Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

It is a celestial accident that Polaris is located over the earth’s Geographic North Pole (there is no comparable South Pole star). It seems to sit precisely on an extension of the earth’s axis; and it has shifted its position so little in our time we think of it as a constant. It nearly is; it has been steady enough to anchor routes of navigation for people in the Northern Hemisphere for as long as history records. Astronomers call the mathematical point in the sky above the North Pole the North Celestial Pole, and Polaris is within a degree of it.

There is no generally accepted definition for a southern limit to the Arctic. The Arctic Circle, for example, would enclose a part of Scandinavia so warmed by a remnant of the Gulf Stream that it harbors a lizard, Lacerta vivipera, an adder, Vivipera berus, and a frog, Rana temporaria. It would also exclude the James Bay region of Canada, prime polar bear habitat.

In 1830, so many ships were destroyed in Melville Bay (the place they called “the breaking-up yard”) that at one point nearly 1000 men were camped on the ice. Legally under the command of no captain, they set fire to the broken ships and milled about for weeks in drunken celebration. (Not a man was lost in this weird catastrophe.)

One fall afternoon a friend, an ornithologist, was counting migrating birds near Demarcation Bay on the north coast of Alaska, at a place called Pingokralik. On several tundra ponds he was also following the progress of three or four families of red-throated and arctic loons. Loons are unable to walk on land, and they require plenty of open water for taking off. Early in September, when the red-throated loon chicks were barely half their parents’ size, the coast was buffeted by snow squalls. Within a few days the tundra ponds were frozen over. My friend emerged from his tent one morning to find a red-throated loon and its chick paddling about energetically in an effort to maintain a small patch of open water. The other parent, which had spent the night at sea, flew by every half hour or so with food in its beak, but it could no more land than the other bird could take off. The next day it warmed up enough so the pondbound adult could take off and the other bird could land with food for the chick. The loons—there were other families in similar straits nearby—persevered in this manner, even as the human observer was driven off to a more permanent shelter. He did not know the fate of the loon chicks (the adults may well have abandoned them). What he remembers seeing were the adults flying back and forth strongly from the sea, dark spots fading in the snow squalls. Resolute, even in the face of poor timing. Successful animals.

The monotonic surfaces of the Arctic create frequent problems with scale and depth perception, especially on overcast days. Arctic hare and willow ptarmigan sometimes disappear against the snow when they are only two or three yards away. Even when a contrasting animal like a caribou or a brown bear is visible on snow or ice, it is sometimes hard to determine whether it is a large animal at a distance or a small animal at close range. In My Life with the Eskimo Stefansson recalls spending an hour stalking a tundra grizzly that turned out to be a marmot. A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus. Johann Miertsching, traveling with M’Clure aboard the Investigator, wrote of a polar bear that “rose in the air and flew off” as the hunting party approached. A snowy owl. “These comical deceptions,” wrote Miertsching, “are a frequent occurrence.”

No summer is long enough to take away the winter. The winter always comes.

Once, camped in the Anaktiktoak Valley of the central Brooks Range in Alaska, a friend had said, gazing off across that broad glacial valley of soft greens and straw browns, with sunlight lambent on Tulugak Lake and the Anaktuvuk River in the distance, that it was so beautiful it made you cry. I looked out at the icebergs. They were so beautiful they also made you afraid.

In the spring of 1940 he was traveling along the east coast of Ellesmere Island, living on supplies he had cached there months before. An Eskimo friend of his from Uummannaq knew that Vibe was a Dane and that some information that had reached Uummannaq in May would be important to him. The man sledged across Smith Sound and found a cache where he knew Vibe would show up. He scratched this message in Eskimo syllables on the side of a pemmican can: germans taking meat from denmark the king is still alive no gas left in shop. The meaning was almost instantly clear to Vibe. Germany had gone to war with Denmark (i.e., “was taking her food”); the government of King Christian had not been deposed; and, because of the war, there would be no supplies coming by ship to Uummannaq in the spring. Vibe said he held the can in his gloved hands and looked around in the bright light, at his dogs and his few supplies, and knew he would not get home for a very long time.

We carried emergency and survival equipment in addition to all our scientific gear—signal flares, survival suits, a tent, and each of us had a pack with extra clothing, a sleeping bag, and a week’s worth of food. Each morning we completed a checklist of the boat and radioed a distant base camp with our day plan. When we departed, we left a handwritten note on the table in our cabin, saying what time we left, the compass bearing we were taking, and when we expected to return. My companions, all scientists, were serious about this, but not solemn or tedious. They forestalled trouble by preparing for it, and were guided, not deterred, by the danger inherent in their work. It is a pleasure to travel with such people. As in other walks of life, the person who feels compelled to dramatize the risks or is either smugly complacent or eager to demonstrate his survival skills is someone you hope not to meet.

not until John Harrison built his first chronometer in 1735 would there be a reliable way to determine longitude. The charts and maps available to expeditions, especially for westering mariners, were of little help. Too much of the information was whimsical or groundless, and updating maps often meant contending with theoretical concepts of geography with which practical mariners had little patience. Furthermore, with no way to determine longitude and scant information on compass variation in different parts of the hemisphere, they found it hard to place new lands accurately and so improve old maps. The Zeno map (1558), a fictitious compilation showing many large islands in the western North Atlantic, was of such intimidating authority, on the other hand, that even John Davis believed he had to “harmonize his work with universally received errors.”

The return of the sun was so eagerly anticipated that during the time of day when it might be expected to loom early because of refraction, a continuous watch was kept from the top of the Hecla’s mainmast. On the fated day, February 3, a relay of men watched—ten minutes each—from the crow’s nest. It appeared at 11:40 A.M., Winter Harbor time. On February 13 two sailors received thirty-six lashes for drunkenness. On the 14th it was –55°F and Mr. Fisher poured water through a colander 40 feet up in the Hecla’s mast to see if it would freeze before it hit the deck. On February 24 at 10:15 A.M., clothing hung too near the stove in Mr. Sabine’s observation hut caught fire and set fire to the building. The blaze was quickly put out, but a man who tried to save the instruments subsequently lost fingers on both hands to frostbite. A young pet glaucous gull died in the fire and was remembered in a dignified eulogy in the next issue of the paper.

In those five years only three of the sixty-four men with Collinson died. According to one historian, Collinson exceeded all his contemporaries in looking after the health and morale of his men. One of his innovations was a billiard table made of snow blocks, erected on the sea ice at Cambridge Bay to dispel winter ennui. The bumpers were made of walrus skin, packed with oakum; the table surface was a sheet of freshwater ice, finely shaved; and the balls were hand-carved of lignum vitae. “I do not suppose that any of the men had played at billiards before,” wrote Collinson, “so they could not complain of the table; but the thing took admirably.”