Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  I woke to the sound of aircraft arriving. It was the cargo of inflatable rafts that some of the crews had ordered in Fairbanks. Our pilot, who had stayed with us, chatted with the newly arrived pilot who informed him that the herd was making its way out of the calving grounds and moving south. With this announcement the camp exploded into activity. My hopes dropped and I thought we were going to miss the migration, but our pilot told us there was a small strip near the calving grounds where we could get some shots of the herd as it moved off. They might not be as dramatic as the river shots would have been, but at least it wouldn’t be a wasted journey. We packed hurriedly and were off in some twenty minutes.

  In another fifteen minutes, after scanning the tundra beneath us, we landed near Demarcation Bay on the icy edge of the Beaufort Sea. It was late afternoon, but the sun could not dispel the chill air. As we unloaded, the pilot passed his binoculars around. In the foothills in the distance we could see swathes of animals but they were miles away. The pilot gestured for us to gather our gear and move away from the aircraft. When we had gone far enough from it so as not to be immediately associated with it, he told us to camp and wait.

  I was only too happy to get inside the canvas. The chill here soon bites into you. I hoped we would not have to spend the night. Some of the crew went prowling around taking stills of the eerily empty plain. I lay back and waited, munching on biscuits and dark chocolate, and started updating my diary. This trip to try to catch the caribou migration had not been on my original itinerary. It was a bonus to get this far, but I was sure it wasn’t going to be our lucky day. I was feeling a bit deflated and was wondering how I would explain to Audrey and the kids about the close encounter with the caribou that never happened. The numbing cold was making me sleepy. I lay back and closed my eyes, recalling again the events of the last few days. Then I began to hum to myself.

  It must have been about one and a half hours later, after eating, writing and dozing, that I looked out of my tent. Unbelievably, we were surrounded by caribou. There were several hundred of them in small groups and in larger bands, some mothers and their young idly munching the tufts of tussock grass. They seemed oblivious to us as they trudged indolently to the south and east. The cameraman and soundman had moved away from the tents to make the best of this opportunity. I was left alone in the middle of this mass movement. Every so often some of the creatures would stop, look momentarily at me, then emit a comical grunt and move on, their spindly legs and feet making sucking noises in the boggy land.

  I had to admit I felt very alone and more than a little frightened. Being in the middle of this phenomenon about which I had read and heard so much was disconcerting. I looked around for the crew, needing to keep contact with where they were. Though the creatures avoided me with total indifference, my panic grew. What would I do if something spooked them and they suddenly stampeded? I remembered what I had been told about bears and wolves avoiding the calving grounds, but I reminded myself that we were miles from that special place. These animals were caught up in some kind of primal drive that took no heed of me. Then I also recalled what I had been told as I left the Gwich’in village: ‘You must thank them for letting you sleep on their grave.’ The statement had been made in a half-joking manner, but it was the other half of that advice that had to be considered. I remembered the moose mother at McCarthy and slowly turned in a circle, silently thanking the caribou for coming to visit me.

  Then I spotted the crew carefully walking in and out of the main group of caribou families. The young creatures seemed giddy and vulnerable, and the older animals, looked at individually, were scraggy and skinny. But the huge herd was moving with one mind and one purpose. They were magnificent. I thought of the dance in the village hall and how all the dancers there had moved as if with one mind. I didn’t feel afraid any more, and I chuckled softly. The caribou grunted in my direction as if they were laughing too.

  I watched this shuffling, snorting, grunting procession for another hour. The caribou came in fits and starts, in large and small groups, and then seemed to vanish into the thick sea fog that began to settle on the coastal plain. I thought we had seen the last of them, but they just seemed to keep coming like shadowy forms moving in and out of breaks in the mist. Inside a minute there would be nothing but grey mist against a grey sky, and then the head and antlers of several males would appear and disappear. Then, just for a few seconds, you might see three or four juveniles, less driven by migratory instinct, run and leap into the mist as if they believed it would support them. Then they too were gone and all that was left was a ghostly grunting and snorting. For a moment you believed it was an Arctic illusion or the backwash of a dream the place had instilled in you.

