We look from one side of the boat to the other. There are no bearded seals in sight. “They're somewhere,” Ko says. “Maybe a mile or two from here. Water radiates sound long distances.”
These are the watery calls of longing, a complex frequency that is wavering, fragile, doomed, eerie, and beautiful. “Like all love calls,” Gautier says. What is it that lifts the notes after they fall? I wonder. Love and loss and more love—don't they always happen in the same kind of rushing slowness and arching falls?
Max traipses back and forth on deck all night recording seals. He wears his wool cap pressed down so that the tops of his ears are exposed and bent forward. “I can hear more this way,” he says. The shapes within the human ear are musical instruments just waiting to be filled with sound. There are bugles, drums, tubas, French horns, and harps. Sound spirals through the auricle, strikes the tympanic membrane, and floods past the ossicles—the three bones of the middle ear—before entering the labyrinth, the deep north of the inner ear, where twenty thousand hairs of varying length are arranged like harp strings whose sole purpose tonight is to slap seal song against an auditory nerve, which, in turn, shoots those pulsations to the brain. At that moment, we hear.
Once, long ago, in southwestern Alaska, a female Yupik shaman put on a bearded seal mask. In an instant she fell through the floor and began to cry out. Her cries sounded exactly like those of a bearded seal. The sound made the onlookers feel as if their foreheads were opening up, they said. With the mask on, she was the seal.
We have no masks. But we have an ear for what is lyric. The ear is an eye. With it, we see our way to the end. Hearing is the last sense to go before death. In a coma once, I could hear the doctor whispering to my mother on the other side of a closed door, “I don't think she's going to make it.” The volume in my brain was turned up crystal clear. My heart was slowing to a stop, but I could hear theirs beating.
There are Inuit words in various dialects for “the bearded seal who at this time of year is singing.” In Anchorage I saw a bearded seal mask at the museum; it was a head with a mouth wide open as if singing, and its yua, the soul—another force— was pushing through.
Near morning. We sleep on glass. It too induces a feeling of falling because there are no rolling waves to keep us upright. Under me, bearded seals dive deep to rake the benthic mud with long whiskers for food. At this moment I'm anything but lonely, and can no longer say “I” or “me.” It is “us,” all twenty-four of us bound together by the rough passage we endured and the sudden beauty coming into our eyes and ears.
BELLSUND AND VAN MIJENFJORDEN
June I and still snowing. Continental slosh and pancake ice spin as the tide comes in. An arctic fox track leads from a bird mountain to a puzzle of ice floes. As the ice shifts, the tracks disappear. A polar bear saunters across a snowy valley on all fours. “The ice bear is perhaps the loneliest of all the animals in the Arctic,” Ko tells me. For no obvious reason, the bear stops, lays his head and shoulder on the snow, then rolls over with all four feet in the air.
We sail out of the storm into the sun and calm of Van Mi-jenfjorden. Ted and Maaike show us the marks on the chart that indicate how much the glaciers on these islands have retreated since they first sailed here ten years ago. A red line marks where they were; a blue line—where they are now—is much farther back.
Time in the Arctic beats to another clock. A caterpillar can take fourteen years to become a butterfly, freezing in middevel-opment during the long winters, thawing out when summer temperatures rise, then freezing again. But once a caterpillar has reached maturity and becomes a butterfly, it lives only a few weeks, then dies of the cold that comes in August in these high latitudes. Arctic flowers, on the other hand, rush through their cycle—greening up, flowering, and going to seed in six weeks.
“I guess water has the longest life of all,” Val says. “One drop melting out from a glacier can take a thousand years to go through the ocean's global circulation.” David Hinton looks at her and grins: “One drop goes a long way.”
Ko, Max, David Hinton, Albert, and I are taken by Zodiac to a thin ledge of rock that cantilevers out over the sea. We sit at the bottom of a vertical wall—a “bird rock.” Albert and Max record; David, Ko, and I just watch. On the craggy face a city of nests rises. So many love stories up there: pair after pair of kittiwakes and Brunnich's guillemots are pushed close together. It's like looking into the lit windows of a New York City apartment building at night. But the noise is much louder.
