THE BIG RHYTHM: A CONVERSATION WITH BARRY LOPEZ ON THE McKENZIE RIVER

BARRY LOPEZ Photograph by Nancy Crampton, 2005

Barry Lopez's body of work is too big and wide-ranging to sum up in a few paragraphs. The beauty of it is in the details. In the high Arctic, Lopez walks among birds who, in the absence of trees, nest on the ground. "I gazed down at a single horned lark no bigger than my fist. She stared back resolute as iron," he writes on the first page of Arctic Dreams. His response is to bow to these birds, opening his opus with a tenor of prayerful respect and humble appreciation.

Lopez's first nonfiction book, 1978's Of Wolves and Men, examines myriad perspectives of human relationships to the wolf. The book helped reshape Americans' attitudes toward this once widely feared predator, and probably played a role in making Americans more willing to consider wolf reintroductions in the Northwest. Since then Lopez has produced more than a dozen finely crafted books, about half of them fictional collections of short stories, such as 2000's Light Action in the Caribbean, which ranged from the darkly compelling title piece to the life-affirming "The Mappist."

In "A Voice," the introductory essay of his 1998 collection, About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory, Lopez recalls pushing his alphabet blocks out the window so his mother would have to take him out to the garden to retrieve them. This richly symbolic vignette, of words propelling Lopez into nature, foretells a life of conscious exploration. An intensely private person, Lopez has let his work respond to queries about his life. It's no accident that About This Life has thirteen pages of autobiography—the rest of the book is a selection of Lopez's finest essays. The message is clear: if you want to know me, read my work.

Yet in recent years, Lopez has been more forthcoming about his life. In a 2002 essay for the LA Weekly, Lopez roots his story in the landscape of his boyhood, the wild creeks and vast fields of the mid-century San Fernando Valley. For his tenth birthday a family friend gave him a flock of twenty homing pigeons. Watching the pigeons soar and dive and tumble was "a source of indescribable joy," Lopez says in the revelatory essay. "I would turn slowly under them in circles of glee," he says in "A Voice."

Though Lopez missed the coyotes, snakes, and other free-roaming creatures of the Valley, he relished the academic challenges of the Jesuit prep school where he studied in Manhattan. He devoured books by Steinbeck, Melville, and countless others and went on to college at Notre Dame. But he felt his education was incomplete. "In my senior year at Notre Dame, at bat in an intramural baseball game, I took a high inside pitch that shattered the stone in my senior ring. I left the setting empty," he writes in About This Life. "The emptiness came to symbolize doubts I'd developed about my education. I'd learned a lot, but I had not learned it in the presence of women or blacks or Jews or Koreans."

In 1970, Lopez settled on the west slope of the Cascade Range along the McKenzie River, east of Eugene, Oregon. His home is decorated with the art of his friends. The dining table where we conducted the interview was made with black walnut cut and milled by Lopez and a friend.

I called Lopez the evening before our meeting, and he asked if I could pick up a sign he'd requested from the Eugene office of the Department of Fish and Wildlife. An unusual number of salmon were spawning in the McKenzie River just across from Lopez's home, and he wanted to warn boaters not to disturb them. We met on a bracingly fresh morning on the day of the autumnal equinox. Lopez warmly welcomed me and poured me a steaming mug of herbal tea. More than three hours later, we clicked off the tape recorder and walked down to the river. A couple of hefty Chinook salmon wriggled in the clear bankwater, the ripples from their undulations sending out tiny waves in all directions.

ms: What are you working on now?

bl: Usually I'm uncomfortable talking about work in progress, but I can give you an outline of what I'm writing, and tell you what else I'm doing besides writing, which is in fact taking up a lot of my time now.

Two things have occurred to me about my work over the last couple of years. First, because I think writers have a responsibility to society and believe that the country is in a dire strait, I've felt compelled to do more than write. Second, although I've never been much interested in reviewing the history of my work—actually I'm suspicious of the impulse—it now makes sense to me, to try to shake out for myself what I've been up to. This has led to autobiography, or at least to a larger component of autobiography in my nonfiction.

Up until recently, you know, that phrase, "my work," meant solely what I was writing. Now I'm not sure what it means. I feel a sense of urgency, a sense of national threat. Because of that I've become more involved in the past few years with higher education, with public presentations and collaborative work, with trying to advance the work of younger writers. I have to be honest with you and say I have doubts about doing these things. I feel the weight of an enormous amount of experience, travel experience in particular, which I've not written about. Sometimes I worry that without my knowing it a half-formed story will leave my imagination, as if it'd become impatient. For someone who's not a social activist, I seem suddenly to be up to my neck in such things.

ms: Political things?

bl: Yes. I really think the direction the country is headed in is self-destructive, the psychological relief we pursue with consumption, the compulsion for distraction, the degree to which lying is now acceptable in business and politics. This is a personal perception; I'm not asking anyone to share it. But I'm one of many people, I have to believe, determined to get the situation more widely aired. I'm also trying to be straightforward here in answering your question, what are you working on?

Maybe what I'm really working on, by writing autobiography and pursuing what I suppose is an effort at public service, is grappling with my own reputation as a writer and what to do with it. A curious thing can happen to you as a writer. You go along in your twenties and thirties and forties, writing books and articles. Then people really want to talk to you, they want to know what kind of book is coming next. They have expectations. If their perception—your reputation—makes you self-conscious, or anxious, it can ruin your work.

I've seen an ambivalence emerge in some writers as they enter their fifties. You ask yourself, what am I really up to here? In a very small way I've become something of a public figure in my fifties. If you find yourself in this position, what are you supposed to do? The answer—for me—is to take it for what it's worth. Lend your name to worthy causes and help younger writers. Read other people's manuscripts. Try to open doors for young writers who are devoted to story and language, and who have serious questions about the fate of humanity. You say to yourself, once older writers gave to me (or didn't); now, regardless, I have to see who's coming along and how I can help them.

ms: That sounds like mentorship.

bl: Sure, it is. Usually you serve a mentorship by teaching in a university or in workshops—you can also do it by responding thoughtfully, carefully, to books that come through the mail for comment. But you must draw a line in all this, too, to protect your writing time. And you have to be savvy enough about your own personality to know if you can actually sit down with the work of a young man or woman and help them find their voice. Is your head so full of your own voice that what you'll try to do is urge them to become something like yourself without ever being aware of that? It takes a special gift to teach writing, I think. It has to be somebody who can, at least for a while, abandon their own ego. Hard to do. I have enormous admiration for people who both teach and write. If the writing is exquisite and credible, if it's more than just beautiful language and is trustworthy in all its dimensions, if someone can do that and can also teach, that's extraordinary. I can't.

