Free Winter Count by Barry Lopez Page B

fast brown water surging against the bridge supports—and spent the rest of the night in my car on high ground, at some distance from the town, in some hills the name of which I do not remember. In the morning I became confused on farm roads and was unable to find my way back to the river. In desperation I stopped at a place I recognized having been at the day before and proceeded from there on foot toward the river, until I became lost in the fields themselves. I met a man on a tractor who told me the river had never come over in that direction. Ever. And to get away.
    I have not been back in that country since.

A Biography of Barry Lopez
    Barry Lopez (b. 1945) is the author of thirteen works of fiction and nonfiction including his landmark study of the Far North, Arctic Dreams , and several collections of essays and short stories. He writes regularly for a variety of magazines including Harper’s and National Geographic , and his work is frequently anthologized in such collections as Best American Essays , Best American Non-Required Reading , Best Spiritual Writing , and the “best-of” collections periodically issued by Outside , the Paris Review , Orion , the Georgia Review , and other publications.
    He is a recipient of the National Book Award, the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, the Christopher Award for humanitarian writing, the Friends of American Writers Award in fiction, and major awards from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Geographers, and the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Parents’ Choice Awards. He is an elected Fellow of the Explorers Club and serves on the honorary boards of Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe, the Mountain Lion Foundation, Cities of Refuge, and Reader to Reader, among other groups and institutions.
    Lopez grew up in agricultural Southern California and New York City, attended college in the Midwest, and has lived in rural Oregon since 1968. His work has taken him to nearly seventy countries and he has spent long periods of time in the field with research scientists and traditional hunters in such places as the interior of Antarctica, northern Kenya, the Canadian Arctic, and the Northern Territory in Australia.
    Lopez is often described as a travel or nature writer but his work is difficult to categorize. His principal concern in nonfiction is the relationship between human societies and the places they occupy; in his fiction, his characters deal most often with issues of personal identity and intimacy. He has also been described as a philosopher and social critic.
    In both his fiction and nonfiction, Lopez draws heavily on the thinking of indigenous peoples, most often Native Americans, Eskimos, and Aborigines. His New York Times bestseller, Crow and Weasel , an illustrated fable, is steeped in indigenous North American tradition, and his pioneering work on wolves, Of Wolves and Men , a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the National Book Award, devotes several chapters to Native American and Eskimo perceptions of Canis lupus .
    After a benign encounter with a polar bear in the Chukchi Sea in 1981, Lopez, who until then had been a landscape photographer and writer, put his cameras away. (He explains why in an essay called “Learning to See” in About This Life .) He has continued, however, to work with a loose-knit group of photographers, composers, painters, playwrights, and other artists and artisans on a range of projects. He collaborates regularly with book artists, for example, on fine-press limited editions of his writing, and recently worked alongside ceramist Richard Rowland to design a reconciliation ceremony between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University. (He wrote about Rowland in an essay called “Effleurage,” also in