A Wilder Time Read online

  Although I was not directly involved in research in Greenland at that time, I followed the research that was published, simply out of personal interest. I was aware of a few papers that had appeared that presented interpretations of the history that were inconsistent with what I had learned from Kai and John and some of their colleagues, but I had dismissed them. I had assumed those papers were simply offering options for consideration and had not been taken very seriously by the research community. I had no idea that a deeper personal conflict was hidden behind the scenes.

  Craving a return to Greenland, and to work closely again with John and Kai, I jumped at the chance to join their expedition. For years, I had been quietly nagged by memories of unanswered questions in the work we had pursued.

  Standing at the rail of the boat, watching the skerries float by, I could not have anticipated that we were on the first leg of a journey that would carry us more than fifteen years into the future.

  WHEN WE REACHED THE SITE of our planned base camp, the skipper pulled the trawler into a cove and we off-loaded the gear, using a small skiff. It took several trips, but within thirty minutes all the supplies were stacked at the foot of a small bluff on the beach. When we were finished, we shook hands with the mate and the skipper and said our good-byes.

  Our campsite sat on a narrow, ragged bench that ran along a stretch of the northern coast of Arfersiorfik Fjord. We were ten miles west of the inland ice cap, sixty miles from the nearest Inuit settlement, and far enough above the Arctic Circle that the sun would not set for weeks.

  A chill evening breeze blew. I turned up the collar of my parka, jammed my hands into its pockets, and climbed the small bluff up to the bench to watch the trawler sail off. As the blue-hulled boat headed away, back to civilization, a bittersweet melancholy drifted over me. Our last concrete connection to the modern world was that boat, and in the churning of its prop wash, that connection was dissolving.

  We were in a landscape of long, rolling outcrops, tundra plains and pockets, massive rock walls and glaciated peaks. The setting had the feel of a flooded Yosemite Valley: dramatic, austere, and beautiful. Small waves splashed along the cobbled shore, becoming a cadenced auditory backdrop.

  Vaguely remembered serene experiences, filtered through years of longing to return, now confronted reality. The crystalline fjord water was bitterly cold; the rhythmic wash of water over stones made for lethally slick algal slimes; the beauty of the wild world was empty of affection. A lonely solitude blanketed the land as completely as the late-afternoon clouds covered the sky.

  I walked from the bluff over to the rocky beach where we had piled our supplies and joined John and Kai, who were carrying food boxes, an emergency radio, tents, sleeping bags, backpacks, hammers, sample bags, and notebooks—the minimal necessities for our four-week expedition. John and Kai, in their inimitable way, had organized where each type of supply should be stacked, and how. In this wild place, some order was being imposed.

  Kai was the anointed cook. His sturdy, rounded self spoke of a joyful respect for good food. He smiled often, and joked about how well we would eat as he strategically placed bags of onions and potatoes next to the cooking gear. Every food box was opened, its contents quickly evaluated, and a decision made about where it should be placed relative to the stove. Each of us enjoyed cooking, but for Kai it was integral to his spirit. Allowing him the privilege of cooking for us served us all well.

  Much of our work would focus on rocks along the shore, where tidal scour had exposed, in cleanly washed surfaces, the patterns and minerals we had come to study. Such work required a Zodiac—an outboard-powered inflatable boat that could easily land on rocky beaches. John, the dedicated mechanic among us, unhesitatingly took on the role of Zodiac “captain.” His beard, already growing into a grizzled stubble of gray and black, and his thinly lined face made him look the part. Taller than Kai and I, with a slightly gruff demeanor and dry humor, and a face vaguely reminiscent of the silent movie star John Gilbert, John projected an authority he embraced but did not demand. Invariably, he wore a blue baseball cap, which covered his very bald head, and a red anorak. Unlike Kai, whose strong Danish accent made it obvious where he was from, John had a deep voice that reflected the years he had lived in Canada, his accent attesting to a confusion of cultures. As I joined the two of them to organize our gear, John pointed to where each box should go.