Let me get back to some specifics with you, on the earlier question. The main focus of my written work now is a large nonfiction project, a book on the scale of Arctic Dreams. It's set in five different places I've been traveling to: the high Arctic, the Galápagos Islands, northern Kenya, the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory in Australia, and Antarctica. It further develops the themes of a relationship between landscape and imagination that are there in Arctic Dreams.

The book that I've just finished is fiction, a set of interrelated stories called Resistance. In it, a fictional Office of Inland Security sends a letter to several American writers and artists, informing them that the American public finds their work disturbing and regards their politics as a threat to democracy. It's a letter of indictment and notification. The government wants to have a talk with them. It's not the kind of letter we're used to seeing in the United States, but throughout history dictators and tyrants have behaved like this. There are nine testimonies in Resistance from people who refuse to cooperate.

I just finished, too, an afterword for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Of Wolves and Men [published May 2004]. I'm writing essays and short stories all the time, and those are moving toward new collections. Also, I've finished a book called Encounters on the Granite River. It's a set of fifty-two fictional narratives—thirteen pieces in four sets, according to the four seasons. They're related in the voices of a husband and wife who've lived in a rural landscape over a period of thirty years. My effort was to elucidate family life tied to a physical place over a long stretch of domestic time, so that the social dimension of life—a conversation, a meal, a walk, the ordinary stuff of everyday life—was filtered through the mystery of what it is to be alive in the physical world.

So, that's my own writing. I'm also helping edit a book called Home Ground: A Literary Guide to Landscape Terms, words like cowbelly, swale, birdfoot delta, flatiron, eyebrow scarp—Cajun terms like playree, Native American terms to some extent, English and Spanish terms that are peculiar to North America. We have forty-four American writers working with us on the project. Each writer is creating definitions for about twenty words. I'll write an introductory essay, about language and landscape.

Switching back again to the "nonwriting" life, I'm spending a significant amount of time now working with people at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. They approached me a couple of years ago about buying my papers. My first reaction was, what does my work have to do with Texas? Then I met people there and realized they had a large, complex program they wanted to launch, an effort to bring natural history and ethics more into the foreground of university education. Their first step was to ask E. O. Wilson and me to design a new undergraduate major, Natural History and the Humanities. You'd have a full-scale senior field project in the biological sciences and another full-scale senior project in photography, writing, dance, film . . .

ms: That's exactly what I was looking for when I was in college, but it didn't really exist.

bl: What we're talking about now, a few years after Tech implemented the program in the Honors College, is requiring every student in that college to graduate with a course sequence in ethics and the same in biology. The idea is that every student must be exposed to studying the ethical consequences of their social behavior and the biological consequences of whatever they choose to do for gainful employment. I'm also working to establish an annual series of lectures in social justice there, to bring shows to the museum, and to conduct workshops.

ms: When I heard you speak in 2001, you mentioned you'd had meetings with an oil company president.

bl: Yes. The president of an oil company [Arco] called me a few years ago and said, I've been reading your work for ten years and I really want to talk to you—about civilization and oil, and, the way he put it, where the hell are we going. I thought this was a strange request, but we're in strange times and I said yes. So we flew up to the North Slope [of Alaska] and walked around for a couple of days. This man was really serious and deeply concerned. He was looking for solutions.

Through him, and through a businessman connected with Texas Tech, I began to meet a number of executives who were profoundly embarrassed by the Enron fiasco, for example, by the arrogance with which the tobacco industry testified before Congress, and by a certain kind of ruthlessness in American corporate culture.

Being business people, however, these men and women have very few outlets for frankly expressing their concerns. They can't speak to them at a stockholders meeting; they can't address these issues at a board of directors meeting, or even speak openly among themselves without drawing suspicion. Somebody who hears you express dismay at the way human communities are being exploited by turbo-charged American capitalism, when your name comes up to be the new CEO at their corporation, they're going to say no way, we aren't hiring this guy, he doesn't have the killer instinct.

So I've been trying to create venues where these people can talk to each other. What I'm interested in now is how the civilian populace can address issues like the availability of fresh water without involving government and business. Business is interested in solving problems to their advantage. Nothing against them—that's what they do. And government is interested in solving domestic problems in a way that helps the economy, which may not be what citizens want.

So I'm working with people in higher education who want students to be ethically and biologically informed when they walk out the door. (At Texas Tech, I guess you'd say we're trying to prepare people to be better citizens.) And I want to get savvy, ethical, powerful business people together to talk to each other. Often they don't even know of one another. They've been politically isolated by our polarizing society.

ms: And by laws that legally require them to run their companies in ways that will earn the greatest profit for shareholders. These people are legally prevented from acting first in a moral way.

bl: They are, but you can't say often enough how distorted our situation has become because of the way news is filtered. When corporations are reporting on the meaning of life, we don't have news we can trust. The Web offers some help, but it's a chaotic, piecemeal thing with an inconsistent ethical context and no narrative thread.

The most encouraging thing to me, politically, is that there are good men and women everywhere, and they are determined to do something good. They're being pulled out of the work they historically have been doing—somebody who's been an actor for thirty years or a writer for thirty years—and they're saying to themselves, I have some responsibilities now as a citizen which I don't think I ever recognized. I'm not going to just make my film or stand up on the stage and pretend nothing is going on.

