by Barry Lopez
Some contemporary art, art that is not about itself or about the artist, offers perspectives that conceivably could release us from the daily tyranny of depressing news, from the meretriciousness of decisions that commit us to the inevitability of environmental catastrophe. All great art tends to draw us out of ourselves. Through the imagination and skill of the artist, it reintroduces us to our surroundings, revitalizing them and revealing interstices there, potential points of entry for our imaginations.
* * *
—
THE THULE, as much as Peter, Karen, and Eric, are my constant companions here. When I recall a story I read months before in Nature, speculating about the Sixth Extinction, or a report that appeared in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, about rising cancer rates in first-world countries, I think about the indomitable, resourceful Thule.
In the austral fall of 1987 I was traveling through Namibia with a few people. We slept in the desert, here and there as we went along. We came south to Kalahari Gemsbok National Park (now Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park) in South Africa. One morning there I spotted a pale chanting goshawk in the top of a dead tree. This particular accipiter hunts other birds, as well as reptiles and small mammals. Like all avian predators of its type, the goshawk’s hunting success depends on depth perception. The bird had its back to me as I approached. I imagined it gazing intensely at an expanse of savannah grass before it, searching for a creature upon which to swoop. As I drew closer, the bird rotated its head and stared down at me. Its right eye had been torn out of its socket. The hole was rimmed with blood-matted feathers.
It turned back to its survey of the savannah, ignoring me.
Often, when I want to give up, I think of that bird. How many other such severely wounded birds are there in the world, still hunting?
On another occasion, while working with a small field party a few miles from the South Pole—we were gathering samples from a snow pit to further document global climate change—I was given a tour of a scientific project under way at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, a research facility and planetary monitoring station established by the United States in 1957. This particular project was designed to locate sources of high-energy cosmic rays, and was part of an ongoing search for dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Astrophysicists theorize that dark matter and dark energy, difficult to detect directly, constitute as much as 95 percent of the mass of the universe; and they believe their presence can be inferred from data being collected by the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) at the South Pole. Most astrophysicists believe that our own and other galaxies are bathed in dark energy. The galaxies we see, then, are like tiny fish suspended in a vast ocean of unlit water.
The AMANDA detection device consists of a massive grid of phototubes buried hundreds of feet deep in the polar ice cap, all of them pointed toward the center of Earth. The tubes register the presence of muons, high-energy subatomic particles that have entered the opposite end of Earth (the North Pole) as neutrinos. In an experimental environment that is otherwise free of radioactivity, and dark, the muons emit a detectable particle called a Cherenkov photon. This evidence confirming the presence of muons registers on a bank of computers in a windowless room above the ice.
I loved the intellectual hunger behind this AMANDA experiment, the collaboration here between experimental and theoretical physicists, especially since I had encountered it (by accident) at a remote outpost like the South Pole.
What else was humanity straining to know in that same moment? Were research scientists elsewhere bearing down hard to understand how the biological fate of Homo sapiens will be affected by the extinction in some places of upwards of 60 percent of the populations of flying insects, including pollinators?
What would a Thule isumataq, a storyteller, a person who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself,” have to say about birds that can’t hunt, out hunting? About the critical importance of invisible matter. About a snowshoe hare sitting bewildered in its white coat on a forest floor of brown leaves, winter’s not yet having arrived. (A second meaning of isumataq is camp leader, a person, in the case of the Thule, guiding a few families through an inhospitable environment to safety by knowing when and where to go. The isumataq is also perceived as a kind of allegorist.)
* * *
—
THE DESIRE TO KNOW MORE, to fashion ever more sophisticated systems of detection and measurement, is a desire not merely to know but to be prepared for the unknown. It is a quest, therefore, without an end. The half-blind goshawk and the recordings of the AMANDA probes came back to me at the Thule sites because here, too, on a different scale, were signs of change as the Thule drove out, absorbed, or perhaps never even encountered the Late Dorset. Evidence of the continuously unfolding universe, in a setting where it’s emphatically clear that nature, the larger category that includes human nature and human history, is not static. It is design without an end. Its rubric is adaptation and change. Its imperative is adapt or die.
Our own imperative as modern social primates might be something else. Cooperate with one another or die.
Once the world quietens for hours on end, as it does here on the tundra, I find anxious questions about what kind of future humanity will make for itself as insistent as a thunderclap. One day I was working alongside Peter, inside the perimeter of a Late Dorset dwelling. “Probably used only briefly,” he said of the place as he turned over the gravel we were kneeling on stone by stone with a small trowel. Here were two men, trying to tease out a few pieces of the puzzle of human survival, invention, and adaptability. I didn’t say anything to Peter in that moment about the question of human survival—it’s not always good for the visitor to attempt to make a point. But I felt the peculiar urgency of our particular task, to know the character and the fate of the Thule and Dorset who had gone before us.
