by Donovan Hohn
From antiquity to modernity, what lay hidden within the ice was anybody’s guess, and plenty of people guessed. Plato guessed that at the North Pole a tunnel conducted water to and from the earth’s watery yolk—and as recently as 1909, his theory claimed adherents. The ancient Finns guessed that the Artic was a parallel universe and that every one of us had a shadow self who dwelled beneath the ice. I like this theory and kind of wish it were true. More accurately, if less hauntingly, an ancient Finnish epic described the Arctic as the “dark Northland, the man-eating, the fellow-drowning place.” In Greek myth, the Arctic was both the Cimmerian hell of perpetual darkness and the Hyperborean paradise of perpetual youth, a sunlit realm where, according to Pindar, dancing girls forever swirled around to “the lyre’s loud chords and the cries of flutes.” According to the biblical prophet Jeremiah, “Evil is brought from the north over all the inhabitants of the Earth,” and in the last canto of Inferno, Dante’s pilgrim visits a circle of hell where the damned are, as the historian Peter Davidson puts it in The Idea of North, “frozen into the ice of their own selfishness.”
In short, the Arctic has always been, in Davidson’s words, “a place of extremes and ambiguities.” I think this is still true today, at least for most of us. Even in the narratives penned by explorers who actually traveled there and saw the place with their own eyes, you can detect traces of the old contradictory nightmares and dreams. The “unknown North,” as explorers often call it, is at once a “desert of ice,” a “howling waste,” “a frozen hell” and a sort of heavenly wonderland—“majestic,” “glittering,” “sublime.” The ice pack is “hydra-like” but the icebergs are “angelic” and the aurora borealis “celestial.” Adventurers still go to the Arctic seeking thrills, and find them; tourists on icebreaking cruise ships equipped with saunas and movie theaters go there seeking wonder and beauty and strangeness; scientists, meanwhile, go there seeking data with which to reduce their uncertainties to certainties, and find signs of fragility—thawing permafrost, melting ice, native species losing ground to invasive ones.
Before we went to the moon, the Arctic was the moon. Before we went to the moon, when we went to the Arctic, hygiene and domesticity were the least of our concerns. Who ever heard of an Arctic explorer taking a bubble bath? Arctic explorers had more pressing things to worry about than the odor of their undergarments—the odor of their gangrenous extremities, for instance. The Arctic is the symbolic if not the geographic antipode of the bathtubs of America, and the yellowness of the duck the antithesis of the whiteness of the polar bear, which is to the Arctic what the rubber duck is to the bathtubs of America—totem, emblem, mascot.
Melville himself gave some thought to the whiteness of Ursus maritimus : “With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged . . . that it is not the whiteness, separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that brute; for, analyzed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all this to be true; yet, were it not for the whiteness you would not have that intensified terror.”
With reference to the rubber duck, the emotions are not opposite. The only unnatural contrast is between the birdlike, childlike form of the thing and the synthetic, petrochemistry of the thing. The yellowness of the duck reinforces the harmlessness and cuteness and happiness of the duck. In the symbolic Arctic, the imaginary Arctic, a yellow duck is an invasive species, a puerile, comical interloper in the whitest, most hostile wilderness of all.
THE REALM OF ICE
When we reach the Arctic Circle, 66.56083°N, First Officer Cathy Lacombe pipes a message over the PA system: all Arctic Circle initiates are to report, pronto, to the hangar deck. For two days now, the officers and crew of the Louis have been subjecting those of us who’ve spent our lives in temperate latitudes to an elaborate hazing ritual. We’ve been made to wear, on lanyards, red ID cards that read ARCTIC CIRCLE INITIATE. We’ve been made to carry raw eggs around, under strict orders to prevent their breakage; if the egg breaks, we’ve been given to understand, there will be consequences. I swaddled mine in tissue and packed it into my thermal coffee mug. We’ve been ordered to write poems about the Arctic.
Now, after we’ve mustered on the hangar deck, Cathy Lacombe conducts us initiates into a mechanic’s workshop, a windowless room with a watertight door, from which, blindfolded, we’re led out, one by one, to the starboard deck. The idea behind the ritual is to sustain the suspense, to make those of us left behind in the workshop tremble in fear of what awaits us. It all seems a bit silly, but a young graduate student named Marie-Éve Randlett is visibly in distress. And she’s not alone. Mine is among the last names to be called out.
