Horizon

by Barry Lopez

It was important to Walsh that a human being, not a rover or a probe, first saw the bottom of the Pacific. “You can’t surprise a machine,” he said to me. And it is this capacity to appreciate the unknown, to be surprised by it, he believes, that will always set the human explorer apart from the machine. The moment of surprise informs you emphatically that the way you once imagined the world is not the way it is. “To explore,” he says, “is to travel without a hypothesis.”

The loss of any human language means that, in the most difficult straits humanity has ever found itself in, one more strategy for survival has been thrown away.

Next to Skraeling is a smaller island, Stiles, known locally as the Sphinx for its resemblance to the famous stone figure at Giza. The Sphinx: a lion with a human head. An Egyptian monument so named by Europeans for its resemblance to a winged monster in Greek mythology, one that lived in Thebes and was outwitted by Oedipus. The appellation seems bizarre here, someone’s effort to diminish and subjugate the unknown, like putting a party hat on a dog.

As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds through which I was traveling over the years, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the breaching of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.

The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific. If one were truly to comprehend the size of the thing, one would be halfway to imagining God.

The moral oblivion of the slave trade. The piracy and ransacking of Spanish villages by Drake and the other West Country mariners. These things do not seem at all immediate in the modern world, nor any longer even relevant. Indeed, to recall them and to express outrage, regret, or sorrow is regarded by some as unworldly, as if conquistadores like Pizarro and perros de presa like Berganza were part of the West’s uncivilized past, largely gone, or an unfortunate aspect of the human desire to possess, to exercise control. Most people do not wish to hear about what the historian David Stannard calls “the worst demographic disaster in the history of the world,” the elimination of the Indian populations of the Americas. For schoolgirls in northern Nigeria trying to run from Boko Haram raiders laughing at their panic, for impoverished Christians in South Sudan trampled by Janjaweed cavalry, for a family blown piecemeal across a city square by one of al-Assad’s barrel bombs, the sixteenth century is now.

History tells us that with every great empire comes great barbarism, that the two are inseparable, so that to diminish barbarism you must dismantle the empires. This forces the question of what, really, civilization brings to people that they did not already have. And why is civilization so hard on the people who turn it down?

The difference between what is today the flickering hint of speciation on the horizon for H. sapiens and an event we can look back on, the survival of H. sapiens and the eclipse of H. neanderthalensis, is that with any future divergence in Homo, geography might not play the strong role it traditionally has. Two increasingly different groups of H. sapiens, one with a high degree of technological competence, the other far less able to manage psychologically in this realm, might come to represent distinct populations not because they are separated by geographic space, once a requirement for speciation, but because they are divided by electronic space: they will have ceased to communicate effectively with each other. The psychological space between them might rapidly become too great to bridge, leaving both groups isolated on either side of a chasm, and neither group in a superior position.

Genetic evidence—geneticists say 2,465 human genes, about 13 percent of the total in the human genome, have been actively shaped by recent evolution in Homo—suggests that man adapted quickly and extensively as the species dispersed and took up life in impressively different habitats—the North American Arctic, the Kalahari Desert, the Amazon rain forest, the islands of Micronesia.

In looking back on our origins, we might easily fall prey to two misconceptions. First, that H. sapiens evolved toward perfection (as opposed to simply changing in response to changes in its environment); and second, that whatever might have been lost from one millennium to the next as modern man evolved is something that we are well rid of. The idea of “improvement” in a species over time has no footing in evolutionary theory. And it could be that something H. sapiens “lost” on his way to modernity, perhaps a willingness to cooperate closely with others on a daily basis, is something he can reclaim because he has, unlike any other animal, a historical imagination and a knack for innovation.

The Bindjareb call the thrombolites woggaal noorook, “eggs laid in the Dreamtime by the female creation serpent.” A prominent mentor embedded in their mythology, this serpent is difficult to imagine separately from the Bindjareb’s home geography. She is an instructor, they say, who illuminates for them the threshold between the inanimate and animate worlds.

For people whose psychological anchor in stressful times is in part the immediacy, the intimate closeness, of the physical country they were born to, and whose guiding stories are inextricably woven into that land, the passage of the train is traumatic. Its very presence signifies their loss of ownership and denial of access to their ancestors’ lands. This is an old story in Australia, in the Americas, on the Tibetan Plateau, and elsewhere. But now, before them in the cars, is the very country itself, being shipped off somewhere. For a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, it would be as if Jerusalem and the ground it stood on had been put through a rock crusher, and the gravel of the tombs, the temples, the churches, and the prayer walls had been hauled away by NASA to build dormitories on the moon.

On a peninsula jutting out into the Indian Ocean, a place where the first white settlers repeatedly poisoned the Jaburrara’s water holes with arsenic and where, when that didn’t kill enough of them, they just started shooting the people, developers broke down 25,000 years’ worth of rock art and dumped it like so much construction debris in a single spot, which they surrounded with a cyclone fence. Like a quarantine station. The Jaburrara were left to sort the jumble out any way they could. The flayed walls of the caves at Lascaux and Chauvet, dumped in a barrow ditch.

