River Notes: The Dance of Herons

by Barry Lopez

An acclaimed nature writer evokes and celebrates the forces, settings, rituals, movements, and imperatives of a river, as it calls us back to unity with the natural world.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Science, Short Stories, History, Travel

68 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1979

About the author

Barry Holstun Lopez is an American author, essayist, and fiction writer whose work is known for its environmental and social concerns.

Lopez has been described as "the nation's premier nature writer" by the San Francisco Chronicle. In his non-fiction, he frequently examines the relationship between human culture and physical landscape, while in his fiction he addresses issues of intimacy, ethics and identity.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I am reading Barry Lopez's magnificent new book Horizon, I am also re-reading his other works between its chapters. I originally read his other books when they were published many years ago, expectantly purchasing them as soon as they were issued at bookstores throughout the West, following the career of an amazing writer, and occasionally getting them signed at author events.

At the time, I thought his fictional "Notes" series of three books (Desert Notes, River Notes, and Field Notes) was remarkable even in the then very active field of environmental/nature writing of the 1970s and 1980s. This was the almost mythical time of Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Wallace Stegner, and many others. Now, Lopez's early books stand out as exceptional writing far above the current standards and taste, in any genre. Highly recommended for their literary depth, mystical insights, poetic music, emotional power, and uniquely evocative language.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To stick your hands into the river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together in one piece." - Barry Lopez

Lopez' short work is full of the loose mysticism of a man immersed in the eternal oneness of the world. If that's not your thing, so be it. If it is, few write it better than Barry. In his world, people (when still enough) slowly erode and dissolve into the river. You can talk to the trees to get the lowdown on the heron. It's natural/magical realism to be sure, but the real magic is watching Alvarez subsume himeslf in oneness until he becomes the moss on the tree trunk, becomes the silent water drop on a heron's wing, becomes a note in the song of the river, becomes a piece of rather than a piece in the landscape. I prefer his observational notes to his short stories, but he brings to each piece the kind of insight that comes only from stillness and patience.

[Christian Lincoln · Rating 5 out of 5]

Profound. Take the keen observations of a Buddhist monk, the extraordinary style of an E.B. White and this is what you get. The negative space around the descriptions; the modesty of man's sense of himself in nature, makes a lot of other writing look manic, and like swagger. He has put himself in the service of nature by sitting by a river and just watching....for weeks.

[Gloria Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The companion to "Desert Notes," this book was my farewell to the water-rich country of my youth, when I moved to desert lands, and it was my look back to all the woodland places I explored when I was a child. Again, Lopez mystical touch and lyric skill with words is transporting, uplifting, and often haunting. These are stories whose point is in the reading, in the knowing more than the end.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do not really understand this book. I wish I did because I admire Barry Lopez greatly.

Eleven short stories, seemingly interconnected and sounding narrowly autobiographical at the levels of touch, sight and sense, present characters who share ways of life on an unnamed Pacific Northwest river but are separated from one another by their psychology and their flaws. Even when nature runs amok, with fire and flood, the human beings, so conflicted, so easily thwarted, show up poorly against Lopez's depictions of the natural world. Nevertheless, together they make a kind of unintended community, begrudgingly responsible for one another.

For the reader, experiencing this book is walking a thin line, half in and half out, between fiction and nonfiction. The prose is quite specific, yet somehow, you don't know where you are. These characters are not people we identify with, in the literary sense. Partly, we recognize them as archetypes, symbolic, even allegorical. They teach (us, themselves) lessons. They experience the landscape spiritually and materially. One is deeply callous while another is wracked with guilt about the necessary ego involved in creating any sort of art. Readers can't help guessing that Lopez is talking about writing, about his craft. At the same time, the characters' choices often seem so wack, so out of keeping with what a reasonable person might do in a similar situation, it is difficult to see oneself in them. They are one thing and another.

Lopez has a new book out, Horizon. Before I read it I wanted to re-connect with Lopez's work by reading one his older efforts. I have read a good deal of this material already. It's been a minute, though. Hence this choice.

