, revisiting once again the places common throughout Barry\u2019s work\u2014the Arctic and Antarctic; the California of his childhood\u2014but lingering longer than his writing ever has in Finn Rock, Oregon, in the forests of the Cascades, his chosen home.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The title of the collection comes from an essay he published in <\/span>Orion <\/span><\/i>the month we met, before the fires, in which Barry asks if it is \u201cstill possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If he had a last word, perhaps it would be this\u2014a question calling from the dark, turning toward the light.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sierra Crane Murdoch is the author of <\/span><\/i>Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman\u2019s Search for Justice in Indian Country<\/span><\/a>, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Barry Lopez<\/em>\u2019s posthumous essay collection<\/em>, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World<\/a>, was published in May by Random House.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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