  Soon we were all huddled together, confirming excitedly that it was no dream. Then one pilot who had seen it all before and was more earthbound than the rest of us suggested we should leave before the fog became too thick. This was the sort of weather that could delay you for days. If it got any worse, to attempt to take off and navigate through such conditions could be fatal. ‘You could still be here in the new year with the caribou licking the lichen off your bones,’ he warned good-humouredly. I remembered what Tex O’Neill had told me about impatience and leaving things to the last minute, so we packed quickly and roared off out of the foggy nothingness.

  Our pilot informed us that out of the possible thirty or forty thousand calves born here only half of them will survive predators and the severe winter, and those that do will return again next year to do it all again. ‘That’s the way it’s been here for ever,’ he concluded.

  Sometimes we caught a glimpse of them from our vantage point in the heavens – a seething mass of brown flowing over the land, unaffected by every obstacle this sublime ecosystem put in their way. One daunting memory stuck with me, a momentary vision of an adult male charging out of the mist. His antlers seemed bigger than the bony frame of his body. His nostrils glared and steamed against the chill air and his big black eyes looked right through me – then he was gone. Or was he?

  The extraordinary act of thousands of animals migrating thousands of miles, year after year, across this primeval landscape of earth and water to give birth and perhaps to die is profound testimony to something living and unseen in the land itself Neither science nor language has the capacity to explain or reveal it, and the raw experience of it is greater than language or logic. Aldo Leopold, the great proponent of the concept of ecological science, once wrote, ‘Only when the end of the supply is in sight do we discover that things are valuable.’ Later, he wrote, ‘It was here that I first clearly realized that the land is an organism, that all my life I had only seen sick land, whereas here was a biota still in perfect aboriginal health.’

  I had had my stay in the wilderness, and I had found it warmly enriching. I’d come up close to a unique life experience for which I remain grateful. But I had to acknowledge that I didn’t have the resilience to make a life there.

  Council of the Raven

  I arrived in Fairbanks exhausted and weak, less from the physical rigours of the past week than from another kind of exposure the wilderness creates in the heart. It was good to be back in my cabin in the hills above the town. A couple of days here would allow me to think through the whole experience with the Gwich’in and the caribou. Now that I was away from my Arctic encounter I had to admit I wasn’t quite sure what I made of it all. But one thing I did know: it was making me ask more questions about the wilderness than I thought I had answers for. I also had to admit that I was glad to be back in a place I knew, with familiar things around me and people I knew nearby.

  The place had changed a lot in the few weeks since I had last been there. The road up to the cabin was deeply rutted and muddy with permafrost melt. The Pequod would have been useless here and would have had to be abandoned like a land-locked Marie Celeste. Also, the place was less quiet: birds and birdsong were everywhere. A big raven stared down at me studiously as I kicked and scraped the muck from my bo
ots. And my old companions, the mosquitoes, were still in abundance.

  The drive up to the cabin had shown me just how fast things change. Wild flowers were everywhere, clumps of bluebells contrasting with the blue flowers of Jacob’s ladder and the deep-pink hue of wild rose bushes. In many places the diamond willow was already laying down its blanket of seed fluff. The cottonwoods were also casting off millions of seeds, creating mini clouds of white fluff with every summer breeze. That evening, as I sat on the porch with a steaming mug of coffee, a plate of digestive biscuits and slices of processed cheese, I also thought I noticed a difference in the clarity of the light from what I had witnessed up in the Arctic. Maybe it was just the burgeoning colours that softened it. It certainly didn’t have the austere quality I’d found in Arctic Village, and even more so at Caribou Pass and beyond. It would be summer solstice soon, I thought. The big black raven paraded up and down on his branch cawing impatiently, as if to say, ‘Everyone knows that, bimbo, now throw me a biscuit!’ As I watched him, flotillas of tiger swallowtail butterflies pirouetted past the cabin and alighted on the ground, flapping their wings where they sat. They, at least, were applauding me. I arose, took a bow and headed for bed.

