Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  Copyright © 2015 by Jack Nisbet

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Sasquatch Books

  Editor: Gary Luke

  Production editor: Em Gale

  Cover illustration: “Aspen Camp 27 Miles from Cow Creek,” James Madison Alden, 1860; Alden Sketch #17, Entry 221, Record Group 76; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

  Design: Joyce Hwang

  Illustrations: Hannah Small

  Copyeditor: Elizabeth Johnson

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 978-1-57061-980-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-57061-981-6

  Sasquatch Books

  1904 Third Avenue, Suite 710

  Seattle, WA 98101

  (206) 467-4300

  www.sasquatchbooks.com

  custserv@sasquatchbooks.com

  Portions of some of these essays have appeared in Cascadia Chronicle, the North Columbia Monthly, the Inlander, We Proceeded On, and HistoryLink.org.

  v3.1

  For Claire

  In memory of Ann, Merle, and John

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map of the Northwest

  I. CHASING THE ELECTRIC FLUID

  II. MELTDOWN

  III. THE LONGEST JOURNEY

  IV. A TASTE FOR ROOTS

  V. A POSSIBLE FRIEND

  VI. RIDING THE HIGH WIRE

  VII. TERRA-COTTA MAN

  VIII. SISTERS

  IX. THE WHOLE BAG OF CRAYONS

  X. RESTLESS EARTH

  CODA: SKATE AWAY

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  I

  CHASING THE

  ELECTRIC FLUID

  Innumerable Luminous Pieces

  In early November 1792, Hudson’s Bay Company fur agent David Thompson led a crew of hungry men through the wilderness of lakes that extended north and west of their York Factory headquarters on the bay. They had found the fishing and hunting very poor around their isolated trade house and had fanned out in hopes of better luck. Thompson and a lanky Scottish lad named Andrew Davy tried Lake Susquagemow (now called Landing Lake in modern Manitoba)—a sizeable sheet of water around thirty miles long and four or five miles wide. Since the lake’s ice was not yet thick enough for secure walking, the pair roamed its edges in search of grouse and hare. After some time, they came upon a frozen marsh, where they spotted a beaver lodge surrounded by a small pool of open water, which the animals kept ice-free by swimming around it in the evening.

  By the time November’s early dusk fell, Thompson and Davy, muskets in hand, had settled into watchful positions near the domed lodge. After a full moon rose over the east end of the lake, a solitary beaver emerged from one of the entry tunnels. Davy eased his firearm into position and pulled the trigger. The musket misfired with a loud snap; the beaver slapped the water with its tail “as if to bid us good night,” wrote Thompson, “and plunged into his house.”

  That slap ended any hope of a successful hunt. Yet the evening was pleasant, and the pair continued to loiter beside the marsh until nearly eleven o’clock. They were about to call it a night when a brilliant light, rivaling the recent moonrise, appeared over the east end of the lake. “It was a Meteor of globular form, and appeared larger than the Moon.”

  The “meteor”—in Thompson’s day, the term could apply to any visual atmospheric event, from hailstones to a lightning flash—seemed to travel directly down the length of the lake toward them, descending through the air as it approached. “When within three hundred yards of us, it struck the River ice with a sound like a mass of jelly,” Thompson wrote. Then it “dashed into innumerable luminous pieces, and instantly expired. Andrew would have run away but he had no time to do so; curiosity chained me to the spot.”

  Next morning, true to his curious nature, Thompson returned to the beaver marsh to look for evidence of the crash. He was astonished to find none whatsoever, even though the snow clearly showed his lightest footprints from the night before. He had read accounts of fiery meteorites in Europe that exploded with a loud noise or threw off a fusillade of stones, but the only sound he could recall from this event was the flop of tossed jelly.

  Thompson had arrived at Hudson Bay almost a decade earlier, as a young teenager, and he had traveled extensively throughout the north country. On more than one occasion, when journeying along an expanse of water, he had observed “phenomena that are peculiar to such a surface.” He had noticed that during the early part of each winter, clear and calm nights gave rise to “innumerable very small luminous, meteoric points, which are visible for the twinkling of an eye, and disappear.” When these momentary sparkles gained intensity, he found, the wind was bound to rise.

  Several days later, the fur agent was back near the same marsh on Lake Susquagemow, hunting for game in an open grove of aspen trees. About six in the evening, another concentrated light from the lake’s east end lit up the premoon darkness. Thompson thought that this “meteor” appeared larger than the first one he had seen, but not as bright, and he tried to track it carefully. The glowing globe dove right into the aspen grove, at a height of about eight feet above the ground. “As it struck the trees, pieces flew from it, and went out … it passed close by me striking the trees with the sound of a mass of jelly … although it must have lost much of its size from the many trees it struck, it went out of my sight, [still] a large mass.”

  Searching for answers about the nature of these strange gelatinous lights, Thompson went out the next day and examined the trees that had been struck, only to find that they were completely undamaged. Even the white flour-like substance that coated the aspens’ bark showed no sign of any disturbance. “I was at a loss what to think of it, its stroke gave sound, and therefore must have substance. These two Meteors were, perhaps, compressed bodies of phosphoric air, but without the least heat, for had there been any, the second Meteor passed so near to me I must have felt it.”

