Horizon

by Barry Lopez

  The lesson in those experiences was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening, resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects. When they saw the bear, they right away began searching for a pattern that was resolving itself before them as “a bear feeding on a carcass.” They began gathering various pieces together that might later self-assemble into an event larger than “a bear feeding.” These unintegrated pieces they took in as we traveled—the nature of the sonic landscape that permeated this particular physical landscape; the presence or absence of wind, and the direction from which it was coming or had shifted; a piece of speckled eggshell under a tree; leaves missing from the stems of a species of brush; a hole freshly dug in the ground—might individually convey very little. Allowed to slowly resolve into a pattern, however, they might become revelatory. They might illuminate the land further.

  As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds through which I was traveling over the years, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the breaching of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.

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  BEFORE I RECOGNIZED it for what it was, I was nearly on top of the windbreak Peter had directed me to at Skraeling ASTt site number 9. The wall was almost three feet high and about fourteen feet long, built between the shore, close by, and what would have been the rear wall of what some Arctic archeologists call a Transitional dwelling. An uncomplicated thing, meant to break the force and chill of the wind. It seemed dormant and resolute, like a volcano.

  Archeologists have removed most of the artifacts they’ve uncovered on Skraeling, but the aura of the presence of early occupants remains as strong at some sites as the feeling of shared desire and fate that comes to me from handling their tools and carvings, the durable evidence of their occupancy. No dwelling seems irrelevant or redundant. Each one speaks of a few specific people who’ve left behind something that clings to their hearth boxes (each stone placed just so), their stone pavements, the circles of anchor stones for their portable tents. When the collapsed roof of a Thule winter house is removed and its interior is exposed for the first time to continuous solar radiation, the floor begins to reek of the animals the Thule occupants once hunted and ate—small whales, bearded seals, ringed seals, walruses, geese, fish, Arctic hares. It’s possible to pick up and eat scraps of animal flesh off the floor (which some find palatable, if not tasty). The size of the entrance tunnels to the winter houses and the dimensions of their interiors hint at the physical size of the people. In a hearth box you might find a handful of “boiling stones,” smooth cobbles heated up in the fire’s embers and then dropped into a skin bag filled with some type of cold soup.

  All across Skraeling the message for me was the same for all of the traditions: tenacity and utility. These were eminently practical human beings. It’s far more difficult—impossible, really—to imagine accurately the ceremonies that assuaged their grief or raised their hopes, or the episodes in their lives that brought on convulsive laughter. It’s hard to picture children. (Elsewhere, not here, researchers have found structures they characterize as “Thule doll houses.”) It’s difficult to grasp how truly daunting places like this could be, with months of darkness, the bone-splitting cold, and the sudden, inexplicable disappearances of populations of food animals when before they had always been there.

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  SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1850S, two charismatic Inuit men, Oqe and Qitdlarssuaq (also called Qillaq), led about forty other Inuit northward from a settlement at Pond’s Bay (now Pond Inlet), in northern Baffin Island. They crossed fifty miles of spring ice at the mouth of Lancaster Sound, to arrive on the shores of Devon Island. Some historians, perhaps to dramatize where no additional drama is really required, believe the men and their followers were running from numerous blood feuds at Pond’s Bay; but it could also have been that these two men had learned from European whalers of the existence of Inughuit—Polar Eskimos—living in northwest Greenland. Familiar as they were with the brisk trade in walrus and narwhal ivory that went on at Pond’s Bay, they might have hoped to make contact with their cultural cousins in Greenland, to see if they might prove to be a new source of ivory. Or perhaps, like their Thule ancestors, they had no plan but the excursion itself, a journey framed by someone’s vision.

  Over the next four or five years Qitdlarssuaq’s group continued north, finally reaching the central coast of Ellesmere Island, probably in the vicinity of Johan Peninsula. The group by then is smaller. Oqe is thought to have turned back for Baffin Island with some people, but there is no record of their ever having gotten back. Qitdlarssuaq led his followers across the sea ice in Smith Sound and there, in the vicinity of present-day Etah, they met the Inughuit. To their amazement, these Eskimos lacked three tools the Inuit regarded as indispensable: the bow and arrow, the kayak, and the leister spear (kakivak), an implement designed to both impale and secure a fish. Anthropologists speculate that either famine or epidemic disease might have wiped out so many people in northwestern Greenland that the few who were left didn’t know how to make these things anymore. So they devised a life without them.