When we finished dinner that night, after I’d done the dishes and we were all having last tea, hunched in our parkas outside the cook tent, I asked Peter what he thought we were looking for on Skraeling. Is the prize here archeological scholarship, or is it something we haven’t spoken of?
* * *
—
NESTLED IN THE DECLIVITY in the tundra that day with the knapper’s debitage, reading about Monet and listening for walrus, I recalled the bee-buzzed hours I’d spent crossing the lowland several weeks before. In my childhood I had known the kind of euphoria I’d felt that day, when the opportunity arose for me to go outside, to leave the domestic rooms, even the rooms where the doors were left open and the open windows were large. I would one day come to understand this impulse I’d felt as a child—to depart—in other ways, depending on the nature of the situation; but what I wanted most of all back then was to pass through the walls of the house. Setting Figes’s book aside for a moment, I courted the memory of that day I’d walked on the lowland. The memory vibrated for me, like a struck tuning fork.
As I engaged the memory further, my fingertips were again winding through the willow stems and again I found the chert flakes. Sifting them, I thought how few archeologists who examine flakes like these and who write about them can fashion a stone tool. What do we miss, as a mostly indoor culture, making a few short summertime forays into Earth’s remote country to inspect places where our ancestors once found a path, a way to live, but not, ourselves, possessing any of their fundamental skills? Not having cut meat with a stone, nor gone a week with only the soft edges of our skin clothing to sustain us, how well can we intuit the purpose of an arrangement of stones our ancestors made? Peter sometimes makes rhetorical observations something like this. How can indoor people understand outdoor people, with nothing but the intellect to work with, with no predisposition to inquire about or make use of what the body knows, what the foot has learned about balance, having easily crossed one terrain but having trouble with another?
The four of us are all stud
ious individuals, squatting here before an Arctic Small Tool puzzle; but you could not call our focused intensity intimacy with the Thule or the Dorset. We’re like blacksmiths, shaping bits of found scrap iron with our hammers, waiting for something we recognize to emerge.
We speculate continually.
I consider telling Peter about the pale chanting goshawk. He might enjoy the indomitability of the bird, this evidence of determined Life, so evident here on Skraeling. I wonder, too, if I understand the AMANDA experiment well enough to convey my enthusiasm about this kind of research question and my high regard for science, though archeology is actually one of the humanities. I could try to convey my euphoric experience hiking in the Arctic oasis across the water from our camp, but he might find my perceptions too abstruse.
* * *
—
PART OF THE PLEASURE of working alongside Peter is his general circumspection, his caution about what he can know; but he is also a searcher who wants to exercise a degree of control over what he discovers, who sometimes wants, in the way of many academics, to own the definition of what he has discovered, even more than he wants to own the thing itself. He is open-minded but of course opinionated about a subject he has given his life to, and he is not always forthcoming. We’re both, however, intensely curious. We converse easily. I think it’s because neither of us seeks to prevail, and anyway, our subjects are often too unruly, too full of guesses to allow for any final words.
I finished the Figes book that afternoon in the cleft, pushed a few belongings into my day pack, and descended a slope that leads to the shoreline, pausing at several ruins as I followed a long route back to our base camp. For the most part, the sites I passed were Early Dorset, maybe 2,500 years old. Peter thinks some of them might be Transitional, however, meaning they were built by people who were neither late Pre-Dorset nor Early Dorset but a distinct tradition somewhere between the two, which some archeologists call Independence II and others call Transitional. (This particular tradition shows signs of having been influenced by a contemporaneous Greenlandic culture of the time called Saqqaq.) A roughly circumscribed area that I stopped to examine—doing this feels like watching an animal that doesn’t know you’re there—included several Transitional and Early Dorset and Thule sites together. The entire complex is named the Grave Rib site, after an upright weathered rib bone, possibly a walrus’s, which someone had once driven into a Thule burial mound here.
* * *
—
ONE MORNING a helicopter arrives in camp, the same helicopter and pilot that had moved Schledermann’s camp here from the Lakeview site on Johan Peninsula. The four of us have packed our gear and are ready to depart for Haa Island, situated between the entrances to Beitstad and Jokel Fjords, twenty-two miles to the west. As we’re boarding the helicopter, Peter tells me there is not enough fuel to safely ferry five people out to the site and back. He regrets, he says, having to say I will not be able to go with them. It’s his call, but I know the range of this helicopter, fully loaded, in calm weather at sea level, and suspect he has some other reason for not wanting me to come along, which he doesn’t wish to make clear.
