A Wilder Time Read online

  Suddenly, the river of fish exploded, scattering like a starburst in all directions, swimming away from a single point right in front of me. Frantic panic seemed to possess each and every fish. The waters churned with flailing tails and fins; if the fish had had voices, the air would have been filled with terrified screams.

  Then, before I even had a chance to rise up on my elbow, a gaping mouth shot up from the depths of the opaque water. A huge Arctic sculpin was attacking the school. In a flash, the dark fish grabbed one of the stragglers and, with the herring wriggling uselessly in its five-inch jaws, slowly sank back into the murky water.

  The Arctic sculpin, or ulk, is not a pretty fish—it is mainly bony head, with a spiny body and a mouth of sharp teeth. It is a near-bottom dweller, darkly colored in gray-browns and blackish splotches, an opportunistic hunter of the slow and small. It was the first time I had ever seen one.

  For perhaps ten seconds, the scattered fish swam in confusion, not knowing what to do or where to go. Then, without any evident signal, the river of fish reassembled and proceeded to become what it had been moments before, an undulating pattern of life pursuing an unknown destiny, oblivious of the death that had just occurred.

  A fish is a simple creature, lacking any ability to dream of success or the future; it does not imagine impassioned stories or far-off destinations. What, then, would it feel like to fear death if there was a complete absence of anticipation? What was the individual sensation that compelled unconscious migration that, in the end, served solely to assure species survival? What was the experience of following others, moving toward something unknown, something formless and indefinable, and yet irresistible? What was life in the absence of thoughtful desire or imagination?

  That life-and-death drama repeated itself four more times while I sat there. Each time, the moving ribbon of animals exploded in a starburst of life, the ulk rose, killing another fish, and then sank back into the murky depths. When I left, there was still no end in sight of that river of fish.

  THAT NIGHT, BACK IN THE KITCHEN TENT amid the sounds of Kai opening packets of freeze-dried soups and vegetables for dinner, the hiss of the boiling water on the Primus playing in the background, I marveled at the universality of life-and-death struggles playing out in that landscape. Bird bones, skulls of Arctic foxes, and reindeer antlers littered the tundra surface—everywhere we went they punctuated in bleached white the surface of darker shades—testament to the process that drives evolutionary change. The future is incessantly born from a surface of bones.

  What we are a part of cannot be known in our engineered and manufactured world. We are the product of billions of years of unfolding change unaffected by our own intent. To truly understand what we are, and what we are part of, requires knowing that unshaped wild—that is where the bones lie.

  ONCE DINNER WAS FINISHED, JOHN AND I took the plates and utensils and kitchen pots out to our favorite dish-washing rock. John washed. I usually did an inadequate job getting all the food bits off, so we agreed I would be the designated dryer. As I waited for each pot and plate, I gazed across the water, lost in my own thoughts.

  After some moments, I turned toward John and saw a cloud of mosquitoes swarming behind him, riding the lightest of breezes just downwind. I picked up a soapy plate and swung it in the air at the buzzing cloud of insects. I turned the plate over and showed it to John. Thirty-seven mosquitoes were flattened on the six-inch soapy surface. John smiled, then took the plate, rinsed off the bugs, and tossed the water on the tundra. Perhaps, after all, the distinction between the ulk and me was, in the grand scheme surrounding us, not as great as I might have wished.

  IMPRESSIONS III

  In Memoriam

  There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

  O earth, what changes thous hast seen!

  There where the long street roars, hath been

  The stillness of the central sea.

  The hills are shadows, and they flow

  From form to form, and nothing stands;

  They melt like mist, the solid lands,

  Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson

  A SMALL TUNDRA EMBANKMENT a few feet thick is to my left, a cobbled beach to my right. Next to my knee, four bones, bleached and flaking, stick out of the tundra like skeletal fingers—a vertebra, part of a rib, and two others I cannot identify. On the surface, a small tuft of white flowers sways in a light breeze, growing in a soft mat of dying, limp grasses. The bones protrude from the tundra about halfway down. The rib fragment is longer than my thumb and about as thick. From its size, it is likely that the remains are those of a reindeer.

