Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Barry Lopez was an essayist, author, and short-story writer who traveled extensively in both remote and populated parts of the world. He is the author of Arctic Dreams, which received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men, Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean, Field Notes, and Resistance. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. Lopez lived in western Oregon.

Julia Martin is a South African writer and a professor of English at the University of the Western Cape. In addition to academic work in ecocriticism, she writes creative nonfiction with a particular interest in metaphors of interconnectedness and the representation of place. She is the author of Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects with Barry Lopez, A Millimetre of Dust: Visiting Ancestral Sites and The Blackridge House: A Memoir, and she collaborated with Gary Snyder on Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, a collection of three decades of their letters and interviews. She and her family live in Cape Town, South Africa.

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THE SOUND

OF WATER

julia martin

There was a little black plastic bear on the dashboard of

the truck when Barry Lopez fetched me from the airport. I

noticed because it was just like the one I’d been carrying in

my backpack since arriving in the United States. “The polar

bear’s elsewhere in the truck,” he said, “the big mother.”

Bears in the old Toyota truck seemed about right. For

decades Barry had pondered the conundrum of human peo-

ple’s relation to other beings, traveling across the world to

explore the mystery, and returning to write luminous prose

that somehow combined lyrical observation with a great deal

of information. His writing spoke directly to work in litera-

ture and ecology that I’d been doing in South Africa for some

years. And after we met through our mutual friend Gary

Snyder, Barry became a dear friend too, even a teacher.

So in fall 2010, I visited him at his home in Finn Rock,

Oregon. The formal part of the visit involved recording a

2 § SYNTAX OF THE RIVER

conversation about his work that extended over three days.

For this, we sat at the window of a small wood cabin at the

edge of the McKenzie River, with my little black bear on the

table beside us. During the rest of the time we drove for hours

through deep green forests, slowing the truck to a walk so as

to get out and look at Douglas fir cones with the little mouse

tails peeping out, a piece of horsetail snapped off and used for

cleaning teeth, wild garlic chewed, mushrooms in the damp

near a waterfall, a Townsend’s chipmunk, a chickadee, a mar-

ten crossing our path. And we told many stories: stories of

bear and elk and mountain lion passing through, stories of

home and away, and stories of the interwoven joys and sad-

nesses of our lives. In all this, Barry’s capacity for openness,

focus, and seriousness were unrelenting. It was an intense

time, and I felt at once exhausted and elevated, the recipient

of something irreplaceable. Three words in my journal noted

what seemed like the heart of it: respect, kindness, suffering.

On returning to Cape Town, I had the recording tran-

scribed. The typist noted that the sound of water was contin-

uous in the background throughout the interview and said

working on it had been a gift of peace at the end of the year.

This was good to hear, and I sent the text to Barry to edit,

hoping to publish it soon. But there it sat. He kept meaning

to work on it, but the conversation was really long, and rather

more rambling in structure than he’d have preferred. And of

course other things kept intervening. His massive book proj-

ect, Horizon, which was finally completed in 2018, took up

most of his writing energy. Then there was a serious cancer

diagnosis, and the years of diminishing strength and deter-

mined courage that followed. Curiously, the deferred publi-

cation of the interview became a background thread to our

contact over the years, a conversation in itself. Barry would

feel remorseful that he hadn’t done it, and I would remind

him that the main thing was the opportunity the visit had

given us to be together.

Two years now since his death on Christmas day of 2020,

the deep blue agapanthus I planted for him are flowering

again, and it feels at last time to share our conversation. His

wife, Debra Gwartney, whom I met on a later visit and who

became a dear friend, is keen for others to read it. And I think

Barry would have been too. His words from a letter in 2015

are a poignant nudge to complete the project. “I’ve no inten-

tion of letting that interview slide,” he wrote. “We worked

hard on it and I’m determined to do my part with it. It is a

beautiful record of our time together, yes, but there is some-

thing else there more than worthy of our continued atten-

tion. The ball is in my court and one day I will surprise you

by returning your serve.”

The Sound of Water § 3