[Shannon Babb · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are looking for a novel, this is not the book you are looking for. If you are looking for a piece of beautiful free-form poetry then this book will more than leave you satisfied. Take time with this book. Allow the river to flow through you at your own pace. Allow yourself to pick it up and put it down base on your mood and there is a good chance that you will find this slim volume immensely satisfying.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

River Notes: The Dance of Herons is a mystical book about the life of a river. It’s simply beautiful nature writing at its best. I first read this book in the early 80’s and its beauty and impact remains true all these years later. This was the first book that made me cry. If you’ve never read Barry Lopez, this book and Desert Notes are great titles to start with.

[Crowleybob Crowley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I return to this slim volume often. The introduction and first essay/story, The Search for the Heron, I know almost by heart. No one evokes nature as Barry Lopez did.

[Alyson Hagy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be the most "traditional" of Lopez's NOTES trio, at least in its structure. The flow and shape of rivers guides all. But the book is still its own kind of ardent brew of fiction/nonfiction. Lopez isn't afraid of going over the top with language or love of place. For me, his patient attentiveness to flora and fauna outweighs the missteps. My favorites in this one: "The Falls" and "Hanner's Story." Those choices probably say more about me (in this century) than Lopez in the last. A potent read for those who want to think of American landscapes as they never have before.

[Leslie Wexler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This books asks: what would it take for a human being to learn “the dance?”

To learn this dance, you will not be initiated upon a first reading. You will need to reach forward and backward to see things differently, and then still - be patient enough to go back and read the entire book again. Meaning will not grace you on first sight with this book, it needs to be circled, revisited, and allowed to ripen.

You must learn to wait to dance. And maybe even more than that: you must become a reader who can bear waiting without turning waiting into impatience or failure. That is the river pedagogy in this book - the river notes will not explain themselves all at once, just as the subtitle "The Dance of Herons" will not be performed when asked. The dance appears only after enough silence, enough watching, enough humility, and enough return to the middle stories has been accomplished. By the end of the first story - it beckons you to meet again "at a downriver bend," which sends the reader forward without any answers, but a direction. Especially, as you realize a future middle chatper is called, "The Bend."

You reach this downriver bend, and find our narrator has fallen "silent like autumn leaves" into a depression. But Lopez makes it so much more than a low, it is a topographical depression, a lowering of himself into a hollow place. He is bedridden and unable to travel to the river, but he believes in "the bend" a turn in the flow that could reverse the course of action of any moving (or unmoving) body - which ultimately could solve his personal immobility. The bend becomes an obsession.

He tries to "solve" the bend, and that is where his troubles begin. He wants the river's turn to offer him a lesson in how to turn. He wants the river's "smoothly done change of direction" to become transferable skills. If he could measure the curve, the erosion of the bank, the slope of the water, the radius, the calculus, perhaps he could learn something about his own life, and so provide his condition with some kind of mastery. So he calls surveyors, geodesic scientists, and hydrologists to find the reason for the river's movements. The calculations pile up as reports stacked in the corner of his sick room. Moss grows on them. The books stacked begin to resemble boulders in the river. The instruments don't reveal the bend, they become part of the burden around it.

All the time spent on "information" to make a good decision breaks out into body pain, rib pain, leg pain, yearning, and the wish to be loved. He is lonely. He wants to know how a river turns because he himself doesn't know how to turn without injury. He wants a form of change that doesn't destroy himself, and falls into a depression because the will to wrestle meaning in the way he had been searching was failing him. His body refuses the project. He goes to bed and listens. He hears the rain, river, frogs...

The story's strangest movement is that he doesn't recover by finding an answer. He recovers by being carried by a group of bears to the river's edge back into relation. Once there he touches the soil of the bank, listens to the water, notices the hum of flies. After which he says, "now I understand the bend." The final perception is from the point of view of a hawk, where from above the bend in the river and him lying beside…it all appears natural. He says at one point - “I have lost some of myself and no longer require as much.” I'm left believing what he eroded was the part of himself that needed the formula.

