FIREBUILDER

WHO KNOWS HOW WE COME TO ANYTHING? HE WASN’T the first writer I read, once I decided to become a writer myself, but he certainly was formative. Helpful. I had picked up his work on a suggestion. An insistence; a celebration. The book I picked up, Desert Notes, was a marvel in its thinness and in what it contained. My first introduction to his work—the first page—was a description of someone driving a van through the desert, not on any road or trail, just kind of magic carpeting along, and stepping out of the van while it was idling forward, and running around to the other side and climbing into the passenger side, and continuing on. He did not present it as metaphor, but as truth: the truth of a landscape without boundaries and an imagination likewise. This was valuable to me. I had always suspected—believed—that was the way the world was, but it was extraordinarily valuable to me to have that belief validated. Encouraged.

He did this thing a lot, where he helped us see anew—usually deeper, but sometimes broader—things we’d been looking past, or looking at incorrectly: with a flawed set of assumptions, or with faulty logic. He helped us look at landscape differently. A classic example is in his celebration of the photographer Hoshino Michio, who was revolutionary at the time for photographing the grizzly bears of Denali and other wildlife not with nature porn close-up head-and-shoulders portraits, but images where enormous herds and individual animals were tiny against the landscape they inhabited.

Barry Lopez questioned pretty much everything. I think that might have become exhausting at times.

Something else he taught me, or rather, in which he served as exemplar: he made it easier for me to make hard and stubborn, even obstinate choices with regard to what some might call art, and the artist’s relationship to the rest of the world. He helped remind me—with the unquestioning insistence of his intensity—that art was different. Different from everything. And a way through. A way through everything.

He did not die a rich man. This is nobody’s business, certainly not the future’s. I bring it up only to verify to the reader, and to other writers and artists who will follow, that his decisions—as they always do in a life of meaning, which is to say, engagement—were not based on finances but rather artistic and personal integrity.

He was a man who in some ways was very aware of limits—unusual for either an artist or a philosopher—yet certainly he had access to both imagination and one of imagination’s unavoidable fruits, hope. I believe that, being mortal, he had doubt. I think one of the primary doubts was his view of contemporary humanity’s ability to grow and change. Of its ability to not be seduced. And yet to not despair.

I think it was his doubt that made him fierce. It was his ferocity that brought the fire.

Of course he lived in the rainforests of western Oregon. Sea fog, mist, and the broad red backs of salmon. And yet of course the fire eventually found him. Each seeks its own. Each seeks our own. Our kin, our kind, our community.

Because he understood science as perhaps only a poet can, he was unafraid to move in directions that seemed opposite to science. Spirituality and storytelling were his foundation. The facts mattered to him as much as they would to a journalist, yet at the end of the day I think he was most ardent-hearted about magic. He had seen and felt enough of it to be comfortable trusting its presence. Whether Crazy Horse actually flew up onto his horse like a bird, never touching it; whether Moses parted the Red Sea—one must consider that the things we call miracles might once have been almost commonplace. That somehow we lost the ability to summon or even receive them.

They still happen, now and again, but on a scale that feels muted. We tend to call them coincidence. We tweeze them apart and try to use our always incomplete, always inadequate science to explain.

You might think at this point that I am going to tell you a story about a coincidence, or magic. As if to prove a point. And I will tell you the first time I met Barry was at Edward Abbey’s memorial, outside of Moab. And that when Barry walked up to make his remarks, out in the orange cliffs, beneath an April-blue sky, a raven followed him above, like a pet, then flared away. And that before Barry could speak, the wind picked up the American flag and hurled it to the ground.

But there are a lot of ravens around Moab, and it is true also that in the canyonlands country there can be sudden gusts of wind. And it is possible too, I suppose, that we are each alone and all we have in the world and forever is each other.

He was a leader—along with Richard Nelson, and others—in helping white folk appreciate certain Indigenous teachings not just as an abstract way of listening, but as a sometimes deeper learning that comes from curiosity. In an era when not many were listening to First Nations and Indigenous people, it was instructive to see him and a few others asking questions and listening, rather than presuming, or not thinking about such things at all.

