Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

solar mirage—the sun was still 5° below the horizon,

more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes.

quantum mechanics, where what is critical straddles a border between being a wave and being a particle, between being what it is and becoming something else, occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometries.

In biology these transitional areas between two different communities are called ecotones.

What one thinks of any region, while traveling through, is the result of at least three things: what one knows, what one imagines, and how one is disposed.

is important, I think, not to lose sight of ingenuousness in these episodes. The desire to understand what is unknown is great. And the wish to create some human benefit out of new knowledge, however misconstrued, is one of the graces of Western civilization. Few historians can say precisely where the special interest of a Barrow or a Robert Peary ceased to serve society and served only the man; or where plans for industrialization cross a line and become of greater service to a nation’s economy than the well-being of its people.

These were to be largely American endeavors; indeed, the principal avenue of approach, the channel between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, came to be called the American Route, and the region itself came to be regarded by some, quite erroneously, as part of the United States, especially during the years when Peary was basing his expeditions there.

The notion of Eskimos exploring their own lands and adapting anew at the same time Europeans were exploring the Arctic was something the Europeans were never aware of.

Arctic Ocean was destined to become a “Polar Mediterranean,” with large coastal ports, submarine traffic beneath the ice, and a network of transpolar air routes.

Its power derives from the tension between its obvious beauty and its capacity to take life.

The continuous work of the imagination, I thought, to bring what is actual together with what is dreamed is an expression of human evolution.