Born and raised in Calcutta, he had a great-uncle who painted and instilled a love of art in him when he was young, but an Indian youth with no particular means could not contemplate becoming an artist. He got an engineering degree instead and managed to enroll in a southern New Mexico university to study computer science and then physics. From there he went to do research at a national weapons laboratory, but Subhankar’s real passion was outside his job.
When he arrived at the university in Las Cruces, he encountered a vast desert with few people. It gave him “the shock of space,” he told me. “Because in Calcutta—you’re lucky to have a square foot of space. But here I was in the middle of all this space and I didn’t know what to do about that.” He began exploring it; friends took him backpacking; he hated it; and then he was hooked, began camping, climbing mountains, became the outings coordinator for the local Sierra Club and then the vice chair. He started taking photographs, and after he had switched to a research job outside Seattle, he went on a commercial photographic expedition to Churchill, Manitoba, the easiest place to see polar bears, and photographed them.
In Churchill he made a photograph that has haunted him ever since. It shows one polar bear eating another. One creamy white bear stands up, its body pointing left and its head at center, small ears, black eyes, black nose, clean fur, its tongue out but a mild expression on its face. The other bear’s head is at center too, its eyes shut, its fangs exposed, its head stained with blood, and its body torn open and partially gone, as much red meat as white fur on display.
What’s disturbing about Subhankar’s image is how much the two bears look alike, except for their expressions. It’s an image not just of cannibalism but of a kind of narcissism, of devouring the self. You devour yourself because there is no one else you can reach. Though male bears kill others of their species and bears will feed on anything dead, there is an apparent rise in polar-bear cannibalism tied to the bears starving because the summer ice is failing.
Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, a disquisition on people, animals, ice, and light at far northern latitudes, is a lyrical book whose undercurrent of warning is more obvious today than when it was published in 1986. Climate change was an idea just being assembled by scientists at that moment; it would begin to enter the popular imagination a few years later. Lopez quoted an earlier traveler in Alaska, the Scottish-born American environmentalist John Muir, saying that polar bears move “as if the country had belonged to them always.”
Though their country is both land and water—they are technically marine mammals—their survival depends on the expanse of sea ice on which they hunt. Or hunted. You could call them neither land nor sea but ice mammals. The ice is fragmented, vanishing sooner, appearing later, turning what was once the solid mass of the farthest north into open water. The country no longer belongs to them. At the end of his chapter on polar bears, Lopez describes seeing and touching an immobilized female polar bear about to be radio-collared “as though examining a museum specimen” and seeing her genitalia “in size and shape like a woman’s. I looked away. I felt I had invaded her privacy. For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this image of vulnerability.”
Almost twenty years ago hermaphrodite polar bears began appearing, mutated and sterile. These changes that brought them closer to extinction were due to the contamination of their bodies by chemicals that had been swept north with currents and migratory creatures. And then came drowning bears, bears trying to operate in a realm of summer ice that no longer quite existed. Mary Shelley imagined nature violated in isolated examples beyond which were the constants represented by the wild places and the order of things. She never imagined that all of us could become Dr. Frankenstein, chasing and fleeing our altered creation that is the landscape all around us and its invisible contaminants, everywhere, from within our bodies to the ends of the earth.
All these polar calamities represent a world that is itself monstrous, a manmade creation gone astray. It was part of what drew Subhankar to the arctic, this sense of need. He was thirty-three. He quickly quit his job, pulled out his savings, cashed in his pension plan, began talking to biologists, and made preparations to be gone a long time. He went forth into the utter unknown of the arctic winter and back to the artistic vocation he’d had as a boy.
Before long, he found the Inupiat hunter who’d become his mentor and guide, Robert Thompson, of the village of Kaktovik on Barter Island on the Beaufort Sea near the border between Alaska and the Yukon. Thompson taught him about cold and survival. They went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to watch polar bears, this time not in a place where the bears were surrounded by viewers in tanklike cars, but where no other humans or settlements were near. The place had been photographed a lot in summer, but it was often described as an uninhabited wasteland in other seasons by those who wanted to ravage it, and Subhankar set out to show that this was not so.
Early on in their encampment, they saw a mother bear and her cubs play near their den, and he took photographs of the yellow-white creatures on snow so white that its shadows are pure blue. They look as though they are the only creatures in the world, one mother, two cubs, in the white world under a white sky, as though time has not been invented, as though the world has just begun, as though nothing can go wrong.
Hoping to photograph them again, Subhankar and Thompson stayed, and a blizzard caught them, and then another and another for twenty-nine days. The wind chill brought the temperature to 120 below. They were confined to their tent much of the time, where the winds made the fabric flap too loudly to talk much. Once the tent nearly got buried in snow. Many times they went out walking. “My benchmark is that, as long as I don’t get separated from Robert, I won’t die,” Subhankar told me. In that environment, the wind and snow can obscure everything even a few feet away. “It’s all white. You cannot have any sense of topography and up and down and hills and it just becomes whiteout and you really feel very scared.”
