We listen back to a conversation we recorded in March 2019 with famed Oregon writer and essayist Barry Lopez. He died of cancer on Christmas Day in 2020. We spoke to him about his final work, “Horizon,” which chronicles his decades of travel all around the world. It’s a book full of wonder and sadness, hope and despair, about the natural world — and the way humans are changing it.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re going to listen back today to a conversation we had in March of 2019 with the legendary Oregon writer Barry Lopez. Lopez died of prostate cancer on Christmas Day in 2020. Pay attention to small things, Barry Lopez would urge himself and so often he did. He stared at rocks, at model ships and silver coins, at dead animals and live ones. And after paying attention to these small things, he would think about big ones, about empire and capitalism, about the genocide of indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures, about cruelty and despair, but also about beauty and kindness and hope.
All of this was wrapped up in Lopez’s final book, “Horizon.” It’s an autobiographical reflection on a career devoted to traveling to every corner of the world, from the poles to the equator and mountains to deserts. What is going to happen to us, he asked. What is our fate if we do not learn to speak to each other over our cultural divides with an indifferent natural world bearing down on us? I started our conversation back in 2019 by asking Lopez about a place he wrote a lot in “Horizon” which was Cape Foulweather on the Oregon Coast.
Barry Lopez: Cape Foulweather was a place that I was marginally interested in because it’s James Cook’s landfall so I was mildly curious about what it actually looked like. So I was going to go and stand in the place he was looking at but not looking to the east from his ship. I was going to be looking from the west at his ship. And the place began to grow on me because it was a clear cut that I was camped in and the wounds of the world were apparent where I was camped on 10 or 12 occasions. And its presence, it’s a battered landscape, it feels like now this is what we’re living with now and then out of that, the book grows.
Miller: You describe looking out at the horizon from this perch, looking out at Cape Foulweather and the horizon, the Pacific beyond with binoculars, sometimes just your naked eyes for hours on end. What are you looking at? What are you looking for?
Lopez: I don’t think my way of writing is to search for something that I could frame as an answer. Most of it is just sitting and watching and waiting and if you do that enough, eventually something you never thought of will emerge and that ties to something else. I don’t write quickly and I don’t think very quickly. I watch for things that most of us ignore–not to put myself in a superior position–but I’m after what’s deep, which comes up out of a scene and winks at you every once in a while.
Miller: It seems like you’re talking about what has popularly become known as mindfulness. Is that a phrase that you like?
Lopez: No. [laughter] I don’t like names for landscapes that take a long time to get to. I mean, it’s wonderful if you can say that you are mindful, but I think you should be, as well as you can manage it, living in that frame of mind all the time. So, I’m just an ordinary person really. I bring a kind of intensity to what I’m doing when it’s time to work. I can clown around and be funny and lighthearted and whatnot and in moments when that’s appropriate. But when I think of work, what is your work? My work is to turn on the intensity control knob and bring it up to max out and just sit there with it.
Miller: You write at one point, “I have never in my life gotten quite enough of the Pacific.”
Lopez: Yes.
Miller: Have you gotten enough of other places you’ve been to?
Lopez: No. Someone would say, well, you’ve traveled all over the world. You’ve been here and there. Well, blah, blah, blah, Timbuktu. [Laughter] And where’s your favorite place? And I say the same thing. It’s my home. I’ve been living in the same house on the Mackenzie River, 40 miles west of Eugene for 49 years. And the reason I say that it’s my place to go to or sentimentally my favorite place, is because that’s where I’ve had the longest conversation with a physical place. And I know as the years go by, there’s always something I never thought of or imagined that will blossom there one day when I least expect it. I could give you an example of that.
Miller: Please.
Lopez: Reading in the middle of summer in not always bright sunshine in the deep woods but sitting in a chair reading, every summer I will see a bug I’ve never seen before trundling across the white pages and I think . . .
Miller: Literally on the book?
Lopez: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, books get in the way of where they want to go and so they’ve got to go over it. But it reminds you or me every summer that you will never get to the bottom of this place or any other place for that matter.
Miller: You mentioned that even in the middle of summer, it’s dark there because you’re in the big woods. How does that tie to your sense that that is more home-like than any place you’ve lived? I mean, the fact that you’re in a kind of enclosure.
Lopez: Do you know the expression “go to ground?”
