At Large and at Small: Familiar Essays

by Anne Fadiman

  In 1989, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago mounted an exhibit called “What Is the Proper Way to Display the American Flag?” In order to reach the leather-bound ledger in which they were asked to record their responses, viewers had to walk on a flag laid on the floor. “For days,” reported The Detroit News, “veterans picked the flag up off the floor, folded it in the ceremonial military fashion and placed it on the shelf. Their faces were almost always stoic; one was visibly in tears at the sight of grimy footprints on the flag. Moments later, however, the flag was unfolded by supporters of the art, usually students with indignant faces, who shook out the flag like a bedsheet, and then draped it on the floor.”

  The same year, in a controversial case called Texas v. Johnson, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy explained why he had concluded, with great reluctance, that flag-burning is a form of free speech and therefore protected by the First Amendment. “Though symbols often are what we ourselves make of them,” he wrote, “the flag is constant in expressing beliefs Americans share, beliefs in law and peace and that freedom which sustains the human spirit. The case here today forces recognition of the costs to which those beliefs commit us. It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt.”

  We kept our flag at half staff longer than President Bush decreed that we should, and then, after raising it to full staff, we continued to fly it after most of our neighbors had put theirs away. Maybe we were making up for lost time. Maybe we needed to see our flag flying in order to convince ourselves that even though anti-Muslim protesters marching near a mosque in Bridgeview, Illinois, had waved flags and chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” we could choose another meaning in Whately, Massachusetts: the one a Chicago flag committee had in mind in 1895 when it called the Stars and Stripes “our greater self.”

  I had not looked closely at our flag when we raised it, so I decided to take it down one day to see whether it was made of cotton or silk. It was a raw afternoon in early December; freezing rain was falling on gray patches of snow. Section 174c of the Flag Code prohibits display in inclement weather, but a handful of local diehards were still flying their flags rain or shine, twenty-four hours a day, so we had followed suit. The flag was sodden and looked like a shrouded bat. When I lowered it and detached the grommets from the halyard, I could see that it was made of nylon. Black letters printed on the hoist, so faded I could barely make them out, read DURA LITE. The red stitching that connected the stripes was beginning to bleed. The embroidered white stars were fraying. As I refastened the brass clip, I tried hard to keep the old, wet, shabby flag from touching the ground.

  THE ARCTIC HEDONIST

  mong the many mental games with which my insomniac father whiled away the small hours of the night, his favorite was called I Shook Hands with Shakespeare. He had shaken hands with the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner, who had in turn presumably shaken hands with her father, Otis Skinner. He had shaken hands with Edwin Booth… and so on, down through Junius Brutus Booth, Edmund Kean, David Garrick, Thomas Betterton, Sir William D’Avenant, and Richard Burbage. Finally, as dawn crept through the blinds, William Shakespeare extended his hand. (My father admitted a shaky manual link between Kean, who was born in 1787, and Garrick, who died in 1779.)

  I myself have shaken hands with the arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Our degrees of separation number only two. Aware of my febrile interest in the history of polar exploration, my father once mentioned that, many years earlier, he had been introduced to Stefansson.

  “Stefansson?” I panted. “What was he like?”

  “The only thing I recall,” said my father, “is his unfortunate smell.”

  I didn’t hold this against Stefansson; it was part and parcel of being an explorer. (One of his expeditionary companions once noted that “he considers any attention to cleanliness, hygiene and camp sanitation as ‘military fads.’ ”) In any case, through Stefansson (or, in some cases, through people he met), I have also clasped hands with Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton—the men who dominated the great period of arctic and antarctic exploration between 1880 and the First World War. I have spent many nights establishing these bonds (Let’s see… Stefansson must have met Amundsen in 1906, when they were both at Herschel Island; Amundsen visited Nansen in Norway in 1900—or was it 1899?), and, like my father, discovered that the handshaking game is far better at keeping one awake than at putting one to sleep.

  The closest hand was the best; it still felt warm. For more than twenty years, I have therefore considered Vilhjalmur Stefansson “my explorer.” During the course of three expeditions between 1906 and 1918, my explorer was the first white man to visit the Copper Inuit of Victoria Island; traveled twenty thousand miles by dogsled; discovered the world’s last major landmasses, a series of islands in the Canadian archipelago; and set what a colleague called “the world’s record for continuous Polar service” (five and a half years, an interval Stefansson considered nothing to boast about, since many of his Inuit friends had lived in the Arctic without apparent difficulty for more than eight decades).