"The Bend" was the first story I found myself re-reading, and mulling over thinking of Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar as I re-read. And then...I was hit like a ton of bricks by (what I thought at the moment of reading it twice) was my favourite story in the book, "The Falls."

It opens in the most extraordinary way, "Someone must see to it that this story is told: you shouldn’t think this man just threw away his life." You must not misinterpret this story, nor the man in it. So, slow down, this story is an act of rescue, not of the man it tells of, but of the meaning of his life.

Everything in this story makes you slow down and consider each of its details. I read this story twice, then again out loud to my partner, then discussed it twice more - and divined a pattern. It starts with a dream. A form of fidelity to a vision quest. There is a life vision in this story, and you're told immediately by a narrator (who was watching over the young 18 year old adult who was sleeping out in the wild for 4 days without food or water) that he never learned, and was never told about what that vision was all about. Instead, we get the aftermath - the boy leaves, returns to the area, works, wanders, disappears. The decisive event of the vision quest is never discussed.

Instead we get this picture of vagrancy reminiscent of "falls" - the man falls out of ordinary society. Falls into dream. Falls into animal relation. Falls into ice water. Falls into suffering. Falls into isolation. Falls away from explanation at any point. He has many itinerant years that read like scattered sightings over a 40ish year period - the man appears, works hard, leaves, returns, vanishes, and reappears. We learn nearly nothing about him other than where he sleeps, how he works, how he moves, and how he behaves in rivers (which is especially violent). He cuts his arms and stands waist deep in a hole in the ice he's broken with an axe and screams like a bear then leaps out and disappears. The story keeps breaking apart and continuing. And yet, you know from that opening sentence, you need to question if this man is "falling into ruin." That is an incorrect reading - the man within the story is not unstable, or failing to settle, drifting, suffering, or moving towards and ultimate leap from the falls as a suicide.

This is a man who received a vision, and the rest of his life was ordered by the vision.

The vision gave this man a shape: salmon. His wandering is not mere wandering - it is migrating back and forth to a home base. He returns. But ultimately his life is shaped by an obligation or a form of obligation like any other pursuit in life that you reach to inhabit. At the end of the story, the narrator wakes from a dream in the night and runs to the falls to find his long-time friend at the head of the falls as the salmon-shaped man leaps.

Did he finally become what he had been moving toward all along? He followed the vision into motion, migration, returns, and finally transformation.

The narrator closes the story asking if he is strong enough to eat salmon. Salmon for him has become personal. Friend. Maybe even kin. Salmon has become a being form in which a human life may pass. It is the narrator as much as the man with the vision who have become spiritually changed. The two are in relation through transformation, death, nourishment, and obligation all at once.

I loved this story. I loved knowing that there are paths in this life that are valuable, not quaint, not pathological, not "vagrant," not decorative or performative - worthy. A vision can order life and teach a person what they are responsible to. And yet that life can also be compeltely illegible to ordinary society, and that still cannot diminish its meaning.

That a vision of one's life can be more true than social legibility is worldview shift. And the story ultimately asks us directly as we return to its first sentence to tell this story - the author does not want us to think this man simply "threw his life away" - it is a life shaped by more-than-human instruction. The man's leap must be protected by understanding the story. The leap is not death, it is the final act of a salmon-shaped life.

Brilliant. Astonishing. Lopez made this story work in less than 10 pages. The Falls struck me with a man's life and how it could be misread without the proper worldview. I was so stunned, I didn't read anything more in the book for over a week.

I was surprised when I returned to the book, to read the next story "The Shallows" - a story where you are accompanied by a kind of tour guide: "here, step across," "look now," and "bend close." Drawing attention to what ultimately is a sandbar in the river. You cannot, you are told, understand the river from the bank. You have to head over to this gravel bar, lower your gaze, bend your back, and bring your eyes closer to the ground and closer to a world of ancient rocks. He guides you to look at chert, basalt, shale, chrysocolla, quartzite, obsidian, and andesite granuals ground up into gravel - and tells us that all these names are reassuring, but not the point. Taxonomy is so precise - so sure, learn the names the guide says later - you can go as far as you like with that, but it's not the point. The point is that the gravel bar looks uniformly gray from a distance, but if you get closer, “come closer now,” and you will feel something different. The world protects itself by appearing ordinary and rewards the attentive one who kneels and finds a mineral cosmos. It not about gaining taxonomies that can go "on and on," but about "the way the water folds itself around that rock and drops away" - something that has no name.

