by Barry Lopez
The scramble to the top of the cliffs takes less time than I thought it would—up a slope of loose talus, across a bay of rock rubble, then about six hundred feet of easy clambering to reach the tableland. I’d expected an arduous climb, but had not considered how having been immersed in a sublime landscape like the one below would invigorate my enthusiasm to explore.
Crossing the lowland from the glacier to the foot of the cliffs, I’d stopped to examine nearly everything that caught my eye. I frequently felt the urge to glass the plain around me with my binoculars, looking for some hint—hardly a chance of this, but it seemed unmindful not to search—some sign of muskoxen or of the diminutive Peary caribou. Setting off again, I sometimes threw my arms up involuntarily, an expression of incomprehension that the world here in the middle of a polar desert could be so intensely alive, so elegant. The emotions born of what I was taking in, all the filaments of creation, peaked in feelings of tenderness toward everything here, a vulnerability to this life.
To my way of thinking the lowland was beautiful.
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MANY YEARS BEFORE I traveled to the Alexandra lowland, I asked a professor of mine in graduate school, Barre Toelken, about a Navajo ceremony called Beautyway and about the Navajo concept of hózhǫ́. Hózhǫ́, a complex idea, is often loosely translated into English as “beauty,” but the word refers as well to a state of harmony that pervades the world, and to a general state that in English means “to be in good health.” Barre, who lived for a while on the Navajo reservation near Blanding, Utah, in the 1950s, and who still had family there, directed me to a book called Navajo Blessingway Singer: The Autobiography of Frank Mitchell, 1881–1967, and he put me in touch with an anthropologist friend, Gary Witherspoon, fluent in Navajo.
In my understanding, which is imperfect, Beautyway rites are conducted over a period of several days by a medicine person called a singer, in the home (usually a traditional hogan) of a “patient,” with his or her family present. The patient is referred to as “the one sung over” and is conceived of as someone who has “deteriorated” or is otherwise in a state of spiritual imperfection. The Navajo way to view this state of deterioration or incomplete integration with the world is to regard it as normal, a condition that develops over time in every person. (The gradual, inevitable loss of coherence in a complexly organized Navajo system might usefully be compared with entropy in the second law of thermodynamics, as Clausius defined it.)
Restoring a person to a state of “beauty” requires that the singer “make it incumbent upon the universe” to re-create in the patient those conditions in the natural world that signify—for Navajo people—coherence or harmony. The rites of Beautyway honor those conditions, and this state of accord is represented for them by a series of sand paintings, which the singer creates and in the middle of which the patient finally sits.
The singer’s intention, roughly put, is to make the one sung over “beautiful” again. A central tenet of Navajo philosophy, embodied in Beautyway ceremony, is faith in the processes of renewal, expressed as Są́’ ah naagháí, bik’eh hózhǫ́. Navajo is notoriously difficult to translate into English, but these words, Witherspoon says, refer to the restoration of beauty through ceremony, “according to which conditions all around are blessed or made beautiful.” Years later, Witherspoon refined this translation for me by referring to “the infinite repetition of the cycles of life[,] according to which there is beauty, harmony, and health everywhere.”
The idea that “beauty” refers to a high level of coherence existing everlastingly in the world, and that beauty can be renewed in us through reintegrating ourselves with a world over which we have no control, has appealed to me ever since I became aware of this Navajo ceremony, a formal expression of that idea.
As I walked the Alexandra lowland, I was brought to a heightened sense of the “beauty” within it, a particular integration of color, line, proportionality, sound, smell, and texture. I was aware of its effect on me, and of how my vulnerability to it enhanced a feeling of health in me, of being in harmony with the world that existed outside my own thoughts and beyond my understanding.
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FROM THE TOP of the cliffs, lying prone on the ground, steadying my binoculars on a rock to separate them from the slight trembling in my fingers (caused by blood coursing through me after the exertion of the climb), I saw gray and white bergs drifting in Kane Basin to the east, against a backdrop of Greenland’s tidewater glaciers. That the rays of light reflecting from the sides of the bergs should remain parallel over a distance of forty-some miles, producing a sharply defined image of their contours, was as astonishing to me as the things themselves. Many of them were larger than the five square miles of lowland I had just crossed.
Before I began searching for a safe way down from the clifftops, I walked out to the northern rim of the tableland to get an unobstructed view of Skraeling Island. It appeared a thousand feet below me as a crinkled mass of browns, gray-greens, and tans, stark there two miles away in the dark water. I appreciated for the first time that it was actually a tombolo, two landmasses connected by a narrow isthmus.
Using a map of the island already in my head, I searched the surface for archeological sites whose names I’d become familiar with: Clinch Ridge, Ghost, Aivik, Oldsquaw. Most of these old Thule and Dorset campsites are situated near the island’s coastline. A few are substantial enough to stand out clearly. Directly in front of me, for example, on the southwestern side of the smaller of Skraeling’s two hills, was a cluster of twenty-three Thule winter houses, semi-subterranean homes with whale-rib-bone-supported sod roofs, all now dismantled. Taken together, the sites on the island represented the entire history of human life in the High Arctic, beginning with a few Independence I camps about four thousand years old and carrying up through camps once occupied by several other so-called Arctic Small Tool traditions (ASTt), identified as Pre-Dorset, Early Dorset, and Late Dorset, and including, finally, Thule sites from about eight hundred years ago. The remains of some modern Inuit camps were there as well, going back several hundred years.
