Barry Lopez in Repose and Ready

Perhaps no other writer is capable of a book like “Horizon,” Barry Lopez’s new affirmation of motion, and proof that travel cures any sense of self-importance while also celebrating connection. Lopez, author of “Arctic Dreams,” “Field Notes,” and many more works of both fiction and non-fiction, recounts a lifetime on the road, from American western deserts to Russian tundra, the northern extremes to Antarctica, and everywhere in between. As much a constellation of moments as a linear story, Lopez explains that excursions to “the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, at Third and Fairfax, or driving over the valley in his mother’s dark green Ford coupe,” led to summer camp in New York with John Steinbeck’s sons, then to dreams of a career in aeronautical engineering. He also traces his travels and adventures around the globe, which eventually landed him on “the west slope of the Cascade Mountains in western Oregon,” in a “two-story house on a white water river” where he still lives. Bricking the path from embarkation and conclusion, Lopez’s narrative navigates past Cape Foulweather near his Oregon home, where Captain James Cook, “a determined explorer in a transitional era,” became “a paragon of Enlightenment,” though he failed to account fully for the unsympathetic landscape. He also examines how “the assumption…has been that the physical place, the actual place, is of no more consequence than the scenery behind a group of actors.” He explains instead, how “physical places…do shape the attitudes of visitors arriving from distant places.” Later, recalling Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island in Ecuador, part of the Galapagos archipelago, Lopez invokes Darwin, Melville, and others, and then clarifies his transfixion at “the range and extent of bird and animal life on the islands…the seeming miracle of it all,” recorded and examined by these writers and scientists that preceded him. Further south at McMurdo station in Antarctica, he weathers an official reprimand from the National Science Foundation staff to fly a kite in protest of the Antarctic Treaty, “a document meant to guide all human activity in Antarctica.” He objects because only the United States flag was flying, though, “If Antarctica belongs to no one, then no national flags should fly here,” underscoring a distrust of borders.