I was on Skype with , legendary scribe of the natural world, when the ravens interrupted. As cawing sang through my computer, I pictured dark wings skimming Lopez鈥檚 home in the Oregon rainforest, where he has lived for almost half a century. Earlier that morning, a raven had cruised past my cabin near the British Columbia鈥揂laska border, and the two felt somehow connected.听

I heard fumbling in the background. The cawing stopped. 鈥淚t鈥檚 my cell phone,鈥� Lopez confessed. One of the perks of a raven ringtone, he told me, is that when it goes off in a crowded room, instead of glaring at him, people look to the nearest window to locate the birds.听

Lopez, at 74, is a master of making us look outside鈥攁t hypothetical corvids through glass, but more often, through his words, at the complicated place of humans on a living planet. Born in New York and later raised in California, he is best known for his 1986 National Book Award鈥搘inning , a natural history of northern landscapes and lives, and how human desires have shaped and been shaped by them. He had authored five other acclaimed books by then, and went on to write ten more, from short stories to essay collections, all with striking lyrical and moral power. But none displayed the scale or ambition of Arctic Dreams, and the problem with writing a modern classic is that people clamor for another.

More than 30 years later, after traveling from pole to pole and bearing witness to a world under crushing pressure鈥攁nd after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer several years ago鈥擫opez has delivered 听($30, Knopf). This epic narrative details his journeys in the Pacific Northwest and the Gal谩pagos Islands, equatorial Africa and Tasmania, the Arctic and the Antarctic, and lands between and beyond. En route, Lopez reckons with human calamity, searches out other ways of knowing, and contemplates the meaning of horizons鈥攑laces actual and metaphorical where the earth meets the sky and knowledge meets speculation. By turns unsettling and sublime, Horizon is a bracing masterpiece for a broken world. It is also Lopez鈥檚 most autobiographical work, in the sense that he鈥檚 the companion we travel with on the page. But the 鈥渢hrottled Earth,鈥� as he puts it, is 贬辞谤颈锄辞苍鈥�s true protagonist, and at stake is our collective future on it.听

In person there鈥檚 a quiet courtesy to Lopez, a sincerity and sense of measure that seems almost rebellious in this age of high-octane oversharing. Certainly, it鈥檚 hard to imagine him ever deploying a hashtag. When he speaks, radiant sentences unfurl like an opening in fog. 鈥淲e need maps that make evident and resplendent the earth,鈥� he mused when I first met him, at a conference in Lubbock, Texas, in 2012, because that is the sort of thing he says in casual conversation. It鈥檚 also the sort of thing he does, with books that collectively wake us up to the immense world outside our small, frazzled selves. He鈥檚 the wise elder we all wish lived just down the road, so that we might swing by and, in the spaciousness of his presence, repair our sanity, our sense of what we want our lives to mean.

On a planet coming unhinged, we need these heart-to-hearts with Lopez more than ever. Horizon distills a lifetime of them. This is the place we now stand, he is saying, and from here the skyline looks hazy. To put it bluntly, as Lopez does in the prologue, 鈥淲hat will happen to us?鈥� If worshipping knowledge, money, and power over wisdom got us into the mess we find ourselves in, do we still have time to get wise? 鈥淲e can throw up our hands and say what鈥檚 the point,鈥� Lopez told me when we talked this winter. 鈥淏ut my urge is to not lose faith. We鈥檝e never truly tested the human imagination.鈥澨�

Often it takes听a crisis to make people go that deep, to ask the big questions. Yet Lopez has always lived and written with shamanic intensity. People have chided him for taking the world too seriously, but how else, he writes, 鈥渃ould you take it?鈥� Plus, seriousness for Lopez doesn鈥檛 preclude an enthusiasm for life, or raven ringtones, or ripping full throttle across the Ross Ice Shelf to test snowmobiles before a scientific expedition. (He admits this was 鈥渕ore testing, perhaps, than they really might have needed.鈥�) Horizon is a grave and demanding book, but it isn鈥檛 humorless. When Lopez visited the South Pole, he brought a tubular map case that made his bureaucratic handler suspicious. Lopez joked that it contained a fly rod, that he wanted to 鈥渕ake a few casts鈥� on the polar ice cap. No less bizarrely, the case actually contained a kite. At minus 26 degrees, and in defiance of his handler鈥檚 dictums, Lopez flew it over the , his 鈥渨himsical and private gesture of disagreement鈥� with the presence of national markers on a continent that belongs to no one.