Cathy Lacombe ties on the blindfold and leads me through the watertight door. On the starboard deck, I’m commanded by a male voice I can’t recognize to drop onto all fours and crawl. Obedient by nature, I obey. As I crawl Canadian coasties pour buckets of icy seawater and kitchen slop down on me, kitchen slop that smells—and tastes, I can attest—like vomit. Then, suddenly, my blindfold is removed and I find myself, still on all fours, at the feet of the boatswain and a steward, the king and queen of the Arctic, so I’m told. The boatswain—Bosun Bob, everyone calls him—has a Rasputin beard. He commands me to produce my poem. I unfold the crumpled paper from my soggy pocket and begin to read: It was kind of like forgetting / the way the earthly world diminished / in our wake, then disappeared. . . . Before I’ve reached the fourth line, Bosun Bob says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, enough,” and commands me to produce my egg. My thermal coffee mug, mercifully, has remained hooked to a belt loop. I unscrew the lid and unswaddle the fragile cargo, signed in felt pen by Captain Rothwell, then proffer it to Bosun Bob, who proceeds to shatter it on my head. For some reason I find myself thinking, yolk and egg white and kitchen slop dripping down my cheeks, I deserve this. Then, wiping egg and slop from my hair, I stumble belowdecks for a hot shower.
This is not what I imagined crossing the Arctic Circle would be like. I imagined that crossing the Arctic Circle would be like waking from a dream, one I’d been dreaming ever since the night I first traced the route of the toys in my Atlas of the World. How astonishing it must have been for those explorers and sealers and fowlers, let alone those first migrating Vikings or Inuit, who if they’d heard of icebergs at all had only heard of them. Here I was on the Louis, showered, safe and warm, in clothes—polyester underwear, a synthetic eiderdown jacket, an ecological windbreaker spun from old plastic bottles—that no longer smelled of kitchen slop, and out there, in the distance, was an iceberg, so distant that it shimmered on the overcast horizon very much like a pixelated image on a screen. I felt none of the feelings of terror and awe that icebergs elicited from my nineteenth-century predecessors. What I saw felt no more real, if anything less, than the icebergs I’d previously glimpsed on television and in magazines.
I wondered again about the limitations of sight. The wind stinging my ears and the cold, rusty rail under my hands, its paint chipping off, both felt more real than the white spectacle in the distance. So did the prospect of lunch, three decks down, in the main mess, a big room the size of a high school cafeteria, where there was a metal track that you slid your plastic tray along, and your tray would still be warm and steamy from the Hobart dishwasher, and you would look through a hygienic visor of glass at the smorgasbord laid out in steel trays, and to be heard over the engine’s throb and the lunchtime chatter, you had to shout your order at a steward, who, after asking you to repeat your order more loudly, would scoop onto your steamed white plate mashed potatoes or beef stew, or buttered carrots. That felt real. Looking at the iceberg on the horizon felt like looking at the idea of an iceberg.
I was reminded of the afternoon the previous April when I took my son for a free
ride on the Staten Island Ferry, which travels past the Statue of Liberty—not to it, but past it. Having lived more than a decade in New York, I’d never gone to see the famous bronze monument, and when I finally did, it looked small and unimpressive, the size of a souvenir replica. It was fun being out on the harbor, though. We’d passed close by a big green container ship along the hull of which, in white block letters, could be read the name of, I later learned, a Swedish shipping line, WALLENIUS WILHELMSEN. I told Bruno that I’d crossed the ocean on a ship like that. But what I remember most from that afternoon were the moments that you’d think would be forgettable. That the ferry windows were so scratched and dusty the sun made them glow. That I’d brought along a banana for Bruno. That he ate it while sitting in my lap. That when he was done I returned the peel to its plastic ziplock bag and tucked peel and bag into the outer pouch of my backpack next to the spare diaper. That it felt good to have my toddler son in my arms, on my lap. That on the return trip, from Staten Island to Manhattan, Bruno and I stood outside, up at the ferry’s crowded bow, I holding him in my arms, the headwind in our faces, while seagulls coasted on an updraft. That he opened his mouth wide and shouted, “Papa, I’m eating the wind!” That I opened my mouth too. As we approached the docks, he said, of Manhattan, “The buildings are floating!” I saw what he meant. It was hard to tell whether the prow of the island was moving toward us or we toward it.
