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Two ravens

Winged Runners

By Hank Lentfer
An Excerpt of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez

Remembering Barry Lopez and His Friend Richard Nelson

 
Barry Lopez, like any great storyteller, was a great listener. He sought out the subtle and the seldom heard. He tuned his ear to stories buried beneath the din of modern life. He followed voices past society’s edge, traveling through time, threading boundaries between cultures and creatures. Barry’s curiosity lured him, repeatedly, to the Arctic, a landscape where he sensed “the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the heavens, the pooling of time in the present, as if it were water.”

Excerpted from Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez edited by James Perrin Warren and Kurt Caswell (May 2024). Published by Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez, edited by James Perrin Warren and Kurt Caswell

Barry Lopez was not only a writer, but also a traveler, visionary, and someone with a deep love for humanity and the natural world. Going to See illuminates how the stories he shared with us were like stones in a pond, sending ripples throughout not just a world of readers, but also a network of writers. Here, 30 of those writers reflect on Lopez’s tremendous influence on their work and their lives.

From stories of intimate conversations with Lopez, to insightful examinations of his writing and outdoor experiences, to deeply heartfelt tributes about his generosity of spirit, what emerges is a “many-sided” portrait of Lopez, as co-editor James Perrin Warren writes. It’s also a celebration of the fellowship of writers that Lopez helped create, writers who are committed to serving the natural world, human and nonhuman communities, and the planet we all share.

Learn more and purchase the book.

Vast distance invites close intimacy. Whereas strangers on a sidewalk may brush shoulders unacknowledged, someone silhouetted on a far, windswept ridge draws attention like an oasis in the desert. Arctic travelers may walk for miles to say hello and learn what the other has seen. Enduring friendships grow from the campfires and conversations that follow.

The cultural anthropologist and naturalist Richard Nelson was, like Barry, a keen listener drawn to Alaska’s cultures and creatures. As fellow travelers through wide lands, Richard and Barry drew close. Early conversations swelled into future collaborations; initial kindness grew into an enduring kinship.

The summer of 1987 found them sitting shoulder to shoulder in a radio studio in Fairbanks, Alaska. For years, Richard had been working with village elders to produce Make Prayers to the Raven, a PBS documentary about Koyukon spiritual beliefs. Barry, as the film’s narrator, was helping Richard with the final edits to the script. They worked long hours in the windowless studio, emerging into the welcome twilight of Arctic evenings to listen to ravens croak and caw on the edge of town.

In the decades that followed, Barry and Richard traveled to each other’s home ground, one by a clear river, the other by the open sea. While camping with Barry on Alaska’s Kruzof Island, Richard journaled: “Barry moves very slowly, absorbs everything he can, takes time for details, talks quietly. He seems to sense how special this place is, just as I do, and his voice glows with enthusiasm for it.”

Barry and Richard collaborated on writing projects and shared stages speaking about place. They wrote letters, visited each other when they could. Even when apart, their lines of inquiry drew them together. Alone in the Arctic, Barry wrote: “I lay there knowing something eerie ties us to the world of animals. Sometimes the animals pull you backward into it. You share hunger and fear with them like salt in blood.”

By himself on Kruzof, Richard wrote: “Closeness is the sacred power I seek. My amulet comes by moving within the touch of eyes, mingling scents, reaching out with my fingers toward feathers ruffled by the same wind gust that surrounds us both.”

Both men were in their early 40s when Barry asked if Richard would honor their friendship by sending him a few deer hides to drape over the back of his writing chair. Years later, reflecting on this request, Barry wrote, “I sensed that resting my back against a pair of cured black-tailed deer hides from Richard’s hunts would put me in a more respectful frame of mind when I wrote, and that they might induce in me the proper perspectives about life…. I felt the hides might care for me as I stumbled my way through life, in the same way our friendship with each other would take care of both of us in the years ahead.”

The letters and visits ebbed and flowed. In their 70s, both diagnosed with cancer, Barry and Richard reached for the phones more often. They spoke about projects they hoped to finish, about who in their orbits would carry on the work of blurring boundaries between people and the rest of creation.

