Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  Peter was warmly welcoming. An extra person with little gear wouldn’t necessitate an additional (expensive) helicopter trip. (Had that been the case, I would have been able to hike back out to the RCMP post, using a route I’d picked out while sitting on the open tail ramp of the Chinook’s cargo bay on the way there.)

  The Lakeview site on Johan Peninsula consisted largely of Arctic Small Tool tradition features, about thirty of them, along with some Thule features—tent rings, stone hearths and caches, and refuse middens. The evening I arrived, Peter, Karen McCullough, and Eric Damkjar were working on a dwelling from which they had raised a number of artifacts, among them some complete microblades about two inches long (the sort of small tool for which this Paleoeskimo tradition is named), a few projectile points, and a single side blade, all fashioned from pieces of medium-gray chert. Importantly, they had also been able to lift from a hearth in this dwelling a small bit of charred Arctic willow. It would later be radiocarbon dated at about 3,940 years BP (before the present), or about 2000 BCE (before the common era), placing this shelter at the very beginning of human occupation in the High Arctic and situating it in the period of several hundred years most archeologists refer to as Independence I. (This particular dwelling consisted of a barely discernible oval of gravel, approximately twelve feet by fifteen feet, enclosing a living area which included a round hearth constructed on exposed bedrock at the shelter’s center. An inattentive passerby might easily have missed this meager evidence entirely, seeing it as nothing more than a patch of gravel and a few stray stones.)

  Over dinner Peter mentioned another ASTt site, a little farther up the coast, that he, Karen, and Eric had also examined that summer. I went to have a look at it after the dishes were done. The scatter of stones here was easier for me to read as a former dwelling, nestled as the feature was in a narrow slot between two rock outcroppings. A square hearth box of small stone slabs set on edge stood out, as did several patches of gravel and sand that these particular Independence I people had built up in order to level the ground for sleeping.

  I would learn in the weeks ahead that “structures” like these, along with their contents, are difficult to be definitive about. Though a region like this has had very, very few people passing through, possibly disturbing what earlier occupants constructed or left behind, those few, along with frost heaving, burrowing creatures, and weathering, have combined to slightly rearrange the places where people once slept and ate before moving on. Thule people, for example, used stones from ASTt sites to build structures of their own. And the rise and fall of sea levels over time—and the isostatic rebound of landmasses once the heavy burden of glacial ice was gone—can give a misleading impression of how far above sea level the dwelling once stood.

  I walked south from this site—Peter told me it had been a summer site, that it was too exposed to have been suitable as a winter campsite—toward a gently rising upland where a bright green line, prominent in the low angle of light from a midnight sun, marked the upper reaches of a small stream passing near the archeologists’ camp. Still intoxicated by images of the fecundity and dense living textures of the Alexandra lowland, and ignoring, again, the contrasting barrenness of the polar desert that surrounds the lowland and is so extensive here on the peninsula, I headed straight for the stream bank. The mats of emerald green moss on either side of the shallow water were so thick and sturdy, I took off my boots and socks and walked on them barefoot back to camp.

  Encountering abandoned ancient human dwellings in Europe and Africa, I don’t recall ever feeling a sense of tragedy. The former residents are usually too far off in time, and what might have been the prevailing circumstances for them in those places are too obscure to invoke. But it was not unusual for me to be overcome with feelings of melancholy before these ASTt sites. A few stones, expertly arranged to blunt the force of the wind, a hearth holding the charred remains of willow twigs thinner than a pencil. Sensing the tenuousness of such an existence, I often felt empathy with the anonymous and long-gone residents.

  Walking the streamside that evening, I remembered for some reason a girl I’d known as a seven- or eight-year-old boy in California. Cerebral palsy had so restricted her ability to move about that her parents had confined her to a fenced yard at their home, to protect her. She lurched spasmodically in whatever direction she wished to go and could not fix her eyes on any one thing for more than a few seconds. Neighborhood children would stand at the foot of her gated driveway, gyrating and jerking, to mock her. For some reason she and I became friends. We mostly sat together side by side on the edge of a porch in her backyard. Sometimes I brought her things to look at. Her speech was all but unintelligible.

