Attending to What Does Not Need Us

The cabin belonged to neither of them. It was a Forest Service structure near the Skagit River, decommissioned, unlocked, smelling of creosote and mouse droppings. Dillard had arrived first and was sitting on the porch railing when Lopez pulled up in a mud-spattered truck. I was already inside, trying to get the propane stove to light, which it would not do.

“The burner’s clogged,” Dillard said without looking at it. She was watching a dipper work the rocks below the bridge. “There’s a needle in the drawer by the sink.”

There was. I cleared the jet and the flame caught blue, and by the time I’d put water on for coffee, Lopez was standing in the doorway with his pack, taking in the room the way he takes in landscape — slowly, without announcing his conclusions.

“I drove through old-growth coming in,” he said. “Douglas fir, some of them six hundred years old. They don’t look six hundred years old. They look like they’ve stopped counting.”

“Trees don’t count,” Dillard said.

“No,” Lopez agreed. “That’s what I mean.”

I poured coffee into three mismatched mugs and we sat at a table that listed slightly toward the river. The assignment, as I understood it, was to talk about a piece of writing I would eventually attempt — something in the territory where their work overlapped and diverged. Nature writing. The phrase itself seemed to irritate both of them, though for different reasons.

“It’s a ghetto designation,” Dillard said. “You don’t call Moby-Dick an ocean book. The minute you say ‘nature writing,’ you’ve told the reader it’s optional. That it’s about something out there, separate from them, that they can appreciate or ignore depending on whether they own hiking boots.”

Lopez stirred his coffee with a pencil he’d found on the table. “I don’t mind the term as much as I mind what it’s become. A genre of appreciation. You go to a beautiful place, you feel feelings, you come home and describe the feelings. The landscape becomes a screen onto which you project your interiority. The actual place — its geology, its creatures, its indigenous names — recedes behind the writer’s experience of it.”

“So we agree on what it shouldn’t be,” I said.

“We agree on nothing yet,” Dillard said, and I believed her.

I asked about attention — the word that appears in both their bodies of work with the force of a moral imperative. What does it mean to attend to the natural world? What does the act of attention owe to the thing attended?

Dillard set down her mug. “Attention is the beginning. Not the technique, not the method — the beginning. You sit by the creek and you watch the water striders and after twenty minutes you see that they’re not skating randomly, they’re working a current seam, and the pattern of their movement tells you something about the hydrodynamics of the creek bed that no amount of reading would give you. That’s attention. It costs time and it pays in seeing.”

“But what do you do with what you see?” Lopez asked. “You’ve described it, in your work, as a kind of ecstasy. The world reveals itself and you’re shattered by it. Pilgrim is full of those moments — the giant water bug sucking the life out of a frog, the mockingbird dropping from the roof. You render the seeing as rapture.”

“Sometimes it is rapture.”

“Sometimes. But rapture is a conclusion. You arrive at rapture and the observation is complete. What I’ve tried to do — and I’m not saying it’s better, I’m saying it’s different — is stay in the observation after the rapture fades. To ask what the water strider’s pattern means to the water strider. What the creek means to the Skagit people who named this drainage. Rapture centers the observer. I’m interested in what happens when the observer steps aside.”

Dillard was quiet for a moment. Outside, the dipper had moved downstream and a Steller’s jay was working the porch railing where she’d been sitting.

“You think I’m a narcissist,” she said.

“I think you’re a mystic,” Lopez said. “Which is the same accusation, phrased more politely.”

I laughed. Neither of them did.

“The mystic sees God in the water strider,” Dillard said. “The naturalist sees the water strider. You think the second is more honest.”

“I think the second is more useful to the water strider.”

“The water strider doesn’t read.”

“No. But the people who build dams do. And the people who decide whether a watershed gets protected do. And when those people read nature writing that turns every creek into a cathedral, they walk away with the impression that nature’s value is spiritual — which is to say, optional. A luxury of perception. Something for the kind of person who sits on a porch and watches dippers.”

This landed. I could see it land. Dillard picked up her mug, put it down, picked it up again.

“That’s not entirely unfair,” she said. “But it’s not entirely right either. The spiritual perception isn’t optional. It’s the thing that makes people care. You can give someone all the hydrology and all the species counts and all the indigenous place-names, and if they don’t feel something — if the creek doesn’t become, even for a moment, more than a creek — they will approve the dam. Every time. People protect what they love, not what they understand.”

“They should do both,” Lopez said.

“They should. They don’t. So the question is: whose job is it? The writer’s or the scientist’s?”

“The writer who pretends those are different jobs is the writer I don’t trust,” Lopez said.

I wanted to interject here — I’d been thinking about the piece I would write, about what kind of attention it would practice. But I hesitated, because something was crystallizing between them that I didn’t want to interrupt.

