Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  “Correct.”

  “And they winter in Canada?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what I want to know is: How do they get across the Bering Strait?”

  The pack ice was getting thicker. By ten-thirty that night it lay across the sea in great irregularly shaped sheets. Some of the floes were just large enough for a man to stand upon; others could accommodate a drag race. The larger sheets had hummocky, rolling surfaces and small oblong ponds of meltwater had formed in most of them. The ponds took on the color of the underlying ice, so that they were light blue or cobalt-blue or blue-green against the white snow-covered surfaces of the floes themselves. In places, these ponds formed their own blue or green rivers, which sometimes fell over the lip of the ice into the sea.

  The water that bordered the floes was all that I could see of the Arctic Ocean. It was a strange iridescent black in the weak light of the cloud-obscured sun.

  In places, the wind had stacked slabs of ice one atop the other to form slanting spires and castles and battlements. These spires seemed to rise out of the broken white plain of sea ice as we approached. The floes were so closely packed that it was possible to imagine traveling by foot across the ice, jumping from slab to slab. The very thought was terrifying; and yet the eye sought out a route.

  At about 11:00 P.M., an announcement was made over the ship’s intercom that there was a polar bear on the ice half a mile ahead of us. I went up to the bridge with most of the other passengers and stared out the large windows. The Yamal had slowed to only a few knots, but the bear, which was now only a quarter of a mile ahead of us, very sensibly fled. It was a shaggy yellow-white beast, and it shambled in its pigeon-toed fashion from floe to floe, swimming in the black water when necessary, then heaving itself back up onto the ice. We were, as yet, so far away that occasionally I lost sight of it.

  From the bridge, the blue meltponds and rivers on the floes stood out much more clearly against the prevailing snow cover and the bordering black water. The bear was shuffling through a world of blue and white and black. He cut left, over a large floe, and the ship’s starboard bow thrusters cut in. We plowed through the ice, over the very tracks of the bear, throwing up spray and keeping the animal directly ahead of us, so close now that I no longer needed binoculars.

  An otherwise quite lovely woman loudly narrated the adventures of the bear to the bridge at large. “Look, he’s swimming,” she announced, as if to a convention of the vision impaired. “Now he’s getting back up onto the ice …” She was the Lady Who Stated the Obvious, and to her credit, she asked a question that I had shamefully left unvoiced: “Do you think we’re bothering him?”

  I tried to see it from the bear’s point of view. What would I feel like if I were standing out in the middle of a vast treeless snowy plain and an apartment building appeared out of nowhere and started chasing me around?

  Were we too close?

  I thought maybe we were.

  I’d never seen a polar bear in the wild before and now here I was chasing one all to hell and gone across the ice in the world’s most powerful icebreaker. It was a question of the animal’s dignity.

  “Look,” the Lady Who Stated the Obvious exclaimed. “He’s defecating.”

  Sea ice drifts with the currents and the winds. It moves in dense packs of floes, sometimes cruising along at two or three miles an hour. In 1596, a Dutch ship captained by Willem Barents sailed around northern Europe and was trapped in pack ice on the northern tip of the island of Novaya Zemlya, at a place called Ice Bay. Barents was searching for the Northeast Passage from Europe to the Orient and its riches. Barents’s ship was eventually crushed by the drifting ice and he, along with sixteen other men, spent the winter of 1596–97 at Ice Bay. That summer, the crew set out for the mainland in small open boats salvaged from the wreck. Barents died en route.

  This is the history of the Northeast Passage: always the ship trapped in the ice. The ship crushed. The howling winter. Death.

  The Yamal’s passengers were helicoptered from the afterdeck to Novaya Zemlya. It was three in the morning. The light was pale, silver-gray, and the sun was rolling around in the sky somewhere near the horizon, a dim silver disk behind bleak gray clouds. In this spectral light, the bay seemed a ghostly place. There were no trees, anywhere. Permafrost, a few inches below the rock, would not permit a tree to sink a tap root. There were a few patches of orange and green lichen, and a gray pond or two where meltwater lay in a depression, imprisoned by the underlying ice.

