Arctic Dreams

by Barry Lopez

landscapes they find themselves in? How does the land shape the imaginations of the people who dwell in it? How does desire itself, the desire to comprehend, shape knowledge? These questions seemed to me to go deeper than the topical issues, to underlie any consideration of them.

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?

It is difficult to imagine the sun’s arctic movement because our thought about it has been fixed for tens of thousands of years, ever since we moved into the North Temperate Zone. We also have trouble here because as terrestrial, rather than aerial or aquatic, creatures we don’t often think in three dimensions.

I had never understood this before: in a far northern winter, the sun surfaces slowly in the south and then disappears at nearly the same spot, like a whale rolling over. The idea that the sun “rises in the east and sets in the west” simply does not apply.

To grasp the movement of the sun in the Arctic is no simple task. Imagine standing precisely at the North Pole on June 21, the summer solstice. Your feet rest on a crust of snow and windblown ice. If you chip the snow away you find the sea ice, grayish white and opaque. Six or seven feet underneath is the Arctic Ocean, dark, about 29°F and about 13,000 feet deep. You are standing 440 miles from the nearest piece of land, the tiny island of Oodaaq off the coast of northern Greenland. You stand in each of the world’s twenty-four time zones and north of every point on earth. On this day the sun is making a flat 360° orbit exactly 23½° above the horizon.

(The awe one feels in an encounter with a polar bear is, in part, simple admiration for the mechanisms of survival it routinely employs to go on living in an environment that would defeat us in a few days. It is also what impresses someone on an arctic journey with Eskimos. Their resourcefulness, as well as their economy of action, bespeak an intense familiarity with the environment. Of course, they are the people there.)

Trees in the Arctic have an aura of implacable endurance about them. A cross-section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 200 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying glass.

Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists, to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He

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.”

Lying there, I thought of my own culture, of the assembly of books in the library at Alexandria; of the deliberations of Darwin and Mendel in their respective gardens; of the architectural conception of the cathedral at Chartres; of Bach’s cello suites, the philosophy of Schweitzer, the insights of Planck and Dirac. Have we come all this way, I wondered, only to be dismantled by our own technologies, to be betrayed by political connivance or the impersonal avarice of a corporation?

Man’s ability to destroy whole wildlife populations goes back even farther than this, however. Arthur Jelinek, a vertebrate paleontologist, has referred to early man in North America in very harsh terms, calling him a predator “against whom no [naturally] evolved defense systems were available” and “a source of profound changes” in the ecosystems of North America at the beginning of the Holocene. This was “an extremely efficient and rapidly expanding predator group,” Jelinek writes, with “a formidable potential for disruption.” The specific events on which Jelinek bases these judgments are the catastrophic die-offs of large mammals that began about 18,000 years ago in North America and in which he believes man played the crucial role. Collectively the events are known as the Pleistocene extinction.

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A 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.

if you have ever seen a polar bear swimming 30 feet below the surface in clear water, watched it stroke and glide, turn and roll down there like a sea otter, you would not wonder that bears could fly.

Because you have seen something doesn’t mean you can explain it. Differing interpretations will always abound, even when good minds come to bear. The kernel of indisputable information is a dot in space; interpretations grow out of the desire to make this point a line, to give it a direction. The directions in which it can be sent, the uses to which it can be put by a culturally, professionally, and geographically diverse society, are almost without limit.

Hardly anyone marvels solely at the fact that on the afternoon of April 16, 1982, five people saw two narwhals in a place so unexpected that they were flabbergasted. They remained speechless, circling over the animals in a state of wonder. In those moments the animals did not have to mean anything at all.

How different must be “the world” for such a creature, for whom sight is but a peripheral sense, who occupies, instead, a three-dimensional acoustical space. Perhaps only musicians have some inkling of the formal shape of emotions and motivation that might define such a sensibility.

I stare out into Lancaster Sound. Four or five narwhals sleep on the flat calm sea, as faint on the surface as the first stars emerging in an evening sky. Birds in the middle and far distance slide through the air, bits of life that dwindle and vanish. Below, underneath the sleeping narwhal, fish surge and glide in the currents, and the light dwindles and is quenched.

Animals confound us not because they are deceptively simple but because they are finally inseparable from the complexities of life. It is precisely these subtleties of fact and conception that comprise particle physics, which passes for the natural philosophy of our age. Animals move more slowly than beta particles, and through a space bewildering larger than that encompassed by a cloud of electrons, but they urge us, if we allow them, toward a consideration of the same questions about the fundamental nature of life, about the relationships that bind forms of energy into recognizable patterns.