  What most endeared Stefansson to me was his conviction that the far north was not meant to be endured; it was meant to be enjoyed. If you knew what you were doing, you could have a “bully time” up there. His favorite temperature was −40°. (Temperatures below −50° were manageable but not quite so bully, since they required you to breathe through your mouth. “Your nose,” he observed, “is less likely to freeze when there is cold air merely outside of it instead of both inside and out.”) When he was above 66° north latitude, he insisted that his spirits were jollier, his appetite keener, and his wavy blond hair thicker. His most famous book, a 784-page account of his third expedition, was called The Friendly Arctic.

  The Friendly Arctic? In 1921, when it was published, Macmillan might as well have brought out a book called The Friendly Pit Viper. The previous century had seen a series of arctic catastrophes, from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage (130 dead of scurvy, starvation, and lead poisoning), to George Washington De Long’s 1879 attempt to reach the North Pole from Siberia (twenty dead of exposure, starvation, and drowning), to Adolphus Greely’s 1881 expedition to Ellesmere Island (nineteen dead of exposure, starvation, and drowning). It was true that in 1909 Robert Peary reached the North Pole—or claimed he did—but he would have had a more comfortable journey had he not lost eight of his toes to frostbite on an earlier expedition.

  The Friendly Arctic was an in-your-face title, and that’s why Stefansson chose it. After all, he wrote, everyone knows what the Arctic is like:

  The land up there is all covered with eternal ice; there is everlasting winter with intense cold; and the corollary of the everlastingness of the winter is the absence of summer and the lack of vegetation. The country, whether land or sea, is a lifeless waste of eternal silence. The stars look down with a cruel glitter, and the depressing effect of the winter darkness upon the spirit of man is heavy beyond words. On the fringes of this desolation live the Eskimos, the filthiest and most benighted people on earth, pushed there by more powerful nations farther south, and eking out a miserable existence amidst hardship.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Eternally icy? Montana, Stefansson explained, in the tone a parent might use to drum something obvious into the skull of an unusually dim-witted child, is far colder; arctic summers are hot; there are 762 species of arctic flowering plants. Silent? In the summer, the tundra resounds with the squawks of ducks, the cackles of geese, the cries of plovers, the screams of loons, and the howls of wolves (which, when heard on starlit nights, constitute “the most romantic sort of music”). Once the ice starts to freeze against the coast,

  there is a high-pitched screeching as one cake slides over the other, like the thousand-times magnified creaking of a rusty hinge. There is the crashing when cakes as big as a church wall, after being tilted on edge, finally pass beyond th
eir equilibrium and topple down upon the ice; and when extensive floes, perhaps six or more feet in thickness, gradually bend under the resistless pressure of the pack until they buckle up and snap, there is a groaning as of supergiants in torment and a booming which at a distance of a mile or two sounds like a cannonade.

  Depressing? According to Stefansson, “an Eskimo laughs as much in a month as the average white man does in a year.” A benighted people? The Inuit are honest, considerate, courteous, hospitable, fun-loving, self-sufficient, and morally superior to any but the “rarest and best of our race.”

  In other words, the Arctic was not (as Peary had described it, using the sort of language to which readers had become accustomed) “a trackless, colorless, inhospitable desert”; it was a high-latitude Arcadia. Precipitation was light. Gale-force winds were rare. Water was abundant, even at sea, since salt leaches out of ice floes within a few seasons, rendering them deliciously fresh. Illness was infrequent; tuberculosis was seldom transmitted during the winter because “the spit is likely to freeze when it is voided.” And the region flowed, if not with milk and honey, then with caribou, polar bear, walrus, and seal, all there for the taking (even if shooting seals beneath the polar ice “resembles hunting as we commonly think of it less than it does prospecting”). Why burden your sledges with heavy provisions, thereby limiting an expedition’s duration and range, when, if you merely did what the Inuit had been doing for centuries, you could live off the land? “Do not let worry over tomorrow’s breakfast interfere with your appetite at dinner,” Stefansson liked to tell his men. “The friendly Arctic will provide.”