Miller: Yeah, but I think it is like a gopher going to its hole to go away from a predator. Is that right?
Lopez: It’s right. It’s fine. I do think that I seek a situation where there are fewer distractions except the one distraction is, what am I trying to do? What am I thinking about? How can I think better about that? So it’s why I say at some point in the book, I’m always drawn to the tundra, to the ice in Antarctic, to being at sea where it’s a large tabula rasa and I can begin to take what’s in my head and put it out there in that space and then start walking through like you’re walking through a museum.
So in the studio where I write, I never take food in there. There’s no telephone in there. It’s my own way of reminding myself that you didn’t get to go to Antarctica and these other places. So if I get to go, if that’s how things fall out, I have to pay attention there, I’ve got to be ethically responsible to a reader who didn’t get to go to say this is what I saw as best I can say it. What do you think?
Miller: Going back to the time you spent in Cape Foulweather, the weather, especially for one couple-day trip that you took there, it really figures, probably you went there because a huge storm was coming.
Lopez: That’s right.
Miller: Why was it important for you to be there?
Lopez: I wanted a storm in it. There is a feeling I think all of us have of wanting to fully experience something you’ve never experienced before. So I’m drawn to that kind of thing and the fact that it was high winds and lots of rain and was just what I was looking for.
Miller: I’m not sure I agree with you when you say that everybody is looking for things they haven’t experienced before. A lot of people, whether we acknowledge it or not, we seek out what we know, what’s familiar, because that’s comfortable.
Lopez: Sure.
Miller: Well, yeah, but you’re different.
Lopez: It looks like it. [Laughter] What I want to steer clear of is that this is a search for bravado.
Miller: Like you’re a storm chaser, right?
Lopez: That’s not what I am. And I’ve gone into things where I’m really at my own edge. Other people I’m with have been doing this before. But for me, it’s brand new and I’m not trying to prove anything, I’m not trying to triumph in any way. But if I’m writing the story that I think I’m writing, I have to be inside those difficulties that the people I’m writing about endure every day they go out there. So I end up getting credit for being a lot braver, a lot stronger or whatever it is than I really am.
Miller: As you mentioned, you set up the camp in the coast range overlooking the Pacific in a clear cut. It’s a place, you mentioned it as a wound, a lot of people see it as ugly, as an example of environmental degradation. Others see it as utilitarian, as what’s left behind when we take advantage of a renewable resource and then replace it with a plantation. How do you see this particular version of a human-created landscape?
Lopez: As a wound and it’s not about economy, it’s not about scenery. It’s the evidence of a brutal relationship with the known earth and it’s the brutality which is unnecessary that really upsets me. I would say at the same time, it’s very late in the game to express outrage [about clear cuts] as opposed to doing something about it. I cannot get over the fact that 20 years after this conversation with you, neither you nor I might be here, that we will have brought this level of aggressive destruction against the earth to such a fever pitch, that there won’t be any place for us. There will be for other animals, but apparently not for us.
Miller: This gets to stuff we’re going to be talking about as we go. That sense of honest fatalism is threaded throughout the book. I want to turn now though to some music because there’s also beauty and wonder in this book as well as I mentioned. You note that you often take music along with you to listen to it, in various places. In general, how do you choose what you want to hear in any particular place?
Lopez: I want to find something appropriate to the moment, I guess what that might be. I say in the book when I went to camp for a while on Skraeling Island in the High Arctic, I chose the obvious things which was music that was akin to or generated by the kind of place that I was going to, something related to that landscape. And the longer I stay there, the more I might find that, well, this was wrong headed and this is wrong headed, but there might be something in my backpack of tapes that fits right in.
Miller: Let’s have a listen to one of the pieces that you brought to, to the Arctic, to Skraeling Island. This is a piece called “The Swan of Ella.” I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly by Sibelius. Let’s have a listen.
[Music plays]
Can you describe the vistas that you saw though?
Lopez: They come up in my mind right now as the landscape of the end game in Finnish mythology. And I didn’t feel that kind of spiritual darkness when I was camped in what’s called a polar desert. It’s far too far north to have trees. Its summers are moderately warm and winters actually are moderately cold, I mean, like 25 and 30 below, but not as cold as it gets in the interior because it has the moderating influence of water nearby. What I’m looking for with music is how did Sibelius in his mind see a relationship between a real place and tonal values and the way in which he would assemble those values to create this thing we’re listening to in the background? And how true might it have been?
