A Wilder Time Page 7

  Kai and John had dropped me at a point on the shore from which a traverse could be made inland to sample and measure, in order to resolve a detail about whether or not a particular rock unit extended that far west. The answer would let us reconstruct how far one of the faults we were mapping extended. The plan was that I should head due south from the shore, up and over the ridge crest and then down into a major valley beyond. From there, systematically crisscrossing the terrain for about five miles would provide ample opportunity to make my observations. Returning across the ridge and descending to the water’s edge, I would rendezvous with them in the late afternoon on the beach of a small cove back up the fjord.

  Wandering alone in that infinite, ancient wilderness, planting feet on land that likely had not been touched by human presence, seeing things no other human eye had seen, existing in a world beyond imagination, always discovering something that could not have been anticipated—that, to me, was heaven.

  The hike to the ridge crest had been long and arduous. The scramble from the fjord and over the talus pile at the base of the ridge had taken a toll—my shins were bruised and bleeding, my knuckles scraped. The boulders were a field of chaos, some car-sized, some fist-sized, covered in an uneven mat of lichens, mosses, grasses, and flowering plants. That soft, undulating blanket of vegetation, undisturbed for thousands of years, masked thigh-deep holes hidden between the boulders. Firm footing could only be guessed at. If I broke a leg there, it would be late afternoon by the time Kai and John would make it to the designated little bay for our rendezvous and start looking for me. The thought of that long, cold wait encouraged caution. I tried to find small hints as to what might lie below: slight undulations in the dull green surface, the shape and slope of the nearest exposed boulder, the latticework of occasionally exposed caverns—all potential hints where the next best place to set foot might be. Even so, all that attention remained little more than guesswork. Inevitably, a few bounding leaps from boulder to boulder would be followed by a sudden crash into a covered hole, a struggle to climb out, moments spent rubbing bruised and scraped shins, a few deep breaths taken, and then the need to push on. There wasn’t time to do anything else.

  The feel of the mosses, though, was unforgettable. At first, I wore gloves, so I missed the sensation. But about halfway up the talus slope, when I had fallen in yet another thigh-deep hole, I decided to rest for a minute to catch my breath. At exactly eye height, a rock two feet across and directly in front of me beckoned. Moss draped over it like a shroud and flowed onto the surface of the surrounding boulder field. Below that stone was a small cavern exposing the underside of the vegetated boulder. The combination of the black-and-white lithic form, the velvety green texture of the moss, and the coolness of the air inspired me to pull off a glove and brush my hand over it. The feel was stunningly luxurious, as though the world’s finest velvet, a foot thick and plush, had been arranged over the boulders in unabashed, delicate extravagance. Climbing out of the hole and walking on, but with gloves off, it was hard not to feel guilty trampling on something so beautifully offered.

  THE TALUS MET THE ROCK WALL at an elevation of about nine hundred feet. A bare face rose out of the talus jumble and stepped up to the crest of the ridge in steep, short pitches. That part of the climb was relatively easy and got me to the top quickly.

  By the time I attained the ridge crest, I assumed it was around noon. I quickly had lunch —canned sardines, cheese and stale rye bread, raisins and chocolate, and some water. The boulders stood imposingly, littering the ice-polished rock. My nose ran and my eyes watered in the blasting, freezing wind. Stones had to be placed on anything I took out of the backpack so it wouldn’t blow across the ridgetop and out into the valleys.

  Once lunch was finished and the backpack reorganized, I walked over toward the cliff edge. I wanted to stand in the raging wind, gaze out at the endless view, and feel the wildness of it—pure in its coldness, present as an absence of everything. I held out my arms to let wind pound every part of me. But the cold was overwhelming. I dropped my arms, stuffed gloved hands into anorak pockets, and just looked out on the vastness.

  For a few moments, nothing disturbed the absolute, stolid permanence of the land. Despite the roaring wind, what could be seen was a passive world, rock-hard, still, and unmoving. Then, just at the edge of vision, off in the direction of the white ice sheet, a small, dark, incongruous dot moved. I slightly turned my head to see if it was real.

  I had a moment’s difficulty fixing on it, but it quickly resolved into an almost invisible black speck moving just above the ridge crest, riding the wild updraft of the wind streaming off the rock wall. The speck was moving very fast and rising toward me. Before I had much of a chance to think, it was at my elevation and closing in like a rocket. Its trajectory would take it within a few feet of my head.

  In a flash, I realized it was a small peregrine falcon, wings held tight against its body, taut, attentive, barely more than a feathered projectile—aerodynamic perfection riding the invisible streamlines washing over the ridge. Its wings barely moved, adjusting ever so slightly to keep it a few feet from the cliff edge with every change in the speed of the wind.

  When collision seemed inevitable, I took a step back to get out of its way. Suddenly, time shifted, as it sometimes does when the unexpected shocks us. Every movement and motion, every thought and sense distilled into crystalline clarity. Seconds and fractions of seconds lengthened. What I saw was remarkably sharp.

  The bird flared its wings, reared its head, its dark eyes opened wide. From less than thirty feet, it glared at me, seemingly suspended and utterly motionless in midair.

