A Wilder Time Read online

  Strolling along the gravelly beach, the only sound that of small splashing waves and the crunch of my boots, I was where I craved to be, walking alone in the presence of wild solitude, the treasure of aloneness seeping from the sunlight, from the blue waters, from the patterned stones. I have loved such places for as long as I can remember. When I was young, solitary walks in the hills near home provided an escape from bullying and rejection, a small child’s refuge, where disappointments could be hidden behind the smell of sun-warmed grasses, the buzz of insects, a sudden glimpse of a vanishing snake slithering through the weeds. The experience of discovering hidden things, a ladybug behind a curled leaf, a sand crab dug up from an empty beach, fertilized my imagination. And now so did the white rock wall.

  A SHORT WHILE LATER, I caught up with Kai and John. Kai, the primary recorder of our observations, was writing in his notebook, occasionally placing the graphite tip of a short pencil stub on his tongue. In his left shirt pocket nestled several other pencil stubs, his favored writing and drawing instruments. Where he gets the stubs, I have never figured out, but he is never without them. A small sharpener is always in another pocket.

  I asked excitedly if they had seen the small bluff of garnet-sillimanite schist, to which Kai responded perfunctorily. He showed me the brief note he had made in his notebook about it.

  He then asked, “Did you see that lens of greenish rock that is probably ultramafic a few hundred meters before that?”

  I struggled to recall seeing it but had to admit I hadn’t.

  “Surely you are pulling my nose. You should go see it. John thinks it’s significant.” Chiding me was a revered pastime.

  “It’s pulling your leg,” I said, correcting him. Kai’s fondness for idioms was well known, but his use of them was occasionally flawed.

  As I turned to go, John, who is an exceptional field geologist, commented that it looked like a tectonic slice of peridotite.

  I had no problem finding it; the pod was exposed on a bare bench of rock that made up a small promontory in the fjord. The yellowish green mass was small, perhaps six feet wide and twenty feet long, surrounded by alternating light and dark layers, and obvious.

  The pod was indeed a peridotitic body. Peridotitic rocks do not normally occur with sediments, which was what the garnet-rich rocks had originally been. Their juxtaposition against one another required mixing by intense tectonic forces. Here was even more evidence supporting the “vanished ocean” hypothesis.

  Crawling over the outcrop, looking in detail at textures and minerals, one layer in particular stood out. It was three feet from the ultramafic body, about six inches thick, nearly black, and perfectly paralleled the edge of the yellowish green mass. Although it appeared that there might be garnets in it, they were tiny and impossible to actually make out. We needed to collect a sample.

  We each carried two rock hammers—one that weighed a few pounds and was used on most rocks, and the other a sledgehammer that weighed about five pounds and was used for rocks that were particularly tough. The black layer stood a couple of inches above the surface. It was obviously resistant to erosion, and looked to be particularly dense, so I grabbed the sledge.

  I have pounded on rocks around the world, but that was, without a doubt, one of the hardest rocks I have ever encountered. With every blow, the steel of the sledgehammer rang loudly and bounced off the rock. I swung harder and harder, fearing that the thick wooden handle would splinter at any moment. Eventually, a hairline crack appeared and began to grow larger with each blow. With sore, stinging hands, I finally was able to wedge free a small sample barely the size of my fist.

  That small sample was unusually dense. The fresh, new surface glistened like broken glass, fine-grained and compact. I got out my hand lens and brought the sample close to my face so I could examine its mineralogy in detail. Suddenly, a faint smell like that of singed hair, hot metal, and desert dust wafted into the air from the fresh surface. Startled, I stopped what I was doing and breathed deeply. There was no doubt: The smells were there in the air, rising from the surface of that newly exposed, sparkling face.

  Hammering on that rock had broken chemical bonds that held it to the face of the outcrop. Tiny crystals had cracked, grain boundaries separated, and a very dense rock had fractured. For the first time in over two billion years, the atoms and molecules trapped in that crystalline framework were exposed to fresh air and the warming rays of an Arctic sun.