  The tundra began growing six thousand years ago, as the last ice age ended and the frozen glacial masses melted back in recession. For the bones to be so deeply buried in the tangled chaos of roots and floral carcasses, the animal must have died three or four thousand years ago.

  It was at that time the first humans were settling Greenland, crossing from the islands of northeastern Canada. Before that, reindeer and musk ox freely migrated throughout that land. Would they have been fearful of the skin-clad strangers? Would they have run, or stood, curiously gazing at a carnivore they had never seen before? A landscape that had been theirs for thousands of years and the resulting inheritance of survival strategies honed by existence in a human-free world were beginning to be challenged. Looking at the bones, I wonder if I might be seeing the vestige of one of those early encounters.

  Over the millennia, plants have feasted on the remnants of the reindeer, rearranging elements and compounds from animal flesh and bone into plant stalks, stamens, pistils, and leafy forms. What was not captured or useful seeped back to the salty fjord. Tidal cycles and winds circulated to the deep oceans the escaped compounds, freeing them to flow through sediments, plankton, and whales. The less soluble white and flaking bone preserved the rest.

  I raise my eyes and watch blocks of ice drift on the gray surface of the fjord, water on water in a dance choreographed by moon, sun, and sea.

  EMERGENCE

  You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.

  —Annie Dillard

  Tide

  THE SILENCE OF WILDERNESS IS NOT JUST the absence of sound. It is a storm of voices we cannot hear because we lack the organs to hear them. In the vastness of that space rests the clatter of unfulfilled possibilities, living and not, animate and still—the echo of the dinosaurs, the mumbling of trilobites, the whoosh of pterodactyls on the wing.

  As I climb out of my tent and head off to see if someone has made coffee, the calmness in the air is sobering. Walking across the short tundra span to the kitchen tent, engulfed in that magnificent silence, the frailty of our four small tents is striking. Huddled on the surface, temporary, fragile, and vulnerable, each tent is anchored by a handful of aluminum pins stuck six inches into the spongy tundra. Seeing them, it is difficult to escape the magnitude of our insignificance.

  As I bend over to crawl through the tent door, the aroma brings a sense of relief—Kai has the coffee ready—the smell in the tent is luscious. John comes in a few minutes later and we start making plans for the day.

  Seven miles west of camp is Tunertoq, an island that we have not explored. It lies along what may be the northern edge of the shear zone and becomes the destination. As we eat our usual breakfast of raw rolled oats, a bit of powdered milk and sugar, followed by some combination of bread, crackers, cheeses, and a bit of jam, we make plans for which headlands and bays to visit in order to find more of that edge, and try to gauge how much time we will need. Mapp
ing the geometry of the shear zone’s boundary is necessary if we are going to describe the form of the collision zone. Once we have a tentative plan, lunches are packed, we collect hammers and compasses, GPS units, sample bags, and the rest of our gear, then head off to the cobbled beach where the Zodiac is secured.

  John pulls the boat in and climbs aboard. Kai follows; then I untie the line and push the Zodiac out and jump in with wet boots. After a few pulls on the starting cord, the outboard roars to life, briefly bellowing a plume of blue smoke that drifts off over the water. With the motor idling, John shifts into reverse and slowly backs us out into the fjord. Kai and I settle in the bow, each taking a side. Assured everything is organized, John shifts gears, slowly turns the boat into the fjord, and opens the throttle. With a raging scream, the engine roars to life.

  As the boat gains speed, the bow drops down and spray flies. We skim over the water, barely touching the surface. The fjord is like glass, the swell from the Davis Strait hardly noticeable. Sun sparkles on the drops of water flying in our wake, a million glittering water stars shimmering in the cool morning air. Kai and I pull down our caps, turn up our collars, and zip our anoraks as the boat-made wind wrestles with us.

