Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  What was learned here was mostly learned by taking dwellings like this Late Dorset structure apart, in order to speculate productively about how everything here might work. It’s a laudable endeavor, but what can be said of a culture like mine, which can’t leave what it finds alone? Are we not in some way just like the Thule, whose habit of dismantling a Late Dorset structure to make one of their own we sometimes rue?

  My days on Skraeling Island had mostly been about two things: gathering knowledge and accumulating experience, the kind of experience that feeds, metaphorically, into other experiences, illuminating both of them if one is lucky. I was on the outside looking in here, like a director watching some other director’s staging of a play like Richard III, but also like an actor in the play, looking out into the audience, into the face of the reader. Being here was an opportunity to share an experience, and then leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions, against the backdrop of many other stories the reader has already heard about our human relatives and about those two perennial questions: Who are we and where are we headed? The narrative of our ancestors, this story in which sophisticated people supposedly replace “primitive” peoples, is far from being straightforward. It might not even be correct.

  If no one really knows what the world is actually like, whether it’s there in three dimensions or ten, whether the urges to love and forgive or to murder and abuse represent one road or two, whether the restlessness and appetites of the contemporary world are the first sign of an eclipse or not, then I’d be pleased to know what these mute Thule might have to say about it.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN PETER EXCAVATED the karigi at the Sverdrup site, where I’d thought to inform the Thule about beauty, he discovered a Late Dorset figurine hidden beneath a flagstone, a wooden carving of a face. He and his colleagues have found related Dorset carvings in ivory—a needle case, a goose, an Arctic hare—all hidden beneath the floors of karigis by people who arrived after the Dorset. The wooden face from the Sverdrup karigi is an elongated visage, about two inches high. The mouth is open in what some believe is a scream. Small wood splinters have been forced into the face. Whether the scream is meant to induce terror or to register horror no one can say. But the Thule apparently saved these images of their predecessors to turn over in their hands and to consider in their own ceremonial houses.

  When we finished for the day, after we had rounded up our tools and the others had started out for our base camp, I walked south to the edge of the Oldsquaw terrace where I could look down on another terrace below, which ran out to the sea. I was able to make out Thule burial cairns there, stone-lined food caches, the husks of excavated winter houses, and sets of long axial features (parallel lines of stones on either side of a central hearth, bisecting an oval living space), the latter characteristic of an ASTt site. I recalled, standing there, the last lines of Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”:

  …what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

  Those people were a kind of solution.

  * * *

  —

  I DESCEND TO the lower terrace, doff my pack, and sit an hour in a sheltered depression with my binoculars, watching the water. Mist settles on me and my rain gear gleams in soft light filtered through an overcast sky. I rise and shoulder the small gray pack with its books and pens, the bird guide, pilot bread, a thermos of water. I descend to the gravel beach and squat there like a primate, poking at the ground with a willow twig, turning over the sea-washed, ice-scoured rocks.

  I walk past the dark blue tent, its entrance zipped shut against the mist and a rising east wind. I walk north and east to a pond where two eider ducklings paddle slowly, warily, over water corrugated by the wind.

  Soon probably, I think, they’ll learn to fly.

  I sit awhile with the birds, until I realize their parents are circling, reluctant to land. I start walking toward the tents of my companions, obscured now by a slanting fall of white. (I’m reminded of that lovely phrase “snowflake Appaloosa.”) I pass the place where I worked with them that afternoon. The string grid is gone, the Late Dorset site descending again into the anonymity in which it was first found. I am some yards past the first site before I turn back. I remove from my pack a package of pilot bread crackers. I place several of them on a flat stone that sits within the perimeter of the old dwelling. An offering, left behind in this Dorset narthex by a heathen.

  The next day, on the opposite side of the island, a helicopter lands. It takes me and my companions away.

  Puerto Ayora

  Isla Santa Cruz

  Archipiélago de Colón

  Eastern Equatorial Pacific

  00°44'36" S 90°18'32" W

  It’s too warm here, too humid, for me to sleep. Or I’m just not acclimated enough to this place yet. I’ve set the door ajar, opened a window opposite as wide as it will go to the night air, and tied the window curtains aside (which might otherwise have provided some privacy in this small room). I’ve done all this with the reasonable expectation that a cross breeze, an onshore wind, would materialize. Miles inland, air still rising from the old lava flows, like radiation from a slag heap at a foundry, should be providing the convection that would draw air off the dark ocean tonight, but it’s not.

  A film of sweat remains on my supine body.

  This discomfort is only a minor distraction, however. In my hurricane mind, the churning of esoteric information goes on, thoughts I can’t seem to organize well enough to create any point of stillness. Genetic variability, how that plays into speciation, is not a realm I’ve much familiarity with. Instead I have books and some correspondence with experts, an approach to learning that is one part gaping wonder, one part respectful critique. To gain a little more room in which to work out some of the biological problems, I’ve been reading the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking tonight on the unboundedness of the universe, the entity containing all other entities and still expanding, 13.8 billion years after it apparently initiated itself. Out there, so very far from here, I’m thinking one might lay out the genetic variables in the joinery of haploid cells expecting—given a blackboard that big—to sort it all out. On my damp, narrow bed, I can only steeply arch my back and gaze upside down through the open window at the geography that preoccupies Hawking, the depthless black with its pulsing crystal dots. A region where there is no upside down. And where, I read once, there is no “nothing.” Plasma physicists define the permeability of free space—the emptiest parts of the universe—as 4π × 10-7 newtons/ampere2. There are always atomic particles there, until you reach the edge of the universe and the province of true Nothing.