That is the epistemology of the entire story. Don't mistake naming for knowing, while allowing scientific attention, sensory reverence, and philosophical humilty all stand together in one guided tour of a gravel/sandbar in a river. By the end, the guide ponders how in the past he could have ever so thoughtlessly thrown a stone into the river?

A re-narration of an earlier childish act (tossing a stone into the river) from the standpoint of a mature accountability borne of what some might consider the highest form of knowledge: attentive appreciation.

A next favourite was Hanner's Story. I won't go into it as in depth as the others, but it’s thrust is that are rather stupid stories in small towns that can circulate as a way to console the aged by thinking back upon a golden era when things were simply "better" - and these nostalgic stories should be distrusted because the loss of utopia (or metaphorically loss of the garden) can rest upon unexamined conditions. And the unexamined fall from beauty and simplicy for the small town was maybe that they didn't understand the relationships with other nations that they were living with. Not living beside. Living with; living inside of.

One of those nations could have been the Quo-taka people, who are historically devastated by epidemic illnesses that do not have the same effect upon the settler community. Hanner's story, is told by a man who distrusts these nostalgic "better times" stories, and instead tells about a fishing teaching he received from one of the Quo-taka: before humans there were bear people and salmon people and the bear nation and salmon nation had an agreement, but had neglected to include the river. The river responds by withdrawing and running in two directions confusing both bears and salmon so as to demand recognition. The three nations: bear, salmon and water now come together - and it is revealed that you cannot take a relation for granted simply because it has always carried you. The river has been the condition of the bear and salmon life, but it has not been treated as a visible partner. That is a bad faith relationship that shapes the exact kinds of environmental crises, settler colonialism, and bad love that people make on ground that holds them, without making an agreement with the ground itself.

The river tells the salmon that it loves them. And that declarative statement is shocking but so well received by both bear and salmon people because it is vulnerable, because one group risked honest affection. Love is not outside the structure, love makes the agreement more truthful. Hanner closes the story by saying that maybe the fall from grace of the small town is something like that. But then says, “this is not a story.”

I hung there on that statement - this is not a story. Of course, it is memory. It is ontology. It tells you how a world is held together. It is not a story - it is an account of a living obligation between nations.

Hanner ends by speculating that maybe the settler town failed because they never made an agreement with the river. Maybe the Quo-taka hated them for that. Maybe a flood entered their homes in the night.

He doesn't know. But what he does know is that it makes no sense to revere a golden past of "better times" and leave out deeper questions. Even if you can't pronounce the answer.

I could stop here again, and just let the book sit for weeks, months. Pondering how so much is in so few pages, but I found myself instead "Upstream" in the deep waters of what is now my favourite story in the book - the most visionary story of the sequence. The search for something "upstream" - the story of searching for the source of our life.

The first astonishing move is that the river's source is not where the map says it is, but rather the headwaters begin with ravens.

Not a spring, not a glacier.

Ravens. Ravens overcome by grief, by betrayal, by desolation, and with a great emotional energy of their tears create (or continue to share) the river. But maybe not the source relationship. The river is a movement of sorrow through this story, made bearable because it is also kind. The ravens will hold to their responsibility. For a human, going upriver means going toward the emotional centre of your world and its relationships.

The narrator is searching for this source, and what he finds is a house by the banks. The house (which I can’t help but read as Ganook’s house) in this story is one of the strangest and most beautiful scenes in the entire sequence of stories. It's not what we expect upsteam. We expect wilderness, ravens, a headwater, tears, something other than a four story filled with domestic things: rooms, furniture, beds, windows, tables by the windows, floors, the suggestion of someone who has just stepped away from these vacant rooms.