After disembarking, we’d walked home from the Battery, up the promenade, along the Hudson River, where only yachts and ferryboats plied the olive-green water. The surf of commerce no longer washed loudly over these shores, only the surf of leisure. This wasn’t Melville’s Manhattan. By Battery Park City we came upon a string of decorative riprap, granite boulders, sparkly with quartz, piled along the promenade’s edge. For a half hour I let Bruno clamber up and over them, a towheaded colossus in a red hoodie striding over a miniature Himalayan range, a papery fringe of diaper sticking out from the waistband of his pants. I hung close, shadowing him, ready to catch him if he slipped. When he attained a summit he would hold his arms up and flash a big look-at-me grin, and when the descent was too steep I’d hoist him down.
It was getting late. To make it home by dinner, I ended up having to jog two miles, pushing his stroller along the bike path, ten-speeds whooshing by us, bells chiming, and our long shadows stretching out toward the West Side Highway. When I paused to catch my breath, Bruno would shout to me, “Faster!” and winded as I was, wearing the wrong shoes, I granted him his wish.
Such are the disappointments and the pleasures of travel, I thought now, as the Louis steamed north, stemming the Labrador Current.
Then, in Davis Strait, the icebergs doubled, tripled, multiplied. The first time we drew close to a big one, we all hurried out onto the decks with our cameras. Now I understood the rhapsodies I’d read in the journals of explorers. Now we’d attained the proper proximity, the proper scale. The iceberg was as close as the container ship Bruno and I had passed in New York Harbor, and as colossal. Its walls were palisades of ice. Its summit towered over the Louis’s bridge. You could imagine how small you’d feel walking around atop it. You could almost imagine what it would taste like. This was our first close encounter. There were more to come.
In Baffin Bay we entered an iceberg armada. They were every where—north, south, east, west, northwest, north by northwest. Supernumeraries and off-duty coasties alike spent most of the day out on the bow or up on the bridge, snapping photographs and exchanging exclamations of awe. Paleochemist Robie Macdonald, whose sense of humor tended toward the corny, told me that scientists had proposed an international standard unit to quantify the beauty of natural wonders such as these—a millihelen. Get it? I didn’t. “One millihelen is equivalent to a face beautiful enough to launch one ship.”
Not even those photographs taken by professionals like the Snapper, armed with zoom lenses the size of telescopes, do icebergs justice. Photographs fail to convey the grandeur of icebergs, but they also fail to convey how mutable they are. An iceberg that looks like a mesa in the distance as you approach transforms into something architectural, with melt-carved towers and wind-sculpted outcroppings suggestive of angels—as European explorers noted—or birds. Explorers, in their journals, grasping for comparisons with which to familiarize the strange, likened icebergs to cathedrals as well as angels. But icebergs lack the symmetries and patterns of a church. They exhibit form, but organic form, form sculpted by the subtle force of the coincident, form verging on the chaotic. Every change in angle is a revelation. The light drapes differently. The shapes shift. The colors turn from white to turquoise to blue. In some there were grottoes or canyons or isthmuses terminating in a peak that seemed about to break off. From the big ones, cataracts of meltwater gushed into the sea. It occurred to me, admiring those waterfalls, that before my eyes the past was dissolving into the present. Those melting molecules of H2O now gushing from an iceberg, joining the currents of Baffin Bay, hundreds or even thousands or possibly tens of thousands of years ago fell as snow on the mountains of Ellesmere or Greenland. Were you to drink a glass of that meltwater, you might well be degusting the climate of the Iron Age. You would be quaffing centuries.34
I found myself wishing that Eddy Carmack, who knows this place as well as or better than anyone, were here to help me solve the riddles written in water and ice; to help me see the microscale, and the mesoscale, and the megascale. Dante had imagined the innermost circle of Hell as an Arctic landscape, and clearly this place wasn’t as hellish as benighted Europeans formerly believed, but I did find myself thinking that, like Dante’s pilgrim, I could use a guide, a Virgil, like those I’d met on previous trips—Ebbesmeyer, Pallister, Moore, Henry Tong, Willa France, Amy Bower.