  Although the thrill of discovery invades every emotional space, more profound is the sense of wonder that we are there at all. An ultimate purity of place pervades experience in that emphatic terrain of rock, water, ice, and life. Beauty becomes overpowering, cutting into the heart. An urgent restlessness insinuates itself into the moment.

  How can it be that organic chemicals and a handful of trace elements have it within them to assemble a living structure that looks into a landscape and experiences wonder? What does it mean that a creature knows there is such a thing as beauty and that it resides in the deepest wilderness? It is not hard to understand the evolutionary advantage of experiencing a sense of serenity when wandering into a place of security and abundance. But here, life is harsh, survival a struggle, yet the deepest sense of awe and peace washes over me as the magnificent scenery glides by.

  TUNERTOQ ISLAND IS TWENTY MILES LONG and four wide, elongate west to east, lying on the north side of Arfersiorik Fjord. Behind it, an intricate latticework of fjords and bays stretches north and east for forty miles, eventually ending at the edge of the inland ice. There, immense rivers emerge from under the ice cap, gushing meltwater into the fjords, freshening the salty sea. When the tides are ebbing, that complex of water veins and arteries feeds into Arfersiorfik a massive amount of meltwater and captured sea. At flood tide, the flow is reversed and that fjord supplies the fluid that sustains the inland waterways.

  The island is an obstruction in that complex liquid lattice, an immense and solid bottleneck situated exactly where the water tries to flow into and out of Arfersiorfik. The inland seas have only narrow passages at either end of the island through which they must flow to get in or out. Given that the tidal range can easily be twenty feet in Greenland, these passages can see vast amounts of water roaring through them when tidal flow is at its highest.

  JOHN, WEARING HIS SIGNATURE BLUE BASEBALL CAP and sunglasses, sits to starboard of the outboard. Kai and I balance the weight in the rubber boat by adjusting our positions to keep us on an even keel and the bow low at high speed. Survival suits are tucked next to us in their bags. On windy days or when there is a lot of chop, we wear them, since being dumped into those icy waters can result in hypothermia and quick death. But today, with the glassy surface gloriously reflecting the morning sun, a very low swell running, and calm winds, those cumbersome suits are stowed away.

  Suddenly, as though slamming into an invisible wall, the boat nearly stops in the water, skewing sharply from one side to the other. John is thrown forward, pulling the handle of the motor down, and the prop swings up out of the water, shrieking piercingly as the engine revs up. Kai and I catapult over the side and are nearly thrown into the freezing water before we grab the hand ropes on the side pontoons. We struggle to haul ourselves back in, rolling onto the floorboards with a thud. The boat jerks from side to side, swaying and bucking as though it is trying to get rid of us. With deep breaths and shock, we scramble back to our places and look back at John. My first thought is that he is playing a joke on us, but I know that makes no sense—he has a sense of humor, but risking throwing us in the water is not his style. As Kai and I try to get settled, the boat keeps up its crazy swaying, tossing us from side to side. Both the deep furrows on John’s brow as he scrambles back into position next to the engine, and his intense, searching gaze to starboard make it obvious that something is wrong.

  He quickly throttles back the engine and turns the bow toward the small passage we are just beginning to cross at Tunertoq’s eastern end. As the boat settles down, he powers up the outboard a bit and looks at us.

  “Tidal current,” he says grimly.

  We look in the direction of his gaze. The surface of the passage is like a roiling river. Huge boils of water bubble up in a fast-moving current, negating any evidence that there was, somewhere out there, a glassy-surfaced fjord. Our timing could not have been worse—we are there at the peak flow of an ebbing tide. The flood of water from behind the island and into the fjord is at its strongest, cutting a sharp edge between itself and the somnambulant fjord seas it struggles to insert itself into. The boundary between invader and invaded is sharp and insistent; it is that boundary we have collided with, plowing into it at full speed.

  Cautiously, John angles the bow a bit more toward the west and guns the engine enough so that we can make slow headway against the current. The boat dips and slews but eventually settles into a motion that is not as jarring. Around us, the water chaotically roils.