He knew from the beginning, as Robin Wall Kimmerer and others remind us, to be unafraid of creating our own rituals and ceremonies; that gratitude is or once was and can be again an underpinning of our species and our route, our path, to connecting back to the tree of life from which we fell, like an apple. Or from which we were cast.

He still visits me in dreams. Not a lot. But he checks in, now and again. I fill Debra in on what he was up to. To say that she misses him—that she and Amanda, Stephanie, Mary, and Mollie miss him—is the wildest of understatements. What he gave was huge; how then could what he took with him, or rather what went away, not also be immense? Grief upon grief upon grief becomes—what? Water? Enough water to extinguish all fires, if for but a while?

She kayaks. She paddles a lime-green kayak on a blue lake beneath a blue sky. She still lives in Oregon, on the rainy coast. The fires from the Southwest have found even this place. She was born into a time of rot and lives now, as do we all, in a time of burning.

In one dream, I was at a campfire in the woods and he came from out of the forest with an envelope he said he wanted me to have. He said I would need it. The envelope was unsealed and when I looked in it there was some paper money—ones and fives, adding up to about ten dollars. Maybe a little more. I thanked him, but thought, How far is this going to take me, and how am I going to make this last?

Another one. There was a war going on, as there have been in so many of my dreams these last few years: in the bombed-out Gaza Strip, in Afghanistan, in Ukraine. And in this one I had of him, he was young, thirty-five (I don’t know how I knew this exact number) and was running toward, rather than away from the active war; toward the smoke and rubble and collapse. He was looking back over his shoulder at me with a look of wild exhilaration and fearlessness—more than that, the delight of meeting a destiny—and he was a journalist, with camera and notepad and flak jacket, and the look on his face said clearly that he was doing what he loved and he was good at it. It was the happiest I’d ever seen him.

Still another—he was driving at night, trying to get somewhere. A big old low-to-the-ground four-door gas-hog sedan. Belly-scraping, really. Big old goggle headlights. Fins. A Detroit relic. Not a Cadillac Eldorado, I don’t think; some kind of Oldsmobile. And it was snowing—a blizzard, a whiteout. He was in a hurry to get somewhere and had been driving a long time. I was riding with him, and we went off the road just as he was coming into sight of the place he was trying to reach. Down in a ditch. Out onto a sagebrush prairie—a night blizzard, us snow-blind from the rooster tails of snow thrown up by the car, just the shushing sound of snow all around us as we plowed through it, an occasional feathery scratching of sagebrush against the sides and belly of the car. It looked like the end of things—there was so much snow—but I reached over and took the steering wheel and aimed the car back up toward where I thought the road was and accelerated, gave it all the power it had rather than braking, and the car muscled up out of the snowy prairie and miraculously found the road again in all that blizzard, and all was well. We continued on into the falling snow—following that one road that led straight and deeper into the storm.

I ragged him about his inveterate habit—a commitment, really, the way a monk or nun might commit—of writing a response to every letter he ever received. And I don’t mean with a postcard, nor by the brain-scrambling wires-crossing miasma of email. He’d type out a thoughtful and generous response on the butter-colored parchment of his notepaper, sign the letter with his calligraphic flourish, then fold the letter neatly and, from a special map drawer where he kept an extraordinary volume of specialty stamps—butterflies, Artic explorers, constellations, flora and fauna of New Zealand, what have you—the map drawer housed in the sunroom of his and Debra’s beautiful home just above the sun-bright riffling waters of the broad McKenzie, in the dappled sun and shadow of cedars—the light falling upon his hands, his face, as he opened one or another of the long flat drawers and pondered his selection, in conjunction with the recipient and the missive’s content—he would choose just the right stamp, or stamps.

This act had all the elements of art. Art gives. Art is selectivity.

Art is creative. It was unhurried. It was slow.

A story he told more than once—not so much agreeing or disagreeing (and he would do that so often; take into private counsel some thought or idea to examine, and worry over, as they say in the South, the way a dog worries a bone)—was of how he came to be a writer.