  One afternoon the girl, Laura, managed to open the gate at the foot of her driveway. She began walking along the edge of the road, heading for my house. The street had no sidewalks, and the margin of oleander bushes, pepper trees, and eucalyptus was close on both sides. She veered in front of an oncoming car, as though suddenly losing her balance. The impact killed her.

  I was inconsolable. It was the first time anyone I knew had died. A door of some sort closed. Or perhaps it opened.

  Occasionally, I presume, this kind of childhood memory, the brutal, unregarding nature of everyday life, must come crashing through without warning for people in incongruous circumstances, as it did for me that cool summer evening walking barefoot alongside that stream. I recalled the innocence of those childhood days.

  Skraeling Island

  I wondered whether Dorset and Thule women had ever walked barefoot here on summer days with their children.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS AFTER I arrived at the Lakeview site, a helicopter ferried the four of us and our gear across the ice to Skraeling Island.

  Peter has set up a camp in the same spot here most every summer for more than a decade. It was pitched on the edge of a small bay that, along with a dry isthmus, separated Little Skraeling Island from Big Skraeling Island. Peter, a handsome Dane, a person intently focused on his work and well known for his unprecedented finds of Norse artifacts in the High Arctic, set about erecting our cook tent with Karen, who was soon to become the new editor of Arctic, a primary journal of scientific research in the far north. Eric, a young Danish graduate student in archeology, and I moved a stove, a collapsible table, and other gear into the tent. He and the others then set up their personal tents close to the cook tent. With Peter’s approval, I took my sleeping bag and other gear several hundred yards off to the east, to a stretch of higher ground where a large cluster of excavated Thule winter houses stood. I pitched my small dark blue tent beside a karigi, a semisubterranean Thule social and ceremonial structure that, without its roof, now sat exposed to the sky. My companions assured me, when I asked, that the floor of the karigi had been thoroughly scoured for artifacts the season before, and that it therefore was all right for me to enter this round structure and to sit on the stone benches abutting the low wall defining its perimeter.

  Like the excavated karigi it was set alongside (before its roof was removed), the blue tent and its waterproof fly were protection against wind, rain, and heavy mists (and, one summer day a few weeks later, snow). Its walls also kept mosquitoes at bay and reduced the intensity of sunlight at night, making it easier to sleep.

  An invitation to join a field party like this one comes with the understanding that you will participate in the work, arrive with appropriate clothing and gear, and be familiar with what your colleagues and others have written concerning the research being undertaken. On my side, I felt I needed to work with people in the field in order to understand their experience and points of view. I needed to know the feel, the smell, the sound of their work, to have those memories in my physical body. By the time I got to Skraeling, I had been with enough field parties for people to sense that I’d no interest in invading anyone’s privacy or in exposing anyone’s foibles or failures. T
he larger subject—in this case Arctic archeology—was for me always more interesting. This meant having to work around people’s occasional outbursts of exasperation or ego with each other—or me. This is not infrequently the story with field parties conducting research in remote places, where weather, accidents, monotony, and close quarters can produce stress.

  I wanted people to understand that I was not here to report on such things.

  I thought it best at Skraeling to volunteer right away to be the regular dishwasher, to assure the others that I wanted to be helpful and didn’t want to interfere in or disrupt their work, which was one reason I set my tent apart. With most field parties, anticipating tensions and preparing for them is never much of a problem; good humor begets a lot of joking at each other’s expense, everyone works hard, and a sense of equity prevails. Often the indifference and imposing authority of a remote landscape by itself undermines the ordinary human tendency to become petty or unnecessarily dictatorial.

