Eighteen months before he crossed the river for the final time, Barry Lopez traveled from his home on the banks of the McKenzie to see me in Portland, Oregon, where I was passing through on my first trip to the American west coast. Barry and I had never met in person, though we’d corresponded by letter and email for several years. I was acutely nervous in the hours before our encounter, for Barry’s influence on my life over the preceding two decades had been that of a north star: distant, blazing, and guiding. In my early twenties, while traveling in the Canadian Rockies, I’d read his masterwork Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, published in 1986, and it had changed the course of my life. That book—with its glittering, mica-like prose poetry, its luminous moral vision, and its vast freight of research and experience—had blown open my sense of what nonfiction could be and might accomplish and had confirmed in me my wish to become a writer about nature, landscape, place, and people.