The effect is totally eerie, but very tender. This not home as property, nor home as settlement. It is home in the shape of a shadowy promise: a room where something has been waiting, where a human might enter, a lie down with another in trust in a brass bed with white blanket and take a nap, where the border between interior and exterior has thinned into a dream about what it means (really) to be in relationship. And in this house it means a dance.

When you wake with your partner from an afternoon nap, you dance with relationship and responsibility itself, and that imagined dance matters a lot.

The narrator, imagines himself dancing barefoot, quietly, in a room with a woman (is the woman Ganook?) where the river can still be seen. The dance is possible - only in a bare state of vunerability and uncertainty, but with responsibility to the dance.

The narrator ends the vision saying that farther up river there are other relationships, and with them - the loss of the promise of finding anyting. That's the paradox: there are some places where you come close to the source, and others where you move further away from the source.

The promise of the dance, is a promise kept without final answers, no clean revelations, just a relationship between anguish and what "upstream" means: human longing and wild places, and between what you can find at the emotional source and what cannot be brought back.

The final sentence: "the walk home is terrifying"

The danger wasn't the upriver or place and its engagements, the danger is never going upriver at all. And then the danger is returning. How do you come back into ordinary life after learning that rivers are born from grief, kindness, vulnerability, and the need to dance yourself into relaitonship? How do you re-enter a world of maps, roads, schedules, small talk, certainty, and utility after the upper river has shown you that reality is held together by invisible relationships?

The walk home is terrifying because the person who returns is no longer the person who left. Like Raven and Ganook, the transformation is one into relationships through recognizing responsibility.

I've rarely been so affected by a story that I audibly sighed a near tearful groan. This story feels so large. In an Indigenous context, this story would be a creation story. And Lopez’s story does feel like an origin story. It doesn't describe just going upstream. It asks what one finds when one goes far enough into the source of things and Lopez's answer is not certainty, not innocence, not explanations. You find grief, kindness, and relationships where you can learn to dance barefoot into the realization that there is a terrible beauty in having to return to "another reality."

The last story "Drought" brings you to the dance of herons, which is not a heron at all - it's when a human can finally learn to dance with herons. And upon finishing it - you are brought immediately back to the title page and the first story again.

Happy reading! What a gorgeous book. Best I've read in years.

[Howard · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can see why i loved this so much when it came out, and why i still love it. this is writing of the Green Revolution before it existed, poetic prose that is sacred in it's handling of the subject matter.
onto desert notes.

[Tom Reeves · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was fully consumed by Lopez and the river at times. Poetic and beautiful, written by someone who feels a oneness with nature that I only brush the edges of at my finest moments. I read a few passages aloud to a friend that I found especially powerful.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another rich collection of Lopez stories, more focused and vivid than Desert Notes, but still claiming that surreal quality that his landscape writing seems to possess so well.

[Ray Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous read on the nature of water and those who observe it closely.

[Penney Peirce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another small and uplifting book that connects us deeply to nature.

[David Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps the capsule review from the Denver Post printed on the back cover of the Avon edition summarizes this book best: "A prose poem, a love song to a mountain river, an almost primeval prayer to the glorious power of nature...a heady distillation of everything mystical yet comforting in the mountains around us."

At first, I was put off from reading this book, which I found while browsing the shelves at a used bookstore. The introduction had me rolling my eyes, and the first section, "The Search for the Heron," was too lyric and not grounded enough in reality to suit me. But, I persevered and got to the second section, "The Log Jam." From that point to the end of the 11th and final section, I was enthralled, bowled over, and captivated (with the exception of the second-last section, "Upriver"). This short book joins my treasured collection of the best nature writing--and not only nature writing, but writing in general. Lopez is a master craftsman.

