A Wilder Time Read online

  As we walk and talk, an endless array of small meadows, tiny ponds, and new plants present themselves, offering botanical delights we had not expected. At one site, a thick blanket of dark green and tan moss is folded at the base of a six foot high outcrop. I am baffled by it, never having seen moss grow in such luxuriant folded forms. Then I realize the moss could not have grown that way. Instead, it must have grown on the outcrop surface, softly covering the rock face in a photosynthetic blanket. For decades, if not centuries, it grew undisturbed, but eventually it reached such a thickness that the weight of the blanket was more than the fragile connection between rock surface and plants could support. The mass of moss ultimately collapsed into a vegetative crumpled blanket resting at the foot of the now-barren rock face. The folded plant carpet is surrounded by bright yellow, finger-thick, feathered stalks of some unknown upright fungus. Were I a mycologist, I would be in heaven. Being simply a geologist, I pass through in a state of wondering bewilderment.

  Suddenly, from the distance comes the unmistakable crack and ring of rifle shots—the short, sharp reports almost being a counterpoint to our hammer blows on the outcrops. They accompany us for the next few hours.

  By late afternoon, we reach a rise that stands several hundred feet above and more than a mile away from the cove in which we had set up camp. We can see that the boat is anchored a short distance from shore. We wonder if Carsten has the seal, but we can’t tell from that distance.

  After another twenty minutes, we make it to the cove and camp. Carsten is on a stone shoulder that slopes into the water. The seal is laid out on the stone and he is carefully skinning it. His movements are precise and skilled. He makes sure the skin is properly cleaned, uncut, and that the meat is washed. Then he loads the skin and the cleaned and butchered carcass into the small skiff and heads to his cruiser. A short while later, he returns for us so we can have dinner on the boat.

  Carsten explains to Kai in Danish that he is going to prepare a local delicacy that we likely will not want. After a somewhat hesitant translation, we finally understand that he is preparing cleaned and boiled entrails with a few other ingredients. The smell, he is certain, will bother us. He excuses himself as we prepare our dinner. Kai takes over the responsibilities for cooking our meal in the galley while the skipper prepares his own meal outside on the fantail. Life lived in Greenland is integrated with the life of the sea; it is balanced and nuanced, and nothing is taken for granted.

  I am reminded of an experience that startled me on the first expedition I went on. We were about to leave from Sisimiut on a small fishing trawler. The day was chill; everyone was dressed in anoraks and parkas, knitted caps and gloves. We were loading supplies on the boat, handing them over the rail from the dock to our companions, who would secure them to bulkheads. Food boxes were stowed below. As I handed a stuffed backpack to a deckhand, I glanced across the water to a dock adjoining ours. Two men were repairing fishing nets, their ungloved hands nimbly knotting the line to eliminate holes. As I watched, one of the men turned around to the roof of the small cabin next to him and picked up a knife that lay next to the body of a small ringed seal. With the slightest motions, he sliced off a wedge of blubber and ate it, then returned to his work. It was his snack before heading out to sea. That seal would last for the days the two men would be fishing.

  ALONE AND DOWNWIND, CARSTEN EATS his meal outside. As we eat, we occasionally look over our shoulders at him, impressed by his gusto. Then, unexpectedly, he shows up at the door of the little galley with a plate of meat. Asking us if we would like to try a taste of the seal, he passes it around, and we each take a small slice of meat.

  What is on the plate looks like tough beef, very dense and with a distinct grain. There is little fat in it. An odd smell, slightly sweet and cloying, while at the same time gamy, emanates from it. I take a bite, expecting something close to what I vaguely remembered of reindeer that I had tasted years before. Although the texture is much like that of tough beef, and there is a kind of beeflike character to it, I am startled by the overwhelming and completely unexpected flavor of fish.

