What makes a great travel writer is not the distance he or she covers, or the variety of mysterious and glamorous locations visited, but the quality of the pauses taken along the way. Pauses for thought, pauses to look past what is on show and, most of all, pauses to remember – with due humility – what a privilege it is to travel at all. So when Barry Lopez pauses, on a journey in some faraway, exotic-seeming place, to remark that his chief duty is to ‘carry some of this home’ and to understand that ‘what you’ve found are not your things, but our things’, he is recalling the time-honoured obligation of those who go on journeys, whether for adventure, trade or research, to bring news of the wider world to ‘people who are not able to travel to Lake Clifton’. Once, any itinerant craftsman or trader who went from village to village plying his skills was a source of news, someone whose tidings enriched the communities he touched – and this is what Lopez has done for decades, renewing our sense of the entire planet (and not just our own small circle of friends, cares and obligations) as home.

Subscribe or Sign In to read the full article