You have, it seems, two choices: either try to change the world back to the way you think it once was in order to relieve human suffering, or be savvy about how fast it's changing and what the detriments might be and how you might address those. There are many ways to do this. I've chosen one way. As a writer, I have a responsibility, as I see it, to society. Other people, of course, don't see writing that way. I want to be careful, however, not to take up a position of thinking that I actually know something, that I have answers. The only thing I know as a writer is how to tell a story. I sit at the typewriter and make a pattern, a story about how my culture works or behaves. Do you know that essay "Flight"?

ms: Yes, in About This Life.

bl: I had this question, why are air freighters flying all over the planet every day with all these products? What's behind this? "Flight" is a piece of journalism, a reporter experiencing a set of events and then writing about them in such a way that you can grasp something as abstract as high-speed consumption. I don't have any particular skill with economic data . . .

ms: But the reader is probably not that interested in the economics. I was interested in that essay because it's personal: you're on the phone with your wife saying, I'm just so disoriented, and she says that's because you're not going anywhere; you're just going. That human story is compelling.

bl: I feel the same way. I think the writer should serve that function in society. We're all busy—someone's raising children, you're taking care of your father, we have all these things going on in our lives. The writer should be a person who sojourns in that chaos and comes back to write something cogent and coherent. That's one's service to society, and that's the relationship I want with the reader. I want to say, "This is what I saw—what do you think?" I don't want to say, "This is what I saw and here's what you should think about it." You either want to be the reader's companion or the reader's authority.

Part of what has happened to me recently is that, like so many others, I've become acutely aware of the political danger the country is in. The voices of the champions of material wealth, the acolytes of technology, and religious extremists are so loud, so bellicose, so uncompromising—who will rein them in? Who's not afraid to criticize their notions of "progress"? The hallmark of their progress now in Third World countries is not further stratification into the haves and have-nots, it's social disintegration. The social cohesion that defines a village, that provides health care, welcome, insurance, love—everything that's been turned into a product or an industry in our culture—is threatened by the indifference of corporate capitalism.

Take an idea like that, community. I wrote a piece for Harper's called "Effleurage," about a group of potters who fired regularly at a wood-burning kiln in the Coast Range [of Oregon]. When the editor called me after he got the piece, he said the essay was really about community, though that word had never come up in our discussions. What that says to me is that, just as "Flight" is in a broad sense about consumerism, "Effleurage" is about community. The context is the air freight industry or wood-fired pottery, but the stories are about the state of American culture.

As a writer, I see that, like you, I have a set of concerns: What's happening to community in America? What is consumerism about? How deep does prejudice go in the social fabric of our culture? I have a handful of metaphors: anthropology, archeology, natural history, geography; that's my stuff. So I move into those realms, talk to those kinds of people, and write. If it's done correctly, a reader can say, I can fit a lot of my own complex feelings into this story, into this extended metaphor. I can now say better what I myself mean, because I read this essay.

To bring this the long way around to travel, I think my compulsion to leave town is based in a belief that it is only by leaving the security of the familiar that I can learn whether my particular metaphors can continue to ground the reader in something trustworthy. If I put myself, say, at a social disadvantage, a cultural disadvantage in an Eskimo village—you're really the odd guy out here, it's not about your imagination, this village—and go through all of that self-doubt, about whether or not I should be here, totally confused, nobody wants to talk to me—if I have those thoughts, I think, good, I'm in the right place. Now I just have to hold on in that windstorm.

When I come back from these places and I say, here's something utterly remarkable about these people, the last thing I want to hear is somebody saying: I want to go live in that village. When you address the real problems of maintaining stable, human, social organization—holding a family together around sexual infidelity, spiritual infidelity, economic infidelity—you can posit that many traditional societies have basically solved these problems; but they can't do this for us. We have to fend for ourselves to straighten out the social chaos we've created. Our families have been torn apart by the forcing pressure of consumption and by having to get and keep jobs.

Here's something disturbing: We can't survive economically without a high rate of divorce. A high rate of social disintegration is required for the economy to work. The family has got constantly to be broken down into independent consumer units. In divorced families, kids often have two homes, two sets of clothes, two sets of toys, two this, two that, two the other thing. Unless you undermine stable extended families, unless you regularly change the "answer" to a wide range of individual human needs and constantly subdivide those needs, you can't keep the American consumer juggernaut going.

So if I go to Australia and visit with Warlpiri people, what can I learn from them about long-term social stability? They don't have the latest cars or clothes, if you know what I mean, that pervasive hyperkinetic milieu of distraction we live in. But they have to deal with the same basic social problems. For me, travel has been a way to jump into the deep, cold end of this pool and try to swim toward the shallower water. I want to do that. That's the work I choose every day, and I do it knowing I could drown.

My writerly responsibility is to try to be discerning—even camped in the Transantarctic Mountains—about how those circumstances relate to people who are just trying to hold a family together, to stay employed, to deal with dying parents, to change diapers on babies when you haven't slept for twenty-four hours. How can I help? The one thing I know how to do, I think, is turn a pattern I see into language. I like to go a long way away, try to recognize a human pattern there, and then put it in an accessible form for people at home, so people might recognize the outline of what's been troubling them and know what to do about it.

ms: I remember as a child reading Loren Eiseley. He wrote about fields being plowed over for shopping malls and wondered what would happen to the rabbits and the mice and all the creatures who made that piece of land their home. And I thought, finally somebody feels the same way I do. I think that's one of the greatest services a writer can provide, to say, you're not alone in these feelings.

bl: One of the things you have to do when you edit your work is make sure that when you use the first person, it's about more than you. We need the story of us. If I feel compelled to share something about my private life, I say to myself, this better be good. When I put About This Life together, I thought, for the first time, that I'd say some things about my private life, hoping these stories would be easy for people to identify with.

Before that, when I wrote Arctic Dreams, the image I had always of the reader was of somebody standing right next to me. I was pointing something out, talking about it. But what I wanted to happen was for the reader to forget about me, to step in front of me, and say, oh my God, I'm sitting here watching this polar bear . . .