Gestures matter to Lopez, even those that might be meaningless by empirical measures. In Arctic Dreams, he famously bowed before the nest of a horned lark, and in Horizon he bows before the world鈥檚 griefs and its almost unbearable beauty. Such as the sun burning inside a glacier 鈥渓ike a lightbulb shining through a parchment shade.鈥� Or the fallen bits of the moon, the asteroid belt, and Mars he sees constellating polar ice sheets. Or the small caverns breathed into the underside of sea ice by surfacing Weddell seals. Surfacing in one himself on a frigid scuba dive, Lopez removed his regulator to inhale the 鈥渧aguely fishy air of multiple seal exhalations.鈥� Horizon never flinches from sadness or disintegration, and never offers false hope; yet reading it leaves you feeling revived, far from alone, and part of a larger unfolding.

When I ask Lopez what鈥檚 next for him鈥攖hat dreaded question for authors who鈥檝e just finished books, never mind a book that took three decades and an entire lifetime to write鈥攈e鈥檚 vague on the writing front. He鈥檚 got some ideas, he says, but what he really wants to talk about is hopping in his truck and heading north. He wants to drive to the dead end of Alaska鈥檚 North Slope Haul Road, now known as the , one of the roughest and remotest tracks in the world, which begins near Fairbanks and finishes near the Arctic Ocean.

He鈥檚 in no rush to get there. Setting off from home, he鈥檒l linger in wilderness where he finds it and pay respects to indigenous communities along the way. Mostly, he intends to listen. Without an agenda, without a plan, and without expectations, he hopes to hear, as ever, what the quiet world has to say.听

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The first sign of doubt is a renewed fanaticism. Back at university, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I studied harder than ever in hopes of becoming an astronaut, despite questioning, deep down, whether I wanted to permanently emigrate to Mars if it meant a lifetime of containment. I spent my spare time presiding over a space club and volunteering in a marine microbiology lab, where my job was to tease long, invisible threads of DNA from the basaltic crust of the Pacific Ocean. Though I didn鈥檛 have the opportunity to retrieve those sea-floor samples in a submarine, the lab was located in a windowless basement, which offered a similar experience of sensory deprivation, only without any of the adventure. Whenever I walked outside, pale and blinking, I felt as if I鈥檇 been submerged for months. Books kept me going like bubbles of oxygen. One afternoon, shielding my face against the sun after the dim fluorescent flicker of the lab, I settled onto the grass on campus with my old friend Marco Polo, hoping to let my eyes readjust to wider horizons with the help of a childhood hero鈥攖his time in his full, unabridged glory.

But as I read , I was shocked to encounter a stranger in the Venetian explorer, someone who didn鈥檛 relish slogging across lands that left me dizzy with longing. Instead, this Polo skirted the Taklamakan鈥檚 wandering dunes as widely as possible, meekly plugging his ears against the spirit voices he feared would lure him into the trackless sands. He may never have seen a big-horned sheep alive in the Pamir, just their horns carved into bowls or stacked as fences, though this species, Ovis ammon polii, was eventually named after him: the Marco Polo sheep. And when he visited the Tibetan Plateau, he dismissed it as a blighted wasteland. 鈥淵ou ride for 20 days without finding any inhabited spot,鈥� he complained, 鈥渟o that travelers are obliged to carry all their provisions with them, and are constantly falling in with those wild beasts which are so numerous and so dangerous.鈥� Again and again the so-called explorer dashed around mountains and deserts as quickly as possible, cursing wilderness as a mere obstacle to swift progress and profit.

I couldn鈥檛 exactly blame him, for the Silk Road was a 13th-century superhighway for trade, after all, and Polo was a merchant. After following his businessmen uncles to Cathay, where Kublai Khan took a shining to the Venetian teenager, Polo was tasked with assessing the value and variety of goods throughout the Mongolian empire, which at the time spanned Asia to the edge of Europe. Polo took this duty seriously, and as a result his travelogue reads more like a catalog. The book details the precious commodities available along the Silk Road: silver in Armenia, rubies in Badakhshan, black magic charms in Kashgar, ivory in India. With regard to lands less obviously exploitable, such as Tibet, the text is far terser.