  David Thompson grew up in London with his Welsh mother, who probably introduced him to that culture’s traditional folktales about “fairy fire,” also known as will-o’-the-wisps or swamp gas. In many such stories, mischievous figures use the eerie lights to lure travelers into danger around spooky marshlands. At some point, the flames are extinguished, and the victims are left to sink into the fens.

  Thompson’s description of the mysterious lights he saw over Lake Susquagemow evoke will-o’-the-wisp tales from around the world. Many accounts describe their appearance as “orbs” of some form, and most modern scientists explain them as a chemical phenomenon. The notion of flammable chemicals trapped within the marshes of northern Manitoba connects logically with the natural gas now being extracted from that region. Although Thompson did not record any particular color during either of his two sightings, eyewitnesses often describe the faint blue-green and yellow-orange hues familiar from laboratory Bunsen burners. Swamp-gas accounts rarely mention noise, so it is Thompson’s inclusion of those fwaps of jellified protoplasm against ice and aspen trees that makes his story truly memorable.

  The fur agent, who grew into a solid geographer and cartographer during his long career, also gained a reputation as a master storyteller. Even though he didn’t write about his experiences on Lake Susquagemow until he was approaching eighty years old, when he was plagued by failing vision and economic hardship, the details of his bizarre encounter with the diving “meteors” remained vivid. B
oth of the darting globes stand out in the mind of anyone reading Thompson’s memoirs, as do his experiences with the much more familiar phenomenon of northern lights, or aurora borealis.

  Drawing on decades of personal observations spaced across the northern tier of the continent, Thompson commented on the aurora’s relative weakness along the shores of Hudson Bay and west of the Rocky Mountains compared to its astonishing brightness around another fur post where he wintered on Reindeer Lake, a huge body of water that straddles today’s boundary between Saskatchewan and Manitoba at around latitude fifty-seven degrees north. There, Thompson asserted, especially in the months of February and March, the entire sky regularly bathed in a bright glow.

  We seemed to be in the centre of its action, from the horizon in every direction from north to south, from east to west, the Aurora was equally bright. Sometimes, indeed often, a tremulous motion in immense sheets, slightly tinged with the colors of the Rainbow, would roll from horizon to horizon. Sometimes there would be a stillness of two minutes; the camp dogs howled with fear.

  On one nighttime hunting expedition at Reindeer Lake, the brightness of the aurora allowed Thompson to shoot an owl at a range of twenty yards. But it was the warping of human senses that most interested him. “In the rapid motions of the Aurora,” he wrote, “we were all persuaded that we heard them. Reason told me that I did not, but it was cool reason against sense.”

  His crew was so enraptured by these displays of sonorous light that Thompson could not persuade them it was an illusion caused by “the eye deceiving the ear.” To prove the point, “I had my men blindfolded by turns, and then enquired of them, if they heard the rapid motions of the Aurora. They soon became sensible they did not.” Such logic could only override their senses momentarily, however, and as soon as Thompson removed the blindfolds, “so powerful was the illusion of the eye on the ear, that they still believed they heard the Aurora.”

  Many of the men and families who worked with Thompson had roots in the Cree culture, and he recorded their interpretation of the aurora. “The Cree Indians of North America call them the ‘Dead’ by the name of Jee pe ak, (the souls of the dead), and when the Aurora is bright in vivid graceful motion, they exclaim, See how happy our fathers are tonight, they are dancing to the enlivening songs of the other world.”

  Thompson, who might have preferred a more scientific explanation of the dancing lights, occasionally applied the word “meteor” to an aurora event, at least on some level comparing Reindeer Lake’s wavering curtains with Lake Susquagemow’s phosphoric globes of swamp gas. “This [auroral] Meteor seems to affect the great bodies of fresh water, over which they are seen more or less splendid every winter and during the summer seasons every clear night they are visible in the north eastern part of the sky.” He did not, however, raise the possibility that the jellified sounds he heard as he watched the orbs over Lake Susquagemow slap into ice or trees might have been caused by the same sort of sensory distortion that he tried to explain to his men. Instead, he put forth a series of questions about the aurora at Reindeer Lake that atmospheric scientists have spent much of the last two centuries trying to work out.

  What is the cause that this place seems to be in the centre of the most vivid brightness and extension of the Aurora?

  From whence this immense extent of electric fluid?

  How is it formed?

  Whither does it go?

  Above the Earth

  It’s been several years now since I received my first personal message from outer space. It took the form of an e-mail with the suffix of nasa.gov and included an attached photograph that took forever to open. When the image finally unfurled, I saw a pleasant-looking gent in a dark polo shirt, holding up a copy of a book I had written about David Thompson. Behind his shoulder, a porthole framed a view of cirrus clouds spread across a patch of blue Earth that looked very far away. “I’m writing to let you know,” the message began, “that your book has been doing some traveling.” The message was signed “John Phillips, NASA Astronaut aboard the International Space Station,” an address that transported me back to the pulp science-fiction stories and B space movies of my youth.