That displacement of myself in the narrative is something I deliberately sought to do. What's changed recently is that I've become more revealing in nonfiction. I've been given so much over the years by so many people. I've been shaped by all of these teachers who are now floating in me. Where before I was very reluctant to write about my own life, to put myself in the foreground as a narrator, I don't feel that need so strongly now. As long as I have a weather eye on where my ego is, I feel it's OK for me to start exploring things that are more personal.

In this new book of nonfiction, I see I have a very different kind of narrator coming along. The narrator of Of Wolves and Men is a young, enthusiastic researcher. As a friend of mine said once, "You can see the homework shining through." In Arctic Dreams the narrator is older, more aware of subtleties, looking at a lot of things that that younger narrator might have missed or might not have been interested in. That's a big leap. And there will be as big a leap from that narrator to the one who's narrating this new book.

ms: I thought it was revealing that About This Life has very little straight autobiography—it's mostly your essays. You're saying, to know about me, look at what I've written. I appreciated that, though as a reader I would have enjoyed reading more about your personal life. I think when a reader respects and admires a writer, that reader often wants to see the writer as their ally. So my one frustration with your work is that sometimes I want you to be more outraged, or more judgmental. I can see that you don't want to be, I can respect that. You'll describe something, for example, the roar of the caged lion in your essay "Flight," and you let the reader feel the feeling. You don't have to be the judge, but sometimes I just want to say, damn it Lopez, get ticked off.

bl: There's an essay called "The Rediscovery of North America" which came out [as a book] in 1991, in which for the first time I let my sense of outrage show. I live at a particular time in American history and, yes, I am outraged. Inevitably those feelings will generate a story, at the heart of which may be a renunciation of something in our culture. The most obvious example of this would be in Resistance, where my own sense of alarm about how far this right-wing government has gotten in stifling civil rights in order to advance its social and economic agendas is clear. But it's not the author speaking in Resistance. The narrators determine the language and the context. Otherwise it's not fiction.

Sometimes people ask how I decide when I sit down at the typewriter with a particular thought or emotion whether I'm going to write fiction or nonfiction. To me it's like asking how you decide whether you will paint or dance. They're two different things. The decision is almost unconscious. It's predetermined by a sixth sense about getting at the truth of existence. Truth in a piece of nonfiction lies with material that can be verified outside the author's authority. You can't take that route with a short story. Its truth is an emotional truth. Is the pattern of events in this short story true to what I know about what it means to be human? Fiction and nonfiction are compelled by two different ways of seeing the world. Maybe you could posit that the former is less empirical or its meaning is less intentional.

ms: In About This Life, you speak of two episodes: one when you were a young child of about three wading into the water and wanting to go farther. The other was when you were younger, knocking your alphabet blocks out the window so that your mother would take you outside. You said later you went back and your apartment number was 2C—that has a nice symbolism.

bl: Well, yes, that's right. Those events took place at the Orienta Apartments at Orienta Point in Mamaroneck [thirty miles north of New York City]. A couple of weeks ago I happened to be walking on a lawn that fronted on a beach on Long Island Sound close to Orienta Point. The feeling I had was close to what I had known as a three-year-old boy. I looked at the water and imagined myself walking out into it until I was up to my neck, and felt, again, the desire to go farther. I don't think I ever had this thought until now, but what a prescient involvement with letters it was, using those blocks to get outside, to get into that garden. Not to mention, as you say, a life driven by a desire to see.

I trust those childhood memories. I'm aware that other things happened which I've forgotten. You tend, I guess, to remember events that are most consistent with the direction you took. A couple of years ago I found some scrapbooks I'd made when I was six, seven, eight years old. I was astonished by the number of images I'd cut out of magazines and pasted into the scrapbooks that were about travel. What else I couldn't believe was how many planes show up, especially amphibious planes like the China Clipper, the PBY Catalina, Sikorsky Flying Boats.

The China Clipper holds together so many emotional touchstones for me—far-flung adventure, new landscapes, the miracle of landing a big plane on open water. I've lived a life based in some ways on what I put in that scrapbook, the kinds of images that are there. There are a lot of photographs of native peoples, involved in different kinds of activities—it's all there in the fantasies of that six- or seven-year-old kid.

ms: When you were three you moved from suburban New York to greater Los Angeles—it sounds like L.A. was much wilder then.

bl: I wrote a piece for the LA Weekly called "A Scary Abundance of Water." It's about my childhood in the San Fernando Valley, about geography and the history of water in the Valley; and part of it is about trauma in my childhood. It's an autobiographical piece, but it gives you a good idea of the landscape I grew up in. Back then, to the northwest, toward Chatsworth, it was open fields and braceros. To the southeast, toward Van Nuys, was where all the development was taking place. Agriculture was foundering, apartment buildings were going up, and I was living right on the crest of this wave of development that was wiping agriculture out. My emotional growth, then, took place on the border between those two very different kinds of communities. Agriculture in the San Fernando Valley came and went like a flash flood. If I remember correctly, in 1950 Los Angeles County was the most productive agricultural county in the United States. By 1960, agriculture there was vestigial—it was gone. In that microcosm you can see a lot of what has happened across the United States to rural land.

You know, when Stegner approached the idea of autobiography in Wolf Willow, he said he couldn't write an autobiography that wasn't grounded in history and geography. After I finished that piece, I thought, well, that's how I feel too.

ms: You write about raising pigeons as a child . . .

bl: This element, you know, is present throughout my life, a fascination with flight, a fascination with the lines flying birds describe. I've always responded strongly to birds and my emotional involvement with those pigeons, which was profound, is set out in that story.[1]

ms: So when you were eleven, you moved back to New York, from farms and nature into the city. From your writing, it sounds like you lost your foundation, your land, your connection to the world.

bl: I was eleven years old and a lot was going on for me. Here's this eleven-year-old kid running around in the Mojave Desert, and then months later he's studying Latin in a Jesuit prep school in New York. Twenty years after that, though, you see a guy traveling in the Arctic with Eskimos and the same guy studying anthropology journals in a library in Oregon. The same pattern is there.