Apparently it’s regrettable but finally all right to let thousands starve in order to ensure that a few have the yachts they require. Apparently it’s all right for thousands to die of lung cancer and for tobacco companies to withhold the evidence that would incriminate them, as long as the companies can show a profit. Apparently it’s all right for China to dam a tributary of the Brahmaputra River and endanger the flow of freshwater to Bangladesh if this will help develop a wealthy middle class in China.

The modern urge to turn a landscape into “what it once was,” to make it “better” by eliminating “pests,” to rid it of plants and animals that, because they didn’t coevolve with the environment, have a special capacity to devastate it, is a complex desire to appease—biologically, ethically, and practically. It is impossible, biologically, truly to “restore” any landscape. The reintroduction of plants and animals to a place suggests that though human engineering of one sort or another has “destroyed” a place, human engineering can bring it back, a bold but wrongheaded notion: humans aren’t able to reverse the direction of evolution, to darn a landscape back together like a sweater that has unraveled. Restoration privileges some animals and plants over others, and therefore presents ethical problems identical to those one faces in examining any project of social engineering or any country’s policies of racial and ethnic discrimination. Finally, it is not possible to restore the soil chemistry of lands turned nearly lifeless by decades of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, and overgrazing. The chief value of restoration projects, perhaps, is psychological.

The morning I reluctantly left Vanda—I felt like I’d had three glorious days at an exclusive spa, despite the necessarily spartan accommodations and plain meals—a female geologist, whose patience I had apparently tried, took me aside to inform me that I was inexcusably confused about the difference between a stone and a rock. The terms are not interchangeable, she said. A stone was a rock that had been put to some utilitarian or cultural use by a human being. Thus a headstone, a paving stone, a cornerstone, and Stonehenge. A rock was something that had not been handled by a human being. Thus a rock-ribbed coast and highway warning signs about falling rock. I didn’t inquire about rock gardens but said I was grateful for the clarification. In the years following, I myself was able to annoy a number of people by requesting that the distinction be observed.

To bolster my chances of getting approval from the lead NSF representative at McMurdo for such a trip, knowing some were sure to declare it too risky, I selected a group of highly qualified friends and acquaintances with backgrounds in search and rescue, and then added in McMurdo’s head snow-machine mechanic. I presented my case to the NSF supervisor in his office on a Saturday afternoon, a few minutes before his office closed (and, I knew, just before he and his staff would be gathering at one of McMurdo’s bars to socialize). I handed him a list of names with each person’s credentials, along with all the required paperwork describing several tasks we intended to perform and signed forms from each person’s supervisor, releasing them for the trip. Everyone in the group, I told the NSF representative, had read the guidelines governing entry to Specially Protected Area Number 6 (Cape Crozier) and had signed a form I’d prepared saying that they had. As for the route there and back, it had been flagged by a New Zealand group some weeks earlier and the flags were still in place. I’d checked. The supervisor nodded thoughtfully at all the paperwork and finally said okay. Early the next morning, long before any supervisor might reconsider and ask for further discussion, we were gone.

The hour we spend with them is intimacy without narration, an experience without increments of measured time. The unvoiced emotions we felt, which we mention to one another later, include inexplicable tenderness, moments of soaring elation. In Antarctica, where death seems to lurk more than it does in other places, each of us is drawn strongly to anything as clearly alive as these birds. Feelings of affinity with these free animals, a sense of shared fate with them, seemed to go deeper and to come on more quickly here than elsewhere.

THERE IS NO LONGITUDE at the South Pole. Its lone coordinate is 90° South. From here, every direction is north. East and west come into play, technically, as soon as one steps away from the actual geographic pole, but such coordinates are without meaning here, they’re too difficult to imagine. People orient each other outside by referring to the wind, as in “upwind of that research hut,” or to the movement of the polar ice, as in “just downstream of that front loader.”

It does not actually snow, for example, at South Pole. What lies on the polar ice cap around Pole is “diamond dust,” ice crystals drifting down on perennially light winds. And a visitor is able to see farther over the surface of the planet here than he or she can anywhere in the middle latitudes, almost twice as far, because Earth flattens out at the poles, making the planet an oblate spheroid. The atmosphere above the pole also flattens out, making the atmospheric layer thinner and creating an effective pressure altitude at Pole of around 11,500 feet, not 9,300 feet. Some visitors arriving by plane from sea level at McMurdo suffer from altitude sickness for a few days before they adjust. (Others never adjust and must return to McMurdo.) The stars, moon, and sun do not rise and set here each day but rise and set instead on a 365-day schedule, a primary reason why so much celestial research is supported here at a place that is difficult to reach and very expensive to maintain.