Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  Our conversation had opened up another interesting topic. Many people during our stay to date had commented on the early arrival of summer, and how generally summers were arriving earlier and winters were arriving later. The phrase ‘global warming’ was offered by way of explanation by many to whom I had spoken. Pat was quick to take up the question. He explained that if it was global warming there was little Alaskans could do about it, but they should be aware of its effects. The greater part of the Alaskan landmass resided on permafrost, and if that started to thaw, Pat declared, ‘We’ve got real big problems, bigger than probably all the gold and oil revenues could cure.’ As Pat explained it, part of the problem was more than just the physical one of permafrost thaw; it was just as much to do with a way of thinking and an attitude to the problem. Scientists thought in terms of centuries and large-scale catastrophe; engineers, politicians and big business had a habit of thinking in shorter increments, such as decades. As he was explaining, Mary winked slyly at me, letting me know I was about to get a lecture.

  ‘Long-term projections don’t really inject the right degree of urgency into the matter,’ Pat said. ‘But it’s a bit like falling into the river. If we don’t take care of the thing today it will be too late tomorrow. The facts as far as they already exist should inform our politicians about the urgency of the problem. Currently, the state spends over thirty-five million dollars a year on permafrost repairs to our roads. When you drive down that roller-coaster between Delta and Valdez you’ll see what I mean. And the Leaning Tower of Pisa can’t hold a candle to the buckled and decayed houses in the Farmers Loop area. People fail to grasp the larger picture. Global warming means more frequent storms and more tidal waves. Already there are several villages along the north-east coast that have had to move. Relocating a whole village and reinvesting in its infrastructure can cost anything from fifty to a hundred million dollars. Now, that’s not petty cash.’ Pat stopped abruptly and looked at me. ‘You sure you want to listen to this?’

  ‘All grist to the mill,’ I answered, encouraging him.

  ‘Okay then. You see, the problem is as much under our feet as it is above us. One of its characteristics is that permafrost literally freezes carbon in place. Carbon is a greenhouse gas and is responsible for global warming. More than one seventh of the earth’s carbon is stored in permafrost. Unfreeze that and climate warming will escalate. Accordingly, the tundra will become grasslands more common to Alberta than to Alaska.’

  ‘And Fairbanks sinks into the sods,’ I added.

  ‘No, Fairbanks is on the Tanana River flood plain; gravel-laden permafrost will thaw in a more stable way. But out there, wet, silted soils will repeatedly thaw, jumping and dancing like a bucking bronco. On your travels you’ll see lots of telephone poles zig-zagging along the roadside like they were tipsy. Well, if you could speed up a series of time-lapse photos taken over the last thirty or fifty years, you could literally watch them jerk right out of the ground.’

  ‘Okay, Pat,’ Mary interjected, ‘you keep talking and we’ll miss our set-down point. Look, there it is. Pull in.’

  ‘Your lecture was delivered with perfect timing, professor,’ I said to Pat.

  He smiled as he hoisted the canoe from the roof. ‘That’s the core problem, time. How much time have we got?’

  Again Mary interjected. ‘Enough to paddle our way back to Fairbanks. Now hurry up, Pat.’

  Within minutes we were on the river, with Pat steering from the rear, Mary in the middle and me paddling downstream like an enthralled Chingachgook, last of the Mohicans. After our discussion in the car, floating down the Chena was like looking through the long viewfinder lens of a millennium camera. Pat had spoken in terms of evolutionary ages, centuries of change and glacial speeds. Now it was as if the lens had been jerked back into tight focus. From a global contemplation we were thrust into this up-close image of three insignificant individuals in a tiny canoe floating easily down the Chena in its first glacial swells. I mumbled to my friends some inconsequential remark about the silence. Mary’s voice answered from behind me. ‘You don’t really hear the silence until you are up in the northern reaches of the Yukon. Out of nowhere you hear the sudden cracking and thundering and then this terrifying hiss as the glacier breaks up. You could be hundred of miles from it, but you hear it, like it was only around the next bend. For a split second you half expect a wall of water to come down on you. But there is nothing, just pristine silence. Like you never heard before.’

  Mary’s words seemed entirely appropriate and did not require an answer. I let the echo of them float into my senses as we drifted on to the soft splashes of the paddle, like hands clapping in the distance. The overriding impression was one of watchfulness, as if I was being watched and even weighed up by the land I was moving through. The forest I was looking at was in fact a forest of eyes looking back at me. I don’t know if it was the silence of the place or if it was some kind of an inverted echo of my night on the frozen lake, but here everything was aware, sensate. Nothing was inanimate.

  I could rationally understand the indigenous peoples’ insistence that nature had a persona as had every living thing in it. It must not be offended and must be treated with respect. Even at this short distance from Fairbanks, nature, the natural environment and the endless unforsaken outback was in control. In Europe the countryside is controlled by civilization; wild places, such as they are, are protected by communities of men and the laws of government. Man is in control. We pass through countryside en route to another part of human civilization, another time or another city. Here in Alaska you realize very, very quickly that it is the reverse. Man is the alien species here. The outback has neither been conquered nor been controlled. People survive in the outback only to the extent that they live in some kind of harmony with it.