  To experience a place is to find nourishment there. A seal knows the subtlety of fish movement, of fish habits and patterns. Its brain is wired to hunt fish, knowing where fish are likely to be, what evasions they will make as they flee, what endurance they must have to get away. That inherited knowledge is the benefit of selected lessons from millions of years of successful and failed hunting. Inevitably, a seal’s experience of place, and how it moves within it, bares the imprint of what it seeks for food and what it eats; it lives life, in part, with the perspective of a fish.

  If I were to taste my own muscle tissue, what would I think? What would I learn about my experience of the world, what I seek and how I live, from what that taste would conjure? It is a certainty, as it is with the seals, that we have inherited ways of seeing, ways of looking at a landscape or clear water or the sky, that descend from evolutionary knowledge that relates to survival. We are the sum total of that inheritance and the expression of those lessons.

  Living in the wild heart of untouched spaces brings to life taste as a forgotten language and vocabulary that encompass the elements of place. Through that language, the history of where and how a life was lived can be written. The vocabulary of that language acknowledges the fauna and flora of place, the landforms and water features, the change of light with seasons.

  Belonging

  AFTER MORE THAN FOUR WEEKS, our time in the field is ending. The conflict about interpretations of the history of the region has been resolved, but new complexities need to be explored, the hints of deeper histories considered. We are eager to get on with the next phase of work, compiling our measurements and observations into a coherent chronicle, and studying and analyzing the suite of samples we have collected. There is, too, the excited anticipation of being back with families and friends, returning to the modern world and the conveniences it provides. Shortly, a helicopter will be here to fly us to Kangerlussuaq.

  Kai has marked out a landing site with a big X on the ground, using white cloth strips brought along for that purpose. The site is a short distance from where our tents stood—a small bench that steps out from the rock ridge I had climbed our first night in the field together. There is just enough space so the helicopter can land without smashing its rotor blades against the rock wall. This landscape is not hospitable to modern technology. The morning, gray and chill, with a light breeze blowing in from across the water, makes for a bitingly cold good-bye.

  The day before, we boxed up unused supplies and the equipment we would be flying out with. Hundreds of rock samples were wrapped in newspaper, labeled with identification numbers and the coordinates of where they came from, and packed into wooden crates. Arrangements had been made for the blue-hulled trawler that brought us into the field to pick them up later and take them back to Aasiaat for shipment to Denmark. We double-checked entries in the docket book to assure that accurate latitudes and longitudes were recorded and that the descriptions of the samples were consistent with our notes. When that was done, we collected all the trash and burned it on the beach at low tide.

  The sample boxes now stand as the sole remnant constructs attesting to our presence here. We took down our tents early this morning.

  Minutes before it is supposed to arrive, we hear the rapid thup-thup-thup of distant helicopter blades beating the air. The sound comes from across the water, miles to the south, echoing off the massive walls enclosing the fjord. We strain our eyes to see the copter, but we see nothing.

  A few days before, a group of three Greenlandic families, nearly the only people we have seen here, set up tents at the headland by the stream where we collected water and where we bathed. They had come to hunt reindeer. Our only contact with them was the day after they arrived.

  We had come back from the field late in the afternoon and found four of the kids standing on the bluff above where we stored our fuel and supplies. The kids watched as w
e beached the Zodiac, tied it up, and unloaded rocks and gear. We waved, but they kept their hands stuffed in their anoraks. Our stash of gear included extra life vests. As we organized our things and stacked them among the supplies, we discovered that one of the life vests we had left behind had been inflated. Curious young minds had found it all but irresistible—the small bright red plastic knob that had to be pulled to inflate the vest was just too tempting not to tug. I was sorry to have missed that moment.

  They hung around for nearly an hour, trying to decide whether to come to our camp and see who we were, while we cleaned up and started preparing dinner. But they never did. I regretted not having gone over to them to introduce myself.

  EVENTUALLY, WE SPOT THE HELICOPTER. It is heading directly at us, like a glistening red-and-white rocket targeting our insignificant outpost for obliteration. Within a few moments, it swoops over us, makes a steep diving turn, and settles onto the spot Kai marked. I glance over toward the small group of Greenlanders, wondering what they are thinking. They are all out, standing by their tents, watching.

