Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  I’ve come back to the High Arctic to learn more than I was able to grasp on earlier trips, to recall things I’d forgotten, and to experience again the templates here that go deeper than I’m able to comprehend.

  On this particular morning in late July I’m glancing up from a sympathetic novel about Claude Monet, Light, by Eva Figes, to take in my surroundings. According to orthodox geographers, I’m reading on one of the planet’s outermost terrestrial edges, the flanks of a bare-boned island situated at the mouth of Alexandra Fjord; the fjord is positioned at the bottom of Buchanan Bay; the bay is a major inlet on the northeast coast of Ellesmere Island, the northernmost of the Queen Elizabeth Islands, an archipelago north and east of the North American mainland. From this island, called Skraeling, 660 nautical miles from the north geographic pole, I can see the ice wall of West Greenland standing like a palisade on the eastern horizon.

  No one lives on Skraeling now. Eight hundred years ago it was seasonally occupied by a Paleoeskimo people known today as Thule (TOOL-ee). No one knows what they called the island.

  My head is positioned higher than my feet in this slightly inclined cleft in the ground I’ve settled into, a shallow notch on a rocky slope tilted toward the water. I’ve gotten out of the way of a fitful breeze here to read Figes’s Light and to annotate my notes about the Thule, whose abandoned houses and hearths I’ve come to Skraeling to see. The depression I’m in feels like a snug room in which to work for a while. Stretching outward from this place, in all directions, are the barren reaches of a polar desert. Extensive loose pack ice floats nearby in the bay. Beyond that, away to the east, lies the mostly frozen sea of Smith Sound. A lair like this makes it easy for me to concentrate, both on Ms. Figes’s curiosity about Monet’s Nymphéas, at this point in her narrative, and on the indefinite lives of the Thule, in whom I have a pressing interest.

  Johan Peninsula Area

  I read and write for twenty minutes or so before I’m pulled up and out of my concentration toward movement in the land, and out into the land’s bright colors. I watch for a while—the radiant light on high, orange cliffs opposite me, a flock of long-tailed ducks rifling by—and then return to my pages. A granite boulder supports my upper back. A cushion of tundra plants, composed mostly of dwarf willow and a type of wild rose called mountain avens, springs my hams above the frozen earth. I was here a good while this morning before I noticed light from the advancing sun starting to gleam on something within a thicket of willow stems beside me. I stared at the glint. I wormed my fingers down into the space. Debitage. The lithic debris a knapper creates when he’s fashioning a stone tool.

  Human spoor.

  Once someone else had rested exactly here, with a different sort of work before him than my absorption in the behavior of light at Giverny and in academic speculation about the migration of people long gone.

  The gleam of these gray chert flakes alters my frame of mind, as abruptly as if a stranger standing nearby in the stillness had suddenly cleared his throat. I set the book aside and reach for my binoculars, without needing to search for where they are. Suddenly I am hunting: What’s out there? Just beyond my feet, the notch I’m lying in opens onto a stretch of dark seawater, a passage between Skraeling Island and the shore of Johan Peninsula opposite, a shore that forms the northern border of a thermal oasis called the Alexandra Fjord lowland. This park-like expanse of a few square miles is boxed in on two sides by talus slopes and high cliffs. At the far end, the double snout of a glacier abuts this haven for arctic plants and small creatures.

  The water between me and the peninsula is almost entirely free of ice at this time of year. I sweep the dark water slowly, searching its surface methodically for the spectral white forms of beluga whales cruising just below. I look for a disturbance in the sunlight’s sheen that might reveal where a ringed seal has come up briefly from its fish-hunting world to breathe before disappearing again. I parse the entire rippling plain of water bare-eyed, putting the binoculars quickly onto any anomaly.

