Against The Current

Barry Lopez On Writing About Nature And The Nature Of Writing

The beauty of Barry Lopez’s writing is in the details. On the first page of Arctic Dreams (Vintage), he writes about walking among birds in the high Arctic 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.” His response is to bow to these birds, a gesture of prayerful respect and humble appreciation.

Lopez’s first nonfiction book, 1978’s Of Wolves and Men (Scribner), examines humanity’s relationship to the wolf. The book helped reshape Americans’ attitudes toward this native predator and likely played a role in the reintroduction of the wolf in the Northwest. Since then Lopez has produced more than a dozen finely crafted books. In “A Voice,” the introductory essay of his 1998 collection About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (Vintage), Lopez recalls having pushed his alphabet blocks out the window at the age of three so his mother would have to take him out to the garden to retrieve them. It’s a richly symbolic vignette — words propelling the author into nature — that foretells a life of conscious exploration. It’s no accident that About This Life has only 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.”

Lopez spent much of his boyhood in the wild creeks and vast fields of the mid-twentieth-century San Fernando Valley. For his tenth birthday a family friend gave him a flock of twenty homing pigeons. Watching the birds soar and dive was “a source of indescribable joy,” Lopez writes in the essay “A Voice.” “I would turn slowly under them in circles of glee.” When he was eleven, his family moved to New York City, and he studied at a Jesuit prep school in Manhattan. Though he missed, to the point of grief, the coyotes, snakes, and other creatures of the valley, he relished the academic challenges of his new urban environment. He devoured novels by John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, and others and went on to college at Notre Dame. As a young man Lopez considered becoming a Trappist monk and spent time at Gethsemani, the monastery where the author Thomas Merton lived. Though Lopez ultimately didn’t choose the monastery, he views his writing as morally informed and sees parallels between the monastic life and the writer’s life.

Lopez settled on the west slope of the Cascade Range along the McKenzie River, east of Eugene, Oregon, in 1970. He continued to maintain this home alone after a thirty-year marriage ended in the midnineties. He has long been committed to a domestic partner and her four grown children who live nearby. His home is decorated with friends’ artwork, and the dining table where we conducted this interview is made of black walnut cut and milled by Lopez and a friend.

The evening before our meeting, Lopez asked if I could pick up a sign he’d requested from the Eugene office of the Oregon 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 autumnal equinox. Lopez poured me a steaming mug of herbal tea, and we sat down to talk. 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 water, sending out tiny waves in all directions.

Shapiro: What are you working on now?

Lopez: Usually I’m uncomfortable talking about works in progress, but I can tell you what I’m doing besides writing. Lately I feel a sense of urgency, a sense of national threat, and because of that, I’ve become more involved with higher education, with public presentations and collaborative work, and with trying to advance the work of younger writers. For someone who’s not a social activist, I seem suddenly to be up to my neck in such things.

Shapiro: Political things?

Lopez: Yes. I really think the direction the country is headed is self-destructive: the psychological relief we pursue with consumption, the compulsion we have for distraction, the degree to which lying is now acceptable in business and politics.

Maybe what I’m really working on is grappling with my own reputation as a writer and what to do with it. In a very small way I’ve become something of a public figure. 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 writers who are devoted to story and language, and who have serious questions about the fate of humanity.

The main focus of my written work now is a large nonfiction project, 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 Australia, and Antarctica. It further develops the theme of Arctic Dreams, which is a relationship between landscape and imagination.

I’ve also recently published a set of interrelated short stories called Resistance (Knopf). 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 each of 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.

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