  Displaced and broken, submicron-size particles and inorganic molecules had flown from the fracture, dancing in the air in an unseen atomic ballet, moving to the vagaries of a gentle breeze. A small fraction of those liberated pieces wafted through the atmosphere, traveled toward my face, eventually affecting the sense organs in my airways, stimulating unexpected and incongruous sensations—the impression of singed hair from a broken fragment of rock? Hot metal? Desert dust?

  That fractured surface had spilled carbon and calcium and magnesium atoms into the world in a violent act motivated by curiosity. Everything that made that rock, and which would normally be released to the oceans through excruciatingly slow erosion, had suddenly been thrown to the wind. The atoms of that layer were the components of molecules that make life possible—everything from sodium to selenium had exploded into the breeze. Thoughts and imagination flow in tangled networks of neurons and synapses fed by the chemistry all those elements embraced. The potential for dreams was there in the atoms of that rock I was smelling.

  What form the atoms and molecules would eventually take was an unknowable mystery—and little more than one more part of a long and timeless journey. Inevitably, once released, they would become part of something new, something wholly different from the mineral structures of which they had just been a part. The destructive act of collecting that small sample was, in a minuscule way, an act of liberation and creation, an unintentional and naïve perturbation of the future.

  I picked up the sample and labeled it “468 416,” and took a few photos. I pulled out my GPS, recorded the location in my notebook along with a few observations, and then stuffed everything in my backpack, not suspecting that little sample, once analyzed in the lab, would shatter our preconceived concepts about the history recorded in those very ancient rocks.

  Cladonia Rangiferina

  LICHEN ABOUND IN GREENLAND. Above the tidal zone, every bare rock surface is textured and colored by lichen clusters, splotches, and mats. Tundra pockets will have lichen threading throughout them. It is the hardiest of partnerships, a pervasive symbiont of fungus and its photosynthetic companion, living as a composite organism, as resilient as it is beautiful.

  There are many different forms, but my eye, trained for minerals and rocks, and not the things that grow on them, discerned only a few. Pale green, brilliant orange, and reddish brown varieties are there, intermingling in fantastic patterns of free-form, organic composition, a background pattern subtly embossed on hard rock. They carpet and upholster, embellish and decorate in a profusion that beguiles the senses. They draw you into hidden worlds where, facedown and wide-eyed, dramas can be invented, played out by tiny bugs wandering through lichen-framed halls.

  Lichen are, as well, a hazard for the careless. One particular lichen introduces itself assertively. When it is dry, its deep black, frilled platelets are extremely brittle—if stepped on, the fringes along its margin crush with a crackle to a fine powder. If touched with a naked hand, its edges cut. But when it is wet, it is like mucus. On drizzly days, it soaks up water, becoming a mat that is impossible to walk on without slipping and falling. Once, when we were landing at a barren rock outcropping, I took the bowline in hand and was getting ready to jump from the Zodiac onto shore. John shouted over the noise of the outboard, “Watch out for the litchen [the Danish pronunciation he and Kai used for the word]. They are slippery!”

  Acknowledging his warning, I adjusted my plan, picked out the flattest spot with the least amount of the mucuslike masses, and leaped very carefully, trying to land wit
h as little forward momentum as possible, but my feet slipped the instant they touched the slime and I landed hard, briefly dislocating my right shoulder. I was on massive doses of aspirin for the next three days.

  THE LICHEN ARE ALSO MARKERS OF SORTS. They grow slowly, even under the best of conditions. A growth rate of a thirty-second of an inch a year is fast. In the Arctic setting we were in, they grew much more slowly.

  One dry, sunny day, we stopped on the south shore of the fjord, at a place where a gently sloping gneiss outcrop came down to the water. We were looking for the contact between two different types of rocks we had found the day before farther up the fjord. Above the high-tide line, lichen grew in profusion, particularly the black variety. As we walked along taking notes, we came upon a place where people had scraped away the lichen, leaving their names and dates in a negative space. All the dates were pre-1960; the oldest was 1943. The names and numbers were clearly legible, the edges barely changed since those messages had been scraped into the surface decades earlier. Those lichen were growing at a rate that could not have been much more than 1/1000th of an inch a year.