I was a gung-ho Cub Scout in California and then a gung-ho Boy Scout. After my first Boy Scout meeting in New York I thought, hmmm, this isn't what Scouting is about for me. So I just dropped out of the Scouts. What I got into instead were museums and other things like the theater that were a vibrant part of that city's life. I did feel a loss—the landscape of my childhood was missing. But what I found was something equally fascinating. It was simply a more intellectual, a more aesthetic realm of experience than the physical experience of landscape in my childhood. I should say that that dual exposure predisposed me not to trust either one completely.

ms: You almost became a Trappist monk. Why didn't you choose that path?

bl: I tried twice. Once when I was a senior in high school and once after I graduated from college. I don't know that there was any clear reason why I turned away. The second time, when I was twenty-one, I was at Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery where Thomas Merton was. Monasticism was a calling, but it wasn't loud enough to have me heed it. I see some parallels between the kind of life I lead now and that kind of life. What attracted me to Gethsemane was a life of physical labor and prayer. In some sense, I have that here, cutting firewood for heat, writing. I remember saying to an interviewer in 1985 that writing is my prayer. It's morally informed. Whether I measure up or not, it's a moral act for me.

There's a certain deep longing in prayer, a longing for reunification with the Divine. That's the foundation for much religious practice: to become one again with the Divine. There's a strong leaning in some of my work toward that. I'm thinking about a story called "The Letters of Heaven" [published in Light Action in the Caribbean], a piece of historical fiction in which two sixteenth-century saints living at the same time in Lima become lovers. Five hundred years later, their love letters are discovered. Two people whose lives were devoted to God became involved with each other in a way that the Church would have condemned. Yet, for them, this was the way they lived out their faith. Their testimony, their behavior toward each other, was all about a deeper pursuit of a relationship with the Divine.

ms: Could you mention a few of the writers who have influenced you?

bl: Well, it would be a long list. The obvious ones were Steinbeck, when I was young, Melville's Moby-Dick, Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Joyce's Portrait of an Artist. Someone mentioned to me when I was in my late twenties that my fiction was Borgesian, like the work of Jorge Luis Borges. I'd never read Borges, so I began reading him. I discovered Cormac McCarthy. I read Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Stegner, Jim Crace, John Berger, Márquez, Coetzee, David Malouf.

It's hard to say what influence is. I didn't—and don't—read people to imitate them. What I want to emulate is the intensity with which certain writers work. Subliminally, maybe I am learning something about the structure of story. Mostly what I am interested in is being in contact with writers who are as enthusiastic about their work and as aware of the reader, with whom they believe they share a fate.

After I came to Oregon—I was twenty-three—I began reading much more poetry than I read when I was young. I find the form, the concision, so inspirational that I return to it again and again. I go to somebody like Philip Levine, say, to his testimony about being alive and his roots in working-class Detroit. I think he has hold of something extraordinarily powerful about American life, and I'm exhilarated every time I come across his work.

ms: Have you been influenced by Thoreau and Emerson?

bl: Not very much, frankly. Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience had a bigger impact on me than Walden did. And Emerson's is not work I encountered very often. It's logical to think that somebody like me has read a lot of John Muir or Thoreau, but that wasn't my path. What I remember, say, is Silent Spring, the extraordinary courage of this woman. Reading her as a young man of seventeen, what I was thinking was, I want to have this kind of integrity in my work. I dedicated a book to her, The Rediscovery of North America. I recalled how much I admired her testimony in the face of all of these people who were trying to discredit her. I identified a lot with Loren Eiseley, his loneliness, as I read him. He was such an island in the world. He was not a social creature. I had a lot of those feelings as a child.

In terms of people whom I identify with now, one would be Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain is a terrific book. I admired it enormously when it came out. We met in a bookstore in Boulder in 1986. He reminded me years later that he had asked me then what the difference was between Winter Count [a collection of short stories] and Arctic Dreams. And I had said to him, Arctic Dreams, that's the big rhythm. He said he never forgot that, that he had that thought in front of him all the time he was writing Cold Mountain. Focus on the big rhythm.

ms: Your work is clearly propelled by curiosity. I wonder, what are you most curious about? In your travels, what have you wanted to find out?

bl: I'm curious about the immediate surroundings of my home place. I want to know why there are more salmon here this year than there have been for the past twenty-some years. All of a sudden there is this big run of spring Chinook, so I'm curious about that. I'm curious about an osprey nest on the other side of the river that was knocked out in a storm five years ago, because now a breeding pair seem interested in rebuilding there. I'm curious how long that's going to take. I'm curious about bears who come through here.

When I travel, I'm curious about everything. When I was working on Arctic Dreams, I remember letting the research go on for about two years before I developed an outline for the book. I knew by developing an outline I was going to narrow the field of my curiosity, so I let curiosity be the fuel until I thought, OK, I'm drowning. I need an outline here. I need a boat.

The kind of curiosity writers have is not unusual. What may be unusual is that writers tend to push that curiosity, to be driven. I have no sense of reserve when it comes to wanting to know something. I remember when I was a kid in New York, a friend and I were walking past an exotic automobile, an Aston Martin or a Ferrari double-parked on Park Avenue. I immediately left the sidewalk, walked around the vehicle, looked in the windows. My friend said, my God, what are you doing? I said, I'm looking at the car. He said, you shouldn't do that; people just don't do that. I said, maybe they don't. I do.

Another New York friend said a few years ago, it's so clear you're not from around here, you're always looking up. He said people in New York don't look up. You look up at the buildings. You look up at the sky. I'm curious about all this, I told him. It's a hunger. I want to feed it.

When I drive anywhere, I don't have the radio on, I don't have a CD going. I always want to be watching out the window. I've driven this road [along the McKenzie River] thousands of times in thirty-three years, but there's always something going on that I've never seen before and I want to know what it is. When I sit out there on the deck every summer, reading, an insect I've never seen before always ambles across that table.