In the summer of 2019, after months of radiation, Richard regained the strength to hike familiar trails on his beloved island and paddle a kayak through the lift and fall of ocean swells. He watched whales, listened to thrushes, and passed precious evenings with his tribe of Sitka friends. In early fall, when the cancer came roaring back, he traveled to San Francisco seeking help to beat it back once again.

I traveled south late that October to keep Richard company as he endured treatment. By the time I arrived, treatment was suspended and hospice had started. It was a 20-minute walk from where I was staying to the hospital where Richard lay dying. Each morning, I’d buy a coffee and find a park bench and give Barry a call. Barry asked about the prognosis, the room’s energy, the medical particulars about how his wild-country-loving friend ended up attached to tubes in a San Francisco ICU. Barry knew his friend was crossing terrain he would soon traverse. He wanted to be there in person, but his own health was too fragile for travel. Questions over the phone were the only way to cast a bit of light on this final, mysterious journey.

November 4, 2019, Richard’s last day, I called Barry from the hospital room and held the phone to his dying friend’s ear. I don’t know what stories, wishes, or prayers Barry shared. I do know that when I held the phone to my own ear, Barry’s voice was tender with the weight and levity of loss and love.

There were four of us, all from Alaska, in the room during Richard’s final hours. Someone brought hemlock and cedar boughs, a frond of kelp—fragrances of home. From speakers came the voices of thrushes and warblers, crows and gulls, sparrows and flycatchers, a wren and nuthatch, kingfishers and woodpeckers, eagles and herons. And ravens. A soundscape punctuated with the strident, complex dialogue of ravens. Richard himself had put the soundtrack together. He’d spent months combing through 15 years of recordings, integrating his finest tracks into an intricate, 90-minute acoustic tour through Alaska’s coastal rainforest. We humans fell silent at the end. We let the birds call our friend home.

I last spoke to Barry precisely one year after Richard drew his last breath. We reminisced about our friend, tossing stories, funny and poignant, into the wide space of Richard’s absence. Barry did not speak about the fire, no mention of the ashes of his writing life sifting into the scorched banks of his beloved river, no updates on the metastasizing cancer shifting through his bones like smoke between trees. One loss was enough for a single phone call. Before hanging up, Barry wondered about the next generation of “runners.” Who were the storytellers traveling between worlds, carrying life-gifting messages across boundaries of knowing?

A few weeks later, when I learned of Barry’s heart attack and ambulance ride and the transition to hospice, I sent him a copy of the rainforest-birds recording along with a note describing the comfort they gave Richard at the end.

Unable to get Barry back to his riverside home, his family brought in a truckload of cedar and fir boughs. They placed beaver sticks around the room, bathed Barry with vats of river water, and laid Richard’s deer hide on his chest. Early afternoon on Christmas 2020, a chilly day thick with smoke, the family gathered around Barry’s bed, certain his death was near. They played Arvo Pärt’s haunting Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Barry, beyond words, was visibly stirred by the music. Debra, Barry’s wife, was astonished that he survived into evening. His daughters took turns drumming and reading poems sent by friends. Earlier in the day, there’d been music by Greg Brown, Mark Knopfler, Beethoven (“Ode to Joy”), and John Luther Adams (Become River). Come evening, the chorus of Richard’s rainforest birds filled the room. “It felt only right,” Debra recalls, “to have those birds at the end.” The family gathered close, urging Barry to head toward the river as the ravens called.

Imagining Richard reaching back and offering Barry the gift of those wild voices evokes a shivering joy and reminds us that not all runners have legs. Some no longer have lungs. Others float and flitter on feathered wings and speak in languages we may only be able to fully comprehend after our last breath.

In the moments after Barry died, Debra stayed by his bedside. When the daughters stepped outside, a great horned owl flew overhead through the smoke and cold. Debra had not seen one there before and has not heard one since.

 

 

Hank LentferHank Lentfer is a sound recordist and writer. His sound is featured in the film The Singing Planet. His most recent book is Raven’s Witness: The Alaska Life of Richard K. Nelson. He lives by a creek flowing through Gustavus, Alaska.

Read Hank Lentfer’s interview with David James Duncan, “Starfish Work,” in Terrain.org.

Header photo by DmZ, courtesy Shutterstock.