  We laugh a bit nervously, and sit up a little straighter. Anxiously, I say, “That was impressive,” to which Kai replies, “It still is.”

  Kai and I sit attentively, hands tightly holding the side ropes, tensely aware that things are not really under control, but relieved that the small boat is stable. John skillfully works the outboard, maneuvering cautiously through the current. We look ahead, watching the turbulent water as though searching for something but not having a clue what it might be we are looking for.

  Then, as though emerging from behind a curtain, a vaguely dangerous presence asserts itself. There is no doubt it has been there all the time, but the more immediate need to keep from being thrown into the water was the only thing we thought about. Now, in a more relaxed state, perception expands and we sense a threat.

  The sound of loud thunder shakes us so we look to the skies, searching for thunderheads, but we see none. The sky is mainly blue, with cotton puffs of clouds lightly sprinkled about. But the sound is pervasive, reverberating all around us, and does not stop, a deep-throated, pounding rumble.

  Our Zodiac is made of inflated rubber pontoons; they form the pointed bow and the sides. Two other inflated cross tubes span the inside for strengthening, but they also serve as benches. The floor is a rubberized fabric over which thin boards are wedged to give stability and rigidity. It is up through that flooring that the thunder booms.

  We quickly realize that the sound must be coming from huge boulders propelled by the rushing tide, tumbling over the hard rock walls and bottom of the fjord, sculpting out of the bedrock gneisses and schists a submerged secret landscape. Minute after minute, the pounding rumble echoes up through the water, through our little boat, and into the cool air. We look at one another and at the rushing water, listen to the sounds, and hunker down a little more. John revs the engine a bit, and we make our way closer to shore. Carefully, we cruise along about a stone’s throw out.

  AS A CONSEQUENCE OF OUR OWN ACTIONS, we are riding along a surface that flows through a world built by forces that outstrip our ability to grasp them, exquisitely vulnerable to death. Had we been thrown out of the boat, we would have been swept away and died in minutes. The tidal roar adds an orchestral emphasis—survival here is little more than related coincidences.

  Within the water
upon which we ride, atoms that had once been part of the rock enclosing the sea were scraped from surfaces by pounding boulders, thereby released to float freely with the tides. In a dialogue framed by simple thermodynamics, they mingle with other atoms whose origins were wind-blown dust, interstellar particles, dissolving dead animals, and decaying plants. They converse in ways we neither comprehend nor perceive. Even so, their discussions will evolve into unities, becoming things that construct living forms or chemical sediments or simple dissolved molecules. They flow into depths, rise to the surface of the sea, and evaporate. They become snowfall on the high Himalayas, and cause the seasonal floods of the Ganges. And occasionally, they become part of us.

  WE SAIL ON, THE VOICE OF THE TIDES RUMBLING in the background. We round several small points of land and cross small embayments, looking for outcrops with enough exposure to let us prowl through their history. We are moving through a world barely touched by science; only the vaguest idea exists of what might be here.

  Then, fifty yards away and across a small bay, we spy bare rock running from the water’s edge to an eroding cover of tundra about one hundred feet inland. Quickly, we land and head to the outcropping rock, intrigued and excited.

  Exposed in that lithic fringe is a pattern so striking, our eyes wander back and forth over it, as we exclaim repeatedly how incredible it is. Bands of pink, white, gray, tan, and black, some no more than a fraction of an inch wide, some several feet thick, draw the eye along stretched-out, languid, folded forms, flowing as though the bedrock had once been as soft as butter. I feel as though I am in the presence of unencumbered, spontaneous artistry, a place where some creative genius has found its rhythm and manically painted from inspired passions, using fluid rock as its medium. Every step we take is a halting one, each new square foot possessing a different form or pattern of colors. We crawl on hands and knees, trying to grasp the significance and history of that place. From a scientific point of view, it is a treasure. From an aesthetic point of view, it is a masterpiece. Our quantitative world has seamlessly become enmeshed with an ethereal realm, dissolving into a Dalíesque fluidity. What we are doing no longer has boundaries; everything the mind can embrace is present here.