  I look about for common and king eiders, sea ducks I know nest on this island. They pass frequently, flying just off the water in long single-file lines. I watch for walrus, whose bellowing I heard an hour ago as I approached this spot from a campsite I share with three others. I watch this world from my sheltered niche unseen, as my shadow companion, the knapper, must have; but where I’m interested in the behavior and ecology of these animals, the look of them, the sensation of sudden contact with wild life, he would have also been interested in killing some of them, in eating and using parts of them to make his way in the world. If he hadn’t been, if he wasn’t alert to signs of their presence in the water while he sat here making a tool, if he didn’t drain every bit of meaning from whatever came to his eye, his children would not eat. They wouldn’t feast on eider eggs or consume the dark flank meat of ringed seals. He would not have the haunches and the backstrap meat of walrus and bearded seal to cache, his insurance against winter’s throttling of all life in this place. He would not have oil from the beluga’s blubber to light the interior of his half-sunken winter home, to warm it and take the hardness out of his frozen food stores.

  It’s different now. He’s gone. His culture is a broken prayer wheel at your feet. Who can translate now what was once inscribed on its handle? His companions might conceivably have been the final expression on this island of Dorset culture, a people not destined to survive the arrival of the Thule, coming in from the west eight hundred years ago.

  I can feel him here beside me, hear the plosive knapping of flakes from the mother stone, see him pausing to investigate the summer water, gazing into the volume of air above, studying the lush land across the way, where maybe he has seen wolf spiders hunting and Arctic blue butterflies feeding on highland saxifrage, and as a boy chased after flocks of purple sandpipers combing the wet meadows for food. Or maybe it was no Late Dorset man who nestled here, but instead a Thule person, whose people arrived in the vicinity better equipped for survival, with their walrus-skin boats, dogs of burden, and small sleds. To speculate productively about who left these flakes here, or what the knapper might have been fashioning, or whether men from both cultures might have chosen this same hiding place in which to work or from which to observe the movement of animals undetected, I will have to ask my companions. They reflect continually on the artifacts, the architecture, the remnants of human life they’ve found here on Skraeling, a place of seemingly insurmountable challenges for humans as summer gave way to winter hundreds of years ago. Neither Dorset nor Thule had much more to ensure their survival than animal skins, bits of plant fiber, animal bones, sinew, walrus ivory, animal fat, rocks suited to building, the occasional piece of driftwood. The archeologists I’m with know the many uses to which these things were put, understand the ingenuity behind the crafting, and view it all as evidence of the human determination to thrive, not to perish.

  Missing from the scraps of skin clothing we have found here, from our sorting trays of bone implements and stone tools, from the broken harpoon tips and stone lamps that have turned up, is any indisputable evidence of how either Dorset or Thule people cooperated with each other here to ensure survival, of their approaches to parenting, of their psychological arrangements with the spiritual character of the land, their ceremonial life, their enduring narratives. This tantalizing evidence of what once had allowed these people to prevail in the face of great difficulty isn’t waiting to be found. It wasn’t destroyed, stolen, or lost. It’s evaporated. We who wish to understand them no longer have it to work with.

  * * *

  —

  I’D ARRIVED ON Ellesmere Island a week before. I flew in from Resolute, an Inuit settlement on Cornwallis Island, four hundred miles south and west of Alexandra Fjord. (At the time, Resolute enjoyed twice-weekly scheduled air service to Yellowknife, a thousand miles to the south, the capital of the Northwest Territories and the town from which I’d reache
d Resolute.) The plane that brought me the rest of the way here, a chartered Twin Otter, put down on the lowland across the way, beside a decommissioned Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) post. The only passenger on that flight, I’d shared the cramped interior with steel drums of aviation gas and helicopter fuel, boxes of fresh vegetables, bundles of shovels and ice chisels, packets of mail, and pallets of spare parts—an omnibus resupply mission, assembled to service several outcamps on the same day.

  The Otter was chartered by Canada’s Polar Continental Shelf Program (PCSP), which deploys scientists across the Canadian High Arctic every summer to conduct research. Alexandra Fjord was its first stop that morning. An archeologist from the University of Calgary, Peter Schledermann, had invited me to join him and two colleagues during the final phase of their field season on Johan Peninsula and Skraeling Island.