  With this field party, however, the atmosphere was sometimes notably tense. It’s harder to join a field group partway through their season, after they’ve established a working rhythm with one another. The group by then shares too much recent history that doesn’t include you, which was the case at Skraeling. Also, the three of them had just been visited by a Canadian television crew, whose presumption and insensitivity had made a bad impression. Additionally, there was a rumor that a group of tourists, the first in this area, was going to arrive later that summer. They were chartering in to Alexandra Fjord in Twin Otters and bringing inflatable boats with them so they could cross over to Skraeling from the mainland. My guess was that Peter was highly conflicted about the way his work—especially finding the Norse artifacts—had drawn popular attention, and about how this remote landscape, which so clearly fed his spirit, had become a destination for wealthy tourists and importuning television crews.

  Peter, something of an introvert, was always gracious with me. He knew my written work and went out of his way to express his respect; but it was my own writing about the Arctic that, too, had cost him some of his privacy. This was another reason that I set my tent apart, to give him, every day, the undisturbed room he seemed to enjoy, a physical and temporal space where he was free to speculate without the threat of being summarized by someone, let alone confronted. The tent apart, of course, was good for me, too. It was a way for me to gently emphasize that I was—and needed to remain—apart, that I was a writer, not an archeologist, not a fan.

  * * *

  —

  PETER HAD ME WORK alongside the three of them most days, carefully lifting up sections of matted plant life that had grown up over the millennia to obscure ASTt features. Most of the time I used my own pocketknife and a pair of tweezers to separate root threads and extract my finds—flakes of ivory and chert, globules of marine mammal fat, bits of worked skin, burins, and other small tools, whole and broken. I marked each find on a chart, the grid of which matched a grid of red twine that had been staked out tautly over the ground there to establish a pattern of identical squares. Other days, Peter urged me to just wander over Skraeling, to examine other ASTt sites and those of the Thule. He told me what to look for at each site, what not to miss.

  On the northwest coast of the island was a second large cluster of Thule winter houses. The difference between those nineteen and the group of twenty-three where I was camped is that only a few of the former had had their collapsed sod roofs removed so that they might be thoroughly inspected. The rest stood undisturbed.

  I needed little encouragement to begin crisscrossing Skraeling with a sketch map Karen made for me. At some of the sites she and Peter had singled out, I paused to make drawings. This handwork provoked questions for me about the way the interiors of these dwellings were arranged and about the direction in which the structure was oriented. As had been the case on the afternoon I’d spent in the cleft, reading Eva Figes, the luxury of sustained attention at these sites brought insight.

  Three or four times during my weeks on Skraeling I climbed the six-hundred-foot heights of Big Skraeling Island and descended into the Sverdrup site, the much less disturbed village of Thule winter houses. The cultural debris still inside most of the dwellings—wood carvings, clothing, harpoon tips, hanks of skin rope, food—had lain frozen for centuries, protected from weathering and scavenging animals by the collapse of the buildings’ roofs. The few dwellings that had been opened up, including the settlement’s karigi, were eerily tidy and barren pits, swept clean of everything of archeological interest. In spite of these excavations, the enclave overall appears never to have been unquieted. To arrive here is like emerging from dense forest to find a group of people asleep in a clearing, set within a close surround of hills. Whenever I visited there, my eye would hold the slumbering houses against the whiteness of pack ice jammed against the nearby shore. I’d watch hoary redpolls, snow buntings, and Lapland longspurs flitting through the scene, landing on the sod roofs and calling sharply. These were the progeny of separate lines of Arctic life, all of them older here than the human line.

  * * *

  —

  WHENEVER I CAMP for a while in a place this remote, I notice again the sensations of isolation. Logic tells you that all other humans except those in your party are far away. (Shortly after I left them, Hans and Eli departed the RCMP post, their field season concluded.) Most everything one associates with ordinary life—the noise of machinery like automobiles and leaf blowers, the anemic color of artificial lighting, the beckoning of electronic alarms, the sight and odor of waste, the monotony of queues, confinement in small work spaces—is far off. On some days the only sounds I heard between breakfast and supper were the voices of birds and the sharp explosions—like pistol shots—of stranded sheets of sea ice fracturing along the shore as the tide went out. The whine of insects. The snort and harrumph of walruses. The ping and click of rain on my parka hood. Sometimes silence so filled the air here I thought I could hear it—that it, too, had timbre and pitch. As I approached a site where my companions were at work, the clank of a steel trowel against a cobble and the murmur of voices became audible. The purl of sandy soil being poured through a sorting screen and falling into a plastic bin.