I was gutted. Like so many explorers falsely portrayed as noble trailblazers in my high school history textbooks鈥攆rom Christopher Columbus to Sir John Franklin鈥擯olo turned out to care mostly about fortune and fame. Did no one but Alexandra David-Ne虂el set off for the pure sake of setting off, propelled by a basic need to see around the bend, without the ulterior motives of wealth and conquest? Sitting in the quad, feeling bereaved, I resolved to see the Silk Road for myself, on a pilgrimage to the precise wildernesses Marco Polo most feared and shirked. I briefly considered traveling on horseback, but the lack of water in the Taklamakan was concerning. Camels were better suited to such arid environments, but the terrain would be bumpy enough as it was. A bicycle struck me as the perfect substitute: self-propelled and unlikely to spit.

That night I called my parents and outlined my preposterous plan. There was a long silence on the line. Then my mother said, 鈥淧lease go with a friend?鈥�

So I asked Mel if she wanted to join me on a bike ride. Just the Chinese section of the Silk Road for starters, I reassured her; it boasted the greatest concentration of places Polo most dreaded. After a warm-up trip across the continental United States that summer, we graduated from university the following year and hit the Silk Road. And that鈥檚 how we found ourselves in the Pamir Mountains, gritting teeth through sandstorms in the Taklamakan Desert, and slinking toward Tibet while the stars looked the other way.

(Tibetan Plateau)

Eventually dawn lit the land around us, revealing mountains as rough as gnawed-down fingernails. The ragged peaks stretched on as far as I could see, a fury of forms. Rock turned to rust in the low-angled light and faded to umber and gray as the sun rose higher. A flock of dusty birds I couldn鈥檛 name swooped above the river, whose turbid surge was distilled at this higher altitude to a clear stream, its water no longer the color and texture of chocolate milk. I felt thin and insubstantial as a shadow, but the day had barely begun. Around every bend in the road I braced myself for a police convoy, a glimpse of the plateau, a woolly mammoth. Nothing would鈥檝e surprised me, for the world seemed less unknown than unknowable, wavering around me like a half-formed thought. Then I realized I was dizzy with thirst.

I reached down for my water bottles, but the first was empty and I couldn鈥檛 find the second鈥攑robably lost in the turmoil at the checkpoint. I told Mel to continue on while I stopped to fill my bottle in a roadside stream. Because of the steady drawl of the water, I didn鈥檛 hear the car pull over. I turned around and there it was, puttering with menace, some sort of government emblem on the door. When a chubby Chinese man in a crisp navy blue uniform got out, I knew it was over, for the third time that morning.

Without saying a word, the Chinese cop kicked my bike鈥檚 tires and tried to lift its frame. The heavy bike hardly budged. Shaking his head, he returned to the car and fumbled in the trunk. For an arrest warrant, I was sure, possibly handcuffs. Instead he returned with three crisp cucumbers.

鈥淗ello!鈥� he grunted as he handed me the vegetables.

鈥淥h,鈥� I said, stunned. 鈥淭hank you!鈥�

Without another word, he got into the vehicle and drove off.

I caught up with Mel, who had been oblivious to my plight, and gave her a cucumber. She looked surprised, but a cyclist is never one to turn down a snack. We continued biking, munching as we pedaled, and by midday reached the bottom of a 10,000-foot pass, the first step on the hypoxic staircase of passes climbing onto and across the Tibetan Plateau, where the average ground elevation is nearly as high as Mont Blanc. Lacking the energy and nerves to tackle the pass that day, we found a gully deep and wide enough to camp in and lounged there all afternoon, trying to ignore the imminent prospect of discovery by the Chinese police. Cucumber Cop had probably told his colleagues there was no need to rush, convinced we couldn鈥檛 get far on such heavy bikes.

The higher we climbed onto the Tibetan Plateau, the better I could breathe. I felt a strange lightness in my legs, an elation of sorts. Each revolution of the pedals took me closer to the stars than I鈥檇 ever propelled myself, not that I could see them by day, when the sky was blue and changeless but for a late-morning drift of clouds. The shadows they cast dappled the slopes of mountains like the bottom of a clear stream, so that climbing the pass felt like swimming up toward the surface of something, a threshold or change of state. Earth to sky, China to Tibet.