Miller: You’re interested in symbols and metaphor at approximations of a way an artist takes the world around them and turns it into art. Is that a fair way to put it?
Lopez: I don’t know. Let’s see. What I’m looking for is I know that I’m in a patterned place. It has color and line, sonic values. There’s a sonic landscape there and I assemble them in a certain way because I’m white and 74-years old and male. And I’ve got all those organizing principles that take something unknown to me and organize it in a way where it’s reprehensible. What I want to find with the music is how did somebody else see this and put it together and create musical equivalents? If I do that, then I have the two poles between which I can tie a thread and have it vibrate. And when that happens, then ideas I didn’t have at all nor maybe did Sibelius will emerge.
I’m looking for the music to trigger some assemblage of sensation that I couldn’t have had without the music.
Miller: You also write about a very different musical experience in this Sibelius. You came up with the idea of playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That’s the famous one that has the “Ode to Joy” in it. You want to play it in an old Thule Camp that they’re a now extinct group of people who are indigenous to the Arctic. What was your plan in the beginning?
Lopez: My plan was to share something that in Western culture we value, we put it up on the top shelf. This is the best we can do, the Beethoven Ninth. And I didn’t realize until I hiked to this campsite that was about 900-years old and the ceremonial house there had been excavated so it’s easy for me to go there and imagine these people sitting on the stone benches. And I came in and tried to explain that I believe that all cultures have dimensions of beauty that are comprehensible to most people.
Miller: And you played a tape recorder. Let’s have a listen just to the beginning of this Beethoven Symphony that you played for the then gone still, obviously now gone, Thule people,
[Music plays]
What was it like to play that?
Lopez: Humiliating? In my enthusiasm to take my little tape recorder and crawl out of my sleeping bag and cross this one mountain and descend into their camp. I thought this is my gesture of respect for Thule culture and people. And I want to stand here naked and put something really great out to offer it. And I was about that far into the first movement when I realized how incredibly racist it was of me to imagine my whole life during different periods immersed in traditional cultures. How could I have been so stupid as to think that I could bring something in that would engage their imaginations. It was a humiliating thing to do. And in the structure of “Horizon,” I thought when I sat down to write the book, you have to talk about this, you have to show in detail what a terrible essentially racist thing this was to do. You meant well. But no, because….
Miller: Did you believe at the time that the spirits of people were hearing this?
Lopez: Yes. And I felt the glare, if you will, of those people that were sitting ghostly in that ceremonial space.
Miller: What do you wish you had done instead?
Lopez: I wished that I’d crossed the mountain that night, left the recorder behind me and sat with them and said nothing.
Miller: Did you want to ask them questions?
Lopez: No, it would have been impertinent.
Miller: So just being?
Lopez: Just sitting with them and if one of them chose to say something that would be great, but to actually interview them, you do want to do that because you’re thinking about how things work in your world. Surely I wanted to ask them about the traces of life that I dug for in that archaeological site every day. I would want to say, who did this? What did it mean? And what other things do you carve? What materials do you use? On and on and on. But so much of understanding the human past is being present without a plan, being present without an agenda. And that very act of crossing the mountain and descending into their camp and telling them something that was on my mind was disrespectful and it was profoundly naive.
Miller: One of the themes that runs through the book in a lot of different places where you visit is just how much has been lost because of the genocide of Indigenous peoples all around the world. And you focus not just on the violence against human beings, but on the loss of knowledge. You write this, “What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of.”
The implication here is that in many cases, we are never even going to know what we have had a hand in destroying?
Lopez: Correct.
Miller: What do you do with that?
Lopez: You have to live with it. I think to some degree in the West, we believe that things can be repaired and recovered and part of maturing in a Western culture is realizing that what you threw away is gone forever. These people, their ideas, their way of seeing a way around universal difficulty. How does every culture handle adultery, for example, which is whatever you think of it as an act, it is a disruption, it’s like tearing a piece of cloth. How do you repair it? You can re-weave it but you can’t do it overnight. You can’t do it with technology.