  I made a few notes before turning in. I had been thinking how oriental the evenings were. It was a mixture of the omniscient quiet, the curious quality of light that lulls the mind and makes it more receptive to how the wilderness opens itself up to you. When I was here before, at the end of winter with the snow still on the ground highlighting the ghostly black trees, I had thought of haikus and Japanese prints. It had all seemed so pristine and eternal then. Even with summer colouring up the canvas of the landscape, there was something quietly revelatory about it like the best of oriental art.

  Kno Hsi, an eleventh-century Chinese painter and philosopher, proposed the idea that man relishes natural landscape because it enriches his own nature. Like me, he was an irredeemable romantic and seeker after things. He writes, ‘. . . the din of the dusty world and that locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors, while on the contrary, haze, mist and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find.’ The ancient painter philosopher obviously believed profoundly in the restorative and redemptive quality of the wilderness, and a part of me wanted to believe but still needed to be convinced of his thesis.

  I skipped through my notebook until I found some references about travel as a search for a spiritual homeland and a heightened sense of authenticity. I tried to apply this to my own recent travels in the Arctic refuge. Had I found beauty or a vision of paradise? No, I had to confess I hadn’t. I could not apply these nouns to my stay in the Arctic. I had another list of words to convey what I felt about the place. It was about hardship and endurance. It was brutal and confining. It was a struggle, physically and psychologically. But it did make you think and examine your own values. There were moments when you felt moved, perhaps by something sublime. Maybe that’s all it is really about, not the search for beauty in some earthly paradise but rather something more transcendent. Something akin to a beatific experience that flares up like a candle in the wind and is gone again. It may leave you once more in the dark but it will have lighted your way.

  All this thinking brought me back to my Athabascan Anglicans. I had not expected to discover the Gwich’in to be a confessed Christian community who found spiritual consolation in the wilderness. In a way they were like modern-day Essenes, who dwelt in caves near the Dead Sea and lived a life of purity and simplicity while awaiting the Second Coming. And their reverence for nature, and especially their empathy with the spirit of the caribou, was a very Franciscan view of the world. Indeed it could even be Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Shinto or Taoist. Eastern thought had never made the schizophrenic division between man and nature that the West had. Neither had the Gwich’in, and that was why they were primitive but profound theologians. They knew that everything in life and in nature was sacred and that man was only another sacred creature. When they spoke about their brother the caribou, they meant it.

  All this theological speculation was making my head light. I suddenly remembered St Augustine and his constant admonition that man should not take joy from life but rather should spend more time in contemplation of his salvation. With that kind of advice, no wonder we couldn’t see the wood for the trees and no wonder the modern traveller is essentially still a pilgrim in search of a spiritual homeland. St Augustine and his confederates in classicism had been misdirecting us for centuries.

  As if he had been reading my thoughts, the big black raven that squatted on the tree outside my cabin started strutting up and down the branch, cawing and calling out in what seemed like hysterical derision. It was as if he was both mocking my speculations and laughing along with me. Then he would perform clownish leaps from branch to branch and sit for a few moments lecturing me, his throaty voice becoming stern and almost threatening. Then he would suddenly flap away to another tree and march drunkenly along, proclaiming with complete abandon that I was absolutely right about that self-indulgent Salvationist, St Augustine! Next he would flutter down to a low branch near the house and sit silent for a few moments, staring at me with imperious disdain before barking at me, ‘Be careful, Keenan, you don’t become too saintly yourself!’ Another time he flew with such ease and immense grandeur to another high branch, where he fluffed his shiny black feathers like a wise old academic adjusting his gown and announced that he knew stories from the shadowy edge of history that philosophers and theologians had not yet even conceived of. So it went on for what seemed an hour or more. I sat thoroughly enraptured until finally this egotistical and audacious wit of a bird decided he had entertained me enough and was gone. Even in daylight this great black creature could disappear as if by magic.

