Arctic Dreams Read online

  It is easy to imagine their sense of wild adventure, that on one of those July afternoons off Pond’s Bay, on a Sunday when a strict Christian captain would permit no whaling, that the crew might be lounging on the sunlit decks comparing exotic arctic souvenirs: the perplexing skull of a muskox, with its massive horn bosses and protruding eye orbitals—“from a kind of polar cattle,” as they understood it from the Eskimo, which lived way off to the west and the north. Or a bit of chain mail, which, someone argued, was certain proof that Viking explorers had sailed far north of the Greenland settlements, hundreds of years before. Or a small ivory carving of a human face, twisted in psychotic anguish, an artifact from the vanished Dorset culture. They likely felt a tension between the unfamiliar quality of these objects and the commonplaces of their own daily lives—the boot-worn deck on which they sat, or the intricate but familiar rigging of sails and spars overhead.

  Perhaps someone recalled having seen a polar bear once, far offshore in a storm, swimming with measured strokes through great dark seas—and, with that, introduced yet another tension peculiar to the place, that between beauty and violence. Or perhaps they spoke of the Eskimos, how astonishing they were to be able to survive here, how energetic and friendly; and yet how unnerving with their primitive habits: a mother wiping away a child’s feces with her hair, a man pinching the heart of a snared bird to kill it, so as not to ruin the feathers.

  In their own separate, spare quarters, the ship’s officers might have been reading William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions or the recently published discovery narrative of William Parry, who had opened the way to the West Water in 1818 with John Ross. They admired Parry; overall, however, they viewed the British discovery expeditions—in ships that were ice-strengthened to a fare-thee-well, manned by inexperienced crews and commanded by officers seeking “imperishable renown”—as a pompous exercise in state politics, of little or no practical value.

  Men and officers alike would have mused more on the blubber and bone below decks, for that was tangible wealth. These two parts of just a single whale would sell on the docks at Hull for ten to fifteen times what a man could expect to make in a year’s work ashore.

  The men on the decks, dozing in the sun on their day off, likely had no thought at all of how utterly devastating their way of life would prove to the Eskimo and the bowhead. They felt, instead, a sense of fortune. And they yearned for home.

  The Canadian historian W. Gillies Ross cautiously suggests that as many as 38,000 Greenland right whales may have been killed in the Davis Strait fishery, largely by the British fleet. A sound estimate of the size of that population today is 200. There are no similar figures for the number of native people in the region who fell to diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, and other diseases—historians have suggested that 90 percent of the indigenous population of North America is not an unreasonable figure. The Eskimos are still trying, as it were, to recover.2

  What happened around Pond’s Bay in the heyday of arctic whaling represents in microcosm the large-scale advance of Western culture into the Arctic. It is a disquieting reminder that the modern industries—oil, gas, and mineral extraction—might be embarked on a course as disastrously short-lived as was that of the whaling industry. 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.

  And our conceptions of its ultimate value vary markedly. The future disposition of the Arctic is not viewed in the same way by a Montreal attorney working on the settlement of Inuit land claims and by a naval architect in Sweden designing an ice-breaking tanker capable of plying the polar route from Rotterdam to Yokahama. And the life history of the Arctic—the pollination of its flowers by the bumblebee, the origins and thoughts of the Dorset people, the habits of the wolverine—means one thing to an inuk pulling on his fishnets at the mouth of the Hayes River, another to a biologist watching a caribou herd encounter the trans-Alaska pipeline, and yet something else to the modern tourist, bound for a caviar-and-champagne luncheon at the North Pole.

  Such a variety of human views and interests in an emerging land is not new; what is new for us, and troubling, is a difference in the land itself, which changes the very nature of these considerations. In the Temperate Zone, we are accustomed to dealing with landscapes that can easily accommodate opposing views. Their long growing seasons, mild temperatures, great variety of creatures, and moderate rainfall make up for much human abuse. 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. Or for the particular shape that time takes in a temperate land, where the sun actually sets on a summer evening, where cicadas give way in the twilight to crickets, and people sit on porches—none of which happens in the Arctic.

  Difficulty in evaluating, or even discerning, a particular landscape is related to the distance a culture has traveled from its own ancestral landscape. 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. Its unfamiliar rhythms point up the narrow impetuosity of Western schedules, by simply changing the basis of the length of the day. And the periodically frozen Arctic Ocean is at present an insurmountable impediment to timely shipping. This land, for some, is irritatingly and uncharacteristically uncooperative.