Schledermann and his colleagues believe the seventeen-acre island was unoccupied for several hundred or more years at a time during those four millennia, most recently from about 500 BC to 700 AD, the period of time between two Paleoeskimo cultural phases, Early and Late Dorset. Whether humans retreated from here because of climate change or simply no longer passed this way, no one knows. However one reckons it, across a span of about four thousand years, one is confronted with the failures (and periodic inflorescences) of an extremely small group of people, several thousand human beings at most, pioneers who traveled here from what one day would be called Alaska, some 1,500 land miles to the southwest.
When I think of the Thule, I imagine a people hungry for movement, a people capable of making consistently good decisions when meeting with extreme circumstances, a people whose extended families perished, here and there, from just a little bit of bad luck—not finding enough food, say—but who were, overall, a resourceful and tireless people. A people, too, who no doubt lived in darkness of more than one sort, who gave darkness the respect it deserved but not more than that. I came to appreciate them in the years before I visited Skraeling and more so afterward, humans whose elders understood not only what to be afraid of but which of the things that appeared to be frightening could safely be ignored.
Everyone I know who’s dug up the material culture of a vanished people somewhere on Earth longs for a conversation with the subjects of their inquiry, with the cave painters at Chauvet in the Ardèche Valley in southeastern France, with the Clovis hunters at Blackwater Draw in New Mexico, with the Semites at Ur, or with the Thule. If I could speak with the Thule, I would want to know what they found beautiful, and in what, precisely, had they placed their enduring faith.
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BEFORE I STEPPED AWAY from the edge of the cliffs to begin my descent, I scanned the thousand feet or so of heights still above me for gyrfalcons and the lowland below, sidelit now by a sun in the northwestern sky. I isolated in my binoculars stretches of meadow and salt marsh, of heath and freshwater ponds. Nearly every animal living here is too small to pick out, except for the birds: small flocks of snow buntings and northern wheatears, flocks of glaucous gulls and black guillemots, one common raven, and a few long-tailed and parasitic jaegers. In the visual fabric of the tundra, however, I could make out patterns of subtle bright color, and see the sparkling demarcations of the creeks and their parent river, the gleam of the ponds. I could appreciate both the plein air transparency of this world and the reflections of light from its surfaces—water, leaves, rock shields, damp ground. The sheets of generalized color—beryl green, turquoise blue, lavender gray—comprised many distinct colors, no one of which could I separate out entirely with the binoculars. I could find no yellows, though I knew they were there. Some of these colors hung unsaturated in vegetation at the edges of melt ponds, where the water reflected these colors of the vegetation back at the vegetation, and colors on the bottoms of the ponds shone through the transparent water onto the undersides of leaves.
The French Impressionists, among whom Monet was so prominent, knew all this about reflected and enhanced light, and their work prompted many of us to think about it, about pigment and the world of incident and ricocheting light, and what was absent and present in the convergence of the two. And they taught some of us, probably without intending to, to see better. I can’t help but think that the Thule also marked the subtlety of the colors I was seeing that afternoon, that like me they would have noticed the glistening surface of the Twin River as they waded across it, and thought that what gave the water life was not solely its movement but the reflections on its surface of wind-stirred plants and of birds passing overhead.
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BACK AT THE RCMP BUILDINGS I found Eli and Hans discussing the contents of the upcoming issue of a Canadian journal Eli edited, The Structurist. It was to be devoted to the subject of transparency and reflection, one reason they’d both been eager to read Figes’s work. They were commissioning articles on reflection and transparency in music, architecture, and poetry, in addition to painting and photography. The issue was to include a portfolio of Hans’s photographs of icebergs. I liked their enthusiasm. Their subject was not their own artistry but the complex business of finding meaning in the world, and of the creation and purpose of art.
As they carried on, I began preparing our dinner, wondering idly if there might be room in their journal for speculation about Dorset and Thule thoughts on all this, particularly on the absence of light, on darkness. Like Hans and Eli, I was so enthralled with the behavior of light around us that I’d failed to consider right away its inseparable twin, the midwinter night. Like the permafrost out there beneath a few inches of life-giving soil, it was invisible on this intoxicating summer afternoon in the hyperborean north.
One more reason, then, to inquire among the Paleoeskimos. What did humans do here when darkness banished the light and you were left with only your imagination, your small ball of saturated moss burning on the surface of a pool of seal oil in a stone lamp, your caches of meat bunkered by rocks too heavy for Arctic foxes to pry away but not so big a polar bear couldn’t flip them aside?
Was the darkness, too, good?
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THE FOLLOWING MORNING I left early to explore the west side of the lowland, where Police Creek carries meltwater from another glacier across the lowland and into Alexandra Fjord, and where there are extensive patches of grassy salt marsh. I began at the water’s edge. To the east, the shoreline runs out against the base of the cliffs I’d climbed to see that part of coastal Greenland called Inglefield; to the west it continues on for some way, farther down into Alexandra Fjord, marking the northern edge of Johan Peninsula.