These are all signs to pay attention, to stay awake. I sometimes say the first rule of everything—including writing—is to pay attention. To actively pay attention you've got to be curious all the time. There's a line in "Flight" where I admire a pilot's ability to perform this repetitious preflight checklist. I couldn't do that. My mind would wander. Is that bird going to stay there at the edge of the runway or fly right into us? I have the discipline to close everything else out, but not unflagging discipline for rote work. That's both the risk and the blessing when you're doing research. You can suddenly be distracted by what seems extraneous to somebody else.

ms: Do you travel alone?

bl: I don't want somebody along with me when I'm doing research because I can't explain why I want to do certain things. Why do you want to go over there? I have no idea, except I know I'll find something. Curiosity is a very powerful pry bar to get into places that you intuit are going to be rewarding.

ms: When you talk about how you approach a place, you say you listen. It's not constant motion, it's not even recording . . .

bl: It's being present. I remember this Nunamiut Eskimo man I mention in Of Wolves and Men, Justus Mekiana. I said to him, when you go to a place you've never been, what do you do? He said, I listen. That was his lesson for me: that's what I should be doing, not talking, listening.

Another dimension of my work now is public speaking. Public presentation is all about talking instead of listening. You spend time listening, and you create a story out of it, and then you get up on stage and you're a talker. You're not a listener anymore. If you're not careful, you can begin to think that you're somebody, and if that happens it can easily harm your work. I don't want to lose the habit of listening. I don't want to close out the voices that tell me what I don't know. The temptation is there, later in your life, to think you know what's going on. You don't, no more than anybody else. That's why the library is full of books.

ms: What has drawn you to connect with indigenous and aboriginal people, and what have been the most important things that you've learned from them?

bl: I've gained a more acceptable—to me—understanding of the responsibilities of the storyteller. I've learned to exist comfortably in the world of comparative ways of knowing, without trying to say that one is superior to another. I've learned to watch animals with less judgment and presupposition than I would have brought to the field if I'd had no experience with native peoples. I've learned about the importance of elders, about where elders fit in society and about why groups of people survive over thousands of years. By developing a sense of respect for them, I've learned how to develop a sense of respect for everything alive. I've learned to tell myself the world knows way more than I do.

ms: That things are more complex than we ever thought?

bl: Absolutely. I've learned the shortcomings of my own education. I've been exposed to many Western ideas. I love and respect that knowledge, but native people helped me understand it as a way of knowing. It's internally consistent, it's engaging, but it's not the whole truth. No one can tell the whole truth.

ms: When you mentioned you've been here for thirty-three years, I thought of a report in this morning's Eugene newspaper saying that in the latter half of the last decade, about half the people in the United States had moved.

bl: My goodness.

ms: We are a society in constant motion. I wonder what you've gained by choosing a place and committing to it.

bl: I'm comfortable here, and the things I think I need to know I get from here. A habit of permanent location in a time of dislocation is also an opportunity to learn about something we're abandoning. I'm concerned about the rootlessness of so much activity in American culture. My allegiance to this place offers me something I can't explain, which one day I may or may not write about.

ms: Does your commitment to this place help you understand the world when you travel?

bl: As a certain kind of place-anchored writer, yes. Other writers are more purposefully peripatetic. They don't feel that they live anywhere; they live in a time of wandering and refugees. Pico Iyer is an example, like Salman Rushdie, of someone writing penetratingly about the life of rootlessness. My way is another way. I miss my home when I'm gone. I miss my place, and in some way my place misses me. I'm integral here in some way. I feel wanted here.

[We take a break and Lopez shows me some of the artwork in the house: paintings by Rick Bartow, a mask by Lillian Pitt, pottery by Alyce Flitcraft, and some prints by Alan Magee.]

bl: Most everything here was made by friends. When you talk about being tied to a place, I look around at these decades of gifts and feel a sense of community. I've grouped the books of several friends in each room, so when I walk into a room there's all of David Quammen's work, or all of Wendell Berry's work, or Annie Proulx's work. When I go through periods of self doubt, feeling my work is no good, I'm borne out of that preoccupation with myself by looking at all this other work.

ms: Our modern view of nature seems to be something we go and see, not something we're part of. Maybe we go to Yosemite and see some animals. I remember being in Belize a few years ago and meeting indigenous Maya who were no longer allowed to live in their ancestral homes because their forests had been declared national parks. Indigenous peoples are so involved with nature, yet our society typically views itself as separate.

bl: I think this preconception is going to prove economically and politically disastrous. "Unenlightened" hardly covers it. The central distinction between indigenous people and a culture like ours is that they continue to participate in the drama of life. We have attempted to step out of that drama. We believe ourselves not only separate from nature but that we can actually direct it. We refer to components of the Earth as resources rather than as entities, life systems nearly entire unto themselves. For many people, the Earth has no meaning until they find utility in it. Coal is without meaning unless it's to fire a machine. A gazelle is without meaning unless it's eaten.

What we're going to find out in the next hundred or so years is whether consciousness is maladaptive. I would guess it could prove so, meaning the organism won't survive. The notion that if we fail then as a consequence life in general will fail, however, is a non sequitur. Signs in hotel bathrooms urge us to help save Mother Earth by reusing the towels. You can do things that will help you survive as a species, but Mother Earth is going to be here long after we're gone.

ms: But we as a species do seem unique in that we've harnessed such overwhelming power, nuclear weapons for example. We can take ourselves down stunningly quickly and cause a lot of other suffering and extinction among fellow species.

bl: We can. We compare with that bolide that smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-five million years ago. There's no denying that. But even that impact didn't destroy the planet; it just triggered the Cretaceous extinction, apparently. There are some choices people can make that would ensure a better life for their children and grandchildren. What this would cost is giving up a few comforts, which, at least in this country, most people don't seem inclined to do.

ms: It seems some people not only don't care about despoiling nature, they seem actively, and almost angrily, eager to conquer and damage it. That's unfathomable to me.

bl: I think this tendency is an expression of fear, fear of not having sufficient control. Modern culture makes each of us so anxious about being able to control our own fate that any opportunity to control the environment around us becomes inordinately attractive. People pursue money because they believe in a folklore that says with money you can control your environment. If you believe, further, that anything and anybody can be bought or sold, then the more money you have, the more you believe you can control your fate. This is naive.

