"Once, before I knew him well, I asked Barry Lopez the earliest thing he could
remember. Without missing a beat, the most widely traveled and sophisticated
spiritual seeker in North American letters in a century--a writer of mystical
sensitivity and grace, who'd been up to his armpits in snow, tracking wolves in
Alaska, and who charted the migration of snow geese across Canada, who listened
to Indigenous peoples across the globe, learning from their knowledge systems,
especially in the Arctic--spoke at length about water. His life began, Lopez
said, with water."
John Freeman shares more in this moving essay.
