A Wilder Time Read online

  The objective meaning of Greenland, expressed as simple facts, deserves consideration. That land of rock-fringed ice, if laid onto western North America, would extend beyond the northern and southern borders of the United States, and stretch from San Francisco nearly to Denver. More than 80 percent is buried under the only permanent ice sheet in the northern hemisphere. At its thickest, the ice is more than ten thousand feet deep and holds more than 10 percent of the world’s freshwater. The summit of the ice cap is over twelve thousand feet above sea level.

  More than half of Greenland extends above the Arctic Circle. It was the last settled major landmass on the planet, its first population reaching it about 4,500 years ago. It holds the distinction of being the least-populated region in the world, and is the only nation listed in the World Bank database with a value of zero people per square kilometer (the database presents all statistics as whole numbers). That same metric for the United States is 35 people per square kilometer; for the United Kingdom it is 265. Most of its fewer than sixty thousand permanent residents identify as members of the Inuit culture. The largest town is Nuuk, with 16,500 people. There are only seventy-eight towns, villages, communities, and settlements on the entire island. A number of them have fewer than fifty inhabitants. The Inuit culture identifies their country as Kalaallit Nunaat.

  Greenland’s culture is steeped in its fishing and hunting traditions, sustainably practiced for hundreds of years. Seal and reindeer are essential staples, providing nourishment and materials for clothing and limited commerce, the hunting done by individuals as part of a subsistence lifestyle. The art, photography, literature, and inherited myths of its indigenous Inuit peoples quietly offer perspective on their home and traditional practices. But in the absence of any significant capitalized trade, few nonnative people have access to it, or can see how it is changing.

  The ripple effect of distant decisions made by countries navigating the complex interactions of economics, morality, and the wild world extends even to a place as remote as Greenland. In 1983, in reaction to the attention given to the brutal commercial harvesting of baby seals in Canada, a ban on sealskin trading was imposed by the European Economic Community, followed in 2009 by a European Union ban on trade in seal products. The consequences were far-reaching, some of which were unintended. A loss of income from the sale of sealskins and other products devastated Greenland’s Inuit hunting culture. The extinction of the seal market diminished seal hunting, causing an explosive growth in seal populations. With a rapid expansion in the number of fish predators, fish populations consequently declined, impacting that component of their subsistence lifestyle, as well. Even with very recent modifications to the ban—those allowing Inuit cultures to pursue sustainable seal harvesting—the impact on income has been significant. Today, about 60 percent of Greenland’s economy is supported by an annual block grant from the Kingdom of Denmark, of which it is an independent member. Greenland remains a country struggling to return to a sustainable existence, but now with the added complexity of a rapidly changing climate, the challenge is formidable.

  WHAT FOLLOWS ARE MY EXPERIENCES of Greenland’s surfaces from six expeditions. The story unfolds in three parts, each part containing the suite of formative sensory experiences that shifted my perception. “Fractionation” documents the deconstruction of expectations, relating experiences that exposed the depth of my ignorance about knowing place. “Consolidation” describes the process of coming to terms with the reality that, as a product of organic and physical evolution, my ignorance is an integral part of being aware. “Emergence” derives from small epiphanies about our place in existence, what we can know of the world and what we cannot.

  That we have a place in this world implies responsibilities, but it does not signify meaning. The majestic power of wilderness is its ability to convey that seeming contradiction through the overwhelming beauty of evolution’s carelessness. That we have an impact on its unfolding is revealed in the reconstruction wilderness imposes upon itself when confronted by changes in climate that mankind has induced and to which wilderness must respond.

  The book is not chronological. Experiences that change perception accumulate in odd ways that are personal and often not initially understood. The reconstruction of a new way of seeing is piecemeal. Each insight or shifted perception fills a space in a timeless tapestry that will never be completed.

  Wilderness speaks with unmitigated honesty. Every belief and imagining that we bring with us as we enter such spaces also reflect back to us, but in a form that can be difficult to recognize. My hope in writing this book is that the value of truly pristine wilderness, as a place from which to sense how we each fit within the grand unfolding universe, will inspire its preservation. If we lose wilderness, finding our roots, personally and as a species, will be virtually impossible.

  IMPRESSIONS I

  Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.

  —George Bancroft

  ALL THAT WE SEE IS SURFACE. What we perceive as experience derives from light reflected, a product of events that have flowed to the present and become, in a moment, a shape seen. Life teaches us to extract texture and form, weight and warmth from that impression.

  But what is it that silently rests below that cosmic skin, composing the thing we sense? We reach toward the stars to understand why the sun rises, why winter comes, why we must die. And yet, what we find in each answer and insight is a deeper question, an underlying complex of mysteries that serve only to feed our imagination. With these fragments, we construct a body of knowledge about the components of our world, each of us building a unique framework that becomes the context for our individual lives, the thing upon which we hang notions of meaning.