  The landing strip at Alexandra Fjord is of a type locally called “make it or die,” which may be something of an overstatement, but the strip is dramatically short and, midway along, it crosses a ridge. Once the plane touches down, you lose sight of the farther half of the runway. I’ve landed in more challenging places, but always savor the relief that comes with making a good landing in any hard place, especially in a plane loaded to its weight limit and carrying six drums of flammable fuel.

  We touched down in calm air, under clear skies. If the weather had been dicey—cross winds, fog, sleet—the pilot might have passed up the landing and I would have ended up sometime later that day back in Resolute, waiting to hitch a ride on the next flight to Alexandra Fjord, which would be days later.

  * * *

  —

  THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT opened the RCMP post at Alexandra Fjord on August 8, 1953. It was meant to replace one set up across Buchanan Bay fjord on nearby Bache Peninsula, in 1926. Several nations back then, seeking mineral rights in this remote and rarely patrolled corner of Earth, had persisted in making vague references to “prior claims” in this part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands. Canada wanted to send a message to them by establishing a permanent official presence here on its international border. The resident mounties serving at Alexandra Fjord after 1953 were also there to inform Greenlandic Eskimos around Smith Sound—Inughuit—that they could no longer cross the forty miles of sea ice separating western Greenland from Ellesmere Island for most of the year to hunt, though they had been doing this since long before there was a Canada.

  In 1962 the personnel at Alexandra Fjord were redeployed to Grise Fjord, a new RCMP post at an Inuit settlement on the south coast of Ellesmere Island. On the day I arrived, the still well-maintained RCMP buildings at Alexandra Fjord were occupied instead by a painter named Eli Bornstein and a photographer named Hans Dommasch. (PCSP had taken over the old RCMP post, which now occasionally supports the work of artists and writers billeted there.) Eli and Hans helped unload the freight meant for this camp and for the Schledermann camp. We all three waved goodbye as the Twin Otter hurtled off the strip and banked away to the north—and the great breadth of silence around us was restored.

  Eli and Hans were delighted to see the Figes book I’d brought, which had just been published, and I was greatly relieved finally to be free of the hurly-burly of Resolute. Diesel generators hammering away all night, trucks and heavy equipment raising clouds of dust from the unsealed roads, air fouled with the odor of combusted fuel. A world of clocks and maintenance schedules, where people either showed up “on time” to dine in the PCSP galley or didn’t eat, and where the offices one had to call at for weather reports, equipment requisitions, logistical support, and revamped aircraft schedules opened and closed precisely on the hour, in a place where the summer sun never set, half the population worked odd hours, and the weather followed a schedule of its own.

  Eli made tea for himself and me and Hans went to bed. He’d been out for hours the “night” before the plane arrived, photographing icebergs grounded in Buchanan Bay. I stored my duffel and backpack in a corner of the dayroom, shared a few stories with Eli, and decided to go for a walk. In doing so, I was ignoring RCMP directives posted on the wall, warning visitors never to travel alone and to always carry a gun to protect against polar bears. I did pack food, water, survival gear, a radio, a first-aid kit, etc., so was not completely irresponsible.

  Eli said he’d radio Peter, who was camped just a few miles to the east on Johan Peninsula, and let him know I was here and ready to join him in a few days when he moved his camp to Skraeling Island.

  The RCMP post—a single-story headquarters building, flanked by four or five outbuildings, each painted white with red trim—is built on an old beach strand, a dozen or so feet above the fjord’s high tide line.

  Alexandra Fjord Lowland

  To the east, ocherous cliffs rise abruptly from an open plain to form a mesa about 2,200 feet high; to the south, Twin Glacier’s two lobes debouch onto the lowland’s gently sloping valley. To the west, vertical cliffs of gray gneiss and granite, less severely pitched, rise to meet the xeric landscape of a polar desert. The fjord lies to the north, with Skraeling about two miles offshore to the northeast. 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.