  These sounds, tiny pebbles in the great basin of indigenous silence, led me to appreciate the way one century nestled within another here, the verticality of time in this place.

  I remember studying a sequence of thirty-nine drawings as a boy. They were included in a book called Cosmic View by a Dutch educator named Kees Boeke. In the first drawing, a girl, perhaps ten years old, wearing a long patterned skirt and a dark sweater, is sitting outdoors on a collapsible lawn chair. The view we have of her is from above and slightly oblique. She is holding a large white cat in her lap and seems bemused. In the next drawing, the scale of representation has increased, from 1:10 to 1:100. We see she is sitting next to a couple of parked cars and alongside part of a baleen whale, lying on its right side. The third drawing, at a scale of 1:1,000, reveals that she’s sitting with these things in a courtyard at a school. The twenty-three drawings that follow this one carry us to increasingly greater heights above the girl and her cat, until, at a scale of 1:1026, the view of her is so intergalactic it seems to be located in the realm of fantasy. The twenty-seventh in Boeke’s sequence of thirty-nine returns us to the girl and her cat at the scale of 1:10. From here we begin a journey in the other direction. First, at a scale of 1:1, we see a mosquito on the web of skin between her right thumb and forefinger. In the thirteenth and final image, at a scale of 1:10-13, we’re inside a sodium atom, within a salt crystal on the girl’s skin.

  This simple exercise in scaling returns to me often. The images suggest tremendous depth and breadth in worlds one or more off from a world scaled to humans—a wasp’s sense of the extent of the Alexandra lowland, say, or a view of Skraeling from a plane flying overhead en route to Moscow from Seattle, as contrasted with m
y view of a king eider nesting in a hearth box here. But Boeke’s drawings encourage more than just thoughts about scale and point of view. They stimulate, at least for me, thoughts about the difference between my universe and that of the Thule. My umwelt and theirs, or mine and the umwelt of the wasp.

  The text Boeke wrote to accompany the drawings is a treatise on barriers and limitations, which points, for me, to a certain conclusion. When a boundary in the known world—say, a geographical one for Thule people migrating eastward from Alaska, moving farther into an inhospitable world than anyone had ever gone—becomes instead a beckoning horizon, the leading edge of a farther destination, then a world one has never known becomes an integral part of one’s new universe. Memory and imagination come into play. The unknown future calls out to the present and to the remembered past, and in that moment of expansion, the imagined future seems attainable.

  In the autumn of 2008, the English artist Richard Long walked from Carnac, in Brittany, to the particle physics laboratory at CERN, outside Geneva, a distance of 603 miles. Carnac is the site of several thousand stone monuments erected in the last centuries of Europe’s Neolithic period, most of them tall upright stones called menhirs. Long’s walk, titled Megalithic to Subatomic, traces a journey similar to the one Boeke takes us on. Like much art of the past sixty years, as painting and sculpture moved out of the studio, Long’s walk offers us a perspective on human existence prompted by questions that arose after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the widespread deployment of nuclear weapons, questions mostly about the likelihood of human survival. The growing depletion of the world’s natural resources, the desperation behind human diasporas, and the largely unaddressed problem of global climate change have propelled much of modern art even further out of the studio. The accumulation of such threats to human survival suggests the existence of an apocalyptic barrier where once, not so long ago, our way ahead looked almost clear. Our question now is, What lies beyond that barrier? Or more important, what is calling to us from beyond that barrier? We already know what is pushing us into the future.