Kittiwakes make nests of mud and straw, but guillemots squat on bare rock. They don't bother making shelter. Their eggs are cone-shaped to take up less room. Because guillemots are stronger than gulls, they get better nesting sites. But once they've claimed their territory, there's nothing to do except sit and wait for the eggs to hatch.
We spy an arctic fox sneaking through the “bird suburbs,” or, as I call them, the “birdbubs.” Where barnacle geese are nesting, a fox leans around the edge of the wall trying to snatch an egg. A squawking bird-alarm sounds; the fox is attacked by glaucous gulls and quickly departs. In the aftermath, two kittiwakes fight over a female. The winner chases the other bird away.
Birds swirl and swarm. The noise intensifies. I close my eyes and listen, trying to separate out the thousands of overlapping cries: kaka-week, kaka-week; kak-kak-kak-kak; and the low grrrr of the Brunnich's guillemot. The air hums. The vibration of wings shatters complacency.
“I'm glad I'm here!” Ko yells. “To see these birds gives me hope when I am feeling there is none.” A bird flies over with bits of grass hanging from its beak. Two kittiwakes groom each other using their necks like hands for fondling. One lifts off the nest, leaving its mate, who calls and calls: ga … ga … ga … Others return with food to share, or a bit of mud to shore up a sagging nest wall. Some couples just sit: face-to-face, neck-to-neck, beak-to-beak, utterly entranced with each other.
Far back, part of a frozen waterfall drops as if the noise had fractured the ice; birds cry out and flap up past it. On either side, wide sweeps of white bind fjord ice to sky.
Night. But light. On board the Noorderlicht, someone discovers that seal songs are traveling up the steel masts; this whole boat is a listening post, and we lean in to hear. The spiraling calls of the bearded seal are twisting down as if waves of water were bending waves of sound. What are the uses of enchant-ment? Dan. Harvey, a sculptor, had asked earlier. Now I know.
Geological desire festers. Just north of here a line of sea vents spurt hot water into the Arctic Sea. The diastolic motion of the sea rocks me asleep, then awake. What is the difference between longing and loving? Perhaps this: longing is almost loving and surely losing; love is the constant inconstant, like a burning that is both instantaneous and light-years away.
I go below to rest. As soon as I put my head down, I hear love songs vibrating through the steel hull. My forehead opens and the seals’ whistling cries pour in. Equilibrium is restored. In the deep north of the ear, the ampulla's sensory hairs sway to these songs.
In this way the ear combats loneliness: it's a shell with a wide entry, elaborate whorls, a pink auricle, and secret tracks that take up threads of song. Seabirds live in crowded colonies. Polar bears wander alone. Bearded seals live in loosely extended families. Longing is their common thread. Passion and solitude. That's all there is for us and all there is for the bearded seal.
A pale light slams against frozen windows. Even under way snow stacks up on deck. A nine-note snow bunting song sounds as we depart. We're taking Ko up the coast to the airport in Spitsbergen's only town, Longyearbyren, to catch a plane to Oslo, then Amsterdam. If all goes well, we'll arrive tomorrow. Behind us is a long spit of land, a thawing landscape on which we walked earlier, where the ground is corrugated solufluxion—all lobes and stones, the small ones separated out from the large ones in perfect polygonal mosaics.
Nature is the only true artist, and we are its apprentices. A piece of blue ice drifts by, ice from which all
the oxygen has been squeezed out. I lean on the rail and breathe in. Blue ice is airless; the thing itself is total absorption: blue becoming blue, having been blue.
TOXIC SPRING
There's so much extravagant beauty, and so much destruction and carelessness. What will the outcome be? A cloud bisects the mountain so that only the peak and foot show. An iceberg drifts by with a porthole through which we see more ice. At dinner, Gary Hume affects a strange Irish voice and manner. His comments are incisive and a little mean, which makes them wickedly funny. We laugh until tears come. “Watching the coast go by,” he says, “is like three-dimensional walking standing still.” We dance, letting the heaving deck throw us around. We can be quiet all together, and we can be loud.
Middle-of-the-night watch. The seas are running big. Our boat is a sieve. Water streams everywhere. Its holes are ears. If only we would listen. Life on earth is so robust that we haven't even begun to finish mapping the world's biodiversity. Yet we kill it off as it is discovered. Life goes the way of life: from the ice caps to the equator, from the Mariana Trench to the young, still-rising mountains, some sort of life can be found, and the internal complexities of the biosphere are only now becoming apparent.