  Within a couple of minutes, our gear is loaded and we climb into the chopper, buckle up, put on headsets, and lift off.

  As we ascend from camp, for a few brief seconds I can see the traces of our presence there—the flattened tundra where the tents had been, lines of crushed plants that were the trails we had made along repeatedly used paths. It is the intrusive geometry of lives lived in a delicate place.

  The flight is due south, back to Kangerlussuaq and the airport we flew into after leaving Copenhagen. We are flying at a little over a thousand feet, skimming saddles and ridgetops, grazing unknown surfaces. To the east, the white of the ice cap glares in the sun; it stands nearly a mile above us, forming a relentless horizon that will soon be simply a historical footnote. At times, we fly just a hundred feet above the ice front, close enough to see water gushing from its underbelly in muddy brownish gray rivers that lumber off toward the west, carrying their pulverized lithic load to resting places in a distant sea. On their passage through the land, they choke the rugged valley bottoms, dropping their coarse sand and gravel onto floodplains and valley floors, making new land at the edge of fjords, displacing the blue waters that flow with the flooding tide of oceanic currents.

  As we fly south, the clouds eventually vanish and a brilliant blue sky emerges. An endless staccato assault of almost blinding flashes sparkle up from the land—the low-lying morning sun reflecting off of pools and wet surfaces in the water-saturated terrain. I start to hunt for sunglasses, then change my mind—I don’t want to be leaving this place and have anything come between me and the experience of it, even though I am in a helicopter flying at twelve hundred feet, the rotor whirling above our heads at 400 rpm, its incessant thup-thup-thup playing in the background.

  About halfway to Kangerlussuaq, we pass over a sharp ridge and see a maze of trails in the tundra of the valley below us. They are reindeer migration paths, empty and otherwise featureless. And yet, they embody a history. They are the ephemeral writings, emblematic of the lives lived there, the elusive consequences of change and survival in an evolving land.

  To our left, the ice pursues its unending effort to disassemble the world’s largest island; to our right, beautiful sculpted valleys and sediment-filled fjords finger off toward the west. The diversity of that scenery underscores how inadequate purely analytical descriptions of natural processes can be.

  Suddenly, we cross a saddle in a ridge and see to the southwest, five miles away and a thousand feet below us, the concrete and tarmac of the Kangerlussuaq airport—an engineered construct designed to withstand extreme seasons.

  The helicopter begins to descend and turn. As we fly in, we see the 767 that will soon jet us across the North Atlantic. We will be in Copenhagen in time for dinner.

  Gently, the helicopter settles onto the tarmac. I unbuckle my seat belt and climb out, my bare hand resting on the painted aluminum skin of the chopper. Immediately, I am struck by the silky feel; the smooth, polished surface is like nothing I have touched in the weeks we have been camping. Although we are standing, more or less, on the spot from which we had entered the wilderness more than four weeks before, there is no sense that any of this is familiar.

  We pull our gear out of the helicopter and toss it in a van—it lands with a hollow metallic clunk. There in that diesel-fueled concrete compound is the essential expression of what we are returning to. My footpath scar across the tundra at our camp seems the definition of nothing.

  We are leaving an existence that was attentive to friendship, tides, winds, and the layering of clouds. The new world is one of separation from the natural flow of evolving landscapes and life, a place of borders and boundaries. Even the flat hardness of the tarmac seems odd—the feel of an irregular surface that offers a thousand ways to feel Earth has been intentionally obliterated.

  The van takes us across the airfield to the terminal/cafeteria/hotel. We walk into the building, where we check our bags for the flight to Copenhagen. At one end of the hotel are public facilities, available for a small fee. Money, a useless concept back in our little community, has the feel of an odd abstraction. We search for bills we had stashed in some zippered pocket weeks before.