  Home was now a bench of tundra-covered rock a quarter of a mile long and two hundred feet wide, abutting a west-running ridge that disappeared under the ice. The late-afternoon Arctic sun was in descent toward the western horizon, struggling to warm the world cast in the shadows of a thick cloud cover and dusky light.

  The permanent daylight was a liberation. Although the body’s diurnal clocks are at first confused, and anxiety about whether or not sleep will be possible jangles nerves, an unexpected calm eventually settles in. The dictatorship of night’s blackness, which constrains movement and limits sight, is banished. Clocks and time of day become unnecessary burdens. The freedom of timelessness seeps into life. We got used to taking strolls along beaches at two in the morning, with billowing globes of clouds backlit by the sun reflecting off of glassy fjord surfaces. Watching prowling Arctic foxes stealthily search for sustenance in the spongy tundra at midnight, clearly visible in the pale light, would become addictive.

  AFTER UNPACKING, WE TOOK A BREAK FOR COFFEE. Kai put a pot of water over a hissing Primus set up on a flat stone. As we stood around waiting for the water to boil, red plastic mugs with a spoonful of instant Nescafé in our hands, we mused about our abrupt change in circumstances. Just twenty-four hours earlier, we had been in Copenhagen, one of the world’s most sophisticated cities, where John met us at the airport for the flight to Greenland. Shortly before meeting John, I had been sipping cappuccino at a sidewalk café and enjoying the bustle of tourists along the quay in Nyhavn. I had flown in from San Francisco a few days before to help Kai finalize the logistics for the trip. Now, isolated from the rest of the world, removed from everything a “normal” day would bring, the meaning of normal became ambiguous. We were at the beginning of days of discovery, of seeing things never before seen. Excitement was implicit in every comment and laugh. The water finally boiled and Kai poured it into our cups, the smell of the instant coffee pungently punctuating the Arctic air.

  But there was also an undercurrent of tension.

  “It is nice to be back.” Kai sighed as he looked across the fjord. His ruddy face glistened from the afternoon’s efforts. A thin smile on John’s face acknowledged the passing of decades. He was looking off in the same direction as Kai. I nodded, and uttered a slight “Hmm.”

  Across the fjord, nearly five miles away, a small ice field glowed white against the grayish greens and reddish browns of the tundra it rested on. We absentmindedly watched it as we mused about plans and what we might find. Eventually, Kai’s comments turned to the controversy that had briefly been mentioned long before. He glanced down at the plant-covered ground and slowly ran a boot across it. He spoke with strong emotions about published interpretations of the geological history that conflicted with years of work and the field observations of two generations of researchers. He quickly alluded to the fact that those new conclusions were based on a single season in the field, and lacked the in-depth direct scrutiny earlier studies had benefited from. It was our task, he said, to break new ground, with more detailed attention given to specific locations and features that might resolve what was clearly a conflicted set of hypotheses.

  I asked what papers he was talking about. Although I knew there was some disagreement about details of the geology—it is a science, after all, and debates keep things honest—there wasn’t any specific paper I could recall that justified this attention.

  John said that he had the papers with him and that he would bring them out later, his baritone voice taking on a serious tone. Then, breaking into a smile, he swept his hand across the scene in front of us. “I think this is a time
to just be glad that we’re back.”

  A few comments on the amazing beauty and feel of the place were made, but most of what was sensed was barely shared through small jokes and quiet nods. The emotions we felt were close to our hearts. After our break, we went back to work, setting up our individual tents.

  By eleven, we were exhausted from thirty hours of travel and work. We said good night, headed to our tents, and climbed into sleeping bags.

  Sleep came quickly, but I woke up within an hour. Tense from the excitement, sleep became impossible. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, pulled on clothes, an outer jacket, and boots, and slipped out of the tent. Shouldering the small backpack that was tucked under the tent’s rain fly, I struck out for a hike up the ridge to our north to calm my mind. In the dusky light from a cloud-veiled midnight sun, colors and edges were muted, but the grandeur of the landscape was not diminished.