“You couldn’t see five feet in front of you and you could see the whole world,” Subhankar recounted. “I went to the arctic, thinking that I’m going to a faraway place remote from my home country. As it happens, the arctic is connected. Today, after ten years, I call the arctic the most connected place on the planet. And that connection is both celebratory and tragic. It’s celebratory because birds travel to the arctic from every part of the planet, including from Calcutta. There is a species called the yellow wagtail that winters outside of Calcutta, where I’m originally from, and nests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where I’ve been working for ten years. So that’s a celebratory connection.”
It’s tragic because of climate change and because of toxins migrating north along with the birds, the toxins that turned bears hermaphroditic and reach human beings as well. “Breast milk of Greenland women is now scientifically considered as hazardous waste,” Subhankar said. “And that’s because these toxins are migrating from all over the planet, and they’re ending their migration in the arctic. So all my work is actually a metaphor for this interconnectedness.”
Subhankar made color photographs of the patterns of caribou herds seen from above, the trails made as they walk single file like quilting stitches across the white blanket of snow. Snow geese, in another image, form white dots on the golden tundra of summer cotton grass they fatten up on before they migrate south again. He often photographed from far away, not to distance himself, but to see the patterns the animals and the land made together. And sometimes he photographed close up, birds nesting, bones on beaches, hunters at work.
And then the work went far. It went to Washington, DC, when the fate of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was being debated. California senator Barbara Boxer held up Subhankar’s newly published book of photographs to support her position against opening the refuge to oil corporations and drilling. The work was exhibited, reproduced, censored, became controversial, became part of the discussion, and Subhankar was committ
ed, an activist on behalf of the circumpolar land, animals, and peoples.
Burma, India, Bolivia, Cuba, New Mexico, California, Siberia, Alaska, Iceland: the red threads connect the islands and the continents that are just larger islands. In between are the ideas and conversations that connect lives and minds, when they arise, when they work, when you pay attention, when you’re lucky. I settled into my new home in Iceland, which was one room with a concrete floor and a bed, a table, and a chair, and two big windows that looked out onto the archipelago, where the arctic terns and the oystercatchers flew and the clouds came and went across the fjord that was punctuated with islands spreading into the distance.
Later in the summer I would go out a few times among the islands, and they held at least one revelation and many pleasures, but at first I just looked at them from the windows and from the harbor and from all the places I could walk to in this remote landscape into which I had been dropped. Late in the day the sun sometimes turned the sea silver like beaten metal and the islands black, though it was hard to say what was late when days lasted until midnight and after and darkness became scarce as summer advanced and night retreated. Each day was seven minutes longer than the one before, so almost an hour of night vanished each week, and the world around me became more and more suffused with strong cold northern light.
9 • Breath
A long time ago on an active volcano in Central America, an old campesino called me over, showed me a small horizontal orifice in the earth like an open mouth, and urged me to put my hand in it. Steamy warmth was flowing out of it into the cool evening air. He told me, “The earth breathes.” The age of most rocks is measured in millions of years, but the earth here was spitting up molten lava that glowed in the night and then turned into black lumps leavened with air bubbles, rocks a few minutes old and still hot from their birth.
A little smaller than Ireland, a little bigger than Cuba, Iceland is surrounded by thousands of tiny islands, alone and clustered on the coast and in the fjords like flocks of birds in the sky. It hangs like a big pale pendant off the theoretical necklace of the arctic circle, its northernmost point a small island named Grimsey just north of that circle, the southernmost point an even smaller island, one that appeared late in 1963. While much of the rest of the world was absorbed by news of the violent death of an American president, Icelanders were watching an island be born like a rough Venus, disgorged by a volcano beneath the sea.
They named it Surtsey, after a figure from Norse mythology, the fiery black giant who slays gods and sets the worlds on fire. The lava poured forth for another four years or so, when the island reached a square mile in size. Since then other natural forces have gnawed it down to half the size it was then, and three satellite islets of volcanic ash appeared and disappeared in 1964–1965. As time passed, life assembled on the island. The first plant came less than two years after the mass appeared above the waves, and lichens came seven years into its existence, twenty species of plants in the first twenty years, of which ten faded away from the poor sandy soil.
“The most widespread species on Surtsey are sea sandwort, procumbent pearlwort, common mouse ear, annual meadow-grass, Poa annua and lyme grass,” says an official report. Birds arrived. Gulls landed within weeks of the island’s emergence, depositing the guano that built a richer soil. Fulmars and guillemots were the first to nest. Snow buntings and graylag geese came, almost ninety bird species in all, and twenty-one species of butterfly and moth. The first bush—a willow—came fifteen years after creation, and five years after the willows, seals were breeding on the young island. The descriptions make Surtsey sound like an orchestra, one instrument after another joining until there was the symphony that is an ecosystem.