ms: The Arctic has probably changed a great deal since you first visited there thirty years ago.

bl: Outside the worldwide effects of global warming and the impact of chemical pollution, I think the most profound changes have taken place in the villages, with the rearrangement of a traditional social order and the growth of consumerism with its destructive compulsions. Part of the reason I was drawn to the Arctic is that at that time—1976—it was a relatively stable environment. That's not the case anymore. When I updated Of Wolves and Men in 2004, I wrote mostly about wolf reintroduction, the one phenomenon there that's new—what lies behind reintroduction, what motivates it, and how people feel about it. The idea that I could update Arctic Dreams, however, doesn't make any real sense. That book represents a point of view about the relationship between landscape and imagination. The early chapters have to do with the scientific imagination, the middle section of the book with the literary imagination, and the last third of the book deals with the historical imagination, how we imagine the entrance of Parry into the Arctic and how the subsequent exploration or invasion, if you will, culminates in the development of gas and oil fields.

I don't think of the Arctic as a place that's changed as much as I think about how people's awareness of it has changed. To my chagrin, after Arctic Dreams came out, a growing number of adventure travel companies began offering trips into the Arctic. One guy told me he built his entire business around reaction to the book in Canada.

I once wrote a piece called "The Stone Horse" [published in Crossing Open Ground].For the first time in my life I was deliberately vague about the location of a place I was writing about. I'd come to believe that travel writers were now faced with making ethical decisions about how clear to be about where they were. Part of the reason remote places change today is that so many people show up and make their presence known. We have to ask ourselves as a culture—and certainly travel writers have to ask themselves—what am I promoting here, and what are my responsibilities? At this point in my life I have doubts about what good is to be achieved by going to very remote places and creating such an aura about them that it compels people to go there. It's troubling to me to realize what I have participated in. I often think the world would be better off if we just left these remote places to the people who live there.

ms: Do you think there's something to be said for the writer as ambassador? Maybe it would be good for you to go but not for a thousand people to go. Maybe you could bring back an understanding of this place.

bl: You can't control what people do, and I am suspicious of the idea of the writer as somebody who gets to go someplace the rest of us don't. On every journey you bring something and you take something away. As a culture, we're more interested in what's there to be taken than we are aware of what we bring. You've got to bring more than money when you go to a foreign place. You have to bring a willingness not to make it over in your own terms, not to demand that people always respond, for example, by speaking English. The best way to travel is to make proposals, not impositions.

It's interesting to me that people who say they are searching for an exotic experience often have already figured out what the exotic experience is going to be. The "exotic travel" is so tightly scheduled that, for some people, it's just another version of a theme park. They don't want any surprises.

I wrote a piece for the Georgia Review [Fall 2003] called "Southern Navigation." Like all travel writers, I occasionally get letters of invitation from adventure travel companies asking if I'd be interested in giving shipboard lectures, and I said yes to this one. I wrote in part about the strange world of the ship, with its five-star meals and all its creature comforts. On the other side of those view-lounge windows, though, I myself had been in very bad circumstances. Cold, really struggling against tough weather. So this piece was about following in the footsteps of Shackleton, from Elephant Island to Stromness on South Georgia, what kind of feelings I had, knowing I had experienced similar physical hardship but that I was in an environment now with minimal risk, where everything was looked after. It's hard in an environment like that to get a deep appreciation of what Shackleton went through for another reason—because the temporal component is removed. You can't get what took months to unfold on Elephant Island and South Georgia, climbing over the spine of that island, in six or eight days.

ms: You wrote an essay about removing dead animals from the road. When I see these animals, I want to get them off the road and give them some dignity. Then I think, I can't stop; it's unsanitary and unsafe. But when I'm on my bicycle, not insulated by glass and steel, sometimes I see these poor creatures and I have to stop and move them to the side. What enables you to break through that lack of connection that we have when we're speeding along from one point to another?

bl: Stopping for the dead is a technique of awareness. By setting up certain regular practices, you can ensure that you do not lose touch with life. If I want to write about the connection between culture and place, I've got to attend to those attachments. My taking an animal off the road or calling Oregon Fish and Wildlife yesterday to get that sign for the salmon—it's all part of the same thing.

In "The Naturalist" [published in Vintage Lopez], one of the questions I wanted to answer was: What is a naturalist? What does that mean today? Part of what it means to me is to stay connected. Keep your hand on the real living Earth. Otherwise what you have to say is not going to be grounded in anything but another abstraction. Ultimately, a culture like that becomes completely solipsistic—its references are all to itself. I want to be in the woods every day because every day there I'll see something I've never seen before, and that's a reminder that there's no way you're ever going to know everything about being there.

I want to confront my own ignorance every day. Getting out of the car to get an animal off the road, it's a discipline, to stay present to what's going on around me. As a visitor in traditional societies, it's virtually never the case that you tell a group of hunters something they don't already know. They will listen to what you have to say, though, not solely to be polite but because their minds are always open to the idea that you could have seen something that nobody had ever seen before. That openness to the numinous dimension of landscape is something good to cultivate.

ms: In "A Voice," the first essay in About This Life, you meet a man whose teenage daughter wants to become a writer. You give him three pieces of advice.

bl: Yes, tell your daughter to read widely, I said to him, and be aware that you can undermine her desire to read by making value judgments about what she's reading. Let her make the choices. Second, help your daughter to understand that someone can teach her to write, but to have something to say, to make a contribution to the community as a writer, you have to be somebody, you have to speak from a position that you are clear about. So I said to him, it's more important for your daughter to be somebody than that she be a writer. The last thing was to help her get out of town, to get away from the familiar.

Texas Tech is working on an exhibit now to be called something like A Working Writer. They'll use my sketchbooks from the field, my notebooks, and some of my field gear so that younger people can focus on something other than the writer's reputation. Here's the typewriter, here's the stack of annotated research, and here are five drafts of Arctic Dreams open to the same page so they can read all the handwritten corrections. The idea is to show young people that this is work, physical and mental labor.

ms: Have you made sacrifices to pursue this work?

bl: Choosing the life I did, I've lost some things that from time to time cause me the deepest kind of anguish. Foremost among those are my social relations with other people. No one is comfortable exploring this topic with a stranger, but the truth is, if you're devoted to your work your family is going to pay a price. How you cope with that—opting for the work or opting to maintain the long-term stability of a marriage, a family—is a singular measure of character.