In Carmack’s absence I relied on those scientists who were aboard, especially Robie Macdonald, who taught me this: there’s another way that icebergs are time capsules; frozen into the ice are sediments scoured from glacial moraines. As the icebergs melt, those sediments sink to the seafloor, where they accumulate in layers, mingling with sediment deposited by sea ice, or terrestrial silt delivered to the ocean by rivers, swept out by deep currents from the continental shelf. These layers of sediment are one reason why we’re here.
Yesterday, in Davis Strait, the science began. I chucked my first batch of forty-eight bottles off the Louis’s stern. Amidships, a team of oceanographers collected water samples, which they would test for temperature, salinity, and certain meaningful isotopes—chemical tracers or signatures that would reveal the provenance of the water and its age. But the main action was up on the bow where Macdonald and his Francophone partner, Charles Gobeil, were wrestling a stainless steel contraption over the starboard rail. This was a box corer, a primitive device that looked like something John Swallow might have soldered together out of scrap.
A cold wind was blowing, and the deck was slick with spray, and the bow was crowded with deckhands and scientists all dressed in orange foul-weather gear and blue or yellow hard hats. Neale Maude, shouldering his big camera, was angling for close-ups, and over Maude’s shoulder protruded his soundman’s fuzzy gray microphone. A crane hoisted the box corer over the starboard rail and dropped it, with a big splash, into the dark water. As it sank, a float on its cable turned from yellow to green and then, like a dimming lightbulb, went out. For a long time, the cable unspooled from a winch. More than 2,500 feet down, the contraption hit bottom, its boxy stainless steel maw sank one and a half feet into the primordial mud, the cable fell slack. Bosun Bob did a chin-up on the cable, checking its slackness. He flashed a crane signal. The winch operator began to reel the box corer back in; 2,500 feet down, a scoop clamped the box closed. Many minutes later, the yellow float appeared, turning from green to yellow as it surfaced, and the box corer followed it, streaming water and dripping mud.
“Bring it down!” shouted Bosun Bob, as the box corer spun around above us. “More slack, please. Down slow! Let it down easy! Hold it! There.” The crowd on
the deck closed in, possessed of the same impulse to discover.
Macdonald and Gobeil pried loose the box of sediment and wrangled it to their prefabricated lab, a kind of steel hut resembling a shipping container, bolted beside the port-side rail. Therein, on a stainless steel table, a surgically meticulous excavation began. Gobeil had brought with him Marie-Éve Randlett and another graduate student, Danielle Dubien, both in their early twenties, both French-speaking, both ponytailed, both dressed in brand-new Day-Glo orange jumpsuits and brand-new boots. For the next few hours, with instruments resembling scalpels or palette knives, Randlett and Dubien scraped away layers of sediment centimeter by centimeter, archiving each layer in labeled ziplock bags. Every fifty centimeters represented about two hundred and fifty years.
Slice, slice, slice—there, into baggies, went the twentieth century. Slice, slice, slice—there went the nineteenth century. Way out in the Arctic Basin, farther still from the continental shelf, a single centimeter of mud constitutes a millennium’s worth of sedimentation. Out in the Arctic Basin, a slice thin as a sheet of cardboard would transport you back to the Norman conquest. Two centimeters would transport you back to the birth of Christ. A third, to the Babylonian Empire. A core as deep as the one we’d collected from Davis Strait would transport you back to the Pleistocene.
Recorded in this mud were “biomarkers,” most of which were compounds of carbon. Most evenings, I ended up talking to Macdonald, who was happy to tutor me in organic geochemistry. After dinner, scientists and sailors alike would gather in the Louis’s main lounge, a room as wide almost as the ship. The walls were paneled in wood. The big picture windows looked out over the bow, and over the bulwarks, toward the far horizon where icebergs drift. There was an upright piano in the main lounge, and a drum kit, and wooden card tables, and a bar well-stocked with spirits and beer. Although there was a two-drink limit, minutes after the bar opened, the place had the loud, convivial feel of a saloon. You almost forgot that you were on an icebreaker, steaming north into the Arctic. That it was nine o’clock and out on the decks the sun was so bright it looked like late afternoon.