  The beach was brown, almost black, covered over in gravel. It rose in a series of terraces that had formed when the last glacier retreated and the land, relieved of its burden of ice, rose up in a process called glacial rebound. Of course, as the glacier melted, sea level rose as well, and thus a series of terraces was formed.

  The ground was strewn with small, flat rocks chipped and flaked from larger rocks during periods of freeze and thaw. The land was literally shattered.

  There was a weathered wooden cross standing huge against the gray sky commemorating Barents. The remains of the cabin his crew built was a sprawl of crumbled ship’s timbers that hadn’t rotted in over four hundred years. The wood had splintered in the cycles of frost and thaw. There were rusted barrel hoops and six-inch-long nails four hundred years old.

  I was examining a reindeer horn when Nikolai Druzdov strolled up and told me that the Novaya Zemlya had its own distinct subspecies of reindeer feeding on the island’s moss and lichens.

  “Already,” he said, “we are in Arctic desert.” There were a few yellow poppies growing in wet rills, flowers the size of pennies clustered together in small, brave groups that hunkered down out of the wind and huddled together for warmth.

  An Arctic tern hovered overhead and screeched at us. The bird had a snow-white body, red legs, and a black head, which made it look rather like a 1920s champagne dandy in terms of plumage. Nikolai thought the tern was defending its nest, which was probably somewhere nearby, among the rocks on the treeless plain.

  It was about 25 degrees. A bitter wind was whipping over the frost-shattered land, and now big wet flakes of snow began to fall, driven across the rock-strewn beach at a severe angle.

  At this time of year, Nikolai said, the terns already had chicks, and since winter comes early in the high Arctic, they were already preparing for their epic migration. Arctic terns nest in places like Novaya Zemyla in the summer, then, at the onset of winter, fly south, over the northern temperate zone, over the tropics, over the southern temperate zone, and spend the southern summer on icebergs, frozen islands, and the Antarctic icecap. The twenty-thousand-mile yearly round trip is the longest migration of any bird on earth. Science does not yet fully understand why the birds don’t stop over in, say, Bermuda; and quite frankly neither do I.

  Nikolai asked me where I was from. “Montana,” I said. “It’s near Canada, in the Rocky Mountains.”

  “Yes,” Nikolai said, “I was in Bozeman this winter.” He had been filming a documentary on Yellowstone Park for Russian television. “It’s very much like Siberia,” he said. “Bison digging in the snow to eat. Like musk-ox in the Taimyr Peninsula. Cold. I was cold there.”

  Cold as Siberia? A man takes a measure of strange pride in such a comment.

  And then it was time to helicopter back to the ship. This particular aircraft, a KA-32C, carried two main blades, one atop the other, and the propwash was considerable. It could literally blow a man off his feet. As a safety precaution, passengers were asked to kneel near the landing site, head to head, as if in a football huddle.

  I thought of this ritual as the helicopter-worship ceremony and prayed loudly: “O KA-32C, we fear Thy righteous slashing blades; we bless Thy Cramp-ed seating and the priests who are Your pilots; we beseech Thee, O KA-32C, make Thyself apparent as promised in the Holy Writ of the ship’s daily program …”

  During this solemn intonation, as the clatter of the blades became deafening, I looked up to see one of the Japanese women
staring at me. This woman, for reasons that remain impervious to investigative reporting, always wore a cloth painter’s mask whenever we made a landing. She, in turn, seemed puzzled by my fervent prayers. We were dealing in realms of mutual inscrutability.

  The Yamal sailed north, then anchored somewhere off the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya while I slept. When I woke and looked out my porthole, I found myself staring into an implacable wall of blue ice. The iceberg was only a few dozen yards from the Yamal and was about seventy feet high. It was shaped like an aggressive modern sculpture, rising on a sharp angle from a long, flat surface to a sheer wall, whose summit was a massive slab of ice that punctured the sky at a 45-degree angle. The walls of the berg were fractured and broken in the manner of granite.

  The nearby coast of Novaya Zemlya looked dark through a mist that wanted to be snow. I knew that the land carried a great dome of ice, which I could barely see through the drifting mist. The weight of the glacier was something more physically felt than visually apprehended.