I've lived in this house for almost thirty-four years, but I know relatively few people here. I'm not involved in the fabric of day-to-day life on the McKenzie, in part because my work is not local. My life is not working in the woods. If it were, I'd be logging every day with people whose lives I shared and whom I went to church with. I don't have that. I've chosen to do work that takes me a long way away. And when I come home, what I really crave is privacy.

I've chosen a life that has made it impossible or very difficult for me to remain fully engaged in the life of a family. As a consequence, there have been times in my life when I've been very lonely. I can't look at paying this price, though, as having made a sacrifice. Because you choose one thing, you don't get another. I miss the pleasures of daily human contact and company. I'm in close touch with a community of people spread all over the country, all over the world, but I don't see them every day. I love my work. It's the good I have to offer. I don't regret what I've done, but I have gone through times when I wondered what it would have been like if I had chosen community over being the kind of outrider that I am. If I had chosen a monastery or a community of people to stay with, if I had chosen a conventional family life where I married somebody and had children. But those were choices I did not make.

My sense of self-worth comes from meeting my own expectations and from an acknowledgment from strangers that the work I have done has been useful to them. I am as ordinary as the next fellow, so an award or formal recognition gives me a sense of accomplishment, but you can't really get a sense of self-worth out of an award, an honorary doctorate, or something like that. Self-worth comes from the acknowledgment of other people, a letter from a stranger, unsolicited, that says your work has meant something.

I see my life in a very traditional way. I live in a modern era, but my sense of obligation and responsibility is traditional. You use your gift to help people achieve what they're trying to do, to go where their imaginations are leading them.

ms: Is there one quotation in literature that stands out, that has been a guidepost for you?

bl: There's nothing I would use to summarize my beliefs, but in Moby-Dick there's a chapter called "The Quarter-Deck" in which Ahab gives his reasons for pursuing the white whale. There's a line in there about breaking through the pasteboard mask. That line has occurred to me repeatedly. In some way I see my life as trying to break through a pasteboard mask, to destroy an illusion, to get at an important reality, because it's the reality, not the illusion, that should be trusted. The thing I am most fearful of in my culture is self-delusion: the self-delusion that deifies progress, the self-delusion that supports the superiority of one culture over another, and the self-delusions of righteousness.

So, breaking through that pasteboard mask is what I'm after. That's why I pull the truck over and get out and get the animal off the road. The pasteboard mask obscures a deeper meaning. It leads you to believe it doesn't make any difference. I just want to keep pushing through, to make sure I don't get trapped. It's important to say that I don't stop for every animal—there's something in a particular animal that calls me and I pull over. Sometimes it's so strong that I'll drive two or three miles down the road and can't shake it off. I'll make a turn, go all the way back, and take care of it.

The cultivation of insensitivity, of indifference, is a component of our culture. It's easy to become remote and detached, to be reinforced in that behavior. It's okay not to love. That's a very strong message in American advertising, which tells you: Don't worry about other people, take care of yourself—and here's a little secret: other people are too complicated for you to be wasting your time on. So if you just have this beer, this car, this vacation, then the world will be under your control. You'll get the things you need, to get you where you're going.

No one breaks that pasteboard mask to destroy the illusion you're actually going anywhere. You're in a little box, eating the popcorn consumer culture throws at you. You have one piece of tasty popcorn and you want another. I go back to Moby-Dick. That novel begins, "Call me Ishmael." That means: we're going to be on a first-name basis. I am going to be your companion. You're going to be in this with me. I want your trust. I'll try to earn it. We'll look at this thing together. Never in that novel are you held prisoner by the limits of Melville's imagination. The best kind of writing opens up a place sufficient to the reader's imagination.

My saying I want to be the reader's companion instead of the reader's authority—implicit in that is my knowing there are many readers far more imaginative than I am. I want to make the place where they can fully exercise their imagination. Not to do that is to cooperate in the building of this pasteboard world. It would be like saying, OK, Michael, look around the room, anything you want to look at is OK, but you can't go outside, into the environment I don't control.

One way I work with my house is to leave the doors and windows open for weeks on end during the summer. I want a sense of animals moving through it, that these walls are temporary. I want to be able to go out the window into the world. I want things to pass back and forth.

ms: We've covered some dark subjects in this interview but I recall that you've referred to your body of work as a literature of hope. Do you feel hopeful and can you distinguish between hope and optimism?

I'm not optimistic. Optimism for me is about examining the evidence on the table, and the evidence on the table is bad. The way we are conducting ourselves as a world culture around limited supplies of fresh water is bad. Federal initiatives to address global warming, heavy metals pollution, corporate avarice? Bad. The degree to which we are dependent on prescription drugs as a culture? Bad. So optimistic, no way.

Hopeful, yes. The reason is the staggering power of the human imagination to circumvent every kind of roadblock. I have to believe that imagining a story will somehow help people to imagine a way around difficulty. And that by encouraging a sense of hope, some woman, some man, will exercise their imagination in a way we could not have foreseen and that will be our blessing and our release from pessimism. Somebody will see a different way to do things. Stories, in some way, work as blueprints for the imagination.

I believe in the power of the human imagination to triumph over all these issues, like the two-hundred-some-year failure of the United States to realize the dream of a Jeffersonian republic. We fail again and again and again, but we are still at it. We are still determined to create a society that is equitable and just and opens the door for all people to imagine their lives in ways that will create a sense of possibility. So when I say a literature of hope, I mean a literature that gives you the opportunity to be hopeful about your own circumstances or circumstances for your family or your larger community.

1. At press time the story was online at: www.laweekly.com/ink/02/08/features-lopez.php. [Barry Lopez, "A Scary Abundance of Water," LA Weekly, January 11, 2002.]