  I remembered standing in a wooden cathedral in Chiloe, an island off Chile. The entire structure was made of meticulously carved tree trunks. All the adornments, the altar and the Stations of the Cross were constructed of hand-carved wood. The whole place was a homage to the god in the wood. In that place I had felt the same sensation of being watched by every artefact in the cathedral, just as now, in this blown-away wilderness, I was being observed. But more than that, it was as if I was being measured for my suitability to enter into this living place. I remembered thinking as I stood in the church and absorbed this watchfulness that perhaps Christ didn’t die on the cross; perhaps his spirit was received into a tree and something of that powerful spirituality was radiating back at me from the tree-framed walls. Though I was thousands of miles away from Chiloe in geographical space and millions of miles away in cultural evolution, and though my present surroundings were wholly different, the sensation was so alike. But I didn’t dwell on the comparative facts of my thoughts; instead I accepted the coincidental reality of my feelings, and with that the watchfulness wasn’t threatening any more, or at least it made me feel less apprehensive.

  I was dragged out of my reverie by Mary poking me in the back with her paddle. As I turned to her she pointed upward. Above me I saw the almost vaporous V of some twenty or so geese moving in the luminous sky. They were turning at an angle away from us and were soon gone. Mary and Pat were trying to decide whether they were geese or swan. Mary resolved that they were trumpeter swan, and that was a sure sign that summer would be with us in less than a week.

  As we continued I would occasionally catch a glimpse of something in the distance, and when I questioned what it might be I was informed it was ‘the pipeline’. I had been contemplating a few minutes earlier how everything in nature had a personality, but the manner in which my question had been answered confirmed that the pipeline also had its own separate existence.

  ‘Oil and Alaska are synonymous terms to the outside world,’ I ventured.

  Pat was quick to respond. ‘The pipeline has funded almost single-handedly, directly or indirectly, the development of Alaska. But the relationship of Alaskans with the pipeline is an uneasy one. A
s I see it, there are two major problems to be resolved.’ I had begun to notice that, like all scientific minds, Pat thought in lists of facts to be examined. ‘How much oil is there left on the North Slope? Some say another thirty years, or more if Bush’s government opens up the Arctic Refuge to exploitation. And secondly, can the existing structure withstand another thirty years? If permafrost thaw is to continue at an accelerating rate then the seventy-eight thousand structures that carry the pipe some eight hundred miles to Valdez are in serious danger. The cost of constant renewal would be astronomical. And while these shortsighted engineers and politicians who are in the pockets of the oil company continue to insist that things won’t happen overnight, they are only adding to the catastrophic dimension of the whole thing.’

  ‘Okay, Pat, we want you to steer us back before you have a coronary,’ Mary shouted. Nevertheless, she continued trying to explain to me just how hot a potato the pipeline was with everyone in Alaska.

  ‘Yes, and with a lot of know-nothings who don’t live here,’ Pat injected, refusing to allow the subject to be put to bed. But neither his wife nor I was prepared to pursue the matter. Permafrost, global warming and a devious but all-powerful oildollar were bigger issues than the three of us could resolve. The river course was, in any case, bringing us into Fairbanks again.

  Chena riverside land is prime real estate, and the size and flamboyance of the homes confirmed it. Many of them had their own small jetties, and the others, not to be outdone, had small floatplanes moored at the end of their properties. It was an astonishing change from only an hour ago in the wilderness, where everything was so sensual and mysterious. Here, the senses became cluttered with mundane things such as the backyards of these solid but sumptuous homes.

  As we paddled on into the heart of the city Mary confessed that she was a writer herself and had penned several short stories but was now working on a novel. I was keen to know what an Alaskan writer has to write about, and asked her. Her best story was the tale of an old Indian woman looking back on her life. The novel, which Mary was still working on, had as its overall theme the emergence from loneliness and finding a new sense of purpose. Listening to Mary and quietly comparing my own limited experience of Alaska, I could well understand how a reflection on a life lived, loneliness, and finding renewal and redemption in a new, unexpected relationship were themes that seemed somehow synonymous with the expanding emptiness outside the townships and the cities.

  But in another way they also seemed close to Mary’s own personal experience. I suppose all writers consciously write out of their own life as a way of fixing it or loosening the hold of the past to renew and secure the future. I was sure it was so with Mary. But the thought caused me to ask of myself what I might be writing had I lived here as long as Mary. I was sensing the smallness of the huge place. In winter, especially, it physically forces you to live a confined life. Eight months of darkness must take its toll on one’s emotional growth. People are forced together as a survival strategy, but if they had no well-developed cultural code and relationship with the living environment as the indigenous peoples had, then existing here could be precarious indeed.

  I took the moment to ask Mary, ‘If it was possible, how would you sum up Alaska?’

  She turned to me, paused for a moment, then said, ‘Everything survives and exists here on a very thin foundation.’ Her eloquence was profound, yet I knew it wasn’t a phrase learned from some book. There was a ring of quiet authenticity about it.