  Then, with subtle grace, it tucked its wings back against its strong, elegant form, slightly changed course, and sped away on the wind. Twice, as it flew toward its unknown destination, it turned its head and looked back over its shoulder, as though trying to assure itself that what it had thought was there on that ridge crest was, in fact, real. The sound of its feathers against the wind was a muffled, swooshing hiss.

  It is impossible to know what that bird experienced during our brief confrontation. It is likely that its flight through the blasting updraft had been one of concentrated attention to wind speeds, gauging distances between itself and the rock face, flying toward some far destination, the scattered boulders along the ridge crest simply impressions of landscape and shadow flashing by, until one of the boulders moved. High on that ridge crest, a human being was not expected.

  To meet that animal at such close range, unintentionally, innocently, was something impossible to imagine in any other setting. Thrilled excitement and shock pounded through me as I realized I had just experienced the purest statement I would ever know of what it means to be wild.

  WHAT WE EXPERIENCE MUST BE SEEN as an altered reality, a tinted fragment. Everything new, whether a physical place or a cognitive construct—a landscape, birdsong, a blanket of mosses—becomes associated with names and emotional impressions based on what we remember. Through that process, it becomes its own memory, against which we compare the next experience. The implication is clear: The richer the past that is contained in memory, the stronger the congruity with the moment will be, and the better we will know what the world is.

  Is everything relative, then? Are all the experiences I reflect on and wonder about a simplified collage of what I have seen and felt? If so, what I can imagine is limited because of the boundaries of my past. Every new experience that fits no previous memory is a gift that enriches the vault of color, sounds, and smells, the wealth of emotions and depth of meanings I have available to me. What is new embellishes all future experiences.

  Wilderness, through the fact of its existence, is new.

  IMPRESSIONS II

  In the face of a rational, scientific approach to the land, which is more widely sanctioned, esoteric insights and speculations are frequently overshadowed, and what is lost is profound. The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in
its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life.

  —Barry Lopez

  We are the result of water insinuating itself into the latticework of crystalline forms, of its persuasive discourse with the elements that reside there to run to the sea. Water encourages unities and pairings; it facilitates the necessity of elements to become molecules, and molecules to form the most complex construct the moment might allow. But water, too, is the catalyst for decay and dissolution. Water decomposes rock just as surely as it encourages reconstruction.

  It is that process of relentless reconstruction that made us. We live in an illusion that is a consequence of our trial-and-error biology. Our reality, consequently, is an impoverished truth. In pristine wildness, one has a chance to experience small epiphanies that expose one’s preconceptions and misunderstandings.

  CONSOLIDATION

  When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

  —John Muir

  The Sun Wall

  TO THE SOUTH OF CAMP AND JUST A BIT EAST stood a majestic rock wall. It rose out of the water, a massive buttress around which the fjord jogged southeast for several miles before continuing its eastward trend to the inland ice cap. It stood nearly a thousand feet above sea level, and dominated the world where we camped.

  In summer, the sun makes a lazy circuit in the sky, neither setting in the north, even at midnight, nor rising more than forty degrees above the southern horizon when it reaches its apogee at noon. Low sun angles make for striking shadows, and with the sun orbiting the entire sky, the face and form of things never stay the same.

  My tent opened to the west, giving me a view down many miles of open fjord water. But the rock wall was to my left and behind me when I would emerge in the morning from my tent. I always turned toward that massif to get a sense of what the day’s weather might be. It was, of course, no way to gauge how the day would evolve—high Arctic weather is notoriously mercurial, but even so, somehow seeing that bulwark in the morning light gave a perspective on the day that would sit with me until we got back to camp in the evening.

  On a clear day, the morning sun would be low in the northeast, hanging just above the white ice, a few hours into its slow ascent in the sky. The rock wall, as a consequence, was backlit and resting in shadow, dark, flat and mainly featureless. Blue sky would blaze behind it, with even bluer water stretching toward me.

  By the time high noon came, details boldly stood out in the oblique light. Chimneys, chutes, ledges, and overhangs, all cast in shadows of varying depth, became prominent, adding texture to the surface that was missing in the morning. As the afternoon progressed to evening, the positions of shadows shifted, and their scale and extent evolved. Color emerged in the rock face indicating that plants lived there, tenaciously clinging with pervasive roots to cracks and seams. Tundra-filled valleys that lapped onto the flanks of the ridge took on hues of rust and sand mixed with the greens and grays of the leafy foliage.

  It was hard not to think of that entire scene as a canvas upon which the sun painted, ceaselessly retouching every inch.

  THE SUN DID NOT ALWAYS SHINE. One morning, when we had planned a long trip down the fjord, we came out and found a dense set of broken clouds hanging over us. A chill wind blew hard, and the waters were choppy. We revised our plans accordingly and traveled up a small inlet near camp and worked that geology in detail. It was a segment of the northern edge of the shear zone we had not seen.