An evocative line that characterizes much of Lopez's writing in this book: "Beneath them [salmon], the river undulated, like sun-dried bed linen shaken out in a French hotel room in the countryside. (From "Dawn," the ninth section)

[Philip L · Rating 3 out of 5]

i found out about Barry Lopez from reading Terry Tempest Williams most recent book The Glorians. She mentioned him in it and this book in particular. It's a short collection of notes, short essays, or maybe you could call them contemplations. The main subject is a river somewhere in the Pacific Northwest and the nature around the river. Lopez spends lots of time around and on it and observing/contemplating its life force so to speak. In reading this book i felt like i was having a conversation with an old native shaman. I had to be in a quiet place to really take it all in. It probably deserves more then the 3 stars I gave it, and I'm sure it will grow on me as time goes by. The chapters/essays are all relatively short and deal with the observations of Herons, the building of a log jam in the river over time, the falls, salmon, the bend in the river, the shallows, local stories of origin, and a drought. I found it contemplative and relaxing to read.

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are those who say that things were once better in this valley, that many years ago there was a different kind of life. I have listened patiently to these stories. They are idyllic and farfetched. I believe they represent hopeful longing on the part of those who tell them..." In this poetic ode to a river and its many stories, the author speaks with awe and respect, wishing to honor the river and the power it possesses, but he does not idealize it. In a series of short stories, Lopez visits the river and its inhabitants, its friends and its enemies, the visitors who are drawn to it, and the intruders who don't understand it.

[Ruth Martinez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful, writing to take your time with and fully absorb. I liked this much better than Desert Notes, kinda makes me want to write my own desert, river and mountain notes. Next I'm going to buy his Field Notes, hope it's as good. I remember buying these 3 books back in the 80s or early 90s and being in love with this one in particular, found them again in an air bnb library, ordered Desert Notes and River notes, and am not disappointed (though Desert Notes didn't resonate as fully with me; the writing in River Notes is far more stunning).

[Mae Raiza · Rating 5 out of 5]

I may not fully comprehend of what is being told in this book, (because im from a foreign country) but as i read each and every word, phrases, sentences of it, i feel like i am relatively connected inside. I love the essence of reading this, i am bewildered by how good Barry is, from changing the perspective to another point of view, and how good he was to hearten the emotions of his reader. Sometimes it looks like He is narrating, telling or observing. I just love this book. 5⭐🖖

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a wonderfully poetic collection of natural/mystical observations to completely lose yourself in. If memory serves, I sought this little work out after hearing patti smith praise it - and she was absolutely right. The writing is unusual, humble, so evocative.

[MJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of beautiful parts and beautiful writing, when it's good it's really really good. Felt so deeply connected and inside the places he wrote about. Appreciated the mystical and silly parts of it too. There were also parts that were more difficult to get through, that felt a little meandering.

[Sara Hanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful prose.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful stories related to rivers

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having just crawled out of the second largest canyon in America, I stood at my bookshelf shuffling between this, A Sand County Almanac, and Loren Eiseley, so I suppose you could say I was in the mood for what is sometimes called nature writing. This little nugget did not disappoint.

As a reader who prefers their natura americana to lean more towards the poetic than the scientific, Lopez’s dreamy musings were medicinal. I’ll leave you with my favorite scene: the narrator, having been bedridden with depression for a long time takes advantage of a “flat spot in [his] depression” to walk out to the river and kneel beside it. From there, he imagines a hawk passing overhead, and himself appearing as natural a part of the river from the hawk’s perspective as a salmon or a flower: an imagining that dismantles his loneliness.

[Adi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really lovely, but I guess I went in expecting it to be more like Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven--so, not totally nonfiction, but certainly... semi-fictional stuff about a place. River Notes, turns out, is more a collection of actual fiction, place-focused but also largely about people, which isn't so much what I read Lopez for, much as I enjoy his prose.

[April Suter · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, you're thinking why did she read this? It was in the library and 1)I'm looking for books guys at school would like to read that are also short 2)Ken just did a report about the Heron so I thought maybe it would be cool. No. Too much thinking, maybe if I was under the influence of something I would see the point but,....No.

81 Pages

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

12/19/2013

[Mills College Library]

813.54 L8642 1979