In grade school, he’d read a book (I can’t remember whether novel, biography, or natural history) by some local/regional writer—I’ve forgotten the name, if ever I knew it—and written a letter to the writer. Sixty-plus years later, Barry still marveled that the writer took the time to take the child’s letter seriously and write back to the child without condescension, but instead with direct intellectual engagement, and gratitude.

To hear Barry describe it was to imagine that for the child, the boy, it was the first time he’d ever felt heard; that, as he had always desired, holding out hope in the darkness that the one ray of light he saw could be something good, someone good, decent, kind.

As if his prayers had made a thing into reality, had then summoned the thing—kindness, and intelligence. Meaningful connection.

Still, I pushed the opposite thought: you don’t have to answer every letter you get, from so many thousands of strangers. You’ve more than paid back your debt, your gift. Enough’s enough—it takes you away from the here-and-now. You have a duty to the moment, too, I wanted to say—not just the past, and not even always to the future. But who was I to counsel an elder? By this point he had married my dear friend, the writer and fantastic mother of four incredible young women, Debra Gwartney. Her daughters—in time, they became his, too, in the way of such meldings, and he spoke of them as daughters—and then, from the oldest, Amanda, and then from Mollie, a profusion of sweet and indefatigable grandchildren.

He encouraged me to write what I wanted to write—a slim fine arts book about a mythical logger. A book about a caribou hunt. An extended essay about this, that, or another, when no market for such exists, or existed. To spend a month writing an introduction to a photo book, or a week or longer on a band’s album liner notes. A week on an op-ed, or an essay for an obscure publication in some foreign country where my people—all five, six, seven, ten, or however many of them there are—do not live. And with my back turned on the hours with them. This awful fire; this awful light.

I do not answer the letters of strangers. By ragging him about his prolific letter-writing, I think I was able to pretend I was in control of my own relationship with time. With the burning.

He could be daunting. As W. S. Merwin wrote of John Berryman in his poem, “Berryman”—

“his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry”

He was a smart son of a gun. It couldn’t have been easy, holding so much in his mind—in his body. Edward Hoagland writes that Turgenev’s brain was the heaviest ever measured—approximately four pounds. I have heard it said also that of the brain’s mass—so many coils and loops and folds, going who knows where—we generally only use about 1 percent. So then where does the other 99 percent go?

I don’t know how much he used. But he could be daunting. He seemed smarter, and maybe he was, but mostly I think he just went deeper. “Just.” The hunter-gatherer, always giving readers more when they asked for it. Needed it, or even just wanted it. It seemed to be a terrible pressure, a terrible burden, in some ways little dissimilar from our own these days, of placing a four-year-old on a balance beam, or a football into a seven-year-old’s hands. He gave. That old fellow he wrote the letter to as a child—it’s hard to say what might have happened, if he hadn’t. Maybe all of this, nonetheless—unstoppable, roaring like a long fire. Or maybe none of it. It doesn’t matter, does it? He was not wrong to write the letters; he wanted to write them, he needed to write them, and so he did. He gave. He gave, and gave.

One of the great tenets of Christianity is the necessity of waiting. The Sun Dance and prophecies of seven generations out address better times ahead. Christianity certainly is founded on the faith of a savior’s return. But Barry was not much of a waiter. To the best of my knowledge he worked every day, and as he grew more ill—he was sick a long time; Debra and the girls’ caretaking of him, across those years—he worked harder.

It’s understandable; there can be a terrible urgency for any writer with things still unsaid. I’ve always marveled at my old heroes for this—the way they push harder near the end, in the way of the female shark injured in the trawl-net who, upon being extricated and tossed onto the deck, gives sudden birth to all her live babies, which skitter across the deck and over the edge, back into the sea, even as she herself will never return.

The way pine trees, under stress of drought or beetle infestation or fire scarring, or the gash of a bulldozer, will generate an extraordinary volume of cones in that same year, a last-gasp pulse of life in the dying.