  If the Arctic was so friendly, it followed that you didn’t need to be a masochist in order to explore it. Stefansson had nothing but contempt for “heroes who conquered the Frozen North,” since he considered the Frozen North a myth and the metaphor of battle entirely wrongheaded. (Friends don’t fight.) He believed this sort of bunkum had been invented to satisfy readers in overstuffed armchairs who found narratives of ease and pleasure less riveting than hyperbolic accounts of “suffering, heroic perseverance against formidable odds, and tragedy either actual or narrowly averted.” Stefansson’s stance—partly a pose, but only partly—was that being an arctic explorer was no harder than any other job. He wrote to a friend that the prospect of returning to the far north was as pleasant as, and not much different from, the prospect of spending a winter in Heidelberg. Finding your way to a remote Inuit camp was “no more wonderful than knowing that a fifteen-minute walk will take you to the Flatiron Building from the Washington Arch.” Why pretend you were bristling with machismo when living in the Arctic was a piece of cake?

  I recognized the Stefansson shtick just last week when I was reading a German fairy tale to my seven-year-old son. Its plot revolved around a king who assigns progressively more impossible tasks to a cocksure young man —stealing a dragon’s flying horse, stealing the dragon’s blanket, and finally stealing the dragon himself. The penalty for failure is death by dismemberment. Every time the king ups the ante, our hero says, “Is that all? That is easily done.” In fairy tales, such characters are never punished for their bravado; they always perform their assigned tasks without breaking a sweat and end up marrying the king’s daughter. In this case, the young man not only follows the prescribed formula for success but has the pleasure of watching the dragon eat the king for dinner.

  The voice of that young man is the same voice Tom Wolfe had so much fun with in The Right Stuff, that of the airline pilot who, as his plane seems about to crash, drawls into the intercom:

  “Now, folks, uh… this is the captain… ummmm… We’ve got a little ol’ red light up here on the control panel that’s tryin’ to tell us that the landin’ gears’re not… uh… lock in’ into position when we lower ’em… Now… I don’t believe that little ol’ red light knows what it’s talk in’ about—I believe it’s that little ol’ red light that iddn’ workin’ right”… faint chuckle, long pause, as if to say, I’m not even sure all this is really worth going into—still, it may amuse you… “ But… I guess to play it by the rules, we oughta humor that little ol’ light… ”

  You know that pilot will never have an elevated pulse, never admit there’s an emergency, and never crash the plane.

  I first encountered this attitude of studied insouciance thirty years ago, when I took a wilderness course at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming, during an era of outdoorsmanship considerably more primitive than the present one. Our catchphrase was “No prob.” Five weeks without tents or stoves? No prob. We slept under tarps suspended from trees and lit fires twice a day, forearming ourselves for rainy days by squirreling little bundles of dry sticks in our pockets—our six-foot-three-inch leader tenderly called them “twiggies,” to underline how very cozy and unintimidating the whole venture was—just as Stefansson had squirreled handfuls of dry Cassiope tetragona (arctic heather) in his pockets. No fancy freeze-dried food? No prob. We baked bread, pizzas, even birthday cakes by heaping hot coals on our frying pan lids, and cleaned the blackened pans with swags of limber pine, which we called Wind River Brillo. No food at all during the five-day “survival expedition” at the end of the course? No prob. We fished for trout and foraged for grouse whortleberries. Those five days were the hungriest of my life, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting it. (Stefansson: “Any traveler who complains about going three or four days without food will get scant sympathy from me.”) That dragon was easy to steal.

  A few years later, when I became an instructor at NOLS, the ratio of bluster to genuine joie de vivre declined precipitously. We pooh-poohed Outward Bound, our competitor in the wilderness-skills field, as unnecessarily anhedonic. OB promised to build character by asking its disciples to face fear and hardship; NOLS asked, as Stefansson had, “What fear? What hardship?” One winter we took out a group of mountaineering students for a couple of weeks to climb Wind River Peak on skis. It was ten below zero, but we built both a small igloo and a gigantic snow cave, in whose toasty precincts we threw off most of our clothes and stretched as luxuriously as cats next to a radiator. At night, when we schussed the snowfields above Deep Creek Lakes, the hoarfrost reflected the full moon, and it was almost as bright as day.