Arriving in Iceland in spring, I watched the annual tuning up of the instruments everywhere as the earth woke up from winter. Mats of flattened gray plant stalks metamorphosed into grasses and great mounds of invasive Alaska lupine smeared whole hillsides violet. Tiny flowers appeared in clumps of greening moss on the stones that paved vast expanses of land. Bumblebees that seemed to have the lower levels of the air all to themselves were joined by tiny butterflies and other insects. New species of bird arrived and the patches of snow in the high places changed shape as they dwindled. As Surtsey gathered ingredients over the years, so this peninsula on the main island acquired its summer elements and sprang to life.
All of Iceland is new in geological time, an isolated mass sitting atop the earthquake-prone volcanic seam between the North American and European plates. It is not quite part of either continent, socially or ecologically, and the seam forms a magnificent rift valley of blue water in narrow stone chasms. It is so harsh, so new, and so remote that it has a simple ecology, with no reptiles and no native land mammals except the elusive foxes. A few species of rodent came with human beings over the centuries, as did reindeer and, most recently, mink. Iceland is a sanctuary and an empty quarter.
Volcanoes are still making and unmaking Iceland, along with other elemental forces in this place dominated by the nonbiological forces of heat, cold, wind, rain, rivers, ice, and snow. These are the forces that will flourish no matter what goes extinct, where the poisons migrate, and how the weather changes. The sun will rise, the winds will blow, the waves will lick the shore, the earth will tilt on its axis so that there is more light in summer, less in winter, rains and snows will fall, if not as they used to, and the waters will turn to solid ice and melt again. This is the world that existed before life and will exist after us.
In Iceland I lived under an homage to those primordial forces. The artist Roni Horn’s Library of Water was a library of glacier melt, twenty-four floor-to-ceiling clear glass columns of water that had once been ice. In wintertime, Klara and others had gathered great chunks of the glaciers that covered ten percent of Iceland, and a different glacier’s meltwater had been poured into each column. I slept under these glaciers, under the ice, and spare glacier melt sat in labeled five-gallon containers in the rear closet of my quarters. The map of where the ice was gathered showed a constellation of the frozen world of the jökulls, the glaciers, slowly melting: of Drangajökull, of Eyjafjallajökull, of Snaefellsjökull out at the tip of the peninsula, and the rest.
Upstairs, the irregularly spaced clear columns seemed to spell out another constellation or an archipelago in the oddly shaped room. The pillars of water from all over Iceland made the room Iceland in miniature and a memorial for what was not yet gone. You could see through the scattered columns, but whatever lay beyond became impossibly broad or thin or halved or twinned or vanished altogether. People became spires and balloons; straight lines bent; islands out the plate-glass windows warped; prismatic edges blurred all boundaries.
A friend who visited took a photograph of me through a pillar, smiling. In the picture, the far sides of my face are almost normal but in between lies a broad horizontal zone in which one central eye—the third, since there was also one on each side—was several inches wide above the broad balcony of my cheek. I was an island. My mouth was a pink channel that ran the whole length of the mass. It was me on the edges and an ebullient monster in the middle, with what looked like a few actual islands reflected in the broad expanse of my forehead. The distortion had pulled me apart as though a rift zone ran through me.
The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale masterpiece “The Snow Queen” opens with the tale of a distorting mirror made by a troll who is the Devil. The mirror shows the trolls their own ugly view of the world, and they fly up above the earth to force the angels to see themselves in it, but drop the grinning mirror when they are en route, up high. It breaks into innumerable sharp fragments. The scattered splinters of glass find their way into people’s eyes and make them see the world as the trolls see it, and some “even got a little piece of mirror in their heart, and then it was quite dreadful. The heart would turn into a lump of ice.” It’s a narcissist’s and cynic’s mirror that freezes the heart and di
storts the world.
Glass, ice, mirrors, are all the same thing in this tale, cold, sharp, clear stuff. One of the mirror splinters finds its way into the eye and then the heart of a poor attic-dwelling child named Kai. He jeers at his companions, mocks his grandmother, and runs off to join the big boys. He is growing up out of the insularity of childhood, into self-consciousness, new cravings, and competition. The story is sentimental at its edges, fierce at its core, and full of snow. The boy’s grandmother calls snowflakes “white bees,” and he asks whether these bees have a queen.
When the Snow Queen comes to town, Kai hitches his sled to her sleigh and she pulls him out of the town, out of the warmth, out of the familiar, into a blizzard with snowflakes the size of “white hens,” and then she brings him into the sleigh, wraps him in a bearskin, and draws him close. It’s a terrifying seduction. “She kissed him on the forehead,” says Andersen. “It was colder than ice; it went right to his heart, which was already half ice. He felt as if he would die, but only for a moment, and then he felt fine.”
Roni Horn had collected Icelanders’ stories about weather in a book meant as a companion piece to the Library of Water, a book called Weather Reports You. A postmistress named Margret Ásgeirsdóttir told of delivering mail in a blizzard when she was very young and of lying down in the snow and falling asleep. A bulldozer woke her up as she was freezing to death because she had fortuitously laid down in the center of things. “But walking in a snowstorm, you just feel tiredness coming on and, oh! it’s so nice just to lie down in the soft snow.”
The Faraway Nearby Page 13