  I thought, as I scanned the sky for him, perhaps he was magic after all, and he had flown off into the invisible world. The rudeness of his disappearance reminded me how the natives believe that to hear the raven call in the dark of night is a sure token of death. I had been listening to this utterly undignified jester for quite some time and the sun was still shining even though it was late in the night, so I was safe from the raven’s malign intentions. Besides, I could not believe my raven had any such designs. In the distant-time stories of the indigenous people, the raven was the creator of the earth; they believed that, like God, he had the power to grant wishes. Part of me wasn’t sure I could trust wishes granted by a bird-god who contemplates the world with cynical scrutiny.

  I had to admit I liked the complicated nature of this big black raven. He was, for me, the quintessential enigma. Once you thought you had penetrated the spirit of this bird it immediately transformed itself, but that was what made it so intriguing. It stripped you of your self-delusions, just as it had done for me as I sat watching it.

  I remembered how the Norse god Odin had kept two ravens, which represented thought and memory. Each day they would circle the world and return to report to their master. I liked to think of my raven like that. In its own clownishly curious way, it had made me question a lot of things about my trip. So I made my wish to the empty sky that the spirit of the raven would visit me again. It was late in the evening and the raven’s departure had informed me that it was time to sleep. I had some people to visit before I moved on. A gold miner, a Siberian émigré artist and the most northerly composer in the world. It really was a raggletaggle assortment that you could only find living within a few miles of each other at the edge of the wilderness. I went to sleep half believing that the trickster raven had conjured them up especially for me.

  More Mammoths and Musicians

  During my first visit years ago I’d tried to meet John Reese, a gold miner, at his mine several miles outside the city. I hadn’t found him, but the remnants of the mine remained; the extreme temperatures of Alaska have a way of embalming things. All I’d gleaned from that first attempt to meet the man was that he owned a few more gold mines some
where further out from the city and that he proposed at some time to develop the gold mine into a quirky holiday venue. It seemed then a feasible if absurd notion. The gigantic earth dredge was still there, a monstrous machine that had created much of the moon landscape in the hills outside Fairbanks. Then there were the miners’ bunk houses, the store, pens and dog shelters, a big parts shed for equipment, communal latrines, and a ‘doc’ shop where injured miners could be quickly attended to, though with what degree of efficiency or care I could not imagine. There was even a small theatre at the entrance to the mine that amounted to a stage, rows of stools and an entrance hall where the hardworking miners shelled out their money for some dubious but well-received relief. Although the theatre was only just outside the mine complex, at least the workers had a sense of getting away from their eternal labour. Laughingly, Pat Walsh informed me that the theatre still operated even though the mine was long deceased. They put on ‘shows’ for tourists, who I supposed wanted to be indulged in the same way the working miners had. It was very Alaskan kitsch, but the locals enjoyed the garish amateur dramatics, Pat explained. But that was then, and now I was going to meet the man himself.

  We met in his machine shop located near the railway lines. It was a clapboard and corrugated-iron structure which from the outside looked abandoned and hopeless. I shuffled through the door, expecting to find the same kind of obsolete clutter that dominated the back yards of every homestead in Fairbanks. Instead, I found myself in a gleaming labyrinth. Here was a machine shop dating back to the 1920s – lathes and machine presses, heavy-duty stamps, a forge and industrial machine cutters, and not a cobweb in sight. The place was a small factory, but everything was spotless. Shiny black contrasted against the burr of dull silver, and everywhere the gorgeous shine of olivegreen casing. Everything was in perfect order, and everything was still running. The lamps to light the place clung to long slender lines with cheap cupcake-like shades. They, too, were working. They shone with an ochre-yellow light. I was amazed at my reaction. This place was an art gallery! The muscular curve of wheels, spindles, knobs and machine hoods was everywhere. This was muscle turned into magic, latent power that was pristine in its silence.