  From the cobble shore in front of the RCMP buildings, with my back to the great basin that cradles the biological oasis of the lowland, I face dozens of square miles of high, spare land on the other side of the ice-strewn water: the mesa-like Thorvald Peninsula on my left, and on the right, emerging from behind it and farther off, the larger Bache Peninsula. One feels the extent of empty land beyond the opaque shield of the water, and senses the threshold of one’s own disappearance.

  I turn inland, a small figure walking south into the U-shaped sanctum of the lowland. To reach the foot of the east lobe of Twin Glacier, which I plan to climb, I cross Alexandra Creek on a makeshift bridge and continue on until I reach the west bank of the Twin River. At virtually every moment the entirety of the valley is visible to me, a man standing there like a sparrow on the floor of a cathedral with its roof gone.

  The air feels heated and smells of stimulated plant life, of rot and pollination. Given the desolation of the surrounding cliffs and the empty expanse of polar desert beyond, the soft wash of redolent air across my face is stimulating to the point of being erotic. The sensation surges through my body as I bend down to examine tiny flowers of purple saxifrage, to feel the knotty bark of thousand-year-old mountain avens shrubs, stems no thicker than my little finger. The hum of a polar bumblebee (iguptaq, in Inuktitut) hovering here, the fugitive odor of sap, the mobbing of blossoms by insects, is not unexpected, but the intensity of it brings me to a halt every few minutes.

  I stop frequently to examine the evidence of lives lived out—the white rib of an Arctic hare, a dead collared lemming, still warm to the touch. No apparent wound, no clot of dark blood at the ear, the nose, the lips. Old age, perhaps. In soft soil at the edge of a sedge meadow, where wet ground grades into heath, I see the fresh, elongated toe marks of red knots and Baird’s sandpipers, all now hunting thirty feet in front of me, a distance they continue to keep as I approach.

  When I reach the river—I should have asked Eli about this—I find the water too deep for my calf-high rubber boots. I stuff the boots, my socks, and my trousers into my pack and step into the rushing meltwater, hoping to negotiate the rocky, uneven bottom thirty or forty feet to the opposite bank barefoot without falling. When I step out of the icy water on the other side, I begin to bark, doubling over like a wounded animal—the body’s outrage—before putting my clothes back on.

  At the foot of the glacier I squa
t down in order to hear more loudly the percolation of meltwater from the glacier’s cold lip, the hissing bursts of air as small pockets within the ice release their stores of ancient atmosphere. With my head tilted this close, I can feel the glacier’s frigid exhalation against my cheekbones. For a few moments the density of the silence in the valley exists in concert with the continuous sound of this huge object’s meltdown.

  After climbing several hundred feet up the incline of the glacier’s tongue, I step over a cascading stream of water only a few inches deep, turquoise against the white ice, a white so intense I can’t continue looking at it. This rill, five or six inches wide, runs so swiftly through the banked turns of its track that the ribbon of water seems almost to turn over on itself, like a Möbius strip. I climb higher, following the flow of meltwater until it diverges into a maze of rivulets, the headwaters of the rill. In little more than a month from now, all will again be quiet here. And the silence will extend from the glacier out across the whitened lowland and out over the fjord’s thickening sea ice.

  On my meander back to the north I follow the river. In places where one environment (the mesic tundra) meets another (the flowing river), what biologists call an ecotone exists. Some biological events, like evolutionary change in a particular species of animal, are more likely to be apparent here, where two different environments overlap. Halfway across the lowland, I bear off north and east toward the base of a scree slope at the bottom of the cliffs. I leave my rubber boots sitting on a prominent boulder, an erratic left in a colder era by the glacier behind me, and switch to a pair of light boots. The rubber boots will be hard to miss on the way back, if I remember to look for them.