  Stacked on a folding chair next to the bed are disquisitions on natural selection and genetic drift, refinements on the original sketches that Wallace, Darwin, and Mendel worked up, not that many years ago. Holding these loose pages down—in case the breeze does come—is a one-pound book about something else entirely, a popular history entitled Satan Came to Eden. In it one finds lust, self-delusion, and what some say is murder and others call pitiable death. The setting of this melodramatic Eden is the Galápagos Islands in the eastern equatorial Pacific, the place I’m lying in tonight being Puerto Ayora, on Isla Santa Cruz.1 And Satan, as I understand the concept, is as complex an entity as any idea either Hawking or Darwin ever addressed, though probably active in the minds of a great many more people.

  Farther from my bed is the room’s second chair, on the seat of which are more books and several manila folders. On top of these is a folded letter from a friend, a man who came to this place in 1960 with a poorly planned and ill-fated expedition, hoping, along with his companions, to actually build an Eden here. They fell short of their goal.

  Satan Came to Eden is a single minor work in the extensive library of books chronicling the cultural history of the Pacific Ocean. Like many of the others, it deals with the effect cu
ltural illusions about this ocean have had on (mostly Western) explorers hopeful of discovering an Earthly Elysium. In the Pacific, no dragons waited in ambush along unexplored edges of the sea, as had historically been the case with the Atlantic. Here there were only teasing possibilities, cultures of, reportedly, voluptuous ease, made idyllic by “salubrious zephyrs” in places like Tahiti.

  No Tahitian zephyrs are passing through my room this evening, but there is plenty here for me to read. Somewhere in it all, I know, is that geologically complex story of how the moon departed, leaving the crater outside my window that now cradles Magellan’s “pacific” ocean.

  * * *

  —

  THE FIRST HUMANS to put ashore in the Galápagos might have been Polynesian explorers, hundreds of years before Western cartographers began guessing where exactly to situate the larger islands and associated islets of this archipelago in Earth’s newly discovered ocean. The isles lie on the equator, about six hundred miles off the coast of Ecuador, just south of an active tectonic boundary separating the Cocos and Nazca Plates. The Western discoverers were Spanish sailors and ecclesiastics, blown off course while sailing from Panama to Peru, in 1535, with Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the bishop of Panama, aboard. By the late sixteenth century, the Galápagos had become a center of operations for pirates and coastal raiders, as well as a regular watering station and depot for merchant vessels and ships of exploration. These ships frequently left goats and pigs behind, a form of insurance for shipwrecked sailors who might find these coasts. Also important to ships’ crews were the islands’ giant tortoises. Stored upside down in ships’ holds and left inverted there, some lived as long as a year before being killed for fresh meat.

  Shortly after Darwin’s arrival in the islands aboard the naval barque HMS Beagle, in 1835 (Ecuador annexed the isles in 1832), the archipelago became a popular way station for American whalers. The Plymouth, out of Sag Harbor, New York, with the mestizo adventurer Ranald MacDonald aboard, anchored here briefly in 1845. The crew filled their water barrels and took on firewood, checked for any letters that might have been left for them in a barrel on Isla Santa María, and then deposited in that same barrel correspondence to be carried east by vessels bound for Atlantic ports. In 1845 whale ships outbound from here were mostly sailing for fresh whaling grounds in the Sea of Japan.

  In his The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles, Melville wrote that the Galápagos Islands present the sailor with a Plutonian sight. He compares the mountainous landscape, with its plains of volcanic rubble and its parched coasts, to the ruins of a burned-out prison colony. By not emphasizing fog-draped forests in the damp highlands of some of the larger islands, or the abundant (and docile) bird and marine life, and by demonizing the place as an Orphean haunt, Melville fixed the islands in the minds of many of his nineteenth-century readers as bleak and unwelcoming, and condemned the archipelago itself as a weird and exotic destination.

  Melville used the imprecise Spanish word encantada to emphasize the feeling of mystery that emanated from the isles, a characteristic his fellow whalers often referred to when discussing the Galápagos. (Seamen also intended the term “Las Encantadas” to convey the fact that complicated currents streamed through the islands, making the archipelago difficult to navigate. Sailors maintained as well, even after the widespread use of chronometers made it possible to accurately determine longitude at sea, that the islands remained difficult to find.) Once Western scientists came to appreciate the complexity of the islands’ terrestrial, avian, and marine life, and the resident animals’ remarkable docility, encantada (when used by English-speaking people) came to mean something much less ominous—a bewitching place, more inspirational than funereal.

