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 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." Excerpted from Syntax of the River: The Pattern Which Connects by Barry Lopez, Julia Martin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.