In moments when I felt perplexed, that I was dealing with an order outside my own, I discovered and put to use a part of my own culture’s wisdom, the formal divisions of Western philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and logic—which pose, in order, the following questions. What is real? What can we understand? How should we behave? What is beautiful? What are the patterns we can rely upon?

An Arctic Summer, Boring through the Pack Ice in Melville Bay

The people, many of them, have not abandoned the land, and the land has not abandoned them. It is difficult, coming from cities far to the south, to perceive let alone fathom the richness of this association, or to assess its worth. But this archaic affinity for the land, I believe, is an antidote to the loneliness that in our own culture we associate with individual estrangement and despair.

One day, out on the sea ice, I left the protection of a temporary building and followed a bundle of electric cables out into a blizzard. The winds were gusting to 40 knots; it was –20°F. I stood for a long time with my back to the storm, peering downwind into the weak January light, fearful of being bowled over, of losing touch with the umbilical under which I had hooked a boot. Both its ends faded away in that swirling whiteness. In the 40-foot circle of visibility around me I could see only ice hummocks. I wondered what notions of “direction” a fox would have standing here, how the imperatives for food and shelter would affect us differently.

A Canadian scientist told me, “I hate as a biologist having to reduce the behavior of animals to numbers. I hate it. But if we are going to stand our ground against [head-long development] we must produce numbers, because that’s all they will listen to. I am spending my whole life to answer these questions—they want an answer in two months. And anything a native says about animals, well, that counts for nothing with them. Useless anecdotes.”

a whale biologist once said to me, “If you punish the data enough, it will tell you anything.”

The Eskimos’ stories are politely dismissed not because Eskimos are not good observers or because they lie, but because the narratives cannot be reduced to a form that is easy to handle or lends itself to summary. Their words are too hard to turn into numbers.

A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner once wrote that what lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different. In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound.

In the 1930s a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf began to clarify an insight he had had into the structure of the Hopi language. Hopi has only limited tenses, noted Whorf, makes no reference to time as an entity distinct from space, and, though relatively poor in nouns, is rich in verbs. It is a language that projects a world of movement and changing relationships, a continuous “fabric” of time and space. It is better suited than the English language to describing quantum mechanics. English divides time into linear segments by making use of many tenses. It is a noun-rich, verb-poor tongue that contrasts fixed space with a flow of time. It is a language of static space, more suited, say, to architectural description. All else being equal, a Hopi child would have little difficulty comprehending the theory of relativity in his own language, while an American child could more easily master history. A Hopi would be confounded by the idea that time flowed from the past into the present.

Whorf wrote that many aboriginal languages “abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations about causation, action, result, dynamic and energetic quality, directness of experience, etc….” He made people see that there were no primitive languages; and that there was no pool of thought from which all cultures drew their metaphysics.

Christian Vibe told me a story. He was in northern Greenland, coming and going by dog sledge from the small village of Uummannaq (Thule) on Hayes Peninsula. 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.

You accept the possibility of death in such situations, prepare for it, and then forget about it. 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.

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.

The Irish imramha, or sea sagas, recount the voyages of monks searching for the Isles of the Blessed and, as it happened, for bleak outposts in the “desert of the Ocean” suitable for contemplation. The most widely known of these was written down sometime in the ninth or tenth century, the Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis, the story of the seven-year voyage of the abbot Saint Brendan, in a carraugh with seventeen monks. Brendan was born about A.D. 489 in County Kerry and was abbot at Clonfert in East Galway when he left on his journey (or a series of journeys). Their craft, the carraugh, was a long, narrow, open but seaworthy boat consisting of a wickerlike basket frame covered with oak-tanned oxhide caulked with tallow. Brendan and his monks sailed with wine and cold food, used oars and a single stepped mast to convey themselves, slept on a mattress of heather, and dropped a stone anchor in bays where they explored. Their journey is a wondrous epic, filled with ecstatic visions and astounding events. They met strangers with gestures of courtesy and used their healing arts among them. They took little note of the hazards they faced. The themes are of compassion, wonder, and respect (as distinct from the themes of property, lineage, bloodshed, and banishment that distinguish the later, Icelandic sagas). Reading loosely, it is possible to imagine that Brendan reached the Faroes and Iceland, and perhaps saw the towering volcanic peak of Beerenberg on the eastern end of Jan Ma...

The geographical knowledge we enjoy now cost some men dearly. It is presumptuous to think they all died believing they’d given their lives for something greater.

“Maybe we have lived only to be here now.”

We tend to think of places like the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Gobi, the Sahara, the Mojave, as primitive, but there are in fact no primitive or even primeval landscapes. Neither are there permanent landscapes. And nowhere is the land empty or underdeveloped. It cannot be improved upon with technological assistance. The land, an animal that contains all other animals, is vigorous and alive.