Lopez leaned back. “When I was in the Arctic — Baffin Island, Banks Island, the Beaufort Sea — I spent time with Inuit hunters who could read ice the way you read a page. Not metaphorically. Literally. The color of ice told them its age. The sound it made under a boot told them its thickness. A pattern of refracted light at the horizon told them open water was forty miles north. This wasn’t mysticism and it wasn’t science. It was something older and more integrated than either. And when I tried to write about it, the hardest thing — the thing I never solved — was how to convey that knowledge without translating it into Western categories. The moment you say ‘the Inuit have a sophisticated understanding of ice physics,’ you’ve already lost. You’ve made them scientists. They’re not scientists. They’re people who live on ice.”

“So how do you write it?” I asked.

“You write around it. You describe what they do, precisely, and you trust the reader to understand that what they’re seeing is a form of intelligence that doesn’t need a Western framework to validate it. You create a space in the prose where the reader can encounter the thing itself, without your interpretation standing between them and it.”

“That’s what I do with the creek,” Dillard said sharply. “That’s exactly what I do. I describe the frog being consumed by the water bug in such precise, horrible detail that the reader has to confront it without the comfort of a lesson. I don’t say, ‘Nature is violent.’ I show you the frog deflating like a kicked tent and I leave you there.”

“You leave the reader there,” Lopez said. “You don’t leave yourself there. You follow the frog with a passage about the extravagance of creation, about how the same God who devised the water bug devised the mockingbird. You contextualize the horror. You metabolize it into meaning.”

“And you don’t?”

“I try not to. Arctic Dreams doesn’t resolve. I spent four years in the Arctic and I came home with more questions than I left with. The book is structured as a journey, but the journey doesn’t arrive. You travel north and the landscape gets stranger and more beautiful and less comprehensible, and then you stop, and the stopping is not an answer.”

“That’s an answer,” Dillard said. “The refusal to answer is the oldest answer in the book. Apophatic theology. You define God by what God is not. You define the Arctic by what it resists.”

Lopez smiled for the first time. “Fine. You may be right about that.”

I told them I’d been thinking about a piece that would try to hold both impulses — the ecstatic and the patient, the rapture and the inventory. A landscape observed over a long span, braided with natural history and personal reflection, structured as a journey but one where the destination keeps receding. I wanted the attention itself to be the subject — not what attention reveals, but what it costs, what it changes in the observer, what it owes to the observed.

“What landscape?” Lopez asked.

“I don’t know yet. Somewhere with enough complexity to sustain long looking. A coastline, maybe. Or a watershed.”

“A watershed is better,” Dillard said. “A coastline is too photogenic. The camera does the work for you. A watershed makes you earn every image.”

“But a coastline is an edge,” Lopez said. “And edges are where the most interesting biology happens. Intertidal zones, estuaries, the littoral. Where two systems meet and neither dominates. That seems relevant to what you’re describing.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you’re trying to write at the edge between two ways of seeing. Between my way and Annie’s way. If the landscape mirrors that, the form will be honest.”

Dillard shook her head. “The landscape shouldn’t mirror anything. The moment it starts serving the essay’s thesis, you’ve colonized it. You’ve turned a real place into a metaphor, and metaphor is the occupation of the particular by the general.”

This stopped me. I’d been planning exactly that — choosing a landscape that would embody the essay’s tensions, letting the terrain do thematic work. She was telling me that was a kind of imperialism.

“So what do you do with the landscape, then?”

“You look at it. You describe what’s there. And then you see what it does to your thinking, which is different from making it serve your thinking. The creek didn’t illustrate my theology. My theology was changed by the creek. The direction of influence matters.”

Lopez nodded. “That’s the one thing I’d insist on. Whatever you write, the landscape has to be the teacher, not the illustration. If you go to a coast and the coast confirms what you already believed, you haven’t gone anywhere. You’ve brought your living room to the tideline.”

“You’ve both written about seeing things that disturbed your frameworks,” I said. “The water bug. The narwhal hunts. Moments where the natural world did something that didn’t fit the story you were telling about it. How do you handle that technically? In the prose?”

Dillard answered fast. “You don’t prepare the reader. You don’t foreshadow. The frog is sitting there and then it’s being consumed and the transition is one sentence long. The prose should replicate the shock of actually seeing it. If you build up to it, you’ve cushioned it, and the cushion is a lie.”

“I work differently,” Lopez said. “I give you context first. The ecosystem, the history, the indigenous relationship to the animal. I build a frame of understanding, and then the moment that breaks the frame arrives, and the reader feels the break precisely because the frame was solid. If there’s no frame, there’s no breaking. Just a series of shocks.”