  This once-elusory Pacific archipelago has become, today, more than a mere focal point for the study of island biogeography or adaptive radiation, two modern disciplines that have produced much of the evidence validating Darwin’s and Wallace’s idea of evolutionary descent by natural selection. The islands’ unexpected preindustrial silence, easily and quickly accessible to a visitor to the islands’ interiors or along its unpopulated coasts, is a rare and deeply satisfying experience for most tourists. Because of the presence of so many animals here indifferent to human life, and because of a peculiar “end of the road” undercurrent in Galapagean society, of people questing for a final meaning in life, a vision of the end, one might characterize this Pacific destination as una tierra de los sueños, a dreamscape. This remains true despite the fact that commercial ecotourism, illegal market hunting, government corruption, creationist dogma, and naïve schemes for amassing material wealth have been colliding here, dramatically, for decades.

  The average visitor does not journey to the Archipiélago de Colón in search of scientific elucidation or of Pacific island history, but rather with hopes of finding that state of pure wonder so effortlessly attained here when standing, say, before a flock of ethereal flamingos, dozing one-legged in a saline estuary, or before a lethargic cast of marine iguanas on a ridge of lava, creatures seemingly left over from the first days of creation. People come here to clear themselves out, to rediscover an inner core of tranquility in a place they believe to be uncorrupted.

  On the dirt road that passes near the cabana in which I now lie, in anticipation of an evening breeze, I once fell into conversation with a local man about this feeling that so many visitors have of attaining here a state of transcendent peace. Concerning the modern significance of these islands, he had this reflection: “La tierra puede transformar el alma y lamente, y corazón de todos los hermanos.” (“It’s possible for this place to shift your soul, to ameliorate the pain of modern existence, to elevate the heart of everyone who visits here.”)

  We’d begun speaking that afternoon, he and I, mostly in English, about images of life and death in the islands. The intensely hued vermilion flycatcher of the high country, who will land on your head and yank out a few hairs for its nest. The swallow-tailed gull, which will fly backward against a headwind in order to settle more gently on its nest; a bird, moreover, that has evolved to hunt successfully in darkness far out at sea. A wounded fur seal, hauled out on shore rocks, a chunk of shark-ripped flesh the size of a pineapple hanging from its flank. A dying immature masked booby, hung up like a broken kite in the branches of a palo santo tree, having misjudged a swirling wind and now, as you come upon it, blinking its last looks.

  The young masked booby dying in a palo santo tree, which I mentioned to this man, was not the only dying—or deceased—bird I came upon the morning I visited their nesting grounds on Isla Genovesa. There might have been twenty-five or thirty dead, immature masked boobies. The opportunity to behold this scene of natural carnage, while at the same time not losing track of the transporting beauty of orchids in full bloom on the slopes of the islands’ volcanoes, was one more thing that Las Encantadas offered me as a guest: the possibility of holding both images together in the same moment.

  * * *

  —

  I GOT UP in the dark, determined to make something good out of my sleepless night. I turned on the lamp by the side of the bed, a 40-watt incandescent bulb, its weak illumination further muted by a crude lampshade fashioned from the translucent skin of an Opuntia cactus. Two geckos shot across the red concrete floor and sprinted up the whitewashed wall opposite, hanging motionless there, tense as strung bows, while I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. I closed the window, locked the door behind me, and set off for a breakwater of igneous boulders flanking Pelican Bay in front of the Hotel Galápagos’s lodge.

  Even at night, with its emphatic horizon missing, the Pacific is vast. Most of us perceive this ocean as a single undifferentiated entity, though Cook gave these waters to the cultural West with a distinct face, and not merely by discovering islands within what had once been a colossal emptiness—Norfolk Island, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, the South Sandwiches—and confirming the location of islands like Easter Island
, South Georgia, Tonga, the Hawaiian archipelago, and the northern and southern Marquesas, which might have been seen earlier by other mariners. He was the one who gave the Pacific a continuous surface. After Cook, scraps of the former Western Ocean—the coastal waters of the Americas, the Polynesian waters, the separate Philippine Sea—became, together, a piece of whole cloth. Cook anticipated, too, the widespread revelation, two hundred years later, of a unique Polynesian epistemology, a singular way of viewing the human-occupied world, one in which the primary frame of reference was not land surrounded by water but a mass of water containing widely scattered bits of land. The Polynesians, he intuited, were ocean, not land, dwellers.

  Frequently, from the shores of Earth’s five oceans and also from the bridges of ships, I’ve tried, hour upon hour, to understand the oceans not as waiting grounds, empty places waiting to be defined by an event, but as a type of consciousness. The modern oceans, evolved from the Panthalassic Ocean of the Paleozoic, from the Tethys of the Mesozoic, and a few other primal bodies of water, all of them moving on now toward something with yet another name, proceeding according to a clock different from the one I keep, also different from the clock that was ticking while thirteen species of Galapagean finch evolved from a single common ancestor, and different from the measure of geological time that applies to the evolution of the archipelago’s shield volcanoes, rising from a single hot spot in Earth’s mantle, a vent that periodically erupts through the Nazca Plate and is the explanation for the ancient heights and calderas we today call Isla Santa Cruz, Isla Sin Nombre, Isla Marchena, and so on.