This would be the opportunity for a writer to talk about Barry’s last book. But I don’t want to talk about Embracing Fearlessly the Burning World, or any of his books. What I wanted for him—when he and Debra knew, really knew, the transition was near—was for him to slow down and live. I wanted him to choose. I wanted him to feel at peace with what he had given to strangers, and to pull in tight. I want that for all of my heroes—they who have sacrificed so much time away from the world, for so many years, decades. Desk-anchored, while this bright world does not slip away but rather the five senses with which they engage it. I wanted him to step away from the desk for himself, but also for Debra and the girls.

Even as I, entering the first of the gray territory, where vision begins to fail and one must look more closely with that light fading, find myself anticipating each next day’s work. As might a prisoner, the night before, fall asleep considering his next day’s workout in the gym. Might awaken and hasten to it for two-a-days, even before breakfast. As if to a wedding.

What I was thinking, when he’d write those deeply engaged letters to strangers—to utter strangers, I’m tempted to say, even though one thing the pandemic has helped teach or remind us is that we are a global community, all eating the same food, drinking the same water, breathing the same air—that the fires burn and the seas rise whether we are Hindu or Christian, Democrat or Libertarian—

—What I was thinking was of how he and Debra and I would go on walks through the old forest that had not yet burned, the ancient light that left the sun so long ago falling softly now down through the fronds of the overstory like a kind of unheard music, unheard song. On those walks through the old forest behind his and Debra’s house, through ferns ankle high and higher, across spongy green moss and the orange vibrant wet duff of the forest floor—through vertical columns of old-growth sunlight sliding off the feathers of cedars, with the creek trickling beside the trail, sounding not as small creeks usually gurgle but instead somehow like chimes—he would point to one giant fallen tree or another and tell how that was a place where he and Debra and Owen and Ezzie, Amanda’s son and daughter, would picnic. Point to a bend in the creek and tell of how he and Harry, Mollie’s young son, liked to sit in the tiny plunge pool on the hottest days and tell stories that it seemed even the trees were listening to.

You can’t put one second back. Yet you can pass forward a pebble of green sea-glass, a curl of turquoise polished by who knows what relentless journey. You can pass forward an image: Barry sitting in a chair next to Debra at Stephanie’s wedding, on a hot August day, in the shade. Out in the country. The scent of horses.

He and Debra holding hands at the candlelit dinner table for a meal my daughter Lowry, Erin Halcomb, and I prepared for them, when he was sick, a long time ago; but not yet too sick. Elk backstrap, chocolate ginger cake, dry-rubbed king salmon. Cornbread pudding. A bottle of really good Bordeaux.

You can pass forward an idea. One that is the opposite of greed, or rage, or fear. You can pass beauty forward; kindness, too. Though it is not unnoticed by me that while his and Debra’s home was spared somehow, in the center of the great burning, the library where all the maps and letters were kept—tens of thousands?—is now not even ash.

And yet, what we carry from the fire remains real. It all remains present. It is just different; changed.

He was a devotee of sports, particularly that most old-fashioned and nonviolent of games, baseball—what used to be called, in an earlier era, America’s pastime. Picnics on the lawn, straw hampers, a blanket spread for all to sit on. He could be boyish. I think that as with so many boys, the statistics of the endeavor intrigued him. A safe harbor, a ferocity of control in the precision, down to the thousandth of a percentage point. Al Kaline’s batting average. Willie Stargell’s. Pete Rose stealing 198 bases. Juan Marichal’s 2,303 strikeouts and 2.89 earned runs allowed in 3,507 innings. And so on.

Something changed in him at the Fire & Grit conference hosted in Washington, D.C., by Orion magazine in 1999. We’d been on Capitol Hill to lobby Bruce Babbitt for national monuments, including one in the Yaak Valley. It didn’t happen; I forget the reasons why, now. There are always reasons. A quarter century has gone by, the reasons are gone, the need is still there, and now they have come up with new reasons, all of which have as their common denominator one word, cowardice. Mike Dombeck was chief of the U.S. Forest Service, beginning his drive to protect all of his agency’s roadless lands: a major policy victory, and one of the last I can recall.

We were seated in some conference room in Interior and had been granted maybe twenty minutes with Secretary Babbitt. Hardly the week-long camping trips of Muir and Roosevelt. Bill Kittredge was with us to lobby for Steens Mountain in Oregon, which passed; Terry for Red Rocks Wilderness, which didn’t, though later President Clinton, in a somewhat defiant gesture toward Senator Orrin Hatch, passed Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument.