“A series of shocks is what being alive feels like,” Dillard said.

“Not to me. Being alive feels like slowly building an understanding that occasionally collapses. The collapse is meaningful because of what came before.”

I was writing in a pocket notebook — not their words exactly but the shape of what was happening between them. Two kinds of honesty. Two ways of respecting the real. Dillard smashes you into the present moment with the force of her specificity. Lopez builds the long context that makes the present moment legible. Both insist they’re serving the landscape, not themselves. Both are probably half right.

“Can I ask about a specific problem?” I said. “Scientific language. Latin names, ecological concepts, geological time. How much of that belongs in a piece like this?”

“All of it,” Lopez said. “Scientific language is precise, and precision is respect. When you call a bird by its common name, you’re using the name your culture gave it. When you use the Latin binomial, you’re using the name that connects it to every other organism in its lineage. Both names matter. Both tell you something different.”

“Latin names are a wall,” Dillard said. “I use them sometimes, but sparingly. They stop the reader. They remind you that you’re reading a text, not standing at the creek. The common name — chickadee, water strider, copperhead — lives in the mouth. The Latin lives on the page.”

“So the choice is between precision and intimacy,” I said.

“It’s always between precision and intimacy,” Dillard said. “In every sentence.”

Lopez frowned. “I don’t accept that binary. The Inuit name for the narwhal — qilalugaq tuugaalik, the one with the long tooth — is both precise and intimate. It describes the animal accurately and it places the namer in relationship with the animal. English makes you choose. Other languages don’t.”

“We’re writing in English.”

“We are. But we don’t have to accept its limitations as natural.”

The light was going. The river had changed color from pewter to something darker, almost the color of steeped tea, and the dippers were gone. Dillard got up and stood at the window.

“Here’s what I keep thinking about,” she said, her back to us. “The violence. Not the beauty — everyone writes about the beauty. The violence. The fact that everything in that river is either eating or being eaten right now, and the beauty of the river depends on that. Not tolerates it, not exists alongside it. Depends on it. The emerald shimmer on a trout is a function of the trout’s health, and the trout’s health is a function of its killing efficiency. Beauty is a byproduct of predation. I’ve never gotten over that. I don’t think nature writing should get over it.”

“Getting over it would be a resolution,” Lopez said. “And you told me earlier that you don’t resolve.”

“I don’t resolve for the reader. I resolve for myself, in private, badly, and then I undo the resolution in the next book.”

I asked Lopez the same question — what he keeps thinking about, what won’t release him.

He took a long time to answer. “Scale. The mismatch between the scale of geological time and the scale of human attention. You stand on a moraine and you’re standing on ten thousand years of glacial movement, and you can see it — the scour marks, the erratics, the till — but you can’t feel it. Your body doesn’t have the receptors for that kind of time. And so everything you write about landscape is a translation from a temporal language you don’t speak into one you do. The landscape is always older than your ability to comprehend its age, and that gap — between what’s there and what you can receive — is where the writing lives. Or fails.”

“That gap is God,” Dillard said, still at the window.

“That gap is the gap,” Lopez said. “It doesn’t need to be God.”

The propane stove hissed. Someone’s phone buzzed and no one checked it. I wanted to say something about the piece I’d write — how it might try to inhabit that gap, the space between what’s there and what can be received — but I wasn’t sure I understood it well enough to speak. So I asked about endings instead, how you end a piece of nature writing that doesn’t want to resolve.

“You stop observing,” Dillard said. “The piece ends when the light changes or the season turns or you have to leave. You don’t summarize. You don’t circle back. You stop, and the stopping is an admission that the world goes on without you in it.”

“I end with departure,” Lopez said. “The plane lifts off from Resolute, or the boat pulls away from the ice edge, and you see the landscape receding, getting smaller, and you know that what’s getting smaller is your understanding, not the place. The place stays the size it always was.”

“Both of those are still about the writer,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Dillard turned from the window. “Of course they’re about the writer. Writing is about the writer. The question isn’t whether it’s about you. The question is whether what’s about you is also true about something else.”

Lopez was putting on his jacket. The evening had gone colder than any of us expected. “Write the piece,” he said to me. “Stop asking us how. We’ve told you what we think and most of what we think contradicts the other person and some of what we think contradicts ourselves. That’s the material. Don’t smooth it out.”

Dillard was still at the window. I could see what she was watching — a last thin line of light on the water, the kind that lasts thirty seconds and means nothing except that the earth is turning and you happened to be facing the right direction.

“One more thing,” she said. “Don’t write about a place you’ve researched. Write about a place you’ve been cold in.”

Lopez, halfway out the door, laughed. It was the first thing they’d agreed on all evening, and neither of them acknowledged it.