  In a tiny bay off the minor fjord, Kai noticed an unusual sequence of off-white and deep green bands running in an exposure just above the high-tide line. John carefully nudged the Zodiac up the shallow reach to the water’s edge and grounded it. After securing a line to a large boulder, we walked the shore over to the outcrop Kai had pointed to. Surprisingly, we found thin layers of marble, sillimanite schists and rocks rich with carbonate and silicate minerals, all the likely signature of shallow-water sediments deposited along quiet shores where microscopic, single-celled life had thrived in warm oceans. Had we been there at the time tides were washing those shores billions of years earlier, we probably would have been swimming in the shimmering, crystal-clear waters of a small bay.

  Now, recrystallized as a consequence of being deeply buried and cooked at hundreds of degrees in the Earth’s interior, the limestone had become marble, and the muds and sands had been transformed to green gneisses and schists. How deeply buried they had been, we could not tell, but the minerals we could identify could not have formed had the rocks not been buried at least ten miles down. We stood on more evidence of an ocean, a consistent element that would be expected in an area where a suture might be.

  About midday, the skies cleared and the wind died down. We relaxed somewhat in the warmer air, eventually heading back to camp in the late afternoon, pleased with what had been accomplished.

  When we got there, we anchored the inflatable, unloaded samples and gear, and headed up to the cooking tent, where we spent what was left of the afternoon compiling notes. John sat on one side of the tent, reading through some of the papers he had brought with him, making notes in their margins. I was across from him, rewriting the scribbles in my field book so that they would be decipherable—my handwriting has never been good. Kai was near the entrance to the tent, preparing dinner. Onions and butter sizzled in a pan on the Primus.

  The data we had collected were increasingly supporting the notion that the region preserved a record of intense deformation, as John and Kai and others had originally argued. The pencil gneisses John had first found in that one outcrop near camp and which were irrefutable evidence of extraordinary shearing at high temperatures, turned out to be a common feature for miles along the shear zone. The lenses of pillow basalts and ultramafics, too, were likely proof that hundreds or thousands of miles of ancient ocean floor had been dismembered and sliced into thin bodies, a process requiring staggering amounts of displacement and deformation. And all this was localized within the shear zone.

  But emerging, as well, was much more complexity than had been expected. Although certainly a zone of deformation, the remnant slices of seafloor required processes that could consume entire ocean basins, leaving little more than the slivers we found. The presence, too, of sediments like the ones we had seen in that small bay a few hours earlier suggested the edge of a continent. Not more than a mile from where we sat were portions of the magmatic remnants of the Andes-like volcanoes that had implied the existence of a zone in which ocean crust was consumed. Taken together, the simplest concept that could explain all these observations was that our camp, serendipitously, sat in the collision zone Kalsbeek and his coworkers had postulated. If so, the shear zone John and Kai had worked on was a much more profound tectonic feature than anyone had imagined; it was the actual suture that locked together continents that had collided 1,800 million years ago. None of that was part of what they had discussed in their earlier work.

  I BECAME A GEOLOGIST BY ACCIDENT. When I was growing up on the Southern California coast, surfing had consumed my life. In high school, I missed classes to surf, nearly failing many of them. I sat in detention rooms and was expelled several times, but the call of the waves always lured me away from class. I could not resist the temptation to immerse myself in the thoughtless uncertainty each wave offered. Sitting on the board, anticipating the next swell—the opportunities for success or failure, the anxious adventure of not knowing the outcome of a self-imposed dare—there was nothing better.

  When the time came to pursue education beyond high school, I chose a college that was farther south along the coast and that offered courses in oceanography. I was convinced that I could dabble in that science as a career while committing most of my time to bottom turns, hanging ten, and getting locked in.

  But at that university, oceanography was a graduate-level pursuit; an undergraduate interested in oceanography had to major in biology, chemistry, geology, or physics before applying the principles of the chosen
discipline to study of the ocean. I reluctantly chose geology.

  I suffered through one course and took another, only slightly interested in the subject. Then one day on a required field trip, the professor teaching the course pulled the van over to a small outcrop at an unplanned stop. I suspect he had sensed boredom in the air. He got us out of the van and gathered the group around him.

  “I want to show you what we are training you to do,” he said, and then pointed at a black mineral in the crystalline face of the road cut. For some minutes he described the significance of the mineral, named it, and explained its chemical composition. He pointed to another and did the same thing. After five minerals, he wove a tale that surprised us all. Where we were standing had been the middle of a chamber of molten rock 65 million years ago, ten miles below the surface. He went on to tell how it had formed, what volcanoes it had fed, what its history had been once it cooled to a frozen state. I was mesmerized. Suddenly, I understood Earth to be a manuscript, written in an extraordinary calligraphy, embellished with an artistry I could barely discern. Mysteries of immense proportion, histories of our origins, and the collection of accidents that had made us what we were resided in stone everywhere. In an instant, the world had become a new place for me.

  A WARM FOEHN WIND GENTLY BLEW from the east, descending the thousands of feet from the inland ice “summit,” lightly ruffling the canvas of the tent as we talked. The low sunlight from the west lit its orange fabric, infusing our little room with a warm glow.