When I first began to travel far from home, I tended to pick up and keep things I found on the ground, whatever I wanted. By most people’s lights, including my own, these were innocuous objects—seashells, feathers, a water-polished agate, the sun-bleached skull of a small mammal. Whatever my hosts or guides offered me, I was also pleased to accept, but these things I took from the land began to weigh on me over the years. I began to feel like a thief, though it was difficult to understand from whom I might be stealing. It was the deliberate disturbance of a place not my own, the ethics of that intrusion, that started tapping at my forehead.
Once, traveling with two archeologists on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in a place difficult to access except by helicopter, I came upon an Ancestral Puebloan site that had not been disturbed in the roughly six centuries since those people had walked away from it. It would have been easy to slip one of the small, stunningly decorated clay pots sitting there into my pack. There were dozens of them lying about. I thought about it. Not acting on the impulse came down to respect for the originators, long dead, and respect for the professional calling of my companions. And I suppose self-respect, not to mention the trust extended to me by these archeologists I was with.
The morning after we finished a survey and inventory of the site, I mentioned to one of them that I wanted him to know that I’d not taken anything.
“Yes,” he said. “I noticed.”
What to take, what to leave in the world’s barely visited places—it’s not a clear line. I worry about the propriety of such casual acts in a culture like mine, so keen on notions of private property, trespass, and ownership. On this second day of my exploratory hike around Alexandra lowland, I walked up on the remains of a small whale. It was almost completely buried beneath a blanket of viridian-green moss—the bright green color in a darker patch of green sedges is what drew me. The undisturbed bones of the left front flipper, the carpals and phalanges below the wrist of a mammalian forelimb, lay splayed in the moss like a human hand. The slow decomposition of the whale’s remains—had it died at sea and been cast up here? Had it been butchered for food on what was once a beach, centuries ago?—seemed one of Earth’s slowest ceremonies. My responsibility was simply to observe and move on, not to probe the ground for a tusk, which, if this was a male narwhal and not a beluga, might be there. So I went on. I did not mark the place and have remained quiet about it—until now.
When I returned late that afternoon, I asked Eli and Hans over tea what they knew of the Dorset, a culture strongly identified with a tradition of wood and ivory carvings of human faces that many believe reflect fear, or were meant to provoke terror. Eli, familiar with Dorset carvings, said he and Hans had chosen to come to Alexandra Fjord partly for the wealth of Paleoeskimo sites scattered along the shorelines of peninsulas here; and had chosen the place they were in for the comfort and shelter the RCMP buildings offered, an indoor place in a very outdoor place; and for the closeness of the buildings to the sea, where Hans could work with the translucency of stranded icebergs and with the broad palette of their whites, the whites of church linen, of ivory and alabaster.
He’d heard of Skraeling, he said, because it was the famous place where Peter Schledermann had discovered so many Viking artifacts—a ship’s rivet, a piece of woolen cloth, an iron knife blade, a carpenter’s planing block. Eli said he didn’t know whether Norse people visited Skraeling from their outposts on the southern coast of West Greenland or whether those items had simply been traded this far north, and so come into the hands of Thule people as long ago as the twelfth century.
I told him this was a question I, too, had, and that I would ask Peter for both of us.
The discovery of Norse artifacts on Skraeling in the 1970s prompted heated international debate about sovereign rights in the Canadian High Arctic. Today, global warming has increased anxiety over the issue of sovereign ownership, with sea ice melting more extensively each year, making it ea
sier to reach potentially rich oil and gas fields. Canadian Inuit and Greenlandic Inughuit are ill at ease with any Scandinavian suggestion that a Norse presence in Greenland and in the Canadian High Arctic, at roughly the same time that their own Thule ancestors were arriving from northwestern North America, could raise legitimate doubts about the primacy of Eskimo claims to the area, the question of later European colonization aside. Like Palestinian claims to lands in the Middle East or conflicting claims in Kashmir or to the Spratly Archipelago in the South China Sea, the question of ownership triggers anxiety and indignation in many, even among people who have no role to play in such disputes. Whenever a people emigrate in search of arable land, freshwater, or material wealth, or in order to enhance their political power or escape persecution, other groups, indigenous and nativist, step forward to interrogate them or to thwart them.
With the sea ice melting, these claims and counterclaims remain unsettled.
That evening a Canadian military helicopter flew into our camp to refuel, using drums the Twin Otter had dropped off. A civilian mapping crew was aboard, conducting the last few legs of aerial research needed to complete a set of 1:50,000 maps of Canada’s High Arctic islands. I was planning to meet up with Peter and his two field companions two days hence at the RCMP post, but the pilots said if I could throw my gear together quickly, they’d run me four miles east up the coast to the spot where Peter’s group was currently camped. I said sure, thanks, and a few minutes later climbed aboard the massive Chinook helicopter, hoping an impromptu arrival wouldn’t complicate Peter’s plan for pulling this Lakeview camp out two days later—with support from a much smaller PCSP helicopter—in preparation for making the final move of the season to Skraeling.