  ARCTIC TUNDRA, THAT UNIQUE ORGANIC COLLAGE of grasses, mosses, sedges, dwarf plants, and lichens, is often portrayed as dreary, as if it were a monotone of color and texture. But that is not the case. The tundra biome flourishes as a botanical riot, an evolutionary chaos rich with successes and possibilities—it is a deep velvet softening to the stone margins of a hard-edged world.

  Mosses insinuate themselves into available spaces. Black, white, and orange lichens, their edges brittle and curled, cover in floret forms exposed rocks and branches. Arctic willows, ragged and squat, scatter about opportunistically, standing with quiet arrogance—at a height of two feet, they are the tallest plant. Flowers of white, pink, purple, red, and yellow are everywhere, sparkling like brightly colored gems scattered on a green-gray world. Clumps of cotton grasses, with their puffy white manes on waving eight-inch stalks, assert themselves with a graceful confidence.

  Each plant extends roots into the decaying remnants of diverse ancestors, a living boreal flesh mantling thousands of generations of organic detritus. They huddle in hollows and drape over rocks, ponding water in small catchments, carpeting that cold world in a damp lushness.

  Time is frozen in such a place. Whether I walked in a twenty-first-century landscape or a primordial, Ice Age epoch could not be told. That inability to know time riddles the experience of place, dislocating perception into an insecurity that, in my case, made it seem as though I had trespassed into some other world.

  By the time I reached the first rock outcropping, the effort of pulling soggy boots out of the thick, wet tundra had grown tiring. My heart was pounding and I was breathing hard. Leaning against the twenty-foot stone face, I worked to catch my breath, rest, and expand my sense of what was around me.

  The stone wall was nothing unusual, just the common gray layered and recrystallized gneissic rock we would see so much of over the next few weeks. Between the clusters of lichen colonies, bare rock lay open to the elements. I took out my hand lens and looked at a magnified rock face studded with broken crystals, excavated and sculpted by millennia of winter ice and summer rains. Perfectly shaped crystal faces and cleavage edges formed a microscopic, raw-edged sharpness to the rounded surface of the bedrock rib that was the ridge.

  The scramble to the top of the wall involved a few minutes of light exertion, but it came at a cost. My fingertips, palms, and knuckles were bleeding in the time it took for that trivial ascent. I dropped my backpack, pulled out my gloves, and put them on over sore hands.

  At the top of the small bench, I looked up and saw that the ridge I had seen from camp and thought was the top was only one of several shoulders below the actual ridge crest, which was several hundred feet above me. What was to have been a short saunter was going to be a longer hike. With a deep breath, I put the backpack back on and set off.

  Walking through that land became a stroll along ponds of slowly seeping water deeply tinted with brown tannins, glistening. Some were enclosed in pillowed banks of deep green mosses, the somnambulant waters barely rippling as tiny streams trickled in and out. Other small catchments were little more than slight depressions in a saturated, vegetated surface. I could not escape the uneasy feeling that I was intruding into private gardens of invisible beings, constructed by them for the sole purpose of quiet meditation.

  Moths and spiders and huge bumblebees appeared out of nowhere, gamboled about, and then instantly vanished. Flying creatures darted from flower to flower, briefly setting them in motion from the backwash of beating wings. But, except for the bumblebee, whose hum became a racket at close range, the visitors were silent.

  Arctic wrens came and went, nervously concerned at my presence. They appeared out of the tundra from hidden places, fearfully attempting to distract my attention, worried I would ravage their nests. They had nothing to fear—I was incapable of finding those exquisitely hidden weavings of grasses and twigs.

  As I walked on, up and over two more small shoulders and the intervening expanses of tundra, concern about the impact of my boots on that delicate place began to loom in my mind. Each step seemed an intrusion, punching down thousands of years of undisturbed growth in a brief, violently invasive moment. Guiltily, I turned to see the damage. It was stunning to realize there was nothing to see. With each step, that wet and soggy world yielded to the presence of a wandering mortal, momentarily exposing its most intimate details to daylight it had not known for centuries, but was hidden again as the boot was lifted and the yielding mass restored itself to its original form. In that world, I was no more significant than an afternoon breeze.