No place looks as pristine as these islands, this sea, these fjords. The Arctic is a wide bowl, a basin that attracts water and atmosphere from the inhabited and industrialized nations to the south. Pollution from the United Kingdom, Europe, Russia, Eurasia, China, and the United States, as well as smoke and dust from Africa, Indonesia, and South America, find their way to the Arctic every day. Persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, radioactivity, and petroleum hydrocarbons, plus smoke from fires and dust—what constitutes a global pool of contaminants—rides a round-the-world circuit of winds, ocean currents, and weather carrying the ills of so-called civilization to the top of the world.
In a paper titled “Physical Pathways of Contaminant Transport” I read grim messages. Westerly winds bring POPs, PCBs, heavy metals, pesticides (including DDT, which is still used in Asia, sold by the United States), and organochlorines from industrial Eurasia over the top of the North Pole that are washed by snow, fog, and rain from the air to the ground. Semivolatile compounds are transported by cycles of evaporation and condensation. Meltwater does the rest, feeding every stream, river, and lake in the arctic ecosystem. Slow-moving rivers can store pollutants in stream-bank sediments; fast-moving rivers move their dirty cargo seaward, causing estuaries and deltas to become particle traps.
Drift ice carries contaminants that sifted down from dirty air into the transpolar drift, spiraling into the Beaufort Gyre or the Labrador Current. Ocean currents slowly push water-soluable and particle-absorbed contaminants from distant industrial coasts into the Arctic Sea and out again down the East Greenland Current and through the Canadian archipelago. Sadly, the sea is the final resting place and sedimentary storage vault for pollution.
The Arctic is particularly toxic in spring. As snow begins melting, there's a chemical surge. The initial melt can remove as much as 40 to 80 percent of the total mass of the winter's accumulated airborne compounds. High levels of PCBs are found in the breast milk of Inuit women. The newest finding is the toxicity of flame retardants used in plastic casings, building materials, and fabrics. In polar bears, these endocrine disrup-tors are causing animals to “change sex,” developing both male and female sex organs. A hermaphroditic bear was found on Spitsbergen in 1997, and others were found in Greenland, just a few hundred miles away.
Radionuclides have been high in the European Arctic since the 1986 explosion in Chernobyl. An American military plane that crashed off northwestern Greenland spread plutonium in Bylot Bay in 1968. A Cosmos-954 satellite spread radioactive material over Canada. Who knows what goes on at nuclear power plants? Arctic haze, actually smog, has intensified, and acid rain and snow are tallied up in the archives of glaciers. Ironically, the Arctic's cold climate may be bacteria-resistant, but it attracts and preserves industrial pollution better than warm climates do.
Cycles and circles enclose us. They are all fixed paths, closed circuits, and we have to live with what we've created within them. Beauty and pollution ride the same trails. The aurora is beaded with lead and cadmium, snowbanks drift hard with heavy metals, rain is toxic, drift ice is radioactive, roaring rivers are pollution highways, the oceans are mercury sinks, the midnight-sun-filled days are cluttered with smoke and dust motes, and Earth and its atmosphere are becoming a hot cauldron where disease and contamination are stirred.
We are under sail; the horizon is a gray thread on which a few beads of ice are strung. Ocean currents clash. An iceberg is upended, sending shock waves to shore. “It's important to have hope,” Dan Harvey says. “Despite the mess we've made. It means we have room for improvement. In my sculptures I work with grass. Grass teaches us hope. The way one blade can grow between the crack of a huge boulder.” He shows me pictures of the floating fields of grass, grass bodies, grass books, and grass houses he's made. He transforms the ordinary and, like any arctic shaman, asks us to step into another way of seeing. Now he's making plaster impressions of ice. Looking out over the bay, he says: “Human eyes are cued to the color green because it has always meant food and water. But up here, the cue for hunters must have been white, or maybe blue. I've only been thinking in one season—summer. This vista of ice changes everything. I'll have to think in the hues of a new season.”