  That was small stuff, and very long ago. But, years later, it was enough to make me understand what Stefansson meant when he described hunting caribou on Banks Island on a cold, clear day: “In his exuberance of good health it is difficult for the arctic hunter to feel anything but pleasure in almost any kind of weather or almost any circumstance. I suppose what I am trying to explain is about what the Biblical writer had in mind when he spoke of a strong man rejoicing to run a race.”

  Stefansson had just the sort of upbringing you’d expect: pioneer-style, in a one-room cabin in the Dakota Territory, with scant food but plenty of Norse sagas recited in the evening by his Icelandic parents, who had emigrated first to Manitoba and then to the United States. When he was eighteen, he set himself up as a winter grazier, caring for the livestock of local farmers. The great blizzard of 1897 hit during his first season, and all his assistants quit, unwilling to work on skis or shovel their way into barns buried in snowdrifts. No prob. Stefansson carried on alone and, of course (because the young man in the fairy tale never labors in vain), didn’t lose a single head of cattle.

  At the University of North Dakota, Stefansson was thrown out of his boardinghouse for espousing Darwinism and then expelled from college for spotty attendance and “a spirit of insubordination.” (His fellow students staged a mock funeral. His hearse was a wheelbarrow, his widow a black-clad classmate whose tears were facilitated by an onion wrapped in a handkerchief.) No prob. After finishing up at the University of Iowa and attending graduate school at Harvard, where he switched his field from divinity to anthropology, he was offered the post of ethnologist on the 1906 Anglo-American Polar Expedition to northwest Canada. He and his expedition never ended up intersecting, since he traveled overland to the Mackenzie Delta—so
lo, of course—and the ship that carried his colleagues failed to penetrate the ice beyond Point Barrow, two hundred miles to the west. No prob. He spent the winter living with the Inuit, collecting ethnographic artifacts, learning Inuktitut, and formulating his belief that the only way to get along in the Arctic was to dress and hunt and eat like a local. “I was gradually being broken in to native ways,” he wrote.

  By the middle of October, I had thrown away my nearly outworn woollen suit and was fur clad from head to heel, an Eskimo to the skin. I never regretted the lack of a single item of such arctic clothing as money can buy in America or Europe.… A reasonably healthy body is all the equipment a white man needs for a comfortable winter among the arctic Eskimos.

  Two more expeditions followed, one primarily ethnographic, the other geographic and scientific. By the end of his tenth arctic winter, Stefansson was the uncontested master of what he called “polarcraft,” a body of knowledge he later codified in a volume called the Arctic Manual. Although it was commissioned by the U.S. Army as a survival guide for Air Corps fliers who were forced to make emergency landings in the far north, its author couldn’t resist transforming it into a how-to book on what he liked to do—live off the land, with minimal provisions, for years at a time. (A downed flier, for instance, would be unlikely to make use of his observation that the ideal sled dog is bred by crossing a husky or a malamute with a wolf.)

  The Arctic Manual is my favorite Stefansson book. The chances that I will ever need to apply its lessons may be slender. But just as devotees of Martha Stewart feel more secure knowing they could make a wedding centerpiece from belt buckles and gumdrops, even if they never actually have to, so I derive a certain degree of comfort from reading and rereading Stefansson’s arctic tips. It reassures me to know that pussy willow fuzz can be used for the wick of a seal-oil lamp. That two lemon-sized chunks of iron pyrite, struck together, will start a fire faster than matches. That it is possible to cook with the hair and wool of a musk ox or grizzly bear, one hide being sufficient for two or three eight-quart pots. That if you are not ashore during the spring thaw, you should select a thick floe on which to spend the summer, and resume your travel in the fall. That a dead seal can be easily dragged, but a polar bear tends to flip upside down. That you should not rub decayed caribou brains on your clothes, since the hides will stiffen. That skin boats can be boiled and eaten. That the best way to approach a seal you wish to shoot is to look like a seal yourself: wear dark clothing, wriggle along the ice, and occasionally flex your legs from the knees as if scratching lice with your hind flippers.