  A great river of ice poured down a large valley from the ice dome itself, and this glacial outlet flowed directly into the bay, where it formed a wall that looked to be a hundred feet high. Tides rose and fell, eating away at the base of the wall so that occasionally enormous slabs of ice broke away from the glacier proper. The sound was that of a thunderous cracking, like a major rockfall in a small echoing canyon, and this was followed by the surging crash of all those tons of ice falling into the water and atop the ice floating below. Seabirds whirled overhead, screeching in their fierce self-righteous manner and feeding on sea life brought to the surface by the turbulence.

  Early explorers postulated the presence of then unknown islands on the evidence of icebergs floating among floes of flat sea ice. My favorite description of an iceberg is history’s first. In A.D. 530, St. Brendan, along with eight monks, set out from Ireland to search for “the land of the saints” in a willow-framed oxhide boat. Sailing “against the summer solstice,” Brendan may have reached Greenland. In the saga of his travels, he saw “a floating crystal castle,” hard as marble and “the color of a silver veil.”

  Our berg looked something like that.

  A man on deck asked me why we weren’t moving.

  “Iceberg,” I said, gesturing toward the blue wall that loomed over us.

  “It’s all ice,” said the Man Who Didn’t Get It.

  Sea ice is never still. It drifts. It drifts—men died to discover—along a series of continuous trans-Arctic ocean currents.

  In the summer of 1879, George Washington De Long, an American trying for the North Pole, sailed his ship, the Jeanette, through the Bering Strait, found himself trapped in the ice off Herald Island (near Wrangle), and drifted for twenty-one months before the Jeanette finally broke up near the New Siberian Islands. De Long and his crew dragged three small boats south across the ice until they reached open water, then sailed to the Siberian coast. One boat was lost at sea; two reached Siberia, near the Lena River delta. De Long’s party died of starvation. The crew of the second boat was rescued.

  Three years later, twenty-three-year-old Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, read a newspaper article describing some debris from the Jeanette that had been found on an ice floe. No big surprise, except that the ice floe was just off southwest Greenland, way the hell and gone across the Arctic Ocean from where the Jeanette had broken up. It occurred to Nansen that “if a floe could drift right across the unknown regions, that drift might be enlisted in the service of exploration.”

  Nansen designed a ship with a reinforced egg-shaped hull that would ride up on the ice and go with the floe. The Fram, with sixteen crew members and provisions sufficient for five years, was deliberately driven into the ice near the spot where the Jeanette had been crushed. The Fram did not break up. It surfed on the ice, as Nansen had predicted, and drifted, vaguely north, for two years. At 84 degrees, 04 minutes north it became apparent that the Fram would not pass over the Pole but miss it by about three hundred miles. Nansen and Lt. F. H. Johansen set out for the Pole on foot, dragging sleds and kayaks. For a month, the two struggled over hummocks and ridges and great jumbled blocks of ice. Going was slow, and the trans-Arctic drift was now against them. In effect, Nansen was on an ice treadmill.

  On April 8, 1896, at 86 degrees, 14 minutes, the highest latitude yet reached by human beings, he turned back. There was no hope of catching the Fram, of course, and Nansen made for the northernmost of the Franz Josef Islands, arriving at Cape Norway, on Jackson Island, in August, about four months later. He and Johansen built a shelter, where they spent a desolate winter contemplating death in the darkness.

  My own brief stay on Cape Norway was a good deal more pleasant. Nansen and Johansen built their hut of rock, interspersed with moss and dirt. The remains of that hut consisted of a giant log sitting crosswise over a hole in the ground surrounded by a pile of rocks. Nansen and Johansen had found the huge driftwood log, laid it on top of their rock home, and stretched a walrus hide across for a roof. When frozen, the walrus hide was almost impenetrable; at least once it withstood an exploratory foray by a polar bear.

  There were a few weathered pieces of bamboo runner from the sleds lying about. Nansen and Johansen had pulled their kayaks on sleds where there was ice; in open water, they put the sled runners over their kayaks. Just so. With very few provisions left after the winter, they had no use for extra sleds, hence the discarded runners.