  Through this process, we have come to realize that life is an unstoppable force that endlessly evolves, eventually achieving the emergence of mind from stardust and time. And yet, despite the stupefying significance of this revelation, we also see that, from a cosmic perspective, we are a trivial event. We are a speck on a flowing river of entropy that still gushes from an unfathomable beginning nearly fourteen billion years ago. We’re enthralled by a story we suspect the stars possess, but we remain unable to grasp its outline. We wander over landscapes, looking for histories the stones sequester, hoping there will be in them a flicker of an insight that will expose something worth cherishing.

  FRACTIONATION

  One thing had impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance that we had left were not important. There must be an infective quality in these things. We had lost the virus, or it had been eaten by the anti-bodies of quiet. Our pace had slowed greatly; the hundred thousand small reactions of our daily world were reduced to very few.

  —John Steinbeck

  Silence

  THE BOAT THAT BROUGHT US into the field was a fishing trawler chartered by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. It had a baby blue hull, a weathered, varnished wheelhouse that two people could cram into, and a worn wooden deck, onto which we had piled the backpacks, crates, tents, a few bags of fresh food, and other gear meant to sustain our little expedition. John, Kai, and I met the boat in Aasiaat, West Greenland, on the southern edge of Disko Bugt. Aasiaat is one of the largest towns in Greenland, with a population of just over 3,100 people. Walking through every street, passing every house, would take a few hours on a summer afternoon.

  Under the watchful eye of Peter, the skipper, we had spent half an hour loading the trawler, securing the gear, and inventorying before setting off into the iceberg-studded waters. The trip would take many hours, so we took turns napping in the tiny forecastle, where two bunks were tightly bolted to the bulkhead. The sound of the sea swishing by could be heard through the hull’s three-inch-thick oak planks. I slept for about an hour, then went back on deck to watch the scenery.

  The air was still and cool, the
water like glass under an overcast sky. Whales occasionally breached in the distance, feeding on schools of small fish at the surface. We passed by skerries, some with packs of huskies that had been left there for the summer by their masters. The sled dogs were nearly feral.

  I leaned against the peeling rail, mesmerized, the chug-chug-chug of the two-stroke diesel thumping in the background. I was warmly dressed in a field shirt, sweater, and fleece jacket, a woolen skullcap pulled down to my ears, my body braced against the forty-degree chill.

  As the islands passed, the world I was leaving behind tugged with an unexpected angst. I had been anticipating the expedition for months, looking forward to sharing with old friends what I knew would be daily discoveries in a virtually unexplored terrain. But an aching sorrow overwhelmed that excitement—my wife and daughter would not be seen or heard for months, the sweet pleasures of family life erased, the known small comforts of cooking meals together, sharing movies, reading the newspaper, laughing with friends at parties, taking Nina to the bus for school—gone.

  My contemplation was broken when the first mate came up and leaned against the rail next to me. His sand-colored hair was matted; his blue eyes blazed in a weather-beaten face. His nose, broad and flat, made it clear he had some history. His English was perfect, but with an accent I didn’t expect.

  “So, what’re you guys doin’ up here?” he asked. Despite the cold, he was dressed in a short-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.

  “We’re geologists,” I said, quickly recovering a semblance of composure. “We’re here to study the rocks.”

  He thought for a moment and then said, “Hmm. Lookin’ for gold?”

  “No, just interested in the history of the rocks.”

  He nodded and pursed his lips.

  “Why is that interesting?” he asked nonchalantly. He wasn’t looking at me—his eyes were on the slowly passing scenery.

  I explained that there was some debated evidence that a mountain system about the size of the Himalayas or the Alps had existed there nearly two billion years ago. Now all that was left were cryptic hints preserved in what might have been the deep roots of that old mountain system. After so much time, erosion had brought those potential roots to the surface, where we could study them to see if that story were true.

  “Mountains like that here? That’s really amazing . . . hard to believe,” he said as we both looked out at a rolling landscape that gave no hint that K2s and Eigers and Mount Everests had once soared there.

  “Where’re you from?” I asked. His Anglo complexion and accent made it obvious he hadn’t been born and raised here.

  “Sydney. I came here with my girlfriend five years ago. We were just tourists but hung around because it was so beautiful. I ran into Peter a couple of times and got to like him. He’s Swedish. Been here twenty-five years. He goes back to visit family in February but has to return here—no place else he can live. Our first year here, we took care of his house when he went back. When he returned, he offered me a job on his boat, and I took it.”

  He looked out over the water for a while and then said, “I can’t go back to Australia. It’s too hot.” He laughed. Then he got serious.

  “I love the life here. It’s free and open. There are too many people in other places. . . . People here take care of each other. But they understand that it’s what’s out there that matters.” He waved his hand at the horizon. “There’s a peace here, an emptiness that I’ve never seen anywhere else. . . . I can’t give that up now. Neither can my girlfriend. This is home now.”

  I looked out at the landscape and wondered what he felt as he looked at it. I loved my neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area, the streets and cafés and small shops, but that connection obviously paled in comparison with his passionate relationship to place.