  At first impression, the ability of life to thrive at that high latitude challenged reason and logic. But as the insignificance of my presence sank in, it became obvious that it was the toughness and tenacity of that living world that defined the reason and logic of the place. The biased patterns of thought I had inherited from another context were little more than low-level cosmic noise, a background hiss. I had yet to grasp the magnitude of my ignorance.

  After perhaps thirty minutes, I reached the last wall of rock. Tired and sweating, breathing hard, legs burning, I climbed the last forty feet of outcrop.

  The ridge crest was a slightly rounded, broad platform of nearly barren white and gray gneiss, randomly covered by the brittle lichens. I scrambled to the top and raised my eyes.

  My breath caught in my throat. Extending from horizon to horizon, for nearly a hundred miles, untouched wildness rested silently in exquisite vulnerability. Stupefied, arms outstretched in submission, I slowly turned around, trying to take in the magnificence of the vista. Tears welled up as tangled emotions—sadness, joy, liberation, humility, anguish—flooded through me.

  I turned toward the east and was surprised to see that the clouds ended at the land’s edge, where it was subsumed by the ice sheet. Some mysterious atmospheric phenomenon demanded that, under the set of conditions that day contained, clouds that hung over land and sea would dissipate over the reflective frozen surface. Brilliant deep blue sky skimmed over the ice, framing the blinding white light of its crevassed surface.

  From north to south, the sharp edge of the ice front zigged and zagged across the ground, marking a jagged boundary between worlds of conflicting expectations. In places, cliffs of white-blue ice soared hundreds of feet for miles, only to give way gradually to gentle ice hills and valleys that met the rock surface with slightly sloping indifference.

  In contrast, the landscape to the north, west, and south was a mosaic of fjords, lakes, rivers, and mountains. The gray sky reflected off meandering waters, while the dark, shadowed land rose and fell in a pattern of parallel sharp-walled ridges. West-running fingers of ice-sculpted bedrock pointed toward the Davis Strait just over the far western horizon, the flow of landforms giving the scene a feeling of movement, a sense that some dynamic was playing out, even in the absence of motion.

  To the south was the fjord on which we had just sailed. That fjord, as with all fjords there, was cut into solid bedrock, confined to flow in narrow channels by sheer walls hundreds or thousands of feet high. Its breadth in places was more than five miles;
in others, less than two. Although our camp was right at the water’s edge, it lay hidden in the lee of that first small ridge I had scrambled up.

  For long moments, I lived in a fantasy that no other person existed, that the lone human soul in all the world stood on that ridge, mesmerized by the bewildering wildness of everything surrounding him. As I stood there with those feelings, a vague unease settled in, one that would come and go throughout my time in Greenland. That feeling was not a sadness per se; rather, it was a quiet longing for things humanity has no words for, but with which wilderness settings overflow. There was a sense of missed opportunities, of an inability to connect with something profound, as though what I was immersed in shimmered incomprehensibly at the edge of sight.

  OVER TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, during the last Ice Age, the landscape I stood on had been buried under thousands of feet of ice. Every valley and ridge that could be seen, every hillock and defile had been the floor to that ponderously migrating sea of frozen water. This was a young, inherited landscape, shaped by the grinding ice of that ancient time. As the Ice Age melted away and exposed the bedrock, the sculpted land provided footholds for pioneer plants. Season after season, as plant life slowly but incessantly blossomed, withered, and died, plant remnants found anchor in ice-wedged cracks, lichen attached to bare rock, and dust settled into pockets and irregularities, nurturing an unimagined future that included our little camp.

  As land plants took hold, Neanderthals and emergent Cro-Magnons may have walked over the hillocks and ridges there, searching for food and exploring. But it’s unlikely they settled anywhere in that harsh place—the world farther south and across warmer seas was more hospitable. Even so, it was difficult, when gazing at the ice walls, not to imagine early humans skirting along them.

  It was a panorama that defied comprehension. There was nothing familiar there. The absence of trees, of houses or streets, of cars or people, the lack of movement of any kind—all contributed to a sense that I was walking alone in an alien world, not of Earth, but of some planet where forces and processes played out their dramas according to different rules.