The Yaak, alas, with all its timber, is not yet protected. (The annular growth rings in the old-growth forests there—centuries-old giants—might be a quarter of an inch thicker, while the mountains above them, also still growing, are perhaps a quarter-inch taller, in places.)

Barry wasn’t there to lobby for a place, but instead for an idea. Straight out of the gate, before any of us had begun to describe our native landscapes and the passions we held for them, Barry leaned across the table, both elbows on the table—flat, low, as if to minimize wind shear; as if preparing to lunge—and asked, Secretary Babbitt, when you close your eyes and sleep, what are your dreams?

I do not remember the secretary’s answer. Barry was never one to talk about the weather.

I do not know what he dreamed about. We were friends but not that kind of friend where you share your dreams. Your waking ones, sure—aspirations. But not the ones when you sleep. When fears come skulking in.

I don’t remember all the specifics, at the Fire & Grit conference, only that we were reading on a hill—some park. I read a story about wilderness, and grizzly bears, and bear spray. About what it’s like to be sprayed by it—self-inflicted. The mood was light, humorous. Another era. I won’t say it was better or worse. It was just a long time ago.

Then he read. He read a story about a boy hiding in a closet. A story about a boy hiding in a closet knowing the man was coming to molest him again. The boy seeing a tiny speck of light outside, from the darkness within, and then the man’s shadow. The terror.

It was dark, there in D.C., even in summer. The evening had gone on long. Lightning began to flicker to the north—heat lightning at first, but then real forks of it, seeking and searching: the sky on fire. It’s so hard to write about fire. The lightning splitting the darkness. The way the light scorches whatever it falls upon. The way we can be frightened of it, with an awe that—in that quick blink—is not at all dissimilar from joy. Then the dark again.

He had never before told anyone that I know of. People were only just beginning to speak of such things. I’d never read or heard anything of his remotely like it. The piece—“Sliver of Sky”—was in the first person, but at the time I believed it was fiction, and I went to find him. To congratulate him, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t know. I thought we were there for art, and that it was a short story. I thought we were there for activism. I didn’t yet quite understand there can be no difference, no matter how much one wants to believe otherwise. That the dark calls for that scorch of light.

Something changed in him, I think, after writing that story and reading it aloud to his friends, family, and fans in D.C. that night. I went up to him and said “What the hell?” It was so unlike anything he’d written to that point; so unadorned by intelligence or any aspect of his intellect that I felt sometimes he employed almost as a shield.

He looked at me as if he had no answer and was somehow—almost—frightened of the place he had gotten to. The place where he was. But determined. And I still thought it was a short story, and an amazing one, for the empathy he had with the character of that boy.

“I have to go off and be by myself,” he said and drifted into the night. There were no cell phones then. I do not know if he called Debra. I do not know where he walked. I never asked.

What I think changed for him was his willingness to trust—to ask for help, in the form of support, understanding, respect, empathy. Fifty or sixty years later, to ask or communicate once again, as he had to that long-ago forgotten writer who’d answered his letter.

How can a river summon fire? How can a salmon become a raven, or a cedar tree, or a grizzly? The system is closed—the energy flows where it will flow, assuming in its passage different forms: earth, sky, water, fire. A salmon is a salmon for a while, then it is a raven, then it is a river, then it is a cedar tree, or a grizzly. There is no waste, just as there is no gain. And yet how we grieve and mourn the passage of things, just as we celebrate and exult in the arrival of things. These are not new lessons. But there is great service, I think, in finding new ways to tell the old stories. This is how life itself—evolution or, as Darwin once wrote, “descent, with modifications”—proceeds, or does not proceed.

Proceeds.

