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 literature 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 marten 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 sadnesses 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 transcribed.

The typist noted that the sound of water was continuous 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 project, 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 determined courage that followed. Curiously, the deferred publication 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 intention 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 something 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.".