My tires scrabbled for traction on the loose knuckles of gravel paving National Highway 219, the only road leading into and across western Tibet. After just two switchbacks, we were high above our last camp, and I could see Ben and the Germans milling around below, dawdling as usual. Mel and I preferred waking and biking early, when the land came alive in the slanted light of morning and it seemed we had time enough to get anywhere by nightfall, Lhasa or the moon. Florian, Mattias, and Ben preferred to sleep late, boil enormous pots of sweet milky rice for breakfast, and amble onto the road at midday. We usually crossed paths again in the late afternoon, when they either caught up with us or found our camp.

Mel and I biked up the pass side by side, barely speaking, sent into parallel solitudes by the effort of the climb. I鈥檓 not sure where I go when I spin wheels for hours on end like that, except into the rapture of doing nothing deeply鈥攁lthough 鈥渘othing,鈥� in this case, involves a tantrum of pedal strokes on a burdened bicycle along a euphemism for a highway through the Himalaya. But in the singular focus of that task, the almost tantric simplicity of it鈥攂reathe, pedal, breathe鈥擨 took in everything at once: the dust settling on my skin, the ache and strain and release of my quads, the river glittering far below like an artery of light, a shining silver vein, surely not the same sludge-like flow we鈥檇 camped next to a few days ago. Ride far enough and the world becomes strange and unknown to you. Ride a little farther and you become strange and unknown to yourself, not to mention your traveling companion.

鈥淣ice face mask, bud,鈥� Mel managed between pedal strokes. 鈥淲earing enough sunscreen?鈥�

I grinned through a thick mask of sweat and grit and sunscreen, which I never rubbed in upon application, convinced it worked better as an opaque, unabsorbed gloss.

鈥淵ou鈥檙e one to talk!鈥� I told Mel. 鈥淵our hair is growing its own hump.鈥�

I can鈥檛 remember exactly how we became friends, but I believe it had something to do with volleyball. When my family moved north of Ballinafad, Ontario, when I was ten, I was the bookish new kid in a school where Mel was universally adored for her unconstellated freckles and the red hair she hated, for her sidelong sense of humor and winning habit of throwing her head back when she laughed. We had little in common until gym class, where the two of us were among the few kids who dove to stop every spike, no matter how futile the reach, how unforgiving the floor tiles. Our team went on to lose every match for the next three years of elementary school鈥攏ot just every game, but every set. I didn鈥檛 mind, and neither did Mel. The point of life, by our mutual measure, was to give it all we had. The only way we knew how to go was too far.

Hence Tibet. An hour into the climb, the sun glared directly above us in the narrow gap of sky not shuttered by mountains, so we stopped to reapply sunscreen. I smeared more on my face and Mel daubed some on her lower back, not so much to block it from UV radiation, for it was already shielded by her shirt, but to moisturize her skin, which was flaking away in bright-red bits. The day before sneaking across the checkpoint, while bending over to sort and pack gear, Mel鈥檚 T-shirt had slipped up and exposed her lower back to the high-altitude glare, which fried the skin a few shades angrier than scarlet. She didn鈥檛 complain鈥擬el rarely did except to exalt her suffering in satire, a form of stoicism I admired and occasionally found insufferable鈥攂ut I could tell she鈥檇 been riding stiffly to avoid twisting her seared torso. No easy task on a road paved in potholes.

After moisturizing, Mel sighed in the quietly determined way that meant she was ready to get back on the road. I wasn鈥檛. 鈥淒o you hear that? Is it a bird? Or maybe the boys?鈥� I ventured, hoping to distract her into resting a little longer. A large part of why I love biking is how blissful it is to stop. 鈥淗ey, are you hungry?鈥�

Of course she was; we always were.

Back on the bike, I pretended that the wheels didn鈥檛 travel the world鈥檚 surface so much as unspool it, and if I stopped pedaling for even a second it would all fade away. The mineral glitter of the mountains and the cloud-shot indigo sky and this road like a parade of detours was all a dream sustained only in motion.

Three hours and as many false summits later, I knew we鈥檇 reached the top when Mel, ahead on the road, threw her bike down and started turning cartwheels. I was so light-headed and giddy I seemed to be cartwheeling while standing still. It was one of those rare moments in life when you measurably accelerate into a new version of yourself, become who you are by leaps and bounds. That I鈥檇 pedaled to an altitude I鈥檇 only previously visited in airplanes, and that I could still breathe, was a revelation, like discovering an extra lung or the ability to see in ultraviolet. I鈥檇 always hoped we鈥檇 make it to the Tibetan Plateau, still technically a few passes away, each higher than the last, but now, for the first time, I believed it.

Excerpt from听听by Kate Harris.听

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