  Qitdlarssuaq’s group stayed in Greenland about seven years, passing on their technical knowledge and intermarrying with the Inughuit. And then most or all of them decided to return to Pond’s Bay. The homeward journey proved a disaster. Qitdlarssuaq died soon after the group recrossed Smith Sound. Those who remained split into two groups and wintered in two separate places. Only one of those places, Makinson Inlet near Cape Faraday, provided sufficient food. The following winter the Makinson Inlet group overwintered there again, along with survivors from the other camp. During that winter, however, the marine mammals around Makinson Inlet migrated elsewhere and starvation set in. Two men, Minik and Maktaq, began to kill weakened people and eat them. Five people, including two children, escaped to the north and were able to kill and retrieve a seal, which got them through the winter. The following spring these five returned to Greenland. Nothing is known of what happened to the others.

  The comfortable isolation my companions and I enjoyed on Skraeling—with cookstoves, plentiful food, helicopter transits, moderate summer temperatures, and regular radio communications with PCSP in Resolute (which warned us of approaching storms)—insulated us from the harsh and unrelenting capriciousness of weather in the High Arctic, a reality the Thule, their predecessors, and their progeny of course could not avoid.

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  THE FOX TRAP, an oblong box with a square cross section about eight inches wide and twenty inches deep, had not been disturbed in the hundreds of years since it had been set. Peering between two stone slabs that formed one corner of the trap, I saw the skeleton of a fox. Its snout rested on the mandible of a ringed seal fetus—the bait. The leather thong that had once suspended the sliding door had disintegrated, but I could see how
this slab had been rigged to slide home.

  A fatal moment for the fox. For me, a kind of shrine.

  Years in the future, walking through densely populated areas laid to waste by natural disaster, like Banda Aceh in Sumatra after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, or being driven down shell-cratered streets in Kabul, I had settings in which to consider how Death, that forever famished and indifferent visitor, is more apparent in some places than others. What I felt before the skeleton of the fox—killed but never put to use—was not sadness, not tragedy, but renewed awareness of the ineluctable horror of life, of which my own culture seems sometimes weirdly innocent. In 1998 a boy in my community in Oregon killed his parents and then shot and killed two students at his school before he was subdued. Predictably, residents asked, “How could this have happened here?” though over the past thirty years incidents like this have detonated randomly, and regularly, in dozens of American communities, and they have been followed by explanations that were unsatisfying and incomplete. One does not find “evil” in these events, one finds desperation and pain, the merely human. At Makinson Inlet, in the face of starvation, one finds cannibals but, too, an unknown person inspiring enough, skilled enough, to get two other adults and two children away, clear of the horror.

  In the modern era, witnessing social, economic, and physical breakdown in traditional villages in Africa or rural Australia or in the barrios, the favelas, the ghettos, or the townships of major cities, I’ve come to believe that the root cause of this breakdown has nothing to do with the absence of “civilization” or the presence of “evil” but has almost entirely to do with the unremitting presence of political repression, poverty, racism, and living lives of servitude. The problem of ensuring human survival in these places, let alone providing for a human efflorescence, is staggeringly large. The situation cries out to be completely reimagined, or as some traditional people say, “It needs to be redreamed.”

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  WHEN I HAD SET my tent up next to the karigi, it was with the idea, presumptuous of course, that the Thule ghosts there would enter my dreams. That I remember, they never did. My dreams were about travel corridors in the land I was in, pedestrian narratives about the small drama of my own life, and demi-visions turning on the familiar axes of allegiance and betrayal, of fulfillment and longing.

  If I had wanted to ask the Thule, and I did, how they managed the darkness that befell them, whether it was from murder or starvation, or only nightfall when it came for good in the autumn, and what they placed their faith in, I also wanted to know about the shape of their dreams, however incomprehensible they might be to me. In the long night of winter, did their dreams become longer, more elaborate? Was there such a thing as a summer dream? Was the dark a teacher or was it an oppressor?

  In 1949 Eigil Knuth, an independent Danish archeologist, from an aristocratic family and with a background in art and architecture, found the wood frame of a large skin boat, a Thule umiaq, near Kap Eiler Rasmussen, in northeastern Greenland. The frame was splayed open under a thin layer of snow, about five hundred yards from the shore of the Wandel Sea, an embayment of the Arctic Ocean. A few of its parts were very likely of Norse origin—several nails and a piece of oak. Disintegration and scavengers like foxes had reduced the walrus-skin hull to scraps. Amid the frame members, Knuth and his colleagues found some pieces of firewood and a few bone implements. In the surrounding area they also located several Thule culture objects—hare snares and a toy sledge. Knuth’s conjecture was that people had simply walked away from the umiaq and left all this behind.