  One lichen that did grow more rapidly than that was Cladonia rangiferina. That lichen is cream-colored and tends to form small, fringed, branching shapes that slightly stand above the tundra background. I first saw them when we set up our camp. I asked John what they were—he was a remarkable store of information about the landscape (some of which, I suspect, was made up, although most wasn’t). He had taught me how to recognize old campsites—stone patterns and concentrations of certain grasses that favored disturbed ground—among other things. John said they were called reindeer lichen because the barren-ground caribou that wander throughout West Greenland, and on one occasion actually walked through our camp early one morning, eat them as an important part of their diet.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, AFTER A DAY with a lot of sailing and not much hiking, I took a walk by myself along the stream we bathed in, heading for the lake from which the stream flowed. Maps and aerial photographs showed that the lake was the most westerly of three that backed into the ice cap, each feeding into the other, each a catchment for water from the melting ice sheet.

  The hike took me through small meadows ablaze with white-tufted cotton grass that waved in the breeze like enchanted sentinels. Arctic char from two to three feet long skittered along the bottom of the shallow water, darting from boulder to boulder, trying to hide. Had I been fishing, we would have had a delicious dinner.

  The sun filtered through thin clouds, and a light breeze blew. By the time I reached the lake, the day had grown chilly, the lake water choppy. I found a boulder and sat down, jamming gloved hands into jacket pockets, and spent some time in that exquisitely quiet place, watching the lake and fish.

  It was hard not to feel overwhelmed by the majestic solitude of my surroundings. Having such moments was a remarkable experience, undisturbed in that profound epitome of untrammeled nature. Life flowed at its own pace, the rock and soil and plants scaffolding a landscape that humans had not shaped. I was the sole audience, a most temporary of visitors, watching the momentary manifestation of flowing processes set in motion from the earliest beginnings of Earth, billions of years ago. What I saw was what that primal force had achieved on its path to future things. Emerging from that sea of possibilities were realizations, ephemeral but concrete, of coincident circumstances, lacking an end point.

  For the first time in my life, I felt as though I understood, to the extent I was capable, how utterly incomprehensible that world was for me. Nothing existed separate from any other part of the whole, and the whole was the entirety of the universe, from its very beginning. And there, in the quiet of that Arctic valley, one manifestation of that unity resided.

  Time did not exist. The only difference between past and future is the interceding mind, which contemplates and describes and details differences, identifying species, speaking as though they are fixed in time and separate, when, in fact, they are incessantly, furiously changing—temporary, creative, individually unique and yet part of an indivisible whole. Humanity was simply one more experiment conducted by something so immensely incomprehensible that the outcome of the experiment had no importance.

  And yet, in that great loneliness, the world was saturated by the beautiful. What surrounded me was stunning in its newness and harmony. Color, texture, form, and pattern flowed from one expression to another without incongruity. There was nothing familiar except the grossest of concepts (rock, water, air, cold); everything challenged comprehension.

  Loneliness and cold made it uncomfortable to stay longer. As I stood, I surveyed the scene, trying to capture some pieces of it that I could share with Kai and John, but I realized I did not have the words to convey any of it.

  RATHER THAN RETURN TO CAMP along the same track by the stream, I headed cross-country to save time and see new terrain. There was a broad expanse of relatively flat ground that formed an apron around the lake a quarter of a mile wide. It was easy walking and open, one of the few places in that world where I could turn my attention toward something other than where my next footstep should go.

  On the way, I came across a field, perhaps two hundred yards long, pimpled by protruding mounds of dirt a few feet across and inches high. They were palsas—small mounds that form when groundwater persistently freezes and expands upward. They are common in permafrost terrains, where pingos (a larger version of the same kind of thing) form. Around the edges were concentrations of boulders pushed up from underground.