  But John Phillips was real. Over the next few months, he corresponded with me while he circled our planet over and over again, occasionally wiring me photographs of landmark lakes along David Thompson’s fur trade routes west of the Rocky Mountains—the same area where I lived and worked. When Phillips returned to Earth, his travels brought him to the Inland Northwest, and we continued our conversation in person.

  Phillips grew up in New York State and the Southwest. His dad was a flying buff who spent many hours touring his kids through local airports to marvel at the bodies and engines of different aircraft. After graduating from the Naval Academy with degrees in math and Russian, Phillips became a Navy pilot in 1974, but even as he flew jets from bases on land and sea, he always kept one eye lifted toward space. When NASA turned down his first application to be an astronaut, he tried again. And again. He realized that he needed a broader skill set if he was going to get into orbit, and left the Navy to pursue an advanced degree in space plasma physics at UCLA. From there he went on to work at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory for nine years until NASA accepted him into the space program.

  When I showed David Thompson’s writings about the two “meteors” at Lake Susquagemow to Phillips, he shrugged them off as swamp gas or good old will-o’-the-wisp—a purely chemical effect. He found Thompson’s aurora experiences around Reindeer Lake much more alluring, however, because during his graduate studies, Phillips had focused on the sun and space environment. There he came to understand the aurora as a plasma phenomenon in which energized electrons collide with gas particles to produce light effects. He traced the discipline’s growing awareness of a correlation between periods of increased sunspot activity, aurora sightings, and changes in magnetic compass readings on Earth. He described the current understanding of the global aurora as two dynamic, undulating ovals of light centered over Earth’s magnetic poles.

  Phillips recalled that one evening during his tenure at Los Alamos, a massive solar disturbance pushed a lobe of the northern hemisphere’s auroral oval deep into the Southwest. He mistook the resulting angry red glow on the horizon for a grass fire until he realized that he was experiencing a diffuse red aurora produced by a large geomagnetic storm, rather than the curtains of green that are most often seen.

  Even though Phillips usually displays a scientist’s analytical mind, he can appreciate the poetry of a moment—this is a man who carried Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass into space. “The first time I saw the passage you sent me about Thompson blindfolding his men to test the true effects of the aurora, it immediately reminded me of Odysseus,” Phillips said. “The way he stuffed wax in the ears of his crewmen, then ordered them to tie him up tight to the forward mast of his ship so that when they sailed past the rocks where the Sirens sang, he could writhe in the total experience.” It’s the Greeks’ own story about watching their ancestors dance, and of singing the body electric; it’s the irresistible lure that connects curious spirits over time.

  Phillips’s natural curiosity helped him to thrive on the rigors of NASA’s training regime. One exercise devoted to severe weather skills took place in the dead of winter in northern Alberta, and it involved living in an old-fashioned canvas wall tent while wearing all-wool gear. It was at this camp that Phillips first saw the vivid, graceful action of the aurora at its most sublime.

  Around 2002, Phillips hit the north country again when he was assigned to prepare for a future mission of the International Space Station. He and cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev participated in an odyssey of training sessions at various Russian facilities, one of them located deep in a larch forest west of Moscow, at the same high latitude as Reindeer Lake. Three years later, a well-prepared Commander Krikalev and Flight Engineer Phillips formed the crew of the ISS’s Expedition 11.

  In total, the pair orbited Earth over tw
enty-five hundred times between April and September of 2005. The station’s pathway sliced across the planet at a continuous angle, like a spiral peel off an apple, topping out at latitude fifty-one and a half degrees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. The craft attained a maximum speed of more than seventeen thousand miles per hour, and its altitude varied from about two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty nautical miles above Earth—not nearly high enough, Phillips pointed out, to see the entire planet isolated in space. Instead, he and Krikalev observed ever-changing vistas, often recognizing familiar details, of their shared home.

  All told, their journey covered over seventy million miles. During the course of the trip, John Phillips became one of the most senior American space travelers, with a total of almost two hundred days aloft. Since his mission flew through summer in the Northern Hemisphere, Phillips did not have much chance of observing a strong aurora borealis. Instead, he was able to study the aurora australis of the Southern Hemisphere winter. Orbiting the earth every ninety minutes, he often saw some trace of the aurora. “If I could get to the viewing port right as the ISS cut over Tasmania or New Zealand, and looked beyond them into the Southern Ocean, the effects were there,” Phillips said. “Usually we had to glance at a downward angle to see the aurora, but occasionally we would pass directly through it.”

  Experience had taught him that the auroral oval is brightest just inside its perimeter. If you are standing on Earth near Reindeer Lake, and there happens to be an intense episode of geomagnetic storms, you are likely to witness bright-green sheets “dancing” just as the Cree described. Sometimes the intensity of the light can overload the sensory receptors of your brain, where neurons built for sight and hearing lie very close together. As the visual input from the aurora spills across both types of neurons, you believe that you are hearing as well as seeing the northern lights. That is the same kind of synesthesia that Thompson and his fur trade crew experienced, and may account for the “tossed jelly” sounds that he described at Lake Susquagemow.