  Archeologists now speculate that this Thule group arrived at Kap Eiler Rasmussen some time in the early 1400s, near the end of a warming period in the High Arctic, having paddled around the northern end of Greenland and put in here as winter was coming on. The site, known as Kølnæs, is the easternmost reach of Peary Land, the northernmost of the High Arctic oases, a place that compares with the lowland at Alexandra Fjord or with Truelove Lowland on Devon Island. From here, north, east, and south, there is nothing but ocean. Human beings—or these people at least—could go no farther.

  Among the records of humanity’s most extreme peregrinations, this one has, for me, become the most prominent. It marks the end of a stupendous journey. The crafting of the boat and the nature of the tools abandoned here evince great technical skill and a considerable capacity for innovation. The cache of firewood in the boat speaks to a certain measure of wealth, if the term is understood to mean more than is needed for survival. These people were whale and muskoxen hunters, fully capable individuals. And then something happened. Perhaps the onset of cooler conditions froze their avenue of retreat, making the boat of no further use the following summer. And having exhausted the local supply of food—or maybe, as would happen at Makinson Inlet, after marine mammals had left the area—the travelers had moved inland with their pack dogs, carrying only absolute essentials and hoping to find muskoxen. They had to cross Peary Land to the west of them and then navigate rugged country between there and the northwest coast of Greenland, where their home country was and where they might find marine mammals again and feed themselves.

  I want to think they found muskoxen and made it the five or six hundred miles back to a place where their relatives were amazed, but not stunned, to see them again.

  A replica of their thirty-five-foot umiaq was put on display at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, outside Copenhagen, in 1980. One day I hope to see it, to feel the way the walrus hide comes tightly over the gunnels and is bound to the frame with bearded seal thongs. Few handmade but well-designed objects like this can be understood quickly, but several hours spent alone with one of them can make a kind of conversation possible. One does not necessarily learn the “truth” of the thing, but an image of the imagination that created it might emerge.

  The umiaq found at Kølnæs surfaces in my mind frequently as a symbol of both Thule ingenuity and resourcefulness. What a remarkable notion, what courage and self-confidence to abandon both it and part of the tool kit that made the physical world manageable for them, to leave it all there on the beach and head inland. To bivouac, to sleep and move on, to search for the distant movement or the dark dot that might mean food. Once winter came down like a sheet of iron and food eluded them and the living became even harder, did their dreams change? Moonlight and starlight reflecting off the snow might have made it possible, when the skies were clear, to navigate; but any search for food animals in the winter gloaming was problematic. Unnuiijuq, the Inuit call this ordeal, “looking for food in the dark.”

  Anthropologists and archeologists I’ve asked speculate that in winter darkness Thule people slept for hours on end. Conceivably these long slumbers opened up large dreamscapes, which might have functioned for them like the cycles of myths they listened to in difficult times from an isumataq or an angakkuq (shaman). In the modern era we’re less familiar with such epic dreamscapes (and of course far less attentive in our secular lives to the myths upon which Western culture itself is founded). In the West, industrialization brought with it a new prescription for rest—eight hours of uninterrupted sleep; and that put an end, for most working people, to the natural rhythms of human dreams. Our dreams are now regularly truncated by “the need to get up and get going,” a timing dictated for daily life by clocks. What Shakespeare in his plays called “second sleep” meant the sleep that came after a period of wakefulness following “first sleep.” During that interval, sleepmates spoke to each other about the imagery of their dreams. In so doing, they maintained intimacy with a way of seeing the world that waned with the rise of rationalism.

  The challenge in addressing the utility of our dreams is not whether to reject them outright in an effort to privilege the sort of logical truth the rational mind offers us. It’s to picture a conversation between imagination and intellect, one that might produce an advantageous vision, one the intellect itself cannot discern a
nd which the imagination alone is not able to create.

  Lying by the karigi on Skraeling some nights, I wondered whether Thule dreamers, like the women and men who abandoned their umiaq at Kølnæs, rediscovered the thread of their resolve in the narratives of their winter dreams, both the intention and the means by which to make another sort of life.

  In my idle thoughts before sleep, I more often thought, however, of the Thule stone bear traps.

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  I HAD THE CHANCE once to visit the ruins of a penal colony built by the French, in 1852, in Les Îles du Salut, a tiny archipelago eight miles off the tropical coast of French Guiana. It was erected primarily to isolate political prisoners like Alfred Dreyfus from French society, but also served to rid France of its “undesirables”—criminals, political objectors, the mentally impaired, and the destitute. Most were confined on Île du Diable, the Devil’s Island, a location made infamous by Henri Charrière in his novel Papillon, and by a movie of the same name.