Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

They regarded the whalers with a mixture of ilira and kappia, the same emotions a visitor to the modern village of Pond Inlet encounters today. Ilira is the fear that accompanies awe; kappia is fear in the face of unpredictable violence. Watching a polar bear—ilira. Having to cross thin sea ice—kappia.

And as naive—our natural histories of this region 150 years later are still cursory and unintegrated. This time around, however, the element in the ecosystem at greatest risk is not the bowhead but the coherent vision of an indigenous people. We have no alternative, long-lived narrative to theirs, no story of human relationships with that landscape independent of Western science and any desire to control or possess. Our intimacy lacks historical depth, and is still largely innocent of what is obscure and subtle there.

The biological nature of arctic ecosystems is different—they are far more vulnerable ecologically to attempts to “accommodate both sides.” Of concern in the North, then, is the impatience with which reconciliation and compromise are now being sought. Our conceptual problems with these things, with commercial and industrial development in the North and with the proprieties of an imposed economics there, can be traced to a fundamental strangeness in the landscape itself, to something as subtle as our own temperate-zone predilection toward a certain duration and kind of light.

As temperate-zone people, we have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice. They have been wastelands for us; historically we have not cared at all what happened in them or to them. I am inclined to think, however, that their value will one day prove to be inestimable to us. It is precisely because the regimes of light and time in the Arctic are so different that this landscape is able to expose in startling ways the complacency of our thoughts about land in general.

To contemplate what people are doing out here and ignore the universe of the seal, to consider human quest and plight and not know the land, I thought, to not listen to it, seemed fatal. Not perhaps for tomorrow, or next year, but fatal if you looked down the long road of our determined evolution and wondered at the considerations that had got us this far. At the heart of this narrative, then, are three themes: the influence of the arctic landscape on the human imagination. How a desire to put a landscape to use shapes our evaluation of it. And, confronted by an unknown landscape, what happens to our sense of wealth. What does it mean to grow rich? Is it to have red-blooded adventures and to make a fortune, which is what brought the whalers and other entrepreneurs north? Or is it, rather, to have a good family life and to be imbued with a far-reaching and intimate knowledge of one’s homeland, which is what the Tununirmiut told the whalers at Pond’s Bay wealth was? Is it to retain a capacity for awe and astonishment in our lives, to continue to hunger after what is genuine and worthy? Is it to live at moral peace with the universe?

Except for the horizon to the south, the color of a bruise, the world is only moonlit ice and black sky.

In 1597 the icebound and shipwrecked Dutch explorer Willem Barents was forced to overwinter with his crew in wretched circumstances at the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya. They awaited the return of the sun in a state of deep anxiety. More than the cold they hated the darkness; no amount of prolonged twilight could make up for the unobstructed view of that beaming star. They quoted Solomon to each other: “The light is sweet; and it is delightful for the eyes to see the sun.” When the sun finally did appear it came twelve days earlier than they expected. They acknowledged a divine intervention. They gestured toward it with joy and disbelief, and took courage against their difficulties from its appearance. What they saw that January day, we now know, was not the sun but only a solar mirage—the sun was still 5° below the horizon, its rays bent toward them by a refractive condition in the atmosphere. Such images, now called Novaya Zemlya images, are common in the Arctic. They serve as a caution against precise description and expectation, a reminder that the universe is oddly hinged.

Arctic ecosystems have the same elegant and Byzantine complexities, the same wild grace, as tropical ecosystems; there are simply fewer moving parts—and on the flat, open tundra the parts are much more visible, accessible, and countable. The complexities in arctic ecosystems lie not with, say, esoteric dietary preferences among 100 different kinds of ground beetle making a living on the same tropical acre, but with an intricacy of rhythmic response to extreme ranges of light and temperature.

On Wrangel Island in the Siberian Arctic, for example, an unbroken, ten-year series of late spring snowstorms prevented lesser snow geese from ever laying their eggs. Between 1965 and 1975 the population fell from 400,000 to fewer than 50,000 birds. In different years in the Greenland Sea where harp seals pup on the ice floes, spring storms have swept hundreds of thousands of infant harp seals into the sea, where they have drowned. In the fall of 1973, an October rainstorm created a layer of ground ice that, later, muskoxen could not break through to feed. Nearly 75 percent of the muskox population in the Canadian Archipelago perished that winter.

Eskimos, who sometimes see themselves as still not quite separate from the animal world, regard us as a kind of people whose separation may have become too complete. They call us, with a mixture of incredulity and apprehension, “the people who change nature.”

Each culture, it seemed to me, is a repository of some good thought about the universe; we are valuable to each other for that.

I bring my glasses up to study again the muskoxen in the far valley to the south. Among fifty or sixty animals are ten or fifteen calves. I regard them for a while, until I hear the clattering alarm call of a sandhill crane. To the southwest an arctic hare rises up immediately, smartly alert. To the southeast a snowy owl sitting on a tussock, as conspicuous in its whiteness as the hare, pivots its head far around, right then left. The hare, as intent as if someone had whistled, has found me and fixed me with his stare. In that moment I feel the earth bent like a bow and sense the volume of space between us, as though the hare, the owl, and I stood on a dry lakebed. The moment lasts until the hare drops, becomes absorbed again in the leaves of a willow. The owl returns its gaze to the river valley below.

I wonder if animals understand each other's languages or just key phrases?