BARRY, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? You and I have been friends for almost forty years now.
We’ve donned hip waders and walked together in the whitewater of your beloved McKenzie River. We’ve walked the woods and hills of the Goldstream Valley. One snowy afternoon, in the crepuscular winter light, as we hiked up the mountain above Cynthia’s and my house, you told me at length about your idea for a sprawling book that would somehow encompass the whole earth with the same intensity and specificity as
Arctic Dreams. A few years later, while you were working on that book,