So often we think, what is the technological answer to global climate change? Guess what? There isn’t any. And unless you can make that switch from, “we can engineer our way out” to a place where you’re thinking, “well, maybe we shouldn’t be waiting for some hallelujah story or some profoundly informed engineer who can give us some biochemical answer to the problems that plague us.” Until you get to the place where you realize it’s up to you and your imagination, you’re at a dead end, and we could be there. We could arrive shortly at a place where we see that in the hominid line, the development of an imagination was maladaptive and the species disappeared.
Miller: Meaning we were smart enough to take fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them to enable all kinds of aspects of culture and technological culture that we have enjoyed the fruits of, but we were not “smart enough” to deal with the repercussions of doing that?
Lopez: Not only that, but previous cultures have seen deeply enough into the relationship between place and people, or humanity and the physical places in which it defines itself as a species, to make part of their cultural approach “don’t touch, don’t touch that.” Huxley, I can’t remember which of the Huxley, said once when he was in the presence of someone who was for his audience elucidating how primitive traditional people are. And he was saying, well, they’re full of superstition. And Huxley said, superstition is not the right word, the right word is a technique of awareness. So these cultures had a way of consciously paying attention to what was going on and remembering to remember.
So the whole huge structure of our place in the world was examined repeatedly and it always came with a caveat which is that some things should not be touched, just leave them alone. We touch everything, we wipe out peoples, we wipe out ideas, we ban religions and look where it’s gotten us.
Miller: You actually have a small concrete example of different ways of seeing and that sort of the Western view that you and I, and many of our listeners come from, and an Indigenous view. And in this case, this is about when you saw a grizzly bear eating a caribou carcass or sitting on a caribou carcass. Can you describe what you saw and what other people you talked to saw and were experiencing?
Lopez: The awareness that I had in that moment was that if I had been who I am 20 years ago and come to the situation, I would have missed most of what was going on because I was so interested when I was young in having it have meaning and have a point to it and have what you might say would be in your memory would be the one picture that reminded you of this incident. And after years of traveling with traditional people, I saw the shortfall there that I had been to many places, I thought, but actually hadn’t been there at all because I was paying more attention to what I was thinking than I was to what was in front of me. So it’s years of instruction that led me to see the incident in an entirely different way.
So that section that you’re referring to is early in the book. And I’m just trying to offer the thought that not only do we not all see things differently, but because we do, we arrive at sometimes profoundly different cultures. Western people raised in Western cultures use language too casually from my point of view. They reduce an incident to language so quickly that the subtle parts of it are often lost before they are even recognized. And I had this in front of me in dozens of examples before I understood when you’re traveling with traditional people in their landscape, hardly anybody talks. Why? It’s because when you create language about an incident, you reduce the incident to a place where it has meaning instead of a place where it stimulates. So you just let the whole day filter through you. And then maybe in the evening somebody says something about something you saw. But if you do it, often enough, you realize nobody’s talking about the things that you as an individual saw, they’re talking about the things that you missed. And so you ask yourself if I wasn’t trying to assign meaning to everything that I’ve encountered, I would see a very different landscape here.
Miller: Barry Lopez lived and wrote on Oregon’s Mackenzie River for 50 years in a house. He shared it with his wife, the writer Debra Gwartney. Much of their property burned down in September of 2020. Lopez died of cancer three months later. Lopez was the author of 16 books and the recipient of numerous awards, fellowships and prizes. His last book called “Horizon” focused on his travels to six different parts of the world: The Arctic Circle, Antarctica, Australia, Kenya, the Galapagos Islands and the coast of Oregon. But it’s not about travel per se. It’s about how these places shape the way Lopez thought about the world as a whole, our past, our present and our future.
I asked Lopez to read two sections from his book back-to-back and he started with a caveat that tells you a lot about who he was as a human being.
Lopez: Before we start, I want to say that really, I’m just somebody that got to go to all of these places. And I feel, as I said earlier, an ethical obligation to speak in a way that makes these places, I hope, comprehensible to those of us who didn’t get to go. And that I’m not unusual or larger than life. I’m just a human being who feels an obligation to a community.
Miller: Maybe you’re not larger than life, but maybe you are unusual in the way that you bring your attention to the world.
Lopez: I’m kind of fanatical about…
Miller: Not wanting to be seen as extraordinary. I think that our audience has absolutely heard that and they can make their own decisions about whether or not you are an extraordinary individual.
