I am 84 years young and over the years I’ve had things that I considered the best, the premiere and most important of things. The night I proposed to Barbara is at the top of that list. There are many others near the top, the birth of my favorite son and daughter, for two more.

There is one, however, that I never thought would ever be on this list because it on the surface couldn’t contend. It was a book that came out in 1986, that after my first reading was to become my favorite book of all time. I didn’t know it at the time, but every year following that first reading I read it again and was equally moved by it.

The book is Arctic Dreams by local Eugene author, Barry Lopez (01/06/45-12/25/2020). It has been 36 years since I first read Arctic Dreams, but by now I have read it at least 30 times.

Lopez as a nature writer accomplished something that should have been impossible by a non-scientist and lay person. He entered the wild far north, an ice kingdom most unrelenting and unkind to humans with the purpose of discovery. He set aside all mindsets of what the world is like, and left his mind fully open, a clean slate.

And, most important, he went for conversation and dialog, in part with the First Nation peoples who today live there, and with numerous scientists studying the people, the wildlife, and the land. He wanted specially to listen to the land.

He studied the expeditions of the 1700-1800s when explorers from Western Europe first set eyes on the New World, and how their arrogance and superior attitude resulted in such colossal failure and death. Unlike those explorers Lopez came with an ear especially for the people, the animals, and the land. He came to listen, not to conquer.

When Lopez asked questions a scientist would ask, he asked as a friend, not as an examiner. There were spaces of silence because that was what was important in the response he heard. And people talked because they felt a trust, and because he listened.

And, through his ears I heard the voice of the people whose line has lived for thousands of generations in such an inhospitable world, and who have not just survived, but have lived well.

Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez’s gift to readers, channeled exquisitely the voice of the peoples of the north, and in doing so, gave us the ultimate hearing of who the people were who lived in. harmony with the land, of the nature of the plants and fauna, and a profound sense of the soul of the land, something the rest of the world could do well to hear.

I am in the middle of this year’s reading of Arctic Dreams…

See: Arctic Dreams: Barry Lopez