There’s this thing all writers know, where the words, working their way across the page, access something deeper, or higher. A different plane, where understanding—first emotionally, but from that, intellectually—comes surging in. Metaphor: we’re not just talking about wolves any more. And then—stay in the burning, ride it out—transcendence, or sublimation. The solid becomes a gas, the ether becomes a solid. The metaphor burns away, leaving only the thing, pure and irreducible. And we can carry it with us. We do not have to leave it behind, or be left by it. We are taught otherwise, but that is not my experience. A letter, or a book—a story or a poem—no matter; I am not speaking of symbol or metaphor, but the physical thing, held in your hands, and connecting you to the physical thing—the grove of aspen, the gray wolf on the hill, across the ravine, looking over at you—you are connected, and finally escaping the abstract cage of your emotions and beliefs, foursquare now in the land of the specific—that which many would assert is the proof of a god or greater being, proof that the abstract rattlings in the mind are not simply lost disconnected madness or unbearable loneliness. The book or poem or letter is like the mycorrhizae beneath the surface of ancient forests, connecting all trees and preparing the way for the aging and strengthening of that forest.

The forest has been made real for us. We are allowed a glimpse, touch, taste, scent, sound of the green burning, whether we can see the flames yet or not—for what else is rot but slow burning? The letters, poems, stories give us entry into the fire. And once it is in us I believe it can never be extinguished.

We speak of our footprints—of being mindful. Of trying to travel lightly and minimize our impact. But even the lightest and best of our kind leave enormous prints, we all leave prints, and it seems to me that our feet are burning, that we ignite the ground now wherever we pass.

I do not mean metaphorically but instead actually. The ground beneath our feet is buckling in the heat and the heat is coming up through our shoes. Places where we step are igniting. Places here in the Yaak where I have hiked: Gold Hill, Lick Mountain, Davis Mountain, Caribou Mountain. Thrice when I have been camping a helicopter has flown to a lake where I camped, a different lake each time, and dipped water to go fight a fire just on the other side of the mountain. All trees burn, even when they are being kept in captivity—even as they are in the mill, awaiting their next journey on the way back to sky and soil. John Brown’s little lumber mill in the Yaak. The Stimson mill in Libby. This year, almost, the IFG mill in Moyie Springs. The West is burning and the world is burning and there is no longer any metaphor and perhaps there never was. Perhaps metaphor was simply a device by which we avoided looking at things the way they really were and chose instead to compare them, slantwise. To contrast them rather than to really see.

He tapped deep. He was practiced at the art of the descent into the steepest ravines and finding his way back up and out. He read a lot, and felt a lot—quivered, incandescent—and, like a boy memorizing the statistics of various players—not just batting averages or strikeouts, but on-base percentages versus the shift, percentages when facing left-handed pitchers versus right-handed, and so on—he connected various conduits and cables of knowledge, of light. Sometimes with a bit of obstinance, I want to believe, which could also be called faith—he dug his own trenches through the jungle and unspooled his cables, with great effort and exertion.

He wasn’t always fully present, I noticed sometimes, but when he was, it was an incandescence. I don’t know where he went, exactly, whenever he’d step away.

As Mary Oliver writes, “Said Mrs. Blake of the poet/I miss my husband’s company/he is so often in paradise.”

We got him when we got him. The rest of the time, he was somewhere else. It is not fair to say he was never here, not fair at all. He was just not always here. Nor are any of us. Nor are all and each of us. We cannot see what he left behind but it is as real as a stone or piece of colored beach glass. Some days, as the years blow past, we might even think we have misplaced it. But then—on a walk through an old forest at twilight, the light leaving the forest so suddenly it seems taken, yet with other things seeming to glow for a moment—the carpet of butter-yellow arnica blossoms, like an expanse of miniature sunflowers or, later in the year, the entire forest floor stippled with yellow aspen coins, or the orange-gold needles of larch carpeting everything, so that every shape, every inanimate object draped with that gold, seems in that twilight to have been briefly animated, awakening finally if briefly stunned with the wholly unexpected gift of life and surging quickly—before the dark—toward joy.

There are moments when it comes back to us, the gift—the beach glass in the palm of a hand; the elk ivory in a medicine bundle; the stone on the windowsill. He was here. He is here. We were here. We are here. A nation, sometimes above ground, other times below, our tendrils and roots reaching blindly in the dark for one another, our hours and centuries punctuated by bursts of extraordinary light.