[Laughter]
Lopez: Okay, it’s self consciousness speaking. Okay, let’s start with this. So a panga is like a dory, small boat:
[Reading] “I rolled out of the panga and kicked hard for the dark bottom I saw below me. The bottom that came into focus, however, was not a continuation of lava flows from the shore of Bartolomé. It was a huge school of orange-eyed mullets. Before I could halt my descent, the schooling fish parted, rising up around me in the form of a hollow cylinder. As I continued downward, the fish below me parted to reveal a white sandy bottom at about 35 ft. When I turned over to look back up at the fish from below, I saw that the elongated school stretched off more than 100 ft in both directions. The lowest layer of this lens was about 5 ft off the bottom. The mullet were swimming in tight synchrony, veering and milling. Thousands of them moved in unison above me like a single thunderhead. When I needed to ascend, I put my hands together over my head like a springboard diver, kicked and started moving up through them. When I glanced down, I saw the white bottom slowly wink out beneath me and slowed my rise wherever I extended my hands. Now, the fish moved gracefully aside. When I pulled in my legs and hugged them to my chest, the fish came in closer and for a few moments, I was entirely surrounded. When the last layer of fish divided above me, I saw the white bottom of the panga through about 10 ft of water. That minute and a half with the orange eyed mullet was an experience my body as well as my mind continued to remember. Here, for me, was the edge of the miraculous. In every corner of the world there was such a resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous.”
So here’s the second reading that you referred to and again, we’re on the Yangtze River:
[Reading] “At the top of the stairs. I entered the night market. Passengers were haggling over root vegetables, turnips, onions, potatoes and merchants were shouldering their way through with plastic buckets of butchered meat. Others were carrying strings of ulcerated fish from the Yangtze water in which I had seen all manner of waste floating and to my astonishment, two endangered Yangtze river dolphins, live monkeys and other small mammals. Hedgehogs among them stared out from the confines of screened metal cages. In one booth, wicker trays of dead crickets and heaps of caterpillars were on display beneath a kind of clothes line from which dozens of sparrow-like birds hung by their feet. This was more than the atheistic scenes of medieval meat markets that Pieter Aertsen painted in the 16th century. It was the future, the years to come when we would begin killing and consuming every last living thing.”
Miller: I want to hear those back-to-back because of the contrast in them. The first one ends here was the edge of the miraculous in every corner of the world. There was such a resplendent life, unexpected, integrated, anonymous. And as we just heard, the second one ends in the future, we would begin killing and consuming every last living thing. How do you reconcile these two moments that you experienced?
Lopez: They’re reconciled for us in life. If you go and write about a place and it’s nothing but darkness and bad things, everybody knows that’s not the place. Nothing is like that. And if you write about the bright and the beautiful and the heart lifting and the soul stirring, life’s not like that either. So throughout the book, I’m trying to be honest about the darkness I encountered, but I am also trying to emphasize that it is cowardly to let it all be dark. You have to have some movement of the heart that reopens the dark world that we despair over to possibility, especially the possibility of another understanding.
Miller: You wrote that when you started your career, you saw yourself as something of a courier that you were carrying news from other lands about how marvelous and incomprehensible life out there was, you’re bringing it to readers back home, people who are more or less like you. I think it was the implication, how do you see your role now?
Lopez: Same thing, go someplace, look hard, travel hard, make sure you ask those who live there for their permission to go along with them, bring as many interpreters into the circle as you can manage. Try to see something worth a reader’s time. As you imply, I have been doing this now for more than 50 years. It’s where I’m comfortable. I’m not a reporter, I’m not a travel writer. I’m somebody who loves language and loves to arrange language in ways that are engaging and whatever authority I have isn’t something I can claim. The authority that the writer has is entirely the decision of the reader.
Miller: You write that if there was a siren landscape for me in my forties and fifties, it was Antarctica.
Lopez: Yes.
Miller: What was calling to you?
Lopez: I don’t know, I joke about it. After “Arctic Dreams,” another book that I wrote came out..
Miller: And won a national book award. Do you hate when I say that, when people say that?