  A mild claustrophobia haunts each step as I walk to the shower. After two turns down the rectangular corridor, I am dizzy and disoriented.

  Afterward, standing at the sink, preparing to shave off more than a month’s worth of beard, the absence of any breeze and the warm humidity of that closed space become even more oppressive. I open a window, which looks out on the rolling hills that are the eastern terminus of Kangerlussuaq Fjord, and am relieved at the rush of fresh, cool air.

  IMPRESSIONS IV

  It was better, I decided, for the emissaries returning from the wilderness . . . to record their marvel, not to define its meaning. In that way, it would go echoing on through the minds of men, each grasping at that beyond out of which miracles emerge, and which, once defined, ceases to satisfy the human need for symbols.

  —Loren Eiseley

  THE SCENE IN MY MIND IS OF THE LEDGE above that cliff face where the falcon and I met. In front of me, in the vast abyss of flowing air, swims that river of fish, migrating to their destiny. Existence there is insulated from the fears that permeate the populated world. What is spoken comes only from the vanishing voice of wild things in wild places, the phenomenon of thought an observation point.

  We hover in suspension, our thoughts and dreams bound by the surfaces of those things we know and see. We are the pioneer species that conceives there is a surface and something that it cloaks. Scraping shins on bare rock, bleeding from the touch of raw crystals, walking with saturated boots through thin air, all inform our experience and create what we see as the natural world. Ice blocks among the fishes, the shattered, screaming winds blasting against cliff faces, the ooze of juices from seal flesh, the sweet scents from the reproductive organs of flowering life—wilderness becomes, in our presence, the only threshold through which we can freely perceive the significance of our ability to reason, imagine poetry, and create what we cherish as beauty.

  Epilogue

  EARTH IS THE CONSTRUCT OF WANDERING STARDUST, accreted from the atomic debris of supernovae and the elemental winds of unknown stars. The gentle fall of interstellar particles, the collisions of comets and meteors and frozen water, gave rise to our planet in a rush of cosmic artistry just over four-and-a-half billion years ago.

  The creativity has not ceased; geology and life are the consequence. But to perceive and participate in such richness requires access to an entire spectrum that has become obscured by parking lots and buildings and city streets. To see the content of sunsets and horizons, termites and molecules and life responding to nature through its own creative prowess requires unshaped space. Without wilderness, the essential perspective that allows such seeing is lost.

  OUR FIELDWORK AND THAT OF OTHER GEOLOGISTS has allowed us to recognize the gross out
line of an ancient mountain-building story. To allow the voice of the bedrock to speak unconstrained requires that we look at the details still waiting to be seen at scales we cannot see with the naked eye. That is why we carry hammers and sample bags and labeling pens.

  From the samples we collected and shipped back to Denmark, we cut thin slabs and send them to special laboratories where they are glued to glass slides and ground down to the thickness of a human hair. The rock surface is then polished to the sheen of glass. These are “thin sections” through which light can pass, allowing the finest details of texture and form to be viewed and recorded.

  Gazing down a microscope at those slender pieces of rock, self-awareness is lost as the mind focuses on fantastical geometries of color and form that no human could have imagined or naked eye perceived. The beauty and fabric of that microscopic realm is a simple expression of the magic of coordinated arrangements of atoms in crystal cages. Hour after hour, as we try to read what has been preserved from the past in those mineral forms, the profundity of the enterprise presents itself. Minerals transforming from one assemblage to another are frozen in geometries that preserve unfolding processes that never reached equilibrium, attesting to the reality that nothing is complete; crystal faces press on enclosing neighbors, annihilating the possibility of empty space; successions of stable arrangements grow over and around one another, delineating changing conditions deep in the earth.

  But reconstructing history is more than tabulating sequences. We need a way to obtain an age for when a mineral formed or a texture developed. For rocks that have experienced more than three billion years of history, constructing that scaffolding of time requires a recording machine with a robust memory. Fortunately, the mineral zircon performs that function well.