  If we are to devise an enlightened plan for human activity in the Arctic, we need a more particularized understanding of the land itself—not a more refined mathematical knowledge but a deeper understanding of its nature, as if it were, itself, another sort of civilization we had to reach some agreement with. I would draw you, therefore, back to the concrete dimensions of the land and to what they precipitate; simply to walk across the tundra; to watch the wind stirring a little in the leaves of dwarf birch and willows; to hear the hoof-clacket of migrating caribou. Imagine your ear against the loom of a kayak paddle in the Beaufort Sea, hearing the long, quivering tremolo voice of the bearded seal. Or feeling the surgical sharpness of an Eskimo’s obsidian tool under the stroke of your finger.

  Once in winter I was far out on the sea ice north of Melville Island in the high Arctic with a drilling crew. I saw a seal surface at some hourless moment in the day in a moon pool, the open water directly underneath the drilling platform that lets the drill string pass through the ice on its way to the ocean floor. The seal and I regarded each other in absolute stillness, I in my parka, arrested in the middle of an errand, the seal in the motionless water, its dark brown eyes glistening in its gray, catlike head. Curiosity held it. What held me was: how far out on the edge of the world I am. A movement of my head shifted the hood of my parka slightly, and the seal was gone in an explosion of water. Its eyes had been enormous. I walked to the edge of the moon pool and stared into the dark ocean. I could not have been more surprised by the seal’s appearance if it had fallen out of the winter sky overhead, into the spheres of light that embraced the drill rig and our isolated camp.

  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?

  It is impossible to know, clearly, the answer to this question; but by coming to know a place where the common elements of life are understood differently one has the advantage of an altered perspective. With that shift, it is possible to imagine afresh the way to a lasting security of the soul and heart, and toward an accommodation in the flow of time we call history, ours and the world’s.

  That dream, as it unfolds in the following chapters, is the dream of great and common people alike.

  1 The tint is from blood-red pigments in the cell walls of species of freshwater algae present on the snow.

  2 “Eskimo” is an
inclusive term, referring to descendants of the Thule cultural tradition in present-day Canada and the Punuk and Birnirk cultural traditions in modern-day Alaska. See note 2.

  One

  Arktikós

  ON A WINTER AFTERNOON—a day without a sunrise, under a moon that had not set for six days—I stand on the frozen ocean 20 miles off Cape Mamen, Mackenzie King Island. The sea ice of Hazen Strait is not completely featureless, but its surface does not show, either, any evidence of severe torture, such as one would find, for example, in the Lincoln Sea. The currents are relatively calm here. During the nine or ten months the water is frozen, this platform hardly moves.

  To the south I can see a thin streak of violet and cobalt sky stretching across 80° of the horizon. But the ice and snow barely reflect these colors. The pervasive light here is the milky blue of the reflected moon. It is possible to see two or three miles in the moonlight; but the pale light gives nothing an edge. Except for the horizon to the south, the color of a bruise, the world is only moonlit ice and black sky.

  The sky has no depth because of the fullness of the moon, but stars shine brightly. The stars have caused me to pause in the middle of my walk. Polaris, the North Star, is directly overhead. Whenever before I have located the Big Dipper in the sky and followed the imaginary line through its indicator stars to find Polaris, I have been looking to the north, into a northern sky. This afternoon I look straight up.

  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.

  I look straight up at that anchor now, a yellowish star one hundred times the size of the sun, alpha Ursae Minoris, the only one that never seems to move. Pivoting around it are the seven bright stars and seven fainter ones that can be joined to create the familiar cup with its handle, or to form the hips and tail of Ursa Major, the Great Bear. In the early history of Western civilization the parts of the world that lay to the far north were understood to lie beneath these stars. The Greeks called the whole of the region Arktikós, the country of the great bear.

  The Old World regarded the Arctic as an inaccessible place. Beyond a certain gloomy and hostile border country, however, they did not imagine it as inhospitable. Indeed, in Greek myth this most distant part of the Arctic was a country of rich lacustrine soils, soft azure skies, gentle breezes (zephyrs), fecund animals, and trees that bore fruit even in winter, a region farther north than the birthplace of the North Wind (Boreas). The inhabitants of Hyperborea, as it was called, were thought to be the oldest of the human races, and to be comparable themselves with the land—compassionate in temperament, knowing no want, of a contemplative bent. In some legends of Hyperborea there are striking images of this blessed atmosphere—white feathers falling from the sky, for example. (The allusion is probably to a gentle lamellation of snow; but the reference is not entirely metaphorical. On the coast of Alaska one summer day, an immense flock of molting ducks flew over my head, and hundreds of their feathers rocked quietly to earth as they passed. In histories of nineteenth-century arctic exploration, too, one finds a correspondence, with descriptions of a kind of hoarfrost that built up like a vaning of feathers on a ship’s rigging.)