Lopez: No, that’s fine. But I thought, well, I wonder what Antarctica is like? And I remember being in the cockpit of the C130 plane that flew us into McMurdo Base. And by that time, even from the air, I thought, yeah, these two places have only one thing in common and that’s they’re both white and beyond that, it’s all sitting out there in front of me. But I knew immediately that you can’t reduce Antarctica and the polar ice in which is sea ice at the North Pole. These places are really fundamentally different and I made six trips, I think, to find out what the difference was.
So much of Antarctica is completely undefined. It’s not that difficult. In fact, I made a joke where I was in the interior, in the Transantarctic Mountains in southern Victoria Land. And, I had climbed up to a place called Bull Pass and walked out across, down the spine of the Olympic Range and I thought, I don’t want to be a big shot kind of thing here, but I very possibly am the first person who ever walked here. And about five minutes later, I came upon a camera case sitting on the ground and later it was identified for me as a camera case that belonged to somebody who was in a helicopter and dropped it. So I still could have been the first person to walk here, but that made me see, don’t you see this as a joke?
Miller: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, after that realization, follows the self castigation, and if I recall correctly, you say something like “what did I miss?”
Lopez: Yes.
Miller: Because I was focused on this sort of hubristic idea that I was the first human ever.
Lopez: I was so wrapped up in Mr. Cool that I forgot to be looking what was lying out there beyond that character or that characterization of the narrator who is me.
Miller: Even though at this point in your life and your travels, you were very critical of this sort of Western idea, this imperial idea of conquering land. It was still hard for you not to get sort of sucked into that mentality for a second.
Lopez: Oh, yeah, everybody, it’s such a vacuum space, everybody gets sucked into it. And when you’re traveling in Antarctica, if you’re based at McMurdo Base, which is like a mining town or something, five minutes out of town, you see the face of God without trying. It is a place that is, I would say the word would be resplendent and I also found wherever I was in Antarctica, the absence of time. I could tell you that in the interior, there are no animals, that there’s algae in the snow or something but that you can put everything on the ground around your camp and nobody is ever going to bother it because nobody is there. You’re the only people there and there are no animals moving through.
One way to see this is in those regions of Antarctica, which is most of the continent, there’s physics, there’s chemistry, but there is no biology and because there’s not given way human beings are tuned into the passage of time, you always feel or at least I did that there is no passage of time here. And in the summer when the sunlight is on all the time that’s it enhances it, it increases the strength of that feeling and you’re off planet. So often, even in the winter, I was in deep Antarctica…
Miller: In the dark.
Lopez: In the dark, in the forever dark, but in both places the only thing I could make work were all of these images we’ve all seen from off-planet movies or space exploration or something like that.
Miller: I wonder if we could get one more reading.
Lopez: Sure.
Miller: This is back to sort of the the beginning in a sense. This is from your first chapter when you’re talking about spending a lot of time and looking out at the Pacific Ocean and Cape Foulweather. This is on the Oregon Coast. Do you mind reading us part of this passage?
Lopez: [Reading] “It’s been my experience that these hours of perusing the water here or while at sea, taking in the occasional bird or surfacing whale, watching light shift on the surface of the water, induce an awareness of another sort of time, a time that fills an expansive and undifferentiated volume of space, one not easily available elsewhere. On those days, such a seemingly mindless vigil offers relief from the monotony of everyday experience.
“During certain periods of uninterrupted vigilance at the edge of the sea, I’ve also had the sense that there is some other way to understand the ethical erosion that engenders our disaffection with modern life. The tendency of ruling bodies, for example, to be lenient with entrenched corruption. The embrace of extrajudicial murder as a legitimate tool of state, the entitlement attitudes of those in power, the compulsion of religious fanatics to urge other human beings to embrace the fanatics’ heaven. The pervasiveness of these ethical breaches encourages despair and engenders a kind of social entropy. And their widespread occurrence suggests that the problems are intractable.
“I can’t say what this other way of looking at these situations is, how a huge domed space like the daylit ocean, a space almost entirely free of objects and offering a different sense of time passing might provide a perspective to make banal human failure seamless, enduring, less threatening. But taking in this view, I always sense that more room for us to maneuver exists. That what halts us is simply a failure of imagination.”
Miller: One of the things to me that’s fascinating about this is that the same attention being brought to bear in a place that could remind you in some way of human brutality to our ourselves or others or to the environment, to the “natural” world, that that same attention can also give you the sense that other answers are possible; that both of these things come more into clarity because of the attention you’re bringing to bear.
