Barry Lopez

The more you watch the river, the more you understand what it means to apply the adjective “alive.” And it’s in those ways, just with regard to the river, the birds, or other components of the place that we separate out and name, that you begin to get an understanding of what . . . of what this place is. I think for any writer, the place itself is not all that important. It’s your intimacy with the place that’s really important. You can learn about God anywhere is what it comes down to. You just have to pay attention.

When I’m down at the river, I can tell stages of the river just by listening. Its voice is completely different when there’s two or three inches more, or two or three inches less water there, because it moves over the rocks in a different way. And what some would, I guess, call cacophony—and maybe it is—to somebody with a more sophisticated ear than I, it’s not cacophony. It’s, you know, maybe a version of arhythmic, atonal music. John Cage could sit here and say, “Oh, yeah, well,” and see some deep organizing principle in the sound of the water, the way you could see by shooting it in moonlight for twenty minutes. You could see the deep resolution of the laminar flow of water. Then it hits one of those rocks. And then it breaks up and goes around it. Heisenberg was famously asked, “If you get to heaven, what would you ask God?” And he said, “Well, I wouldn’t say to him, ‘Why relativity?’ I would say, ‘Why chaos?’” Meaning that chaos is more complex, it’s more difficult to wrap your mind around chaos than it is to wrap it around relativity. And this is the orchestra of chaos right here in front of us. And it’s so interesting to me always, that the world of commerce and vacations and going to town is, you know, fifty feet away.

Barry Lopez Syntax of the River