  Perhaps some traveler’s story of irenic northern summers reached the Greeks and convinced them of the Hyperboreans’ salutary existence. A darker side of this distant landscape, however, was more frequently evoked. The indigenous southern cultures regarded it as a wasteland of frozen mountains, of violent winds and incipient evil. For theological writers in the seventh century it was a place of spiritual havoc, the abode of the Antichrist. During the time when the southern cultures in Europe were threatened by Goths, Vandals, and other northern tribes (including, later, the Vikings), two quintessentially malevolent figures from the Old Testament, Gog and Magog, emerged as the figurative leaders of a mythic horde poised above the civilized nations. These were the forces of darkness, arrayed against the forces of light. In English legend the northern armies are defeated and Gog and Magog captured and taken to London in chains. (Their effigies stood outside Guildhall in the central city for 500 years before being destroyed in an air raid in World War II.)

  A gentler ending than this is found with a hill outside Cambridge called Gogmagog. One of the northern giants in that barbaric army, the story goes, fell in love with one of the young women of the South. She spurned him because of his brutish nature. He lay down in remorse, never to move again. His body became the hills.

  In a more prosaic attempt to define the Arctic we have arranged it around several poles.1 The precise location of the most exact of these northern poles, the North Pole itself, varies (on a small scale). Tectonic activity, the gravitational pull of the moon, and the continuous transport of sediments from one place to another by rivers cause the earth to wobble slightly, and its axis to shift as it does so. If the North Pole were a scribing stylus, it would trace a line every 428 days in the shape of an irregular circle, with a diameter varying from 25 to 30 feet. Over the years, these irregular circles would all fall within an area some 65 feet across, called the Chandler Circle. The average position of the center of this circle is the Geographic North Pole.

  Other northern poles are as hard to locate precisely. In 1985 the North Magnetic Pole, around which the earth’s magnetic field and its magnetosphere (far above the earth’s atmosphere) are organized, lay at 77°N 120°W, some 30 miles east of Edmund Walker Island, at the southern end of the Findlay Group. This is 400 miles farther north and somewhat west of where it was when James Clark Ross discovered it in 1831, on the west side of Boothia Peninsula.

  The North Geomagnetic Pole, around which the earth’s magnetic field and its magnetosphere are theoretically (mathematically) arranged, lies about 500 miles east of the North Magnetic Pole, in the vicinity of Inglefield Land in northern Greenland.

  Movement of the North Magnetic Pole, A.D. 1600 to the present. Locations prior to 1831 are approximate.

  A fifth northern pole, hardly noted anymore, has been made obsolete. In the nineteenth century people believed no point on earth was more difficult to attain than a place in the sea ice north of Alaska, at about 84°N 160°W. The pack ice of the Arctic Ocean was thought to pivot slowly around this spot, making an approach by ship impossible and a journey on foot or by dog sledge too perilous. No more evident to the eye than the Geographic North Pole, this Pole of Inaccessibility has now been “seen” numerous times from the air and even “visited,” probably, by Russian icebreakers.2

  More useful, perhaps, than any set of lines in developing an understanding of the arctic regions is an image of the annual movement of the sun across the arctic sky. To the temperate-zone eye the movement is irregular and unorthodox. The borders that divide periods of light (days) from periods of darkness (nights) seem too vague and the duration of both too prolonged or too short, depending.

  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 remember the first time these things were impressed on me, on a winter flight to Barrow on the north coast of Alaska. It was around noon and we were flying north. By craning my neck and pressing my face against the cabin window, I was able to see the sun low on the southern horizon. It seemed to move not at all from that spot during the two-hour flight. When we landed at Barrow, it seemed to have set in the same spot. As I walked through the village, I realized 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. The thought that a “day” consists of a morning and a forenoon, an afternoon and an evening, is a convention, one so imbedded in us we hardly think about it, a convention of our literature and arts. The pattern is not the same here.3