I’m irked, watching them fly off, but soon decide, with everyone gone for the day, that it’s a good time for me to bathe. I heat a small basin of freshwater and take it down to the edge of the fjord, where I strip, wash, and then wade into the cold water to rinse off.
I’m into fresh clothes and have hung my wet laundry out on a line to dry when I hear the helicopter returning. The pilot is close enough for me to read his hand signals. I understand he’s motioning me to approach the helicopter as he lands. He props open the side door with his foot to shout over the noise of the rotors that he’s sorry Peter bumped me from the flight. Do I want to fly with him now on an errand he has? He’s spotted a beach-cast narwhal with a large tusk on the north shore of Pim Island, about twenty miles to the east, and wants to retrieve the tusk. Yes, yes, I say, and run to grab my day pack and survival gear.
We land upwind of the carcass, which is bloated and rank. Polar bear bait for sure, and I’m not comfortable standing around without a rifle while the pilot chops the tusk out of the whale’s head with a hatchet. It’s eighty-two inches long. He lashes it to one of the helicopter’s skids and thirty minutes later we’re back in camp. He drops me off, crosses the water to the RCMP post, tops off his fuel tanks at the barrel farm, unloads the tusk, and heads west to a scientific camp at Sverdrup Pass. He’s carrying some resupply to two women there studying Arctic hares. Their camp is about thirty miles west of Haa Island. He’ll pick Peter and the others up on his way back.
After making lunch, I set off to find a stone fox trap, located along a route Peter has drawn up for me in one of my notebooks. Thule people trapped both polar bears and Arctic foxes in these simple stone enclosures. A sliding stone slab, tripped by the animal’s tugging on a bait line, dropped down to pen the animal in a constricted space, immobilizing it. Thule pursued this lethal strategy with bears and foxes for two reasons—for the raw materials the animals offered them and to keep the foxes, especially, from disturbing Thule meat caches. Both types of Thule trap can be found in the Bache-Thorvald-Johan peninsular region around Buchanan Bay. Peter refers to this part of Ellesmere as “the crossroads to Greenland,” because it was from here that different pulses of human migration made the crossing eastward across Smith Sound to the northwest shore of Greenland.
The trap Peter described to me was on the southern coast of Big Skraeling Island. Knowing my companions would not be back until suppertime, I decided to take a less direct route to the trap than the one Peter had marked out for me along the shore. I wanted to look at a set of “jumping stones” early occupants had set up for a game like hopscotch, and to see how the stones at another campsite had been assembled to create a windbreak. I’d thought frequently about Thule people’s cleverness with stones. Their work doesn’t show the same skill with fitting stones together tightly that their Inca contemporaries had, but they were able to move massive rocks, sometimes over considerable distances, to establish foundation walls for their houses or in order to construct bear traps. They fitted “flagstone” floors together; made benches, meat platforms, and hearth boxes of stone; and carved stout but elegant soapstone lamps that held seal and whale oil for cooking, heat, and light.
* * *
—
SKRAELING IS NOT a large island, but it has a lot of topographic relief, so it has many nooks, clefts, and elevations where anything could have happened or be happening. From the start of my walk, then, I was alert for signs, and conscious of not letting my mind drift off somewhere else.
I tried to get out of myself, to enter the country.
When I was young and just beginning to travel with indigenous people, I imagined that they saw more and heard more than I did, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were, and they did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where later they might deepen the meaning of an experience.
If my companions and I, for example, hiking the taiga encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost entirely on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear in this case might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate the
smaller thing within the larger thing, back and forth. As they noticed trace odors in the air, or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten to just “meeting the bear,” was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter with the bear, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund bearing.
Over the years I absorbed two lessons from indigenous people about how to be more fully present in an encounter with a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed. Second—let’s say we didn’t disturb the grizzly bear as he fed, but only took in what he or she was doing and then slipped away—the event itself could not be completely defined by referring solely to the physical geography around us in those moments. For example, I might not recall something we’d all seen a half hour before, a caribou hoofprint in soft ground at the edge of a creek, say; but my companions would remember that. And a while after our encounter with the bear, say a half mile farther on, they would notice something else—a few grizzly-bear guard hairs snagged in scales of tree bark—and they would relate it to some detail they’d observed during those moments when we were watching the bear. The event I was cataloging in my mind as “encounter with a tundra grizzly,” they were experiencing as an immersion in the current of a river. They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies, and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene—the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots that I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single rigid line. My friends, in contrast, had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.