  That night, with the kids in bed and our cabin humming with heat from the great log fire, Audrey and I discussed my trip down the Chena. Audrey had been spending much of her time playing fetch and carry back and forth to the town with the boys while I was off on my excursions. We had not had a lot of time to talk until now, but I wanted to keep her filled in. I spoke about the trip and my companions, explaining what a pleasantly odd couple they were, the scientist and the writer. Inevitably we moved on to discuss the bush, particularly my feeling that something other than the trees existed there and that you could feel its presence. Surprisingly, Audrey concurred with me. ‘Sometimes I hate this place,’ she said. ‘It’s those black spruce. They’re creepy. There’s something very deathly about them. They remind me of that horrible part of Sleeping Beauty where the castle is surrounded by an impenetrable wall of vicious black thorns. But it’s not just that you don’t know what’s out there watching you – a bear, a wolf, a bull moose, anything. It’s like you’re always looking over your shoulder. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.’

  Without mentioning it, I picked up on her sense of being watched. ‘Do you think it’s only animals that might be watching you?’ I asked.

  Audrey returned my question with one of her own. ‘What else are you thinking of, weirdo ghosts?’

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. I didn’t mean a ghost, but I did mean something else, beyond empirical definition. Audrey was curious and pushed me on the subject. As I wasn’t sure of the ground I was standing on I began by explaining how the native peoples believed that the natural world and the supernatural world were one, and that they had a set of beliefs and concepts for explaining the supernatural world and even manipulating it. Men could form a partnership with these spiritual forces.

  ‘What are you trying to say, Brian?’

  I confessed again that I wasn’t sure, but emphasized that these same beliefs were logical, consistent and powerful. ‘Maybe I mean it’s that power our cultural upbringing denies that we sense out there,’ I said. ‘And we are apprehensive because we don’t know how to respond to it.’ I knew I wasn’t unearthing the answers we were both looking for. For a moment I related how Pat had talked to me full of facts, figures, scientific data and logical projections. Pat’s world was explained through rationalist and scientific means. He had been paddling the backwaters of the outback for years but he had no concept of the mystery of the prying eyes that make your hair stand on the back of your neck, and if he had it didn’t seem to have expanded his scientific mindset. ‘I’m not saying he was wrong, he simply understands differently. But his logic doesn’t have the power that the native believes in and chooses to co-operate with.’

  My mind was still turning over its impressions of the boreal forest from my aluminium canoe. My innocence and optimism about tracking down the ghost of Jack London had so far only provoked an encounter with some other kind of ghost, which I had weakly described as some kind of powerful presence. Perhaps I was learning my first lesson about Alaska, that things are not always what you have chosen to see. The problem with trying to encounter a place vicariously, through the artistic impressions of someone else, is that you sometimes discover that their imagination creates an articulate world, all neatly mortised together in their fiction. The reality is always less well finished. Mary’s statement about things in Alaska existing and surviving on a very thin foundation was echoing in my head. Expectation, I resolved, was a dangerous thing.

  Ghosts in the Confessional

  That night I went to sleep expecting to dream of monsters in fairyland and those deformed black spruce trees with skeletal boughs and gorgon-like black limbs constantly pointing me in the wrong direction and whispering all sorts of curses and ill omens on me. But it didn’t happen. I slept dreamlessly. The forest, it seemed, had not turned against me but smothered me in the lullaby of its embrace.

  Whatever trepidations and dangers I had avoided in my sleep Jack brought to me in the morning. ‘Dad, are we going on a bear hunt?’ he repeated as he jerked me out of my forest of the night. I had read Helen Oxenbury’s story We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to him many times in preparation for our departure to Alaska, hinting that we too were going on our special kind of bear hunt. Jack adored the story, but by now I was utterly tired of the book’s journey to discover the bear with the shiny wet nose, big furry ears and two goggly eyes, and then having to do the whole trip in reverse with the bear tearing after us. But I had always insisted that the bear was not a scary bear. In fact, the bea
r had pursued the family not to frighten but to befriend them. Because they allowed themselves to be frightened they didn’t understand the bear. The closing illustration in the storybook reveals a lonely bear walking dejectedly along a dim foreshore with the midnight sun creating a shimmering path out into the sea and the waves lapping like liquid silver around the creature’s feet. I had become weary of the book, but reading it yet again now to Jack as we both curled up on the big settee, it came alive, for we were in the land of the bear and the midnight sun. Soon we too would be traipsing through all kinds of wilderness, searching for something as benign as a mystical bear just waiting to become our friend. Already I was beginning to believe that We’re Going on a Bear Hunt had become our totem story. I wanted to think that for Jack it had a similar significance as The Call of the Wild had for me. Certainly I could see it now as an extended fairy-tale metaphor of Jack London’s man-killing Chilkoot Pass, which had to be conquered through a terrifying ordeal before Alaska could be felt and understood.

  After breakfast we got ready to go into town, climbing into the Pequod and rolling down into Fairbanks. Audrey was going to drop me off and we agreed to meet up back home. As I got up to leave, I explained to the boys that I was going to meet a friend and would see them later.

  ‘When are we going to find the bears?’ Jack asked.