Lopez: I would say yes. And that the attention that I try to pay to darkness and two places we call the light is intentional because you’re gonna drive the car off the road if you go to the right or the left there and say, I see a vision of the future that’s beautiful and we’re driving and whatever. Or I see peril, nothing but peril. What you have to be careful of is to never let your spirit of life become paralyzed by the darkness that you’re faced with. There’s some kind of movement that you can do with your body to keep you from being swallowed in despair.
Miller: Is that hard for you to not be swallowed by despair, given what you’ve seen and what you know about the world?
Lopez: Oh yeah, I would say I know quite a few things that I would never speak of to you, even if we’re off radio and sitting in the green room or something because they just can’t be managed without some kind of context. I often in my life recall one elder in particular, whom I became formally associated with in 1981. I go over what he says, which was always instructive for me. One thing he said once was, you know Barry, we don’t tell all the stories to all the people. And I felt that that was an instruction. Take in the horror that you will see in a war torn zone or something like that. But you have no reason to believe that this will help another person. It’s too far beyond the reach of everyday life for all of us.
And that’s why in the beginning of the book, in the short prologue where I’m with my grandson, I took him to see the USS Arizona and Pearl Harbor on Oahu. I wanted him to see it with me and try to explain why we harm each other at this scale. Why…
Miller: I should say, in case people are hearing seagulls right now, I’m not sure if that’s being picked up by our mics and that’s your phone.
Lopez: It’s my fault, it’s the ravens.
Miller: And, if there’s going to be a phone call during the conversation, I want it to be when I’m talking to Barry Lopez and when there’s a raven ringtone. So that’s just, it’s perfect.
Lopez: Sorry about that. So I was with my grandson and what I say there is I can explain in the face of his incredulity that we harm each other at this level. But I also make the decision that now will not be the time I’ll tell him about the 8th Air Force in Dresden. Now is not the time that I will talk about the invasion of Nanking. He’s going to learn about that. Maybe he’s never heard of Nanking, but I say it would be cruel to take a child and instruct the child in the scale of harm that we can cause.
Miller: Before we’re done, I just want to ask you - you have been given a terminal cancer diagnosis, as some of our listeners may know. Has that diagnosis–that knowledge–affected the way you think about all the worldly issues, the global issues we’ve been talking about?
Lopez: Well, yes, but it’s not some version of “I see the light.” [Laughter] What’s really happened with that diagnosis is that I found a kind of a depth of compassion for the world that I hadn’t felt before. Almost everywhere I go now, I want to embrace a stranger and ask how they’re doing if they seem to be in trouble. And I easily think many of us are in deep trouble of one sort or another, broken heart or our cancer diagnosis or whatever. And it calls for kindness toward each other and compassion. I’ve thought…
Miller: It doesn’t necessarily, it could lead to a kind of very understandable, turning inward.
Lopez: It could and there’s your end, you’ve given yourself the end of your life. If you do that, I wonder what it would be like in the United States now with Mr. Trump, etcetera, if we were not a polarized nation because we suddenly developed a more compassionate attitude toward others. I’m not talking pollyanna here. I’m talking to somebody that gets the kind of diagnosis that I got and who can choose to say from here out, I will find a deeper sense of compassion for everybody walking on the streets of Portland
Miller: Only connect.
You describe your young self early on in the book when you were a boy as curious, but where you say you were a suburban crow, what are you now?
Lopez: An old suburban crow. No, I’m not a suburbanite. I’ve lived in the woods for 50 years here. But, I’m a cosmopolitan person. I can’t say that I live in the woods all the time. I’m going to New York next week and I have a life full of things like that. But I don’t know what I am now. Maybe those ravens are calling, I’m just one of the flock of ravens living in the world and trying to make it easier for other people and encourage youngsters every time I go to a university. My sense of possibility is renewed by these fierce young men and women who see what’s coming and they have terrific energy and a terrific sense of survival. It brings me to tears when somebody hands me a book to sign that meant so much to them or usually they say this meant so much to my parents and now it means so much to me. Thank you.
Miller: Well, Barry Lopez, even if you don’t think you’re anybody special, It was a real honor and a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much.
Lopez: Of course. Thank you for having me.
Miller: That was Barry Lopez, in an interview in March of 2019. Lopez died on Christmas Day, 2020.
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