A snowflake falls, moving the mass balance of a glacier from ablation to accumulation, but later it melts, sending the equation the other way. Every moment is teetering, and every glacier. Balance, then, must be imbalance: all tipping and tilting, gaining and losing, unending rock and roll. Nothing is steady. But that's okay. The boat's listing deck has taught us how to dance on rough seas, how to spin straight on steep angles, how to keep from falling once the water is still. Within us is what Emerson called “the soul of the whole,” in which what is seen and the seer, what is heard and the listener, are one.
LONGYEARBYREN
Latitude 78 degrees north. Tonight the horizon bends slightly. The world is not flat after all. As we enter Recherche Fjord, the ever-erudite Casper pays homage: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past.” An eerie whistle catches our ears; the fjord is littered with drift ice, silver platters holding bearded seals.
We circle around and around, getting as close as possible. The seals’ long whiskers glisten and their calls ride the air. We humans must be the most primitive beings on the planet, the most uncivilized. There is so much we don't hear, know, or sense in any way. I can't send my love songs through the water to anyone I love; I can't sing that way.
We idle beside one of the seals. He tolerates us for a long time, then slithers into his watery paradise. If the warming trend continues, the ice shelves where these seals raise their pups will melt and they will die.
On the way out of Bellsund Sound we spot another polar bear. Is the bear male or female, someone asks. Or both? Val says. When the ice goes, the bear goes. But she can't know that now. She steps from iceberg to iceberg, walks the length of a snowy valley, stops, looks up, yawns, and continues on her way.
Jason, an Australian diver, filmmaker, and North Pole guide whom we meet along the way, says, “Except for a few areas, the Spitsbergen islands have been beautifully preserved, but the committee forgot to include the ocean. The arctic ecosystem is very simple. It has three or four steps—from fish, to birds, to seals, to polar bears. Without a healthy sea, the arctic ecosystem collapses immediately. Bears, walrus, birds, and seals need fish. Fish need healthy water. They need to be left alone. At the moment the sea is being overfished. Take one element away and everything goes. How could the Norwegians be so shortsighted?”
The Noorderlicht sails down a coast wrapped in black smoke. Beyond are ramshackle wooden buildings and massive apartment blocks above on the hill. This is Barentsburg, a Russian coal mine and factory town. Spitsbergen has no indigenous populat
ion and is governed by an international consortium under the sovereignty of Norway. Fifty percent of the main island of Spitsbergen is contained in three national parks and two preserves for plant protection, but the rest of the island, including the area around Isfjorden, is a no-man's-land, with mining claims plus 250 claims within the national park boundaries. Barentsburg is one of them.
Ted asks if we want to visit. Some say yes, others no, but the yea-sayers win. Reluctantly I join the tour. The guide is self-appointed. He shows up at the dock and tells us it will cost twenty of whatever currency he's using. He's exuberant, having just arrived from Ukraine, where he made a fraction of the money he makes here. “And they fly us in a helicopter to Longyearbyren to shop any time we want to go,” he says proudly, not realizing that the company docks his pay for these excursions.
There's a huge communal dining hall, a forlorn hospital, a school, and a hotel for visitors, with a bar where we buy shots of vodka, as well as a farm on the hill, a summer garden, and an old-fashioned theater on whose stage traditional Russian dances are performed. The women are hefty, and the men— all miners—are black-faced. The pollution from the mine— plumes of black smoke wafting over snowy mountains and ice-littered seas—serves as a reminder that one of our most complex problems is how to balance the needs of humans from developing countries with the need for a healthy planet. To do so, we must make decisions that are all-inclusive and biologically sound, taking human, cultural, and biological elements into consideration instead of looking for economic gain only.
By two o'clock we're onboard the Noorderlicht again. A Norwegian fireboat is docked next to us, and a dog—a Siberian husky—is chained up on deck. I look across at him and he at me. I see open snowfields and frozen fjords in his eyes. He sees my claustrophobia. I turn to Ted: “Let's get out of here.” Soon the ruined mountain is behind us. Seal song soaks up through the hull. We're making our way to Longyearbyren. Ko has to catch a plane. Now that we have our sea legs under us, we can do anything, “as long as the boat is rocking,” David Buckland says, laughing. By the time we finish this two-week voyage, we will have traveled 1,020 miles.
The Future of Ice Page 11