  I wandered across the tops of the mounds, looking for cracks to see if the underlying ice might be visible, and along the little boulder-strewn valleys at their edges, following a polygonized path through the landscape. Where I walked was like a small maze, a place in which I imagined a mystical tradition of chanting and dancing performed by some unknown spirits, preserved there in that timeless place, patiently waiting for the next generation of believers.

  As I walked, something seemed out of place and unusual. Then it struck me: All the boulders were oddly pale in color, with none of the black and speckled patterns or the banding of the gneisses and schists we commonly saw.

  The color was due to a lichen of the genus Umbilicaria; they covered the boulders in a profusion we had not seen anywhere before. Why that should be, I had not a clue. In the tundra surrounding the boulders a profusion of reindeer lichen patterned the ground. The thought then occurred to me that wandering caribou would have had a feast there—it was as though nature had laid out a banquet, allowing an endless indulgence in lichen delicacies. I knew that this would be my chance to find out what, if anything, I had been missing. What did lichen taste like?

  I carefully removed a small clump of the filigreed, platelike forms from the nearest boulder, cleaned off small grains of sand, and took a bite. The texture was slightly chewy and leathery, but not tough. It was easy to eat. The taste reminded me of a simple white sauce and semolina pasta—nothing extravagant or spicy, just a light, delicate creaminess. There was no great complexity, but a comfortable simplicity that was easy to enjoy. I swallowed the small bite and took another and another, trying to get a better sense of lichen as food.

  Suddenly, memories of childhood meals in our small home, tucked next to lemon orchards in Southern California, flooded my mind—the thoughtful flower arrangement that was usually on the table, the patterned tablecloth with faint Early Americana scenes, the milk glass by my right hand, my father to my left, serving us from the casserole in front of him. I stopped chewing and was briefly spellbound in those long-forgotten memories, surprised and disconcerted by faded feelings of childhood comforts. Lichen as time machine.

  Could it be that somewhere in my experience of place at that moment, there was a shared element of perception and memory that overlapped with that of the reindeer?

  I did not think to try the other lichen. I wish I had, just to get a feel for the world of flavors that encase rocks.

  Falcon

  I WAS HU
DDLED IN THE LEE OF MASSIVE BOULDERS on the summit of a west-running ridge fifteen miles from the edge of the ice. A cold wind blew down from the north, pounding out of the Arctic like an unstoppable train. I was there to collect basic observations that might add some small detail to our emerging story.

  The ridge summit along the southern edge of Arfersiorfik Fjord was the highest point of land for miles around. Two yards away, a sharp cliff dropped more than six hundred feet to a massive talus pile at its base. The boulders and rubble that had fallen from the north-facing wall formed a steeply sloping buttress that extended to the edge of the fjord below. To the east and west, the ridge ran for miles, dropping hundreds of feet in elevation from its pinnacle, an undulating bedrock backbone that defined the grain of the land. To the south, for at least sixty miles, unfolded the classic Greenland topography of rolling valleys and ridges, sharp walls and small lakes, carved into a land surface mantled in tundra and littered with boulders, a land skin of wrinkles—furrowed elbows, smile lines, creased brows. A sense of intelligent patience exuded from that skin, conveying the impression of a land that knew much but was content in its silence.

  Dark gray clouds hung so low in the sky that I could almost touch their south-rushing underbellies as they pressed a meager layer of rain-swept air against the water-land interface.

  To the north, beyond the cliff face, the fjord dominated the scenery, its massive presence defining the place where ocean water and ice melt mingled. I looked down on it and could barely make out the Zodiac in which Kai and John were cruising along the shore, taking measurements—a small dot on a huge, gray, liquid surface, my anchor to humanity. Beyond the water, farther north, the landscape mirrored that to the south.

  The ice sheet to the east rested as the inevitable white horizon that dominated the world, a stolid sentry to an ancient land. Even from the height of the ridge summit, I was still thousands of feet lower than the ice sheet’s crest. Seven millennia ago, the ice had extended even farther west than where I stood, and everything that I could see was basement to it. Since then, the ice has been in retreat, dropping, as it melted, boulders of all sizes that had been locked in its frozen grip. My shelter from the blasting, cold, wet wind was one of those stones.