  It was warm, about 40 degrees, the day I visited Cape Norway. A rocky cliff, alive with nesting birds, towered above the beach. At the summit, where there was a line of snow like frosting on a cake, a waterfall had formed. It fell through a cut of blue-green ice, then burst over a projection of rock and down a snowfield that was watermelon pink with an algal bloom. The water disappeared under a plunging rockfield, emerged downslope, then wound its way past Nansen’s hut, where it formed a series of pools. The pools were connected to one another, like a stair-step fountain, and were surrounded by moss and small yellow flowers. The stream emptied out into the bay, which was choked with eroded icebergs that looked like swans and mushrooms and castles and alien battlements.

  Nansen had left Cape Norway and headed south just as the sun rose in the spring of 1896. A month later he and Johansen, quite unexpectedly, ran into a British exploratory team, the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, on one of the southernmost of the Franz Josef Islands. Nansen sailed back toward Norway with the British, just about the time the Fram, with all hands in fine fettle, emerged from the ice near Svarlbad—precisely as Nansen had predicted it would.

  I thought about Nansen as birds swept over the sea and across the watermelon snow. I think, to some small seething degree, I despised my shipmates, as I did myself. We were traveling in comfort, if not to say luxury. The North Pole, an atavistic voice whispered, ought to be earned, at the risk of life. My shipmates and I lived in an age when technology had replaced honor.

  Then again …

  … glory is where you find it, and heroism isn’t necessarily physical. Consider again the saga of Fridtjof Nansen.

  In later life he made lasting contributions to the science of oceanography, then headed up the Norwegian delegation to the League of Nations, where his work with refugees and famine relief is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives. In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work. Nansen gave the prize money to international relief organizations. He died in 1930.

  Just down the slope from the remains of Nansen’s hut there was a memorial to the man: a stout wooden pole with an inscription written in Russian and Norwegian. One recent visitor had stopped to sharpen his claws on the pole.

  Which brought up another matter.

  With Nansen in mind, I decided that I’d speak to the tour director, see if I couldn’t get the Yamal to stop chasing polar bears around. It seemed wise to take the hero business one small step at a time.

  In a relatively ice-free bay about fifty miles from Cape Norway, we boarded Zodiacs and motored o
ff toward a gravel spit that spilled off of a nearby island. There were walrus sunning on the spit, and several more in the water: six groups of about twelve apiece. I could hear them grunting from some distance away. Bulls weighing up to two tons showed us their huge rounded backs as they dove: backs big enough to roof a small house. The animals surfaced with a snort that sent a fine stream of spray five or six feet into the pale blue Arctic sky.

  It was about midnight and the sun was golden across water and ice. The walrus swam past and stared at us, half out of the water. The beasts had tiny eyes set in jowly, elaborately whiskered faces. They had the look of well-fed Victorian gentlemen, sternly British, indomitable, intolerably stuffy. “Piffle,” they seemed to say, and, “Poppycock.”

  We kept a respectful distance, but the walrus approached our boats—rather than the reverse—and swam nearby for over an hour, curious, it appeared. It was clear that they had never been hunted. A large bull surfaced inches from one boat and snorted in the face of a man with his eye to the lens of a camera.

  “I could actually smell his breath,” the fellow told me later.

  “What did it smell like?” I wondered.

  “Well, have you ever been to a dump in the tropics?”

  Walrus eat clams, lots of clams, but according to one of the biologists on board the Yamal, Benoit Tullo, they do not rake the sea bottom with their tusks to get at them, a factoid I’d gleaned from one of the books in the ship’s library. Not so, Benoit claimed. Study any walrus tusk, he said. They are never abraded on the inside as they would be if used for rakes. A walrus, according to Benoit, ate clams by sucking up the mollusk’s siphon with its strong lips and tongue. He had seen several walrus with two broken tusks and yet the animals had always looked well fed.

  Tusks are used to haul a two-ton animal with no arms up onto ice floes. They also have about the same social function as antlers do among deer.

  I knew one other thing about walrus tusks, and that is: Look out for the animal with unsightly yellow blubber stains on his. This is a rogue walrus, one who has probably found a dead seal, eaten it, gotten the taste, and now deliberately hunts seals. It is said that rogue walrus may attack humans, that some learn the trick of upsetting kayaks to get at the tasty morsels inside.