  For a long while, nothing was said. Then he pushed back from the rail. “I better get back to work. Peter hates it if he’s payin’ me and I’m not doin’ somethin’ on the boat. Good luck. I hope you find what you’re lookin’ for out there.” He shook my hand and walked away.

  THE JOURNEY THAT HAD LEAD TO THAT MOMENT was a long one, stretching across years and half the globe. I had met Kai Sørensen nearly three decades earlier, in Oslo, Norway. He was from Denmark, escaping a complicated situation involving love and friendship, while simultaneously trying to pursue his scientific career in geological studies. He had come to the research institute where I was to find a mental refuge where he could quietly continue his research and reconstruct his life.

  I, too, was seeking change. I had just been through a divorce, started a new relationship, and finished my Ph.D. When the chance to pursue new research directions in Norway was offered to me, I jumped at it, craving a place where I could start over. I knew no one in Oslo, which provided the possibility of a monastic lifestyle, a quiet world where immersion in a science I was just beginning to understand could be an escape from a complex emotional past. Our somewhat similar state of emotional and cultural transience resulted in many discussions, a shared apartment, and a close friendship. Eventually, we were joined by a third, Julian Pearce, whose life path mirrored ours in many ways. We became an odd household of foreign friends. Each morning, we rode the bus to the research institute, ate lunch at the communal table of geologists on the third floor, and rode back at night to take turns making dinner. In the evening, we played hearts, which I nearly always lost, listened to Cabaret and Jesus Christ Superstar on Kai’s stereo, and sipped coffee enhanced with a shot or two of Linie aquavit. In that temporary setting, we found stability.

  THE DESIRE TO CHANGE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS was stimulated by a growing excitement I could not have anticipated when I began pursuing geology. During the first few years of my thesis work on the relatively brief sixty-million-year geological history of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, I slowly began to perceive the incomprehensible magnitude and beauty of Earth’s evolution. I was overwhelmed by the unstoppable, yet unimaginably slow, dynamism eloquently detailed in the bedrock backbone of landscapes. I became addicted to the thrill of experiencing unseen and unrecognized histories of much more ancient times. The position in Norway provided an opportunity to work on problems more profound than what my thesis research had considered. The work at the research institute in Oslo was a chance to deal with fundamental questions, such as how certain types of rocks exchanged chemical compounds with other rocks when buried tens of miles below the surface. It was an esoteric academic issue, of little interest to any but a handful of other researchers scattered around the world, but it also allowed me an opportunity to delve into something that had global implications, even if on a virtually insignificant scale.

  While involved in those studies, Kai would tell me captivating tales of the work he was doing in West Greenland in a terrain of very old rocks with a complex history. The setting, at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet in a place I knew nothing about, deeply intrigued me. He described mysterious patterns in rocks over two billion years old that seemed to record events very much like those happening near the land surface in today’s Himalayas or Alps. Those ancient events in Greenland seemed to have taken place many miles below the surface, possibly preserving hints as to what is happening today far below the jagged peaks of those present-day mountains. But there was no obvious plate tectonics context within which to fit those observations—the rocks were too old and too little was known about those ancient times to allow anything other than empty hypothesizing.

  His specialty was structural geology, which meant he focused his attention on the shapes, patterns, and orientations of layers in the rocks. He and his colleagues had reached the conclusion that the area was a complex zone where it seemed a continent had literally fractured, with one part slipping past the other for many tens or hundreds of miles shortly after the mountains had formed. It was an area of intense deformation.

  I had a background that could complement their structural work, providing details about temperatures and pressures the rocks experience
d as they went through that extreme deformation. My expertise was in metamorphic processes, which meant using the minerals in rocks to decipher how hot they had gotten and the paths they had followed deep into the earth and back again. Working in laboratories with microscopes and X-ray spectrometers and electron beams, I could tease from the rocks their journeys through vast times and great distances deep into the earth and back to the surface. Just before returning to the U.S. I convinced him to let me work in the lab on the rocks he had collected, hoping one day it would lead to visiting the place.

  Eventually, I became friends with John Korstgård, a colleague of Kai’s who also was primarily a structural geologist but who had extensive experience in geochemistry and mineralogy. The three of us made a good team.

  After a few years, we obtained funding to travel to Greenland and then worked there together, enjoying our collaboration. For nearly a decade, we pursued common interests, publishing a few papers and giving joint presentations at conferences. But over time, our attentions were distracted by differing career paths and life choices. By the late 1990s, our communication was only occasional, and the work in Greenland a fond memory.

  Unexpectedly, Kai got in touch with me in 2000 about plans for a new expedition. At that time, he was involved with the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which was sponsoring a regional research effort in West Greenland. He asked if I would be interested in joining him and John in new work there. It would be a chance to expand our earlier work into areas we had not been able to explore before because of budget and time constraints. In passing, he also mentioned that there was some controversy about the earlier interpretations he and